by John R. Platt

hy horror? As a writer of very dark fiction, I get that question all the time. The answer isn't always simple.

A few months ago, while on a trip to Maine, some friends introduced me to a very successful local painter. She has a wonderful little business painting pictures of the coast of Maine and then selling the paintings to vacationers. She told me she was "living the artist's dream," but still, she was fascinated by meeting me, a writer. It seemed as if I was completely outside her realm of experience.

It was only a minute into our conversation before she asked: "Where do you get your ideas?"

I smiled. "The same place you do," I said, "From the real world."

How does a horror writer compare to a realistic painter? Pretty easily. She looks at the sea every day and paints pretty pictures of waves, birds, and beaches. I look at the ocean and I see a boat full of zombie sailors returning from their watery grave, a scaly monster coming out of the ocean to look for love on dry land, and a world where every drop of water turns to poison.

She paints what she sees, I write what I see.

Tomato, tomahto.

So I look at the world a little bit differently than other people. It's still what I see. Take some of the stories in my book, DIE LAUGHING: A telemarketer working for Hell, a gumball machine that dispenses body parts, a serial-killer clown... that's the world to me. Jobs steal our souls, commerce rules our lives, five billion people on this planet accomplish nothing much more than sitting around waiting to die, and laughter and fear feel pretty much the exact same way.

That might sound just a wee bit negative, but to me, fiction is a way to combat that negativity. Especially horror fiction. Afraid of death? Take its power away by mocking it. Got a bad boss? Revel in his literary disembowelment. Don't like the world you're in? Change it...

And maybe in the process change yourself.

Fiction has an amazing transformative ability. You can encounter a fear in the pages of a book or up on the silver screen without actually having to confront that bad boss or run from a serial killer. But through that process, you still have the potential to undergo a transformation. To change. To face your fears and to overcome them. To become a better person than you were before you opened a book to Page 1, bought your movie ticket, or pressed Play on your VCR.

As a writer, horror fiction transforms me every day. I lost several family members to cancer, and subconsciously dealt with my fear by writing a story after story about people wasting away. Bad jobs and bad bosses became the defining elements of other stories. And a few months after 9-11, I wrote a story called "The Day the Laughter Died" which started out as just a high-concept story about dead clowns, but became my way of dealing with the events of the day as I wrote it.

I pour myself out onto the page, and sometimes there's nothing left when I'm done. It gives me room to grow, to expand, to think, and to be.

On the other hand, sometimes it's just fun to be scared -- or to scare someone, or make them laugh.

I think what we all want from horror fiction is to feel something.

In a world where cities are overcrowded but everyone is lonely, where we spend more time with our co-workers than with our families, and where corporations and governments try to tell us what to think, feeling something, anything, is a very good thing.

And that is why I write horror.