Recently, I tried to read Goblin by Josh Malerman. For those of you who don’t know, Goblin is a collection of six novellas that all take place in the small Michigan town of Goblin, where it rains sixty percent more than anywhere else in the US, the police resemble shuffling zombies, and you don’t enter the woods if you want to come out again.
I liked the idea of it and finally got around to reading it recently. And…I was unimpressed. I got through pages quickly every time I picked it up, but the stories within were just not drawing me in. By the time I got to the fourth novella (I know, I’m a trooper), I was lagging. And finally, by the first night in Marietta, I just couldn’t finish it. I put it down, never to pick it up again.
What was the issue? Well, it was the focus on the titular town. There was too much time spent on it and not enough on the stories. On the storytelling. On the horror.
Way too many words are spent on the town’s history and geography. It feels more like a history lesson at times. In fact, the second novella is focused on a former high school history teacher who knows the town history like the back of his hand. And you get that there’s a lot of interesting history there. And you can feel Malerman’s love for the fictional town.
But all that isn’t what we picked up the book for. We came for a book with six interconnected novellas centered around a single town that will hopefully scare the shit out of us. And this emphasis on worldbuilding by the author comes at the expense of the scaring the shit out of us.
Now, every story, regardless of genre, requires some degree of worldbuilding. The horror genre is no exception. You have to establish the setting, the people, the vernacular, and all that. Sometimes this can be done with having a date at the beginning of the story or just a few hints. Other times, like with stories set in historical eras, you have to do a ton of work to build the setting, bringing to life the clothes and manners and whatnot. And in the fantasy and sci-fi genres, authors will have all sorts of complicated compendiums and charts and maps to make their made up worlds feel as real as possible.
That being said, in the horror genre, the emphasis has to be on scaring readers. So, while you can spend time building those worlds, you have to remember it’s all in subservience of telling your story and scaring those readers. Look at Alma Katsu’s historical horror novels, or my own novel The Pure World Comes. We put so much research into the eras our stories take place and spend so much time building those locations, you can almost feel the winter chill killing the Donner Party, or smell the offal in the street of Victorian London.
But neither of us forget that this is all for the story. We never think that the location, while interesting, is more important than telling the story. And it feels like with Goblin, Malerman, for all his strengths as a writer, got those priorities mixed up. And the result were six subpar novellas that might have been decent if more time was spent trying to frighten us readers.
Honestly, I wish the book had approached Goblin’s history like King approached the history of Derry in IT. In that book, the town history, which has several chapters devoted to it, doesn’t detract for the story. For one thing, most of those chapters take place in-between the action, which doesn’t detract from the story. Second, most of those history-building chapters are presented as Mike Hanlon doing research on the town and on It, so these sections are not only part of the main story, but they add context and help us realize just how ingrained It is to Derry. In Goblin, the history is rarely related to the events of any of the novellas, which only detracts from the stories.
And finally, It always has a hand in the history of the town. Whether appearing as Pennywise or causing some disaster at the end of Its active period, It is always there, making the history of Derry the history of It.
As for Goblin…the history could be cut out of most of the novellas I read and it wouldn’t matter. In fact, it might make the stories scarier. Especially since those stories I read don’t really have anything to do with Goblin history.
This is something important to keep in mind when writing horror in a location that requires extensive worldbuilding. Yes, it’s important to bring the location to life. Yes, the history can be interesting and can be talked about throughout the story. However, that must all be done as part of the story. In service to the story. Otherwise, you’re just going to get an ode to a fictional town, and not anything really scary.
Personally, I think I would rather read IT or The Hunger again and use those lessons in my own writing.
One more thing, Followers of Fear: The Solar Press Horror Anthology Volume I, which contains my story “The Dedication of the High Priestess,” is going to be released on December 1st. Not only is this an exciting short story anthology, it also contains one of my favorite short pieces, in print for the first time (before this, it was only available in audio).
If you would like to preorder a copy, you can do so using the links below. If you like in the UK and EU, order directly from the website. If you live in the US, use Orbit DVD.
That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. Until next time, good night and pleasant nightmares!
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Rami Ungar The Writer 