Writing Horror
Supernatural Horror in Literature/Introduction - Wikisource:
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
This essay by H. P. Lovecraft is almost 80 years old, and yet I find the above words to be pertinent to today. The more I have thought about writing a good ghost story, or haunted house story, or any other story in the horror genre the more I have come to want to do just what Lovecraft is prescribing.