My Source of Dread: Why I Read and Write Horror

I was five years old and playing in the dirt side yard in front of my childhood home when I met my first clown. I distinctly remember one summer day when a man dressed as a clown and carrying balloons (the colors black and yellow seem prominent in my memory) walked by my house and tried to sell me one of the balloons. I don't remember how much they were exactly, but it didn't matter. I had no change on me.

When I told him I had no money, he seemed irritated and raised a hand like he was going to hit me, and skulked away. The whole time he was yelling back at me, “they’re only pennies, kid… they’re only pennies and you can’t even buy ONE? ONE!? ONLY PENNIES!!” This frightened me in an indescribable way. For weeks I was scared he would come back and kill me because I didn’t buy a balloon. Or worse, he would just stand outside my window.

***

“Why do you read and write horror?”

Although some horror writers—that is, those who have the guts to actually use the word “horror” as the descriptor or title of the genre they primarily work in—like to answer that question, others don't. The ones that don't like answering it have too often had that question contextually framed as a way for them to be dressed down by literary bigots, or worse, shamed for doing what they enjoy and even love to do.

This inaugural and biographical blog post entry for Jeamus After Midnight answers a big part of “why do you read and write horror?" when it's directed at me.

And here's where pills come into the picture.

I picked up my renewed prescription for desvenlafaxine yesterday. I've been taking the antidepressant steadily for years now. Whereas it comes with its own set of side effects, the med has been nothing short of a miracle in my mental health life. The road to this med has been a long trail littered with the medicine bottles of failures, and more failures of taking the bad advice of others who were/aren't medical professionals. Even more failures came via listening to—and believing—the fire-and-brimstone condemnations of “pill-popping-to-sin-easier.” My own general stupidity and ignorance on the subject had to get personal research, self-discovery, and bona fide medicine dropped onto it like a ton of bricks. Over the years, more than one doctor has come to the conclusion that I struggle—at the least—with cyclothymia and PTSD, and all of the things that come with those two and their overlapping ripples.

They can build on each other in a cascade-effect manner, and make life—especially an interior life—the purest of hells. The desvenlafaxine (Pristiq is its original and outrageously-priced corporate pharmaceutical incarnation) helps tremendously with the cyclothymia and PTSD, and allows me to maintain some level of creativity in my art and writing life. So far, the adverse side effects have been worth the peaceful and closer-to-equilibrium life I want. A bonus is the the retention of art appreciation and art creation in their many forms.

I share this with you as a backdrop for the reason my girlfriend of almost three years expressed dismay over a comment I made recently after returning from picking up my prescription at the pharmacy. That comment was, “well, I can behave for another month.” Other past comments by me have included, “I got my good-boy pills,” and something to the effect of not having to worry about “hulking out”. My partner was dismayed as she explained she felt like the comments, while they may be intended to be a joke, minimized mental health issues with people in general and were specifically disrespectful of myself and the battles I've faced. She knows of the gritty struggle I've had.

She's not a fan of my penchant for self-deprecation. In the context of our lives, relationship, and what she knows of me and how I'm trying to continue to grow, she's right to be dismayed by the dismissive and offhand comments like this. And in thinking on this subject, it made me recall the road here, the one to where I'm at now, and the efforts I have made and will make on this road into the future. It's overall positive, and in fact a beautiful thing, but not without struggle.

In that struggle, the horror genre has been positively cathartic for me. I won't get into a full blown defense and/or apologetic here for the bursting cornucopia the horror genre is in this already-protracted blog entry. But I encourage anyone who seriously wants to study the subject to also include looking at the concept, practice, and etymology of catharsis. In an ironic and stoic sense of “the obstacle is the path,” horror isn't just an amusement park for many; it's bona fide therapy.

Bringing it down into my subatomic particle life in the context of this consuming and chaotic cosmos, horror fiction helps me slay my dragons. To bring it a bit more palpable into the horror genre and its myriad subgenres, it helps me destroy my monsters, and helps me be okay and all right and copacetic and even chipper at times with being what many see as a monster. Many can warp or disfigure "monster" and "horror" to fit comfortably in their worldview, but all it means to me is to embrace—and, gasp, even love—myself, imperfections included.

I tell you all of the above so I can tell you all of the below.

In Autumn of 2017 I caught a bus to the nearest movie theater to see It. It was a chilly and bleak-sky Saturday. My car was on its umpteenth stay in the repair shop, and my girlfriend was gone for the day on an activity with her two youngest kids. The dial of the skies had been rotating between overcast and full on bursts of rain, and I was in the mood to visit the closest theater to see something scary. This wasn't just another trip to the cinema, though. Since It was first published, I've had a longtime relationship with Stephen King's novel. For those who aren't familiar with It, it's King's magnum opus in the monster-horror realm. The thousand-plus page tale is about a group of longtime friends and their decades-long war against an extremely powerful and millennia-old shape-shifting monster who appears to them most often as a clown named Pennywise. By “relationship” with King's book, I mean one that extends into the personal, and beyond any shared public fascination with the tome, or the film adaptations, art creations, and critical theory that It has inspired.

Let me explain the relationship, and in so doing reveal to you my source of dread (and we'll get back to this oft-used phrase of mine). If I take the long way in doing so, please understand it's because I'm delicately showing you things that have affected this thorny, beautiful, terrifying, wonderful, blue, black, and gray-pathed timeline of my life. I can only peel the scab off so fast, and in so doing continue to heal the wounds and mine the good—or better—things in this journey. And if this exercise helps anyone else who struggles with cyclothymia, PTSD, or any number of other behavior and mood disorders (still "disorders" to me as they are not a positive thing in my life) then all the better. Let my tale be cathartic for other strugglers or sufferers.

One weekend in late 1983, I was on a bus heading back from Phoenix, Arizona to my hometown of El Paso, Texas. It was a bus full of exhausted fellow church-members, and we were heading back home after attending the wedding of one of our co-pastors. Remembering the big freaking deal made about it at church, I recall the church members--including me--viewing this union in much the same way the general public at the time fawned apoplectically over Charles and Diana’s royal wedding. That includes the sugary build-up, the ceremony itself, and the saccharine denouement.

This wedding trip was right smack in the middle of the time my dad was beginning his soon-to-be-lost battle with colon cancer. He was too sick from the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation to attend the wedding, and my mom was staying home with him in El Paso. I had no parents or other family members with me. I thought it would be fun to hang out on a southwestern road trip via bus with other church youth members, singles, and a few younger families.

And as I even begin to talk about this wedding road trip, I find myself needing to shift point of view in my narration. Second-person seems more comfortable, in that it moves away from me and shares the burden with you. So you are a kid of fifteen now, a blonde-haired blue-eyed male who’s beginning to exit adolescent awkwardness and come up on the radar of the opposite sex. You’ve hit your fifteenth birthday this past August. Your thoughts stay in the realm of the tug of war between the theological-social strongholds of evangelical Christianity and the wonders of females. You want to get to know females more. You’re beginning to stop thinking of them in an objective, childish, and clinical sense as “females.” You don’t want to call them girls anymore, because they aren’t girls any more in your social sphere. They’re young women, and they are awesome.

But your experience on this bus will trip you up for a bit. It will make you more homophobic than you already are. Ironically it hurts your relationship with women for a long time. It will eventually haunt your marriage and be a major factor in killing it (there's many factors, but this is a big one). Because when the new family-trusted friend—we’ll call him X, a type-A personality great in business and holding forth as Super-Christian—sees that you are tired and encourages you to stretch your legs across him in the very back row of the bus (an extra long inadequately-padded seat), you make the mistake of taking him up on his offer, as this will take you down a path of regret, self-loathing, and sorrow that you almost don’t come back from. He’s about seven years older than you; young, yes, but in hindsight, still a full-on predator.

He conveniently drapes a blanket across you and him—he’s still sitting upright—and the ancient bus is kinda crowded, but cold, and the reclining seats are pretty worthless. So the blanket is fine. And you lay across him, not knowing any better because up to this point you’ve never had a reason to not trust other adult males in the church. Men of God we are, setting examples for the world around us so they stand a chance of wanting to be like us. You know, be like us so they don’t burn in hell for being, well, the world. The world is worldly, and you are not. And you are drifting off into sleep when you realize your penis is forming an erection.

Not because you’re attracted to X, but in the fog of waking up you realize his hand is firmly stroking your crotch through your jeans. And you’re horrified. Not just because he’s male, and that’s wrong, but because it’s sex, and it's before marriage. All of it’s wrong. And turning it up a notch in the horror level, he has this dead look on his face and in his eyes. The kind of look that sordid memes you would see on the internet decades later would label the rape-face. You’re frightened. You’re a boy who simply does not know how to handle this situation except to try to get up and get away.

X is betting on your embarrassment to not make a scene, and he wins that bet. The bus is so freaking old and loud that even if you spoke in a raised voice or even yelled, it would be some time before others would notice. You don’t know whether or not he would deny it to others, and you’re just a boy wanting to be a man of God. X is already a man of God. So you try something simple. You try to get up. And you realize for the first time that X is very strong. With little effort, his crotch-stroking hand—which at this point seems to be trying to find every vein in your penis—barely lets you raise yourself an inch before he pushes you firmly back down, his dead eyes still looking straight ahead. The rape-face you see in the so-dark back of the bus. When Stephen King later describes the “deadlights” of It, they will remind you of the corpse-like eyes of X. How they would run through your mind on repeat again and again and again. How deep the bitterness would grow. How much you wanted to smash those eyes

(deadlights)

right the fuck in. But you’re in the moment, on that bus, and he’s pushed you back down, and you have to make your next move. Without really thinking, you put your finger into that bundle of nerves between his collarbone and trapezius, and you keep pushing it in harder until it visibly hurts him, and he finally relaxes his hand. You throw the blanket off and are up, ready to head back to your normal seat when X stops you. He's grabbing you by the arm, quickly apologizing but you can barely hear him over the grinding gears and rattles of the ancient bus. Incredibly, tacked onto his non-apologies are questions directed at you as to why you would think God would test you in this way, if there’s some sort of secret sin in your heart that might have brought this all about. Like the dumb kid you are, you actually buy some of X’s predatory bullshit.

You make it back to your seat and contemplate your relationship with him. Only years later you would learn a word you could attach to what you’re feeling. He was grooming me. Oh God, he was grooming me. When you arrive back in El Paso and everyone is carpooling from the church to their homes, you end up in the same vehicle with him. On the sly he continues to apologize, his arm carefully placed around you in a nonthreatening-by-appearances way. He will do this sickening pseudo-apologizing several times over the next few weeks. Because you’re a dumb kid, you believe him.

And you tell no one, for a long, long time.

And the hurt comes to the surface years later when you’ve decided to frame this in a nonfiction piece to be reviewed and critiqued by your peers in a horror writers group. The emotions are rawer than ever, but the act of writing about it is catharsis, so you continue. You decide more distance in the narration is needed.

You’re going to have to move into third person if you, Jeamus, are to continue this without completely losing your shit. But Jeamus didn’t lose his shit, and kept writing. He wrote for nearly an hour more before his partner, who’d been binge-watching Frankie and Grace on Netflix, called from the living room,

“Whatcha workin’ on, babe?” Michele had been expressing interest in Jeamus's writing of late, but this made him somewhat uneasy as he knew horror was not a genre Michele particularly liked. But she might be interested in this piece, as it was somewhat a biographical essay, but… clowns. Creepy clowns were in it, and their presence was only going to increase further into the piece. Jeamus stopped briefly, scratched the neck of his chihuerrier-dog Xavier, who’d been sitting at Jeamus's feet. Jeamus sighed.

“I’m writing scary stuff, hon.”

“Gotcha,” Michele said. This wasn’t a dismissal, so much as it was shorthand for for the understanding Jeamus and Michele had. Michele didn’t mind Jeamus writing horror, and she only ever supported him in it, but Jeamus's understanding was that she would not read it, or any horror for that matter. She wouldn’t do so for the same reasons many people don’t engage in horror or darker fiction chock full of boogeymen, folklore nightmares, plain old monsters, ghosts, serial killers, other tweaked fears made manifest, and the accompanying trembling. Jeamus would someday make it available to her to read so she could understand him and unpack him a little more. But he wouldn’t push it.

The rapid clicking on the Chromebook keyboard continued.

Jeamus remembered that after the incident on the bus and the subsequent weeks and weeks of X over-apologizing and his tears and his promises to never do something like that again and the promises to get counseling and help and all of the rest of that happy horseshit, somewhere in there Jeamus actually forgave X and resumed a friendship with him. And trust was renewed.

Two years later, the renewed trust was destroyed. One night when Jeamus and other church-member guests were visiting X at X’s brother’s house that X was house-sitting while the brother was out of town, Jeamus was stretched out on the couch asleep. The other guests had left, leaving Jeamus alone. X again made a predatory move, this time with a crotch-stroke and an attempted kiss. No words were exchanged this time, no bullshit apologies and confessions of sin, no questions as to why the terrible-debble might be tempting Jeamus with homosexuality. By now, Jeamus was somewhat getting clued into X’s predatory bullshit, and Jeamus simply left. He was mad at himself all over again, wondering why this kept happening. Jeamus's fear was that if he were to share these X encounters with anyone, he himself would be accused of the soul-flaying crime of homosexuality and X would twist this to his advantage.

Jeamus was 19 when the second assault went down, but technically an adult and still so wet behind the ears he had gills. Less than two weeks later when X made it known to the church he was moving to another city, Jeamus was relieved. This time when more apologies and tears came from X before he bugged out to another state—these apologies and tear-filled excuses turning into mini-lectures were never in the presence of any other witnesses—Jeamus simply nodded to end the conversations and false humility sessions as soon as possible. X would be spreading his type-A peacock feathers in another city, and would be out of Jeamus's life.

Jeamus finally told someone close to him about the X-assaults. What he went through is minimized by this confidant’s shoulder-shrugging-equivalent of a reaction. It was something terse and quipped, something in the neighborhood of “sometimes bad things happen and we just have to live through it,” and Jeamus swore to never tell anyone ever again. He still struggled with the idea that maybe some of this was his fault; it’s sort of implied by the person he shares the stories of his assaults from X with.

And here’s where creepy and murderous clowns re-enter the picture.

Sometime between the bus assault and the couch assault, two things happened:

1. Jeamus's father died in 1984. This would wound him for years to come.

2. When trust was renewed with X, Jeamus was with X when X was shopping at a newly conceived store-warehouse experience that went by the name Sam’s. It was late September of 1986. And among those interminable aisles of bulk-packaged granola bars, six-packs of canned shaving cream, and analog televisions the size and weight of Jupiter, there was a 4 x 4 table that had stacks and stacks of the newest book by Stephen King: It. At this point, Jeamus is able to cruise-control back into first-person narration, because the panic and stress have subsided and I can talk of these things again without running and screaming.

When I first saw those stacks of It, I skimmed through a copy quickly while X was on another aisle getting some type of hair product or vitamin supplement to further help his mirror-preening. You see, for a couple of years I had been reading horror on the sly. Reading “worldly” novels and frequenting worldly movies was—and still is—a no-no in churches of the type I was affiliated with, and reading and watching horror-genre stories was an even worse crime. For every time I opened the pages of a scary story, I’m sure a kitten died somewhere for that thought-crime.

You see, at this point it’s hard to leave sarcasm out, as I could make a point about the Bible being quite the frightening epic horror novel all by itself. This includes the wages of sin coming in the form of entire nations getting wiped out in the most gruesome ways and means, tent-pegs being driven through the skulls of sleeping dipshits, a strongman bludgeoning and beating enemy soldiers to death with the jawbone of an ass, special forms of head-wrenching execution for those involved in bestiality, and hundreds of other lovely like-minded stories—but I won’t do that. Instead, I’ll make sure that you know this: in the context of my church at that time, horror = bad. Bad, bad, baaad.

But it was too late for me. Not long after the bus episode and beginning to endure the subsequent self-serving monologues and bullshit from X, I’d borrowed a copy of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story and discovered a realm where embattled humanity engaged fear at its core. A story about how evil was engaged in order to destroy it or sometimes just survive it. It could be told in prose of elegance or brute force. I enjoyed reading horror. It was cathartic. I even enjoyed tales with bad endings, because it kept things real for me. Real in my mind that not everything bad could be vanquished by finite humanity. And so there I was, thrilled to see that Stephen King had written the ultimate monster story, the story of a group of friends trying to survive It, and eventually destroy It.

When X returned from selecting items much more righteous in nature than the hooks of hell springing forth from the copies of It, he saw me setting a copy back down. This provoked a disappointed and disapproving head shake from him, and he walked up to the display table, threw open a copy, and briefly read aloud from the text. It was from the scene where an adult version of the character Beverly Marsh is visiting her childhood home in Derry, Maine. She is served tea from a friendly older woman who turns out to be Pennywise. And the clown was serving Beverly blood and filth in a teacup by the scene’s end. After X read the description of what’s in the teacup, he flashed a look at me

(deadlights)

and tells me he’s disappointed I would even dare crack open a book like this one, when I already know what’s inside. At that moment, I would make it my goal in life to be nothing like X. In my heart I knew what my talisman would be against this pervasive asshole; a talisman against this persistent and unrepentant narcissist.

Horror.

Horror was the talisman I needed to deal with this egotistical fuck and destroy the wrecking ball he took to my ego and self-worth. I didn’t realize the fullness of the event and its implications at the time, but I would grow to understand it later. Stephen King's It was my Bible to use in redemption of myself, forgiveness for allowing myself to be a sucker and near-disciple of this monster-predator and his wretched shadow. And, in a metaphorical sense, It became my textbook on how to battle and destroy monsters. I fired my opening shot with Ghost Story, but It became the power-core.

That wasn’t the only moment of dark profundity blooming in my head after seeing mountains of copies of Stephen King’s It. The other moment that landed on me was tied to my young childhood. The word and name “Pennywise” dug up a still-scratching corpse in my memory: “They’re only pennies, kid… they’re only pennies and you can’t even buy ONE? ONE!? ONLY PENNIES!!”

I’ve gone over that day again and again in my head, wondering if my brain implanted things there based on King’s book. Did I only remember it half right, and the other half was created by out-gassing images and emotions from King’s tale? I don’t know. But it was so real, the fear I recall is palpable in the very room I sit to write this story.

The final sexual assault from X occurs in 1993, when in a group hug moment in the context of a small reunion party of former church members, he uses the occasion to do a reach around and grope me. I am so stunned by this and so disgusted by my own stupidity in putting myself in any kind of situation with this person over and over, that I shrink away to the bathroom later that night and wash myself so vigorously my skin is raw and bleeding in places. Over the years I chalk up visit after visit to shrinks, counselors, and I buy all the books on how to heal, the whole ball of smelly wax, the whole ball of clown white makeup.

And so it brings me back to the day I caught the bus to see It. As the tale winds down to the climax, catharsis is so powerful for me that I begin to tear up when the Losers finally get the upper hand on Pennywise. In my mind’s eye, I am beginning to vanquish the clown horror deadlighted eyes of X and the predatory marks he left on me, and I am destroying the smelly, half-shaven, gate-mouthed, salesman-jester creep who verbally terrorized me for not buying one of his greasy, black, and yellow balloons.

I am destroying those things that are my source of dread. The confluence of these monsters at different stages in my life leading up to one great Grand Guignol of horrific neurosis is falling back into the endless dark. Falling back and away from me it goes, because I’ve smashed it squarely in its head. Catharsis. I’ve put a serious hurt on monsters that have hurt me for so long, and then I simply melt down. I cry leaving the theater. I cry in the rain walking to the bus to take me home. I cry when I see a sewer drain is at the bus stop. I cry when I flip it the bird and spit on it. I don’t see any eyes 

(deadlights)

shining out from its dark grated hole as it sucks in greasy street water. I cry my fucking eyes out the rest of the day. I cry because I am letting go and it feels so good, yet so alien to me. It does more for me than all those hours on the shrinks couch, more than all those hours spent begging God in prayer for this haunted house inside my head to heal up.

"Why do you read and write horror?"

Because every time I do, I am sending creepy clowns back to hell.

I still have to use desvenlafaxine and take precautions to ensure my mental health stays steady; it's highly likely I’ll have to do this until I’m dead. I have battle scars. But they are no longer gangrenous. They’re a little rough and pinkish, but they are reminders that the clown in the sewer in the back of that bus and the clown who slithered through my neighborhood are gone. Their faces and noise are echoes from a giant, yet shrinking standpipe that I continue to walk away from.

I hear Michele call from the kitchen, “Whatcha workin’ on, babe?”

“I’m writing scary stuff, hon. But I think it’s good, and you’re welcome to read it. Whenever you’re ready.”

I feel her hand on my shoulder. Our history with exes and hard knocks doesn’t make us impervious to relationship difficulties, but in Michele’s touch it typifies our history in that I can feel the surety that no scary story I have behind me will scare her away.

“I’m ready,” she tells me.

Why do you read and write horror?

Because I want it out of my head, heart, and life. I want it up there on the page. I want it behind the keystrokes. I want it behind the strength I need to destroy my source of dread.