For many fans, the horror genre transcends the roller coaster-thrill of sitting in a dark theater, white-knuckling the arm rest. Given enough time, horror has a way of seeping into your bones and forming the lens of your perspective. Conversations on bodily autonomy reflect The Exorcist, consumerism becomes a re-enactment of Dawn of the Dead, and of course, death and human frailty loom over it all.
Horror becomes a tool, a series of building block-shaped tropes that fit together in such a way that we can assemble our own worlds and test our own dark hypotheses. We have no choice but to write horror—we know no other way. It’s become a part of us.
I don’t know that Patrick Barb considers himself a postmodernist, but it’s worth noting that in his debut collection, Pre-Approved for Haunting, the lens applied is twofold—to that of the story and to that of its structural foundation. I’ve long been a fan of Barb’s unique take on horror fiction (read “Haunting Lessons,” please), because as an artist he is not only at ease with the fundamentals of the craft, but also: the reader gets the impression that he’s having fun while traipsing through the graveyard. Barb’s stories are full of human, lived-in moments, but these moments flourish in often absurdist distortions or deconstructed echoes of the genre itself.
This is all to say that Patrick doesn’t just write horror stories—he also writes about horror stories.
Pre-Approved for Haunting is an excellent collection of weird and dark fiction that explores both the genre and more immediate themes of violence, found family, and the supernatural. To say the collection is any one thing would be to discredit it—as there are a handful of stories in here that have little to say about the horror genre itself. But its heights are when Barb feels like a kid in a sandbox, a mummy in one hand and a vampire in another. The glee borne from this imaginative process is contagious.
“A Portrait of the Artist as an Angry God” is an early standout that takes a haunted painting and runs it for the touchdown by emphasizing its father and son relationship, the idea of legacy, and some interesting insights into low and high art. “I Will Not Read Your Haunted Script” is a mind-bending monologue of sorts, as meta as the title announces, but extremely enjoyable nonetheless. The title story, however, might be the crown jewel of the collection, a brilliant deconstruction of the haunted house tale that asks poignant, yet simple questions of the reader to get them to consider what makes a house haunted. By the end, the story transforms from a playful romp through hallowed ground, into an exercise in inevitable dread.
The final, and perhaps the most extravagant genre-experiment is “The Giallo Kid in the Cataclysm’s Campgrounds,” where Barb weaves together several disparate horror elements—the giallo, slasher, and apocalypse—to create a sort of Cabin in the Woods riff starring a killer in a Homer Simpson mask. It is, in a word, batshit. But in the good way. Barb excels when he’s juggling horror iconography, letting the pieces fall where they may, and then sketching in the sinew.
My favorite story in Pre-Approved for Haunting though, breaks this mold in favor of bleaker subject matter and the elimination of genre navel-gazing. “Melvin and the Murder Crayon” is a dark tale about the death of a child by a trigger-happy resource officer and how the tragedy takes shape after the child’s death. The story is told across five pages, with plenty of scene breaks, creating the feeling of witnessing a flip book of snapshots—the initial violence, the press conference, the clean-up, and, of course, the titular crayon which takes on symbolic (perhaps supernatural) relevance. It’s a brilliant piece of horror fiction that is confrontational, empathetic, and sadly reflective of real life.
As a whole, Pre-Approved for Haunting moves quickly. There’s a fair amount of flash fiction, and most stories run less than fifteen pages, giving the reader a sense of breathless revelation as they turn from one to another. I’m a big proponent of leaving novellas out of collections because of the dead stop they put on the pacing and I was happy to find that Barb’s debut is a well-sequenced sprint, rather than a stuttering crawl.
Pre-Approved for Haunting is a book of horror stories written for horror fans. Barb dumps out his play-chest of slashers, hauntings, and monsters and asks you to see your own life built from the remnants of shrieking music stings and half-remembered direct-to-video rentals. Pre-Approved for Haunting shows us that horror, above all else, is a language.