Content warning: This post contains a discussion of sexual assault depictions in fiction.
So I've been reading a lot of horror, and particularly extreme horror, this year. It's been fun! Mostly. I love horror movies and I love horror books. Some of them have been excellent, like Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door, which I reviewed last week.
One thing has been bothering me, though, and it's the inclusion of sexual assault in—I'm pretty sure—every one of the extreme horror stories I've read.
I get it, I do. Sexual assault is horrifying. It's viscerally and primally horrifying in a way that both men and women can relate to.
And not all the authors have been gratuitous in their depictions. Most have handled the subject with relative sensitivity, cutting away from the "action" rather than lingering just for the sake of inducing horror.
But we live in a great big world full of horrifying things: body horror, psychological horror, etc. At some point, I think relying on sexual assault is cheap. It's thrown in without any consideration of how such things affect people; it becomes a plot device, and nothing more.
So I wrote an extreme horror short story! And it doesn't include any sexual assault. Be the change you want to see, right?
My short story, "Dinner and a Show," ends abruptly and needs to be workshopped, but I'm excited to see where its development goes. After months of reading extreme horror, it was cool to try some out for myself. I felt like Garth Ennis!
Comments