It’s unlikely that you’ll encounter any actual psychopaths at the 20th annual World Horror Convention this coming weekend. It’s highly unlikely, since estimates suggest that only 1 to 4 percent of a population harbors the traits that require such a designation.
That can lead to violently and intentionally severed carotid arteries, for instance.
That might allow a refrigerator’s bright shelves to boast a human head or two among the more typical luncheon meats.
And, hell, the folks attending the convention – the writers, the artists, the hardcore fans from all over the country – they’re just like you and me.
Well, more or less.
“We don’t write these things because we’re damaged in some way,” says Nate Southard, co-chair of this year’s gathering at the Doubletree Hotel near the interchange of I-35 and 290, “we write them because we’re genuinely trying to find the answer to how some of these things can happen.”
“When you’re writing horror, you’re not endorsing the badness,” says Lee Thomas, the other co-chair of the literary horror crowd’s social event of the year. “You’re trying to figure out why it’s happening. You hopefully get to some point of greater understanding through the characters.”
And so it goes – to a greater or lesser extent – in the darkling fiction of Southard and Thomas, as in the fiction of Peter Straub and F. Paul Wilson and Sarah Langan and Joe Hill and Sandra Kasturi and Joe R. Lansdale, all of whom (and dozens more) will be celebrating the (vicarious) Evil That Men And Women Do, with book signings, instructive panels, and pointedly non-murderous mingling this Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
Maybe you don’t want to do the whole four-day thing, but you’d like your first edition of Ghost Story signed, or maybe you want a chance to tell Jack Ketchum that his novel about a cannibal family in Maine creeped you the fuck out and turned you Vegan-for-life? Here’s a hot tip from co-chair Southard:
“Saturday night, we’ll be having a mass author signing at 7 or 7:30, and that’s actually open to the general public, you won’t need a membership or a badge to get in. Pretty much every author we have at the convention will be in one of the ballrooms.”
Noted and marked.
You want more information, friend, check out the convention website, hey? And remember to look here, on your Chronicle’s blogspace, tomorrow: We’ll be running a decent-sized interview with Southard and Thomas, covering such things as 1) the difficulty of running a big convention, 2) how someone gets hooked on horror in the first place, 3) the difference between crime fiction and pure horror, and 4) fuckin’ soggoths – how do they work?
This article appears in April 22 • 2011.