Horror, of all the genres, is the only one that can provoke an involuntary visceral reaction.
Stephen Graham JonesRead
If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.
Interpretation
The essence of your current story often lies in your past experiences.
This quote suggests that if one finds themselves frequently referring back to the past in order to make sense of the present narrative, it indicates that the core of that narrative is rooted in past events. It implies that understanding one's history is crucial in order to fully comprehend the current situation or story being told.
In practice
In a book discussion about character development and backstory.
Horror, of all the genres, is the only one that can provoke an involuntary visceral reaction.
We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.
I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.
The way humor's usually used in horror, it's as a pressure-release valve; without it, the drama would escalate out of all control almost immediately.
Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.
Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.
Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty.
Religion, art, and science flourish best in a free society. True, freedom does not afford much opportunity for grand gestures. It has little room for martyrs. But life is not supposed to be about dying well. It is about living well.
What’s hard about being on the other side of the world is that sometimes the problem feels so big that changing one life doesn’t feel like enough. But it is.
April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.
Aikido is the spirit of loving protection for all beings.
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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