My writing partner Sean and I have written in a lot of genres, but the one thing we haven’t written a ton of together is horror. We only have one true horror project: CURSED. And now that we’ve just released a NOOK-exclusive 6-book set in the CURSED world, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
And I’ll be honest. CURSED is a great story. It’s got werewolves and demons and action, a quiet love story, and lots of blood. But as much fun as we had writing it, we don’t always love to think about CURSED.
Because as much as it’s the story of Ricardo Cuaron — a man bearing a shapeshifter’s curse and on the run for over a hundred years — CURSED is our story, too.
Think about it.
Reading (and, for us, writing) lets us be someone else for a while. Horror lets us enter shadowy places in safe ways. We can experience darkness while keeping our distance, because it’s easy to keep that darkness at an arm’s length: the person in the story did those horrible things, but we never would.
But what bothered us about CURSED‘s main character was that we liked Ricardo quite a bit. We understood him, and went to great pains to make the reader understand and like him, too. He’s shy, considerate, and keeps to himself. He always does what’s best for those around him.
Toward the end of the first book, Ricardo is pushed. Hard. He doesn’t like what his inner beast does during what follows, and we wrote that scene so the reader would understand and not blame Ricardo. We all — authors and readers — could walk away from that blood feeling good: So what if Ricardo is a nice person, just like us? He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t resist what the monster made him do.
We made our excuses. And then in the second book in the series, we made more. As with Ricardo’s first push, his second big push felt justified. This time, we didn’t only find ourselves explaining things away using the beast as an excuse. This time it was there was another excuse, too.
Ricardo couldn’t help it.
He couldn’t resist what the monster made him do.
And besides … they had it coming
Over and over, we had to step into Ricardo’s shoes. Over and over, we found ways to justify his behavior. We always had a fallback: The beast — not Ricardo — spilled all that blood.
But when we took the monster out of the equation, Ricardo’s actions, more and more, still kind of made sense, because those other people had it coming.
I started to wonder how allegorical the story really was. We put Ricardo into more and more difficult situations. He encountered old and new foes. We learned what made him as cursed as he is, and uncovered sinister secrets about his 100-year pursuer.
But it still all had to make sense. And because the justifications had to make sense, I started to wonder if Ricardo, in the final reckoning, was really cursed at all.
When you read CURSED, you ask yourself: What would we do if we found ourselves in Ricardo Cuaron’s shoes?
If fiction really is a mirror, what Ricardo’s actions say about Ricardo will ultimately tell us some of the same things about ourselves.
Part of me didn’t want to keep writing the CURSED books, no matter how interesting and compelling they became, thanks to those revelations.
But a larger part of me wanted very badly to keep telling the story, because that part of me knows that turning our backs on the darkness inside wouldn’t have been very honest.
Not for Ricardo.
And not for the rest of us, either.
Johnny B. Truant and Sean Platt’s new NOOK-exclusive 6-book CURSED box set is now available exclusively on the NOOK store.