Guest Post: Fiction You Can Sink Your Teeth Into - Tim Waggoner

Fiction You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

By Tim Waggoner

I’ve written a lot of horror fiction over the course of my thirty-seven-year career.  My favorite kind to write is nightmarish surreal horror, where reality is unstable, where characters’ psychological states are mirrored in the outer world, and where Entropy always wins in the end.  This kind of horror is the most artistically satisfying for me, but the most fun I’ve ever had writing horror was when I wrote my two novels for Severed Press: Teeth of the Sea, which came out in 2017, and Blood Island, which was recently released.

If you’re not familiar with Severed Press, they’re a Tasmanian small-press publisher that specializes in pulp horror of the monsters-eat-people variety, complete with lurid covers featuring toothsome beasts.  I’ve loved all things dark and wonderful since I was a kid, and I was especially fond of what I called monster movies.  I watched any horror movie that came on the TV – no home video devices or content streaming services in those days – but I enjoyed movies where some horrifying creature preyed on hapless humans the most.  The monsters stimulated my imagination.  There were so many different types, from humanoid varieties like vampires and werewolves to giant insects and irradiated dinosaurs.  The plot structure was likely comforting to me as well.  These stories were as simple and ritualized as genre fiction gets.  Monster appears and starts eating people, people discover monster exists, people battle monster while monster eats more of them, survivors find a way to defeat the monster in the end (often by learning about and exploiting its one weakness).  Somewhere in the story, people would have to deal with personal issues exacerbated by the danger and tension of the monster attacks, but this aspect wasn’t very interesting to the child-me.  I usually read comics while I waited for the monster to make another appearance.

As I grew older, I began to discover more sophisticated horror in books and film, but the creature-feature variety has always remained close to my heart.  I’d never had any ambition to write a monster-chomps-humans novel, but one day I saw a submission call from Severed Press on Facebook, and I thought to myself, “I wonder if I can do that?”  (Much of my writing career has been a result of asking myself this question).  So I pitched several ideas to Severed Press, all of which were received with less-than-wild enthusiasm.  The publisher asked if I could write a sea monster book since they sold best.  None of my original pitches took place on the sea.  I almost drowned when I was nine, and I use water a lot in my stories, but never at novel length.  I thought the sea would be too limited a setting for a monster book.  All people had to do to escape the monster was stay away from the water.  But it became a challenge, and I was determined to come up with a kick-ass sea monster concept.  The result was Teeth of the Sea.  In this novel, prehistoric monsters called pliosaurs attack the island resort of Elysium – which is crisscrossed with an intricate canal system (making it easier for my pliosaurs to hunt).

I had a lot of fun writing the book, but when I was finished, I figured that was it for me and sea monsters.  I’d found a way to tell a story with sea beasts, but how could I write another without repeating myself?  I started to wonder if I could do it again, and the eventual result was Blood Island.  This time a real-life sea monster attacks a film crew making a low-budget creature-feature movie.  And while the monster lives in the sea, extensions of itself can go onto the land in search of prey.  I had even more fun writing Blood Island, and I leaned in even harder to the cheesy B-movie vibe.

One thing I did in both novels is the same thing I try to do in all my fiction: make the story about people as much as, if not more than, the monsters.  The best horror – even cheesy B-movie just-for-fun horror – is never about the monster.  It’s about how people react to the monster (or to becoming a monster).  And even if a character makes only a short appearance in the story before he or she gets eaten, I do my best to make them as fully fleshed (no pun intended) as possible.  I try to give these characters some dignity before they’re forced to exit the stage.

If you check out either Teeth of the Sea or Blood Island, I hope you enjoy them.  And if you’d like to try your hand at writing a monster-eats-people story, always remember the people are just as important as the monsters.

Oh, and don’t forget to have fun.