People are sometimes surprised to find a joke sitting in the middle of one of my horror stories. I understand the surprise. Horror is meant to be the genre where you hold your breath, not the one where you snort with laughter at an unfortunate turn of phrase. But in my experience, the two get along rather better than you’d expect, provided you let them.
The Tension Does the Work
Here’s the thing about fear: it’s exhausting to sustain on its own. A story that’s relentlessly, unbrokenly grim starts to feel less frightening and more like an endurance test. But drop a moment of genuinely dark humour into the middle of it — a character making an ill-advised joke at the worst possible time or the narrator with an unreasonably dry observation about the monster currently chasing them — and the fear actually gets sharper afterwards, not softer. The laugh releases the tension just long enough for the next scare to hit harder.
I didn’t work this out deliberately, for what it’s worth. It’s just how my Muse seems to operate. She’ll have me three paragraphs into something genuinely unsettling and then insert a line so dry it makes me laugh out loud while I’m typing it, in a room on my own, like an absolute lunatic.
I’ve been told by my writing coaches that the main arc of a story is rising tension until the climax, and decreasing tension afterwards. The thing is, you can’t have the tension rising all the time. You have to let up on the reader occasionally, letting them relax, before the next whammy comes along and you tighten the screws even more! With a little humour in between, you fool them into thinking that they are safe. Then you prove that they are not!
Paranormal City as Exhibit A
Paranormal City is probably the clearest case of this, living in one place. It’s dark urban fantasy, properly unsettling in parts, full of creatures that have no business existing outside of someone’s worst nightmares. And yet there’s humour running right through it; not jokes that undercut the horror, but ones that sit alongside it, the way gallows humour sits alongside genuine fear in real life. People joke at funerals. People joke during emergencies. It’s a very human response to things that are otherwise too much to sit with directly. It’s our way of handling the tragedy, the pain, and the fear.
Why I Can’t Write It Any Other Way
I’ve tried, on occasion, to write something purely grim, no humour allowed in. It never lasts. Somewhere around the second page, a character says something that makes me grin, and I let it stay, because cutting it always feels like cutting something true about how people actually behave under pressure.
So if you pick up something of mine expecting to be properly unsettled and find yourself laughing somewhere in the middle of it, that’s not a flaw. That’s just how the two of them have always shared a roof in my head.