By, Sarah Pinborough

In one of my English classes, I teach a 12-year-old kid, who for the sake of anonymity, I shall call "Tom." For the first six weeks back in September, I probably didn’t notice him much. Even in a nice middle-class school like the one I’ve been teaching in for the past year or so, our groups number about thirty so it takes a while to see past the big characters to the quieter ones. Tom is skinny with sandy hair and a naturally tanned complexion; he’s not too tall, not too small, sits in the middle row towards the side, and keeps his head down. The kind of boy that’s easy to miss for a while.

Tom isn’t a natural English student and NEVER puts his hand up; he definitely didn’t back then, anyway. He’s popular enough in his own way, and I get the feeling he’ll grow up into the kind of teenager that the girls will suddenly notice. In fact, only a couple of weeks ago the rest of the class were very quick to tell me that he was ‘dating’ Rebecca on the front row. And they both looked pretty happy about it let me tell you, and I was pretty happy that maybe at least one girl in the class would one day land on her feet with a good man, because bubbly as Rebecca is, maybe she’s got an early glimmer that still waters can run deep, and obvious isn’t always best.

But I digress.

I’d like to say that I started to pay attention to Tom because I’m an excellent teacher who can see the special in each and every one of the 150 students that step into En1 every weekday. I’d like to say that but it would be a lie. I’m human, and most of the time I’m just tired. I get up at 5:30 in the morning to write before school and I rarely get to bed before midnight between marking class assignments and more writing; so sometimes I’m not even sure what class is coming through the door before they get there.

No, I started to pay attention to Tom when I found out he’d missed most of the previous year in hospital fighting leukaemia. When I queried him about it, he just shrugged in that embarrassed way kids do, smiled easily, and said he was better now. When I checked the school records, it seemed things had been pretty touch and go for a while and not something to shrug and smile easily about at all.

Well, last Sunday Tom’s granddad blew his own head off with a shotgun. It was out of the blue and completely unexpected. They were by all accounts a close family, but then leukaemia in a child can do that, I guess. Maybe once Tom had conquered that threat, his granddad couldn’t hold back his own demons. Who knows? The family doesn’t, that’s for sure; there was no note. Again, you can only wonder why, and the emotional-vampire-writer in me wants to veer off and find or invent the story behind that cruel lack of note and explore that painful legacy, but again…

I digress.

All of Tom’s teachers were notified by email (don’t you just love modern communication? God forbid we should speak to each other face to face…), and the school secretary said that Tom would be back in school on Wednesday and to treat him gently but not to broach the subject because he was very traumatised and devastated by the whole incident.

Now I don’t need telling twice. I’m a writer. I don’t talk about feelings. Uh-uh. If I try, I get tongue-tied and end up just making a joke or getting moody and snappy. I’ve ended relationships without ever talking about what’s wrong. If something affects me, I write about it, preferably through a character that I’ve made much better equipped to deal with it than I am. It’s a major flaw, I know, but in this case, it was a flaw that kept Tom safe from interference from me.

As it was, Tom did indeed return to school on Wednesday and turned up at English, the same easy-going quiet kid as ever. I didn’t mention his granddad. I wouldn’t have known the right words even if I’d tried. Instead I just got on with the lesson.

Next Monday, we have Graham Joyce coming in to talk about writing and to answer questions and sign books. In preparation for this, we were looking at the very entertaining opening chapters of his three excellent YA novels, most of which make some reference to boy/girl relationships and all the humorous teenage embarrassment that goes along with those. Rather than focussing on the language analysis like most of my more professional colleagues were probably doing in their classrooms, we got sidetracked into talking about the general differences between boys and girls and the ways they flirted (amazing how very little is different between 13 and 36… God help them.).

Anyway, I found myself elaborately telling a story of when I was seventeen and a friend of mine dropped me off at a pub where a boy I really liked was sitting outside with a group of friends. Unfortunately, as I casually slammed the door and waved her away, I failed to realize that my long, elasticated-waist, goth-style skirt had caught in it. Oh, the shame as the mini metro pulled away, and tugged my skirt down with it…revealing a very skimpy pair of pink knickers to the world –and said boy -before my hammering on the roof of the car finally got my friend to stop and I could desperately reclaim my clothes, but unfortunately none of my dignity.

God, those kids laughed. And as I looked up, my own face as pink as those long-ago knickers, my inner self shocked that I’d actually shared the tale, my eyes met Tom’s. He was laughing so hard he was nearly crying and when he looked at me, he shook his head and smiled the sweetest smile I’ve seen in a long time, and I grinned back.

There was hope in that shy, sweet smile. After all the horror that he’d faced, there was definite hope that the world would get better.

We didn’t need to talk about his granddad. The smile didn’t need words, because when he was laughing hard like that, imagining his ancient teacher standing in the middle of the Edinburgh streets with her pink knickers on show, I could see that just like he’d beat the cancer, he would beat the shotgun.

He might not be the same as he was before it, the same way that he probably wasn’t the same as he was before the cancer, but he’d beat it all the same. And someday, when he was all grown up, he might take a moment and look back and wonder at just how amazing he was when he was a child.

A while back on a message board – and I’ve mentioned it in my forthcoming Tower Hill interview with DSM – I read a comment from a reader saying my stories often focussed on children in peril. It stumped me, it really did. I honest-to-God hadn’t realized that I did it, and it’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to since. What is it that’s so fascinating about children and that makes us feature them so much in this genre? It’s not just me who uses them in horror. Lebbon’s done it. Keene’s done it. And King is the King of the kid fighting evil.

I’ve mused (no pun intended) on this a lot, especially now that I’m about to take a year out from teaching and not be around children every day. And I can only conclude that kids are just better at realizing the important things than us oldies. Because kids just don’t understand death, not in relation to them at any rate, and that makes the world a whole different place. Let me try and put my ramblings more plainly...

All adult fears are built around death.

Let’s take mine:

Fear of flying is actually fear of crashing which is actually fear of dying/being wiped into nothingness FOREVER.

Fear of heights is actually fear of falling which is actually fear of dying/being wiped into nothingness FOREVER.

Fear of deep water is actually fear of drowning/sharks which is actually fear of dying/being wiped into nothingness FOREVER.

Fear of cancer is actually fear of rotting away which is actually fear of dying/being wiped into nothingness FOREVER.

Do you see what I’m driving at? We spend our whole adult lives with a niggling dark fear that we can do nothing about. And that makes it a pretty dull fear all things considered.

Children though...children don’t actually believe that death will ever happen to them which makes the things that scare them far more interesting; the fear of looking stupid, the fear of not being accepted, the fear of embarrassment, the fear of not being believed, the fear of being the only one to be afraid.

The fear of the monster under the bed isn’t fear of death. It’s the fear of that awful moment when the icy fingers wrap round your ankle and you know that things really do live in the shadows and adults really don’t know shit.

Children are open to stuff that we long ago put behind us. They’re willing to believe in good and evil, and worlds that exist in different dimensions, and monsters that live in the closet, but they’ll also let things go in a way that adults can’t. They’re too busy discovering the world to start disbelieving that it’s essentially a good place. They’re just not hardened and cynical like we are. They believe in true love. They believe that the truth will win out. They believe in fair and unfair, no matter how many times we tell them that life doesn’t hold with that.

Now I know that I’m generalizing. We live in a society where kids are stabbing each other to death on the streets of London for no good reason fathomable to anyone over eighteen years old. Twenty dead kids this year so far, which for England is unprecedented. The government is in a constant whirl of how to deal with it; knife amnesties, videos showing the grief of relatives, creative projects to distract young people from joining gangs, and so many other well-meaning schemes. But they forget one thing.

Children don’t believe in death. They don’t believe it will ever happen to them, so why would they put the knife down? Being in the gang is the adrenaline rush. It’s the belonging to a society that’s their own, outside of us. The death part happens to other kids. Their fears are far more complex. And children are, I’ve discovered after working in schools at both ends of the social spectrum, under all the image and different backgrounds, all pretty much the same. They’re us before the world got to us. They’re fascinating.

All the things that make children so interesting to use in writing are the same things that make horror a genre that I will always be drawn to write in. Horror isn’t about vampires, or zombies, or viruses, or the devil or any other symbolic monster that we use in our writing. Horror isn’t about death. Not for me anyway. It’s about the trial that people go through to come out at the other side. Horror is about characters fearing more than death. It’s about being afraid that you just won’t cut it. That maybe you haven’t got what it takes to be the hero. It’s about finding that kernel of strength that you never knew you had. It’s about people making sacrifices to save other people. Horror is all about the good stuff, the stuff we were made of when we were children. Don’t you get it?

For me, horror is about hope.

It’s about the sweet smile three days after the shotgun.

And who wouldn’t want to write in a genre like that?

Sarah Pinborough is the author of five mass-market horror novels, The Hidden, The Reckoning, Breeding Ground, The Taken, and her latest, Tower Hill - all published by Leisure Books in New York. She also has a novella called The Language of Dying due out from PS Publishing in the UK in December 2008. Her short stories can be found most recently in Summer Chills (Carrol & Graf), edited by Stephen Jones, and the upcoming British Invasion from Cemetery Dance.

Publishers Weekly has compared Sarah’s writing to Dean Koontz and Bentley Little.

When not writing, Sarah spends most of her time thinking about what to write next, talking to her cats, planning an escape to America and drinking wine. She currently lives and works in Milton Keynes, England.

Visit her official author website and MySpace page.

MUSE is the collective term for novelists Deborah LeBlanc, Sarah Langan, Alexandra Sokoloff and Sarah Pinborough. Visit these dark dames at their official website.