Control: Make a Teen Horror Into a Work of Literature…

I, Dalton Lewis, am writing. Horror sounds good — sounds delicious. Scare your readers — I know I want to. Ghosts sound good for this one. I will show them how terrible the world can be...people dying, people mattering to them and then dying. I am writing this because a friend seems to have killed himself and I wanted to write about it. His name was Rylan. He died quite a few years ago now, but I don’t want to forget about him.

He was ceaselessly nice to me and everyone. He wanted to be an engineer but struggled in the engineering classes. He played Magic: The Gathering but only played the white cards because he didn’t want to sin — and thought that homosexuality was a sin, clearly. The clear problem here was that he hated himself — something I can understand and sympathize with. He died a while back — but I wanted to write about it again.

We all hate ourselves a little bit. I hate myself a little bit for being fat and unpopular and unsuccessful in my chosen field. This makes for an interesting story, I think: I want to write about unhappy people in high school. I remember some of that era and want to write about it.

I remember such horrible things: people complaining about me or laughing about me or not talking to me. I remember being a part of a group that didn’t include me as a friend but should have: the school newspaper group should have all become friends and hung out, but we didn’t. We were pretend friends for three years, working like crazy together and living together and never being real friends. We seemed like a group but never became close friends. I will always regret that.

Teen horror can be very much a work of pulp literature — but it can be a work of art if one works hard enough on it. Dramatic conflict can raise the stakes of the conflict. The disagreements between the characters are just as important as the disagreements between the characters and a terrifying bad guy. In the book I’m writing two of the three ghosts are incredibly sympathetic characters, with real emotions and pain and pathos. I don’t want them to be seen as villains, not at all.

Symbolism and irony are essential tools for writing an intelligent story. Each person means something; each storyline means something; something is being said about society. In The Hauntings of Old Liberty High the moral community is examined, and the one percent’s relationship to the ninety-nine percent. Characters kill in order to get up the ranks in the community. People kill themselves because they are ignored, shunned, and rejected by the community. The community itself certainly isn’t innocent — it has a lot to answer for in the piece.

I wanted to write about a time in my life long ago — a time that meant a lot to me. I know that I can’t write teen horror forever — I have to grow up and write something else sometime. For this project, though, I wanted to channel all my memories of high school and come up with a story which reflected them. That time of my life was filled with such tremendous highs and such terrible lows that I wanted to show it — and Rylan — to the audience.

Thanks, and take care, friends.