HORROR VS TERROR VS THAT'S JUST F***ING NASTY

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”
― Stephen King

You gotta give it to good ol' Stevie, he's figured it out.  Be prolific, be formulaic, and come up with enough crazy ideas to keep your shit selling.  I don't hate him, I'm jealous.  Okay, I'm a little pissed.  He had that one thing, the Cat's Eye, taken partially from his Night Shift collection.  Yeah, let's blame little trolls for stealing children's breath in the middle of the night.  And, AND, make the cat the savior.  No, we do that.  We steal your breath.  We stalk.  We kill.  We attack and shred your limbs when you dangle them over the bed while you sleep.  But it's okay to keep thinking we don't...SLICE!

Now, back to this whole Terror vs Horror vs Gorror bullshtuff.  I'm not gonna kid you or myself.  I'm not gonna claim to be holier than thou like some people (see above), and say, 'Terror is the noblest of the genres, and the less skilled will resort to Horror, and Gorror is reserved for the truly inept and exploitative.'  I just quoted myself.  Suck it.

Let's get real.  Society has changed.  We live in an immediate, visceral world.  Terror just isn't terrifying anymore.  Also, people are pretty stupid these days.  You gotta slice them across the face with violence and gore to get their attention.  But what about...?  Shut up.

Take me, for example.  No, take Patton first.  He did it the old fashioned way.  He built tension, ratcheted up the terror, then thrust a big ol' dose of horror on those sumbitches!  Then, THEN, before he even got to the gorror, Sir Spanks-a-lot, AKA Billy Bob Dick, cuts the scene.  And you're left wondering, 'What's gonna happen next?'  And then your imagination takes over, and if you're anything like me, you're f**ked.  Did you even read the STALKER chapter?  READ IT!

I do things a little differently.  I build terror through horror and gorror.  You'll not see me until the very end, after my damage has been wrought.  You may hear the scraping of my blades, see the evil shimmer of my fangs in the dim moonlight, smell my rotting fur, taste the foul air as I poison it with vile intent, and feel the thumbscrews of death as I twist them around you.  

Then I get bored.  That's when the severed arm crashes through your patio door.  That's when your heart stops.  That's when you see this...

And that's when you're dead.  You're just...f***ing...dead.  I'm not sorry and it is personal.  If I killed you, you know you deserved it.  You all deserve it!  I will not stop until every last one of you is a rotting feline buffet!  

Are you still there?  Sorry, I get a little excited when I'm thinking about eradicating you assholes.  Then I have to remind myself, I'm not quite ready to tackle that chore yet, and until I am, I may need some of you.  You know, somebody has to supply the bullets.

So, until I strike again, don't bother me.  I'm terrorizing a book.

And you wonder why...