Birth of a Horror Lit fan.

I suppose the best way to begin a new blog is to start at the beginning, so that’s just what I am going to do: tell you exactly how I fell in love with horror, particularly horror literature.

My earliest exposure to the genre came courtesy of my mom, who planted the seeds for this lifelong obssession. You see, I don’t remember her ever watching kiddie shows with me, but I do remember curling up on the couch after kindergarten and watching Dr. Who with her. I remember trying to keep my six-year-old eyes open late into the evening as she took in disaster movies on TV. I remember her teaching me to read at age three and that on warm summer nights she would recount to me tales from a gigantic hardcover volume of Asian folk stories full of ghosts, demons and other bad things that go bump in the night. Those stories never frightened me, even at age five or six, I was fascinated by them.

My mom died when I was seven, and with her went my early education into all things dark, strange and weird, but she had succeeded in instilling a lifelong love of those things in me - that may just be one of her greatest legacies. After her death, my genre intake quickly became limited to early morning animated episodes of Scooby-Doo and grim Choose Your Own Adventure books that I could sign out from my grade school library. I no longer had an adult to expose me to cool the grown-up stuff. I remember trying out some Judy Blume, young adult fiction and hating it. You see, I was a kid living through all that kid shit, being bullied, being raised by just my dad - I didn’t want to read about it. Perhaps living it was simply bad enough. I wanted to read books that stole me away to unusual places. I wanted to immerse myself in spooky houses and all things supernatural. I wanted the glorious escapism that I discovered very early that literature could and did provide.

By the time I was ten I had graduated into adult paperbacks. I would save up my allowance only to spend it at the first convenience store with a rotating book rack that I could find - always trying to choose the most horror of the horror novels there. This is how I discovered James Herbert’s The Rats, Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz. Others like Clive Barker, I uncovered during my weekly trips to the public library. I couldn’t get enough. I was in love. To this day you can ask my father what I was like as a kid and he’ll tell you that I always had my head in a book.

By the time I was done grade school I had read everything King, Koontz and Barker had released until that point. My grade eight independent study project was a detailed comparison of the writings of King and Barker. Yes, I was in deep. Very deep. Around this same time I decided that I wanted to build my own personal genre library, something that wasn’t going to happen as long as I lived in my father’s house as he frowned at owning books. But I still bought horror paperbacks and hardcovers as often as I could, stowing them away for that great someday when I would be an adult and could do what I wanted.

Today, those twenty-year-old novels represent the earliest building blocks of - you guessed it - my own personal library. Three big, black bookshelves that span from the floor to the ceiling and represent that dream hatched by my twelve-year-old self. All in all, my most prized collection, even if everyone curses it to high hell every time we move.

So that’s the beginning of how I got from there to here, for the rest of the middle and end, you’ll need to check back later (after all, if I continued the tale now, it would be a novel in itself).