The Gory Details (Gross)

Gory Detail #47 "Hey! In U Endo"

I just love the word innuendo. It sounds like where you're going to put something. "If you don't leave me alone, I'm going to shove this softball bat innuendo." That's not what it means though. It means something that is suggested rather than directly stated. It's closely related to the concept of inference, where one thing suggests another. It can be powerful in horror writing. It's also tied to the idea of metaphor, the big power house of writing. That's where you describe something using the properties of something else. ie. Her love was gentle...like a meat cleaver.

Let's start with a real world example of innuendo. A few months ago a restaurant here in town was cited by the health inspector for having skinned cats in the freezer. See how easy that was. I didn't have to say that the meat in the fried rice was cat but you all went "ugh."

In horror writing innuendo can give your writing a wonderful, detached sort of feeling. Take this example:

In Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Claudius the king thinks Hamlet has killed Polonius and asks Hamlet where he is. Hamlet's response, in part is;

"...But indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby."

The truth of the story is that Hamlet killed Polonius behind the curtains in the lobby and he uses innuendo to suggest that the body will begin to stink "you shall nose him" soon. He does not however directly confess.

Inference works almost the same way. With inference, we provide the reader with something that explains what is going on without directly stating it. \

"Derrick could tell by the smell that they corpse was somewhere in the cellar. What he didn't know was how he was going to find it in the pitch dark. His wondering was ended when his first step off the end of the stairs ended in a squishing noise and the buzzing of flies."

Can you tell what happened? Thought you could.

Now for the biggy, metaphor. A metaphor is where you use one thing to describe the attributes of another. "Her voice was like an alarm clock going off." "The pistol shot sounded like the crack of doom." The use of metaphor is directly tied into the way humans think. There are actually very few absolutes in human thought. Take the color blue for example. There is a blue, the pure color on the spectrum. This hardly describes all instances of blue however. There's the blue of sunset, of blue berries, of sea water over a sand bar. Each of these can be used as a metaphor to expand our experience of blue. "Her eyes were the blue of a stormy sky."

Metaphor becomes even more powerful, as suggested above, when it includes emotional or descriptive elements not normally associated with the direct object. In the above example, there is no logical association between "eye" and "stormy." We don't literally have thunderstorms in our eyes. Using the metaphor however suggests an emotional state for our character. It can also be used to change a character's physical presence. Try this.

"His skin had the dry, white nature of a fungus grown in the dark and cold far from the world of light."

Here we didn't say he'd been raised in a cave or anything. But the metaphor to a fungus makes him cold and distant. Metaphors are fun.

For horror writing, there's nothing better than these three. We horror writers don't write about what happened to ordinary people in their ordinary lives. We write about the exception and unusual. How better to stretch the world around our greater experiences than to flex out with some innuendo or inference and let the reader do the dirty work for us or to get some kick ass metaphors going to pump the story up.

One final example from something I wrote:

I could have written;

"She was a good kisser."

Instead I wrote;

"When we kissed her lips crackled like the lips of a succubus breathing the fires of hell."

See the difference?

Now get out there and write.  

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