Oh, The Horror.

Consider this post a special program in honor of Halloween in which I preempt my usual chronicling of the life and times of the kid as if this were a broadcast of It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. While I may, at a later date, write about the great costume debate of 2011 which pits Pooh Bear against SpongeBob, at the moment I feel the need to reflect on something truly horrifying, like, um, writing guides. Stay with me. It's frightening. I swear.

You see, I started this blog because several people seem to enjoy my tales of parenthood. But I also started it because I love to write. Unfortunately, I don't do it nearly as much as I should. And when you’ve spent a lot of your life plink-plunking around writing and not actually doing it, which usually translates into having taken a million fiction workshops and reading a billion writing guides, the consideration of purchasing yet another book that might tell you how to write, all the while secretly hoping it will just make you write, is frightful. It’s like being addicted to diet books and imagining that just reading them will cause the pounds to plummet directly from your hips. It’s scary shit.

Recently, during a rare bookstore visit, I wandered over to the writing reference section. I say “wander” as if I had involuntarily drifted off of a predetermined course. Of course, this was not the case. There I found myself, yet once again, among the shelves stacked with writing guide on top of writing guide when my eyes fell upon what looked like a lovely hardcover with a picturesque white country house and its cellar doors on the front. The book? Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scary shit.

But now that I’ve read it, not scary shit all. Actually, totally and utterly delightful shit. I must admit that I have a great love for Stephen King. He is one of the most prolific writers of our time and one of our best storytellers. I think he’s a genius and I admire him immensely.

Unfortunately, I’ve never read one of his books.

Why? Because I am the world's biggest wuss. I can barely walk down the horror book aisle in a store, let alone actually read one of them and don’t even mention watching a horror movie. I’m still traumatized by the few I’ve inadvertently seen or been forced to watch. And at  41 years of age, I am still afraid of the dark.

I believe this fear can be traced back to 1977 when the ads for Suspiria caused me to burst into howling tears. I knew the commercial by heart back then: the back of a lady’s head with glowing, luxurious hair, and then the voiceover: “Roses are red, violets are blue, something something something That will be the end of YOUUUU!!!!” And then the head turns around and it’s a freaking skull in a wig, which is hideously disconcerting. You’d think I would have seen it coming since I saw that commercial on an almost daily basis. Why did I never change the channel? Did I constantly mistake the head for one of a Breck Girl? It’s possible that because it was 1977, channel changing entailed actually getting up off the couch and walking to the television, which would place me in much closer proximity to the offending head. God only knows why I continued to torment myself, but my phobia of horror movies—and I mean phobia as in I’m not just afraid to watch them, but their entire existence sends me into a hyperbolic panic—was cemented that year and only grew worse as I got older.

In the sixth grade, dressed as a lawyer for a Halloween party (don’t ask), I had to brave Friday the 13^th, Part 2. I thought I could just lower my head so that the brim of my lawyer’s hat (It was 1982, every business woman worth her salt hat a great hat) would shield me from the television, but I inevitably couldn’t stop myself from looking up at the worst possible moments. This marks the day that I first saw what I fear more than anything in a horror movie: decapitation. No, I didn’t really enjoy the two kids having sex who got skewered together by a stake coming up through the bottom of the bed and subsequently, both of their bodies, but it was the loss of heads that really got me.

Then there was the 8^th grade school Halloween party which I had been planning not to attend for years in advance (I went to the same school nursery through twelfth grade. Again, don’t ask.), knowing full well that it involved the viewing of a horror movie. However, my near decade-long plan was thwarted when my mother made me attend as punishment for walking home from school that day, instead of taking the bus, which I did in order to purposefully miss a ballet class I didn’t feel like going to. I was forced to watch Vincent Price’s Theater of Blood, in which a disgruntled actor kills theater critics in various manners from the works of Shakespeare. You would think I could have overlooked the gore in appreciation of all the literary references. And you would be wrong. Very wrong. Included in the seven or eight gruesome and grisly deaths, there was indeed a decapitation and one that still plagues me. While a couple is in bed, good old Vincent cuts off the man’s head with some ginormous gardening shears (And I cannot even begin to imagine what Shakespeare play this is from.). The wife merely rolls over accusing her hubbie of snoring again until she wakes up in a Godfather-horse-head-in-bed pool of blood, shakes her husband to see if he’s all right, and wouldn’t you know it, his head rolls of the bed. Now when I sleep next to my husband, I sometimes become too petrified to move, afraid that his head might spontaneously detach from his body.

And then there’s the classic, Nightmare on Elm Street, which was the movie of choice at a 9^th grade slumber party. By this time I was wise enough to remove myself from the room entirely so I didn’t even see a single scene of this one, but I’m still hideously afraid of Freddy Kruger. A few years ago, I had a dream in which Freddy appeared as a Rastafarian dressed in a spiffy white tennis ensemble, adeptly playing doubles on my high school’s courts. One would think that would make me warm up to the guy—no burn pun intended—but no. Still petrified.

There was also Death Ship. I don’t even know where this piece of crap came from. No one’s ever heard of it. I think my friend’s brother had it so we thought it would be a bright idea to pop it on the old VCR. What was I thinking? It was about some haunted World War II Nazi boat by which some poor survivors from a boating debacle were rescued. I recall something of someone drowning in a sea of skulls, but not just plain skeleton skulls. They were somehow green and goopy. As if plain, dry skulls weren’t enough.

And the piece de scaredy cat resistance: the TV movie version of The Shining with Steven Weber. I could never get near the Jack Nicholson version so I thought I’d try this one thinking I couldn’t possibly be scared of the guy from Wings. Apparently, I was wrong. I had an utter meltdown during a scene in a room with skeletal heads on pedestals or some such vision. I’ve never been so happy for a commercial break in my life.

So now I’m reading this memoir and I am falling in love with Stephen King more and more with every page. However, the one night, while I was in the living room reading a section of his book on how to write strong dialog in a novel, I started to become obsessed with the notion that there might be a severed head in our refrigerator (Which is not even from a Stephen King book. That’s a hideous Friday the 13^th, Part 2 flashback in action). I ran upstairs to read in bed with Stu, but he’d already gone to sleep and I had to get in bed in the dark and there I was, convinced, yet once again, that his head had been cut off, just waiting for me to discover its detachedness.

Maybe I was right. Writing guides are HORRIFYING.