Meet JG Faherty

Hello, my name is JG Faherty. Welcome to my blog. In case you don't know me, I write horror and dark fiction. I do other things as well, in order to actually make money, but this is what I do if you get my drift.

If you write horror and dark fiction, everyone asks you where you get your ideas from. The sarcastic answer I'd like to give is 'From my imagination, butthead. Maybe you should try using yours.' However, those types of comments earn me painful blows to the shin from my wife's shoes, so I tell people about my misspent youth instead, how I grew up watching horror movies, building monster models, and reading scary stories.

One of my earliest memories is of going to the drive-in theater with my parents to see a double feature. Planet of the Apes was the first movie, and Night of the Living Dead was the second. That would have been in 1973, making me...12 at the time. I'd previously seen all sorts of monster movies (Them! was my favorite), not to mention a million showings of Godzilla vs. anybody, but Night of the Living Dead was my first real gore-fest.
I was hooked!
My parents didn't make it through the whole movie, but later that year I found it on television. After that, I couldn't get enough dismemberments, disembowelments, and exploding skulls.

So I guess all you armchair psychologists can blame my parents.
Personally, I thank them!



Graveyards, Ghosts, and Twisted Teens

I grew up in a small town 35 miles north of Manhattan. I still live there, and it's the setting for many of my stories, along with upstate New York, and the rural south. The county I live in is full of history. Revolutionary War battle grounds, two-hundred year-old gravesites, ghosts, haunted roads, and tales of monsters in the woods - a great place to grow up.


Once I was old enough to take off for the day on my bike with my friends, I was able to explore all these things and more. We often played hide and seek in the graveyards at night (the same graveyards that years later became THE place to park, drink, and bring dates), and in fact it was a rite of passage in our neighborhood to be pushed into a sunken grave or locked in a mausoleum. There probably wasn't a kid on my street who didn't have some kind of strange encounter, including myself. (You can read one of mine, "The Phantom Milkman," in 'Haunted Encounters: Departed Family & Friends' {Atriad Press}, available from this site. The rest I'm saving for future stories.)


In high school and college, armed with my driver's license and a few dollars, some of these past times were replaced by 'adult' activities - booze, beer, and bimbos. But even then it wasn't unusual for us to keep a dead cat as a pet (until a schoolmate stole it), sneak into a satanic ritual in upstate New York, charge money to let people watch my African Puff Adders eat their weekly meal (this involved having small mice bitten by large, venomous snakes), or even just having a beer at midnight in old cemetery while "Funeral for a Friend" played on the stereo.


And of course, there were the books and movies.


The Golden Age of Horror

Ahh, the eighties! Forget punk rock, Duran Duran, and The Breakfast Club. The eighties were the best years, in my humble opinion, for horror. It seemed like every week I'd go to the bookstore and pick up another paperback about vampires, werewolves, ghosts, or demons. Were a lot of them dogs, barely worth a place in the basket next to the toilet? You bet!
But a lot of them were hidden treasures, and launched many a career still going strong today.I remember purchasing books and short stories by Tom Monteleone, Ramsey Campbell, Charles L. Grant, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Karl Edward Wagner, Richard Laymon, Dennis Etchison, Manly Wade Wellman, and so many others.
It was the heyday for King and Koontz, when you'd wait for months for that new novel to come out. Peter Straub, too, although unlike the other two he's still going strong these days. One of the scariest nights I ever had was sitting in my apartment in 1983 reading Pet Cemetery. I started it at 2 in the afternoon, and at midnight I was so involved I forgot I was supposed to meet friends out at a local bar. When I reached the part where Dr. Creed makes his first trip through the deadfall trees, I was so creeped out I had to put the friggin' book down and get a soda!

Today, horror is different. There're many more authors, and many more places to find short stories, great magazines like Cemetery Dance. Online bookstores like Shocklines, and specialty presses like Borderlands Press. But it's grown very hard to pick up really good material. I go back and read my old copies of "Year's Best Horror," or similar anthologies, and I can expect to enjoy half the stories. Today? I'm lucky if one of them is worth reading twice. The same goes for books.
Give me a solid beginning, middle, and end. Vampire, ghost, alien, lunatic killer, monster from the deep - I don't care. A classic plot is okay, if the writing's good. Just don't make me read 400 pages only to find there's no ending. Leave the art house writing to some other genre, not horror.
As a reader, I enjoy 'classic' horror, as opposed to vague, twisting tales that go nowhere. So it only makes sense that my writing follows suit. I'm not here to impress you with how many words I know, or how far I can stretch a boring plot line. I just want you to get that jiggly feeling in your spine or your gut. I want to disgust you, unnerve you, freak you out. Make you laugh, make you cry. And maybe even scare you.