Welcome to the Nightmare

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about my writing. I think it’s essential to explore my influences and define my style as a writer. After all, I want my readers to know what they’re getting when they pick up one of my books or start one of my stories. That’s why I’ve been getting into my upbringing and delving into why I am the way I am in previous blog posts. But I’m taking it even further and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.

I’ve been writing cross-genre speculative fiction for years—always with an element of horror. As I’ve grown as a writer, though, I’ve found that I’m drawn more and more to the void. I’ve been exploring the bleaker corners of the human experience, and I’ve found that though the horror genre allows me to delve into those spaces, there are other genres I can blend into it that really make that exploration personal to me.

Despite the fact that I’ve been writing for some time now, I’ve always struggled with how to define my style. Am I a grimdark writer? Horror? Weird fiction? Cross-genre speculative fiction? I’ve written stories that could be described as any of those, as well as those that could be described as literary fiction, magical realism, or even science fiction. But as I’ve looked back over my body of work, I’ve realized that there is a common thread that runs through all of my writing: a sense of unease, of something lurking just out of sight.

So I’ve decided to coin a new term for my writing:

Nightmarism.

Nightmarism is a genre that combines the best elements of horror, literary fiction, magical realism, and weird fiction. At its core, Nightmarism is all about exploring the dark areas of the human experience and the very real things that terrify us. But it’s also about delving into the unknown, the surreal, and the unexplainable.

What can you expect to find in Nightmarist fiction?

First and foremost, you’ll find bleak realities with complicated, adult relationships. I like to explore broken homes, faded relationships, regret, self-loathing, and distrust. These are all-too-human horrors that are known and experienced the world over and are at the forefront of the stories I tell.

But it isn’t all negative. Other common human experiences of hope and love are often themes I explore in my stories. The human experience is more than just the bleak, and those highlights of the good are what ultimately make the horror so awful.

Beneath the surface of these mundane experiences, though, you’ll find layers of reality being stripped away. The loss of sanity is muddled with intrusive magic. Insomnia leads to nightmares of alien vistas and the waking world becomes home to liminal spaces, cosmic dimensions, and dreamscapes. The unsettling, the strange, and the unknowable hammer the background of everyday horror reinforcing just how small humans are on the grand scale of the universe.

And through it all, there’s always a wriggling thread of terror. An unsettling feeling, a sense of impending doom, or the presence of death itself. Nightmarism is all about creating a surreal sense of dread in a very realistic experience.

I hope that this gives you a better sense of what my writing is all about. Nightmarism is a genre that I’m excited to continue exploring. If you’re a fan of horror, literary fiction, magical realism, or weird fiction, I’d like to invite you into my world of waking nightmares.

Welcome.