What makes a great horror story?

Winding Road Stories Newsletter #41

Apr 03, 2025

An interview with Tim Waggoner, four-time Bram Stoker Award winner

Tim Waggoner is a four-time Bram Stoker Award winner for excellence in horror writing. Old Monsters Never Die, the collection of many of his finest short stories, has been nominated for this year’s Stoker Award as well. We asked Tim about what goes into creating great horror fiction.

You are one of the most prolific horror authors in the world. Has it become easier or more challenging for you to come up with premises that terrify readers?

In some ways easier, in others more challenging. It’s easier in that I’ve developed a technique that helps me come up with premises for stories and novels. I take a weird experience/observation I’ve had, a true experience from my life, and an emotional core, often drawn from ideas I record using the notepad app on my phone, and I put them together. The elements can connect in some way, or they can be random. For example, for the last couple days there’s been a strange smell of fresh earth in my living room. (My wife works outside a lot, and it’s probably a bit of soil she tracked in that I haven’t found yet).

A few weeks ago, I attended the graveside service of a friend and colleague who died unexpectedly. He died on my 61^st birthday, so my own mortality has naturally been on my mind lately. For a story, I might make the man who died my brother. (He’s the same age as the man who died). That way, the main character will have a stronger emotional connection to the person who passed away. I’ll make the soil smell follow my character around to different places. And I’ll use fear of death coming closer toward the character as an emotional core. I’ll change the characters so they aren’t so much like me and my brother, too. The more realism I can inject into a story makes the fantastic elements more believable, and then they’ll (hopefully) have more impact on readers.

In addition to teaching creative writing, you have an excellent blog for all writers called Writing in the Dark. What is the most common pitfall you see for new/aspiring horror writers?

Not writing with an immersive point of view. Beginning writers (of any genre really) write as if they’re passive observers of a scene, like they’re sitting in a movie theater watching events play out on the screen, with no real mental or emotional attachment to them. Writers need to write as if they are the viewpoint character in a scene or story, experiencing everything the character does, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Not only does this kind of point of view make for good fiction, it’s vital in horror, because if readers can’t connect to a character, they aren’t going to empathize with all the awful things he or she goes through in a story. Horror happens inside characters, not outside.

Old Monsters Never Die is a collection of some of your finest horror short stories over the last several years. Do you find that great horror short stories share any similar characteristics?

1) They usually have smaller premises. For example, I once wrote a story that takes place after a zombie apocalypse. Instead of focusing on the big picture, I focused on a small one, a man who drives a mobile crematorium to dispose of dead or captured zombies people leave at the curb like trash. His own wife and infant child are zombies, and he keeps them in the basement of his house and feeds them roadkill. He fears he’ll be discovered, and his wife and child will be thrown into the mobile crematorium by someone else.

2) Great horror stories also start relatively close to the end. Richard Matheson’s classic story “Born of Man and Woman” starts close to when the protagonist (a mutated child whose parents keep locked away) escapes. Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” starts close-ish to the end. We learn about the narrator’s obsession with the old man’s “vulture eye,” then we see the narrator kill the old man, then try to hide the murder from the police. But of course, his guilty conscience – manifesting as the sound of the old man’s still-beating heart – forces him to confess.

3) They start with a cool idea and build to an even cooler ending. Too many writers save their cool idea for the end of their story, making everything that came before little more than dull build-up to the climax. But to use “The Tale-Tail Heart” again, Poe starts with the narrator’s bizarre obsession and ends with the thunderous beating of the old man’s heart and the tormented narrator’s confession. Cool idea to cooler idea.

4) They don’t overexplain. In Poe’s story, we don’t know who the narrator is telling his or her tale to. We don’t know why he/she was living with the old man. The character’s obsession with the old man’s eye is never explained. And while we can surmise the heartbeat is a result the character’s guilty, we don’t know for sure. In Matheson’s story, we don’t know why the protagonist was born some kind of mutant. We don’t know how it learned language or the crudely spelled diary entries it writes. We don’t know why it writes them or with what material. None of those things matter to the story, which is a metaphor for child abuse.

If someone were new to the genre and wanted to begin becoming literate in horror, which three books would you recommend for them to start with and why?

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. And I’m going to cheat and add a fourth book: Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer. Jackson’s book for its literary style and its relentless, mounting psychological dread. King’s to see an old premise made new, as well as his depth of character and strong sense of place (and no one can evoke fear in their prose like he does, especially in his early work). Barker’s to show the artistic possibilities of extreme and erotic horror, two genres often looked down on. And Ligotti’s to show how the best horror comes from a unique imagination and perspective.

Last but not least, what is the scariest room of any house and why?

Whichever one I happen to be standing in at any given moment. As I said earlier, horror happens inside us. We carry it with us wherever we go, and it can manifest at any time, triggered by the most seemingly innocuous things…like a weird odor of soil in your living room.

Old Monsters Never Die can be purchased here.

Upcoming Author Appearances

Clare Castleberry - Azalea House and Forbidden Gardens

Clare Castleberry will be appearing at the Books Along the Teche Literary Festival in New Iberia, Louisiana, on Saturday, April 5th from 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. Clare will be chatting with readers and signing copies of many of her books, including Azalea House and Forbidden Gardens.

Clare Castleberry
Books Along the Teche Literary Festival
Bouligny Plaza
Main Street
New Iberia, LA 70560
booksalongthetecheliteraryfestival.com

Jessica K. Foster - Andy and the Summer of Something

Jessica K. Foster, author of Andy and the Extroverts and the sequel Andy and the Summer of Something, will be appearing at Barnes and Noble in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday, April 12 at 3 p.m. to greet readers and sign copies of her novels.

Jessica K. Foster
Saturday, April 12 - 3 p.m.
Barnes & Noble
2236 E. Beltline Avenue NE
Grand Rapids, MI 49525

NJ Gallegos - The Broken Heart and The Fatal Mind

NJ Gallegos, author of The Broken Heart and The Fatal Mind, joined her co-hosts on the Scream Kings podcast to discuss the horror film, The Substance.