Ask a horror writer what influences them, and the answer often involves religion or history.
When it opens Nov. 21, an exhibition at the American Writers Museum in Downtown Chicago called American Prophets: Writers, Religion and Culture will explore those influences on creative works.
But this time of year, horror writing, in particular, has captured the museum’s fascination. The museum even recently invited three award-winning authors to share their experiences and inspirations for horror writing on a panel at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The authors included Matt Ruff, whose novel Lovecraft Country was turned into an HBO series; Tananarive Due, author of The Good House, and Juan Martinez, a Northwestern University professor who is the author of Extended Stay.
WBEZ contributor Adora Namigadde spoke with each of the authors at length to learn more about their inspirations.
Matt Ruff, “Lovecraft Country”
Matt Ruff of Seattle, Washington originally wrote the story for “Lovecraft Country” as a TV series, but said he realized he needed to publish a novel first in order to remain true to the way he wanted to write. His inspiration: the science fiction TV drama The X Files. However, instead of writing about white FBI agents in the 1990s, he wanted to focus on a Black family in the 1950s.
In his story, the family runs a travel agency and publishes a fictional version of The Negro Motorist Green Book – a guidebook that listed safe recommendations for African American travelers during the Jim Crow era – that he calls The Safe Negro Travel Guide.
One of the main characters, Atticus, finds establishments that are accepting of Black customers so he could add them to the book.
“He was the kind of guy, if he saw a werewolf running across the highway in the middle of night, he’d know how to deal with that,” Ruff said. “At the same time he was also going to be dealing with the realities of life in the Jim Crow era. So it was sort of contrasting paranormal horror with the more mundane horrors of racism.”
TV producers initially rejected Ruff’s pitch to bring the story to TV, saying viewers would not want to tune in weekly to discuss racism. So Ruff turned it into a novel.
“[Lovecraft is] is all about the dread of being in a world that isn’t really made for you, and where you are seen as an outsider,” Ruff said. “You’re constantly getting these little hints that violence could happen at any time. That sense of mounting dread is very much a horror story.”
Juan Martinez, “Extended Stay”
Juan Martinez was a horror reader before he became a horror author. An early life death scare led to him falling in love with the genre. When Martinez was 14, he contracted a serious illness that made him bedridden. He said he was misdiagnosed with an autoimmune disease, when it turned out he had contracted something much more treatable. He picked up horror reading while stuck in bed for a year.
“Horror kind of became this kind of life-saving, safe container to deal with things that you really can’t deal with,” Martinez said. “That are just really, really difficult.”
Martinez, who teaches creative fiction writing at Northwestern University as an adult, continued reading horror through the years and went on to write “Extended Stay,” the story of a man who flees his home in Colombia and finds work as a cook at a seedy hotel in a rundown region of Las Vegas. He is working on his second horror novel..
“There’s a very visible way to think about how you want to tell your story
that isn’t a formula. It’s just a bunch of really cool moves that are at your disposal to write,” Martinez said. “That makes writing horror really fun, because you’re in conversation with all these great people who did it before you, but also you get to borrow some of their great borrowers.”
Tananarive Due, “The Good House”
Fellow horror author and academic Tananarive Due, who teaches at the University of California Los Angeles, said she also looks to people of the past for inspiration in her writing.
Her novel “The Good House” tells the story of Angela, a woman who hopes her grandmother’s famous “healing magic” will help bring her family together. Instead, Anglea discovers that she and other family members have been suffering tragic losses and wonders if they’re related. As she moves past her misconceptions of vodou, Angela is able to get to the heart of what’s happening in her family.
“It is an intergenerational sort of standoff between a human who got a little too comfortable, a little too filled with hubris and thought she could play around with the gods and the impact of that mistake on her family,” Due said. “That is absolutely where the horror comes in. Had she not overstepped, she had a very good thing going. I think one of the other sources of the horror from the contemporary standpoint of the character who doesn’t know about these traditions, who was embarrassed by these traditions, is what you don’t know can hurt you, and secrets.”
The American Writers Museum will host several events and author discussions in advance of the opening of the American Prophets exhibition, including a Houses of Horror Museum Tour on Halloween. Here is a full schedule of events.
Adora Namigadde is a contributor to WBEZ. Follow up with her on this story at madebyadora@gmail.com