Horror can happen anywhere, anytime. You can have a haunted house in the middle of nowhere or a haunted apartment in the middle of Manhattan, and, if done right, both will be just as scary. You can have zombies in rural Georgia or downtown Atlanta. Vampires in the Arctic wastelands or suburban neighborhoods.
So why do people say setting is so important?
In three words, ‘Because it is.’
You see, while you can tell a scary story in any setting, you can’t necessarily tell the SAME scary story in any setting. Setting (or environment, or location, whatever you want to call it) is a like a character in the story. It has to match everything else. Just like you wouldn’t put a tobacco-chewing, gun-slinging, nineteenth-century cowboy on a New York City subway (unless your story involved time travel!) you wouldn’t use a crowded city as the location for your story about a country magician trying to stop an evil being from destroying a town (unless it was a fish-out-of-water type of plot).
Each story lends itself to a certain setting. In The Burning Time, I chose to go with a small town as my location, for several reasons. Let’s take a look at them, and why they’re important.
1. Isolation. In today’s modern world, it’s hard to create isolation on a small scale (as opposed to some type of apocalyptic event). I wanted my characters cut off from the rest of the world. No telephone, no internet, no cell phone service. That’s easy to achieve with a small town. Take your pick: toxic spill, earthquake, storm, or the one I chose, which was having my antagonist use dark energies to disrupt all those services. But you couldn’t do that with a city like New York or Chicago or LA. They’re too big, have too many redundant systems, and, most importantly, they’re so vital to the country that people would immediately notice and investigate.
2. Friend vs. Friend. A key part of The Burning Time was how previously friendly neighbors and relatives suddenly turn on each other while under the influence of dark magic. The idea of friends killing friends is somehow more chilling than strangers killing strangers. In a small town, you know everyone, and you never expect someone you know to suddenly turn into a homicidal maniac.
3. The Stranger. One of the main parts of my story is the aspect of a stranger coming to town, and the suspicion it arouses. In the big city, everyone is a stranger once you leave your floor of your apartment building, so a stranger in town would be invisible. I didn’t want invisibility, I wanted my strangers to stand out like fresh blood on a white carpet.
4. Logistics. There are parts of the story where my protagonist has to get from one place to another in town. In one scene, he is attacked by dogs. In another, he is picked up hitchhiking. I wanted his mobility constrained by his lack of owning a car, and I didn’t want subways or taxis to be readily available. Also, using a small town means having small local pubs and diners where everyone knows your name, empty fields that hid dark secrets, and quaint bridges that are perfect to commit suicide from. It also means a small police force that can’t be everywhere at once.
Of course, one of the main problems with setting a story in a small town is that it’s been done before. Lovecraft, Poe, King, Koontz, Straub – you name the classic writer, and they’ve probably done a small-town horror story. Or 10. So, when someone else tries to do one, there is immediate comparison. And that’s a shame. A story should be judged not for where it is set, but for how well it is written. ‘Salem’s Lot in a big city wouldn’t be ‘Salem’s Lot; it would be They Thirst (look it up). Still a great story, but not the same story. The Burning Time wouldn’t work if I set it in New York or LA; it wouldn’t even work if I set it in St. Louis. I needed a small town, and so I created one.
How did I create Hastings Mills, you might ask? Simple. It’s based on the town of Olean, NY, where I went to college. I changed a few street names here and there, added a church where one didn’t exist, but that’s about it. The stores, the river, the bridge, the park – they all exist, in a slightly different form. And here’s a little-known fact: I used the same town as the basis for my fictional village of Whitebridge in Carnival of Fear. I even considered keeping the same name, but after what happened to Whitebridge, I figured it would be too much to destroy the same town all over again!
Some might find it interesting that all of my novels – The Burning Time, Carnival of Fear, Cemetery Club, Ghosts of Coronado Bay – and my novellas – The Cold Spot, He Waits – all take place in small towns, but my short stories are pretty much equally divided into small town, small city, and large city settings. I know I think it’s odd. Is it because I have spent most of my life living in small towns? Perhaps. We do tend to write what we know best. Or maybe my brain is just wired to write those types of novels. Or it could be that it’s just my own prejudice – I hate spending time in cities – coming out.
In any case, the important thing is that setting is as important to a story as characters or plot. The three are tied together in Gordian knots that shouldn’t be messed with.
Otherwise everything will fall apart.
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About JG Faherty
JG Faherty grew up in the haunted Hudson Valley region of New York, and still resides there. Living in an area filled with Revolutionary War battle grounds, two-hundred year-old gravesites, ghosts, haunted roads, and tales of monsters in the woods has provided a rich background for his writing. A life-long fan of horror and dark fiction, JG enjoys reading, watching movies, golfing and hiking with his wife and dogs, volunteering as an exotic animal caretaker, and playing the guitar. His favorite holiday is Halloween (naturally), and as a child, one of his childhood playgrounds was an 18th century cemetery.
JG’s first novel, CARNIVAL OF FEAR, was released in 2010. His next book, THE CEMETERY CLUB, came out in 2011, followed by GHOSTS OF CORONADO BAY and THE COLD SPOT. His other credits include more than two dozen short stories in major genre magazines and anthologies. If you see him at a horror convention, feel free to buy him a Guinness.
You can find also him on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and LibraryThing.