Start With This, by the team behind Welcome to Night Vale and several other successful podcasts, makes for a great resource for any writer. While they do focus specifically on writing for podcasts, much of what they discuss can be applied to any format of storytelling.
But this spotlight on our usual Fear Friday column goes to their most recent set of episodes, which dig into the way horror gets told. They start with Lovecraft and similar stories. Specifically, why his particular brand of horror, dealing with not just the unknown but a vast unknown that doesn’t care about you, continues to resonate despite his specific prose not being that great. They then followed up with a sequel looking beyond Lovecraft into the other ways that horror works – other themes and elements that make for universal terror fodder.
So for all the horror writers out there, definitely check out this set of episodes and the insights they bring to why different types of horror work.