I have just completed my third, adult
thriller. I 'm often asked why Thriller Chillers?
Nothing, nothing captures the pain that
lies at the heart of human beings more than something overwhelmingly frightful,
loathsome, shocking and abhorrent.
The horror genre
is construed around such emotional and physical responses. It seeks to produce
in its audience anxious fright and hair-raising chills.
Across history
and culture, horror stories have served to document and illuminate the human
condition. Horror lies at the very heritage of literature, from scary
narratives in folklore and fairy tales to a long standing tradition of
fear-narration.
Horror lies in
the tension between the figurative and the real, the conscious and the
unconscious. It is an emotional response extremely personal.
'Man's
inhumanity to man', anger-motivated violence, murder, abuse, and the worst of
all acts, the deprivation and cruelty heaped upon our children are what
disgusts me. Since I have many untold happenings to draw on, I use these themes
in my more chilling works.
When writing
'thriller chillers' the emotional empathy becomes so strong that I find it
somewhat draining and frequently disturbing when the character takes over. I'm
often left wondering where that chilling idea or action came from
It was in 1951
that I tasted, for the first time, the extreme emotional forces associated with
horror. Few confrontations have divided New
Zealand as decisively as the 1951 Waterfront Dispute—the
longest, costliest and most widespread in New Zealand history. Few New
Zealanders were left unaffected during this time of great nationalism, civil
disobedience, prejudice, stubbornness, passion and anger.
It was also,
during this time of unrest, I discovered Edgar Allan Poe's, 'The Tell-Tale Heart,'
a tale where an old man's cloudy eye incites the narrator to an act of madness.
The hook,
'True——nervous—very, very, nervous I have been and am.' captured my attention,
the story as it unfolded, creepy, chilling, thrilling.
This was the
first time I identified with characters in a literary rendition. While I read,
'Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and
quicker and louder and louder every instant,' my heart banged against my
ribcage and my pulse played a symphony in my ears. I heard that heart beating
in moments of silence, week after week.
I then tackled
Poe's poetry and was mesmerised by the lyricism and the economy of words used
to create a chill.
Leave
my loneliness unbroken!
-quit
the bust above my door
take
thy beak from out my heart,
and
take thy form from off my door!
Quoth
the Raven, "Nevermore"
And
the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting,
still is sitting
On
the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And
his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And
the lamp-light o'er him steaming throws his shadow to the floor;
And
my soul from out the shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall
be lifted-nevermore
Consequently,
fifty odd years on, having immersed myself in the works of Edgar Allan Poe,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley and other canonised authors of horror
stories, when I came to writing, I chose, to write 'Thriller Chillers.' for
adults Not because works in the horror genre remain some of the best-selling
and most cherished books of all time, because, chilling experiences provide
coping strategies and I have so many
horrific acts which have never been aired in the public domain to weave into
works.
Maureen Green
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