We were fortunate enough to have an advance look at Scott Snyder's essay for Wytches #3, his Image series with Jock and Matthew Hollingsworth, here on Bleeding Cool in the past, and we couldn't be more grateful this time for the chance to share with you a personal essay from Wytches #4 that really is of a different stripe. Approached on Twitter by fans to talk about why he loves horror, or what horror books had appealed to him in his youth, Snyder decided to gather questions from social media and attempt to address them in an essay to accompany Wytches Issue #4, which arrives in shops this Wednesday, February 4th.

When Snyder sat down to write the piece, it came in at a whopping 2000 words, and even then it's right to the point, telling in brief the complete narrative of a turning point in Snyder's life which seemed to spell disaster, but instead proved strangely seminal to all his later sensibilities as a reader, and perhaps as a writer, too. The entire essay seems to prove an interesting point about self-examination and examination of the comic creators we esteem: If you ask a question about formative influences in life, you may well get an answer, but it probably won't be the answer you expect, and almost certainly it won't be an easy answer either.

It's with great pleasure we present Scott Snyder's essay from Wytches #4:

As an experiment for the backmatter here, I asked you guys on Twitter what you'd like me to write about, and the most common questions had to do with my affection for horror – what attracted me to it, what was the first horror book I read, and so on. So I thought I'd try to address that here in my own slightly rambling and unwieldy way… Thanks for the questions!

-Scott

I was nine years old when I fell in love with horror. I actually remember the exact day—the exact moment—it happened. It was summer, and I was away at sleep-away camp for the first time. The place was this an all-boys, super competitive sports camp located in upstate New York on a remote lake – all pine tries and dark log cabin bunks. To be clear, sports were like the religion of the place. First thing in the morning, we played a sport, then another, then lunch, then rest, then afternoon sports, then evening sports. We were on all sorts of teams with all sorts of rankings and all of it was very important in the day to day.

Me, I was a pale, chubby, nervous kid from the city. I was into videogames, drawing superheroes (I wanted to be a comic book artist back then, not writer – writer? Fuck that), and not much else. I'd followed a friend to the camp, and quickly lost him in the maw. My parents still have my first letter from that summer, in which I ask them to come get me, right above a spot on the page showing a tear stain, circled in red with the words "ACTUAL TEAR" written above in caps.

It was the kind of place, for example, where color war was taken extremely seriously. There were two teams; Green and Gray and once you were chosen for a team you were that team for life. For life. No matter what. The process by which you were chosen for a team was something in and of itself, too. On the night color war started, older boys would set off alarms and come running into the younger boys bunks' and wake us all up. Then they'd take us up to the cafeteria, which had a porch about twenty feet off the ground with lights pointed at it. One by one, boys new to the camp – unpicked by a team – would walk nervously out on to this porch in front of the whole camp and two counselors, one representing each team, would pretend to play tug of war with the boy, until one of them pulled him over to the appropriate side and he would be ushered down the steps by his new (lifelong) teammates.

I was terrified of this prospect. What if no one wanted me? What if my arms got ripped off? I mean ripped the fuck off?! How would I be a comic book artists then?! The night this all did happen for me, I made the unfortunate choice of wearing green Hulk pajamas. Unfortunate because I was subsequently picked for the gray team. And so as I went down the steps, the pajamas were pulled off me, leaving me in my underpants in front of my new teammates. (Full disclosure: the underpants were actually—I shit you not—Batman-themed, and gray, which went over great with the older boys. And so it's wholly possible all my writing for Batman is just some attempt on my part to repay him for saving me from DEFCON 1-level boyhood mortification had my underpants been green. I love you, Bruce.)

To be fair, the camp wasn't a bad place; it was just extremely competitive, with this very intense macho energy that I couldn't tap into. I was bullied over my weight, my shitty sports skills, but the thing that really made me anxious was how foreign it all felt to me. There was only strangeness. I didn't understand the rules. Everything was scary in that regard. And I remember very quickly becoming very panicky and very nervous… then developing these little habits to make myself feel better, odd little behaviors and such. Counting, walking certain ways. I took to spending time hiding out at the arts and crafts center—really just a small, meager cabin at a remote end of camp where they kept some paints for making team posters. I remember pouring a lot of time into designing elaborate and imaginary team floats I would one day build to win all my teammates over. Floats. Like parade floats.

So what does any of this have to do with horror?

Well, there was one thing I loved about camp that summer, the thing I remember most vividly, and it has to do with horror. We had this counselor, Ted, in our bunk, and for some reason, he'd decided that he was going to read us a book that summer. He was a bit of an oddball counselor. Pudgy, a bit awkward, artistic… Anyway, he'd picked a book and he'd mapped it all out so that he'd start the book on the first night and end pretty much on the last. The book was Stephen King's Eyes of the Dragon.

When I heard this, I was terrified. I knew Stephen King by reputation, and was sure the book would only make things worse for me. The truth is, I've teasing my nine year old self here, but I was really scared that summer. Not simply because camp wasn't for me. But because I was experiencing my own unhappiness in a way I hadn't before. Somehow, it felt different, like a constant state of nervousness. I was having trouble calming down, ever. My mind wouldn't let go of particular worries unless I performed particular tasks… It was all very scary and all I wanted was NOT to be scared anymore.

I tried not to listen that first night, when Ted began the book. It was just after lights out, not long after I'd written that tear-stained letter home), and I viscerally remember lying in the dark, under the covers, but, trying not to hear, but hearing him say: "Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a king with two sons…" The kingdom of Delain. Roland the Good. Peter. And Flagg…

From go I was transported. And while the book isn't straight-up horror, the horror parts are what I remember being most captivated by, even on that first night. The cut made to Sasha so she bled to death. The twisted poisoning of Roland… It made NO goddam sense to me. If I felt scared all the time, why would being more scared feel…good?

Still, it got so all day I'd look forward to lights-out so I could hear what happened next. Soon I was asking my parents for Pet Semetery, Cujo… I was reading Tomb of Dracula. Swamp Thing…

As I got older, I continued to be a nervous kid—later an anxious kid—and yet over and over, for some reason, horror always made me feel calmer, better. The stories (the good ones), the ones I loved best, cut right to the core of my childhood fears. Losing family. Being alone. A world transformed around you. Experiencing them made me feel…good.

It wasn't until much later I began wondering about the weird paradox inherent in my own relationship to horror. I've said before, but I don't mind saying again here, I've had troubles with anxiety and depression over the years. Looking back, I can see the precursors in moments like that first stretch at camp – the panics and odd behaviors… I've had about nine or ten bad bouts with it over the years, give or take, and when it comes on strong (usually a result of a combination of factors, some preventable some not), it puts me in a dark way. It starts with a kind of low-frequency nervousness about a topic (the ones that come up most often for me are illness, or loss through aging) – a nervousness that won't quite go away, that seeps into everyday life in ways it shouldn't, and if I'm not careful, it can spiral very quickly into a kind of crippling and fearful obsession with that topic.

For me, when I'm down in this way, everything I look at is a reflection of myself, but an ugly, funhouse mirror reflection telling me my fear about the topic at hand is true. If the topic is illness: see that poster for a cancer center? You have cancer. It's in you. Or: going for a run, Scott? Why bother, you're already sick. Feel the lump in your throat? No, better check and check and check and… I end up avoid looking at newspapers for fear I'll see something about illness that will trigger a panic. Or watching TV. Or talking with friends. All these things I find comfort in most times become monstrous. I don't know how to explain it except to say that nothing is safe to encounter, because it all points back at me in a menacing way.

The thing is, the best horror, in my opinion at least, does this, too. Great horror takes the things we find safety in and turns them menacing. Your friendly neighbors plotting against you. Your own child coming back evil. Sleep being a place you can die. A road-trip with friends suddenly becoming a nightmare. The world you know turning on you. Classic monsters are enduring, I think, because they offer ways of expressing this. Zombies are your friends and loved ones come back to kill you. Vampires too. Werewolves. The people you know turning murderous. Your own body changing, becoming unfamiliar…

That's the funny thing: even when I'm at my worst, one of the few activities I really like doing is experiencing horror stories. When I'm not well, and I see a horror film or read a horror book dealing with the fears I'm experiencing in my own exaggerated, obsessive ways, it makes me feel less alone with these fears; someone else has them, too. But for another thing, the book ends, the movie ends, and just by ending, the story suggests that the depression will end. Great when the hero survives and triumphs, but honestly, even in stories where the monster wins, where everyone dies, the story ends and I am released from it. In the end, the truth is, when I'm well or not well, horror helps me explore the things I'm sometimes afraid to look at in real life in piercing and true ways that somehow make me feel better.

That's the trick of horror for me. I love reading it to feel less alone with my fears. To experience them acutely and then be set free. I love writing it to explore them in ways that are probing and difficult for me and well, scary, too, but controlled. Not controlled because those fears are less potent, but controlled because I decide how far to go with them, where they lead…

So: Wytches. It gives me a place to go as dark as I can, talk about my fears now – fears about being a bad parent, about being selfish, about anxiety in children, about losing myself in my own head when I'm anxious or depressed, about losing a child… about all of it in a way that allows me to go as dark as I can, and then, when it's done, close the laptop and walk away.

At the end of the day, I guess I love horror because in at its best, horror scares me into not being…well, so damn scared.

Thanks a lot for reading.

[Also, as a quick epilogue… I actually kept going back to camp. I ended up liking it more than I thought I would. And in my third year at this camp, color war came down to just a few points, and this year they decided for some reason that the arts and crafts point would be THE deciding factor. And—no bullshit—that year, I had made a float. Yes, a float. A big-ass gray dragon out of wire and papier-mâché and crappy clay and all that. And my team WON because of this point—the arts and crafts point – and from that moment on, no one ever teased me about my geekiness ever again. I just became that kid who made the floats. They all left me alone to do my weird art thing.

Which is pretty much how things are now, too… no? ]

Wytches #4 reaches shops and digital platforms on Wednesday, February 4th. Don't miss it!