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How to Write Your Horror Without Attachment
The juxtaposition of trauma and cool, calm detachment can be symphonic.
When I was small, we used to joke that the trash got picked up faster than the bodies. Bodies bloated blue. Bodies under swing-sets and park benches. A lone arm with a syringe. We played tag — you’re it! amongst the junk sick, the dead. One night I crept out of our apartment and peered into an open door. A woman splayed out on linoleum, the overhead lights bleached her face clean. Her eyes and mouth gaped wide. I shook her and she felt cold, yet soft, like cashmere. And then I stood up, padded up the stairs to our apartment and woke my mother. I think someone’s dead.
I was five.
It took me decades of writing to find my personal style, my signature, the way someone can read a work of mine and know it’s wholly me. It’s how one tells stories, the way they structure sentences, the tone, tenor, and language they use. Are their lines verbose or lean bordering on anemic? It wasn’t until my late 30s that I realized I approach dark subject matter with a cool detachment. And with that comes being a surgeon of sorts. Every word has to hold its weight. The stark, the slim, the better.
In a Kirkus feature of my first book, The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here, the reviewer writes: “Sullivan’s…