The Garden of Earthly Horrors

I’ve been shocking myself lately.

As I’ve been working on this horror novella, especially during the drafting process, I found myself pushing my boundaries of comfort. I may be an atheist and a horror writer now, but I was raised Roman Catholic and those hooks of so-called decency still ensnare me.

I made myself squirm, with the goal of making my readers squirm, but even I had to take pause and consider what I was writing.

Where did this come from? From where am I drawing these details?

The internet is a likely culprit. I’m a millennial, after all. My formative years were when the Internet was the wild west. When it was horrific, new, and dangerous. Not like it is now, a slow rot of cancer that whips us from apathy to rage at gigabit speeds. No, the new internet was scarring. Shocking. Nascent.

And it was on those just-born pages where maybe I started to cultivate the horrible within myself. I’ve seen some horrific things on the internet, and I don’t just mean two girls, one cup, goatse, or beheadings. I’m not talking about haunted e-mail chains, copypasta, and cursed websites. No, I stumbled upon some truly awful things. I was ten years old when I saw something so vile it changed my perception of humanity forever. And that darkness has likely stuck with me ever since.

So yes, the internet is part of the reason I write horror. It raised me. Literally and figuratively. In the time when I was learning teenage independence, in the years when I left home to go to boarding school, a place with the barest amount of adult supervision, the internet was shepherding me into adulthood.

But that’s not the whole story. I was raised Roman Catholic and if the internet is all of humanity’s sins at your fingertips, Catholicism is the comfortable chair you sit in to enjoy your vices.

For who created sin?

As damaging as the internet was to my psyche, and continues to be to my health, how damaging was all the talk of fire and brimstone to a child? How impressed upon me were fear and damnation? I grew up in Europe, so I toured the bone ossuaries and skeleton chapels. I saw the torture devices of the Inquisition. I stood beneath the statue of Archangel Michael slaying the dragon. And I fell under the spell of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, at seven years old.

All products of Catholicism.

No, all of the blame cannot be placed at the feet of the internet. The horrific things were already there inside of me before I ever loaded the first website. How dare the vestigial religion be shocked by what I’m writing now when it is its architect? How dare the creator of sin and hell judge my words?

You’re going to hear a lot about nightmarism in my upcoming blog and social media posts. It’s the name I’ve given my kind of horror writing. I’m looking forward to exploring what that is with you, but in the meantime, I leave you with this:

I’m going to keep writing my nightmarist fiction until I kill the last vestiges of Catholicism within me. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Stay frosty, my friends.