World Horror Convention is frightful — and successful

Things that to go bump in the night might be the least of your worries if you experienced the stories and images that were celebrated at the Radisson Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City over the weekend.

The 18th annual World Horror Convention brought writers, publishers, illustrators, gamers and fans of the genre together to participate in four days of workshops, discussions, celebrations and networking.

Convention organizer Charlene Harmon said on Saturday that the event was going "extremely well."

"We had over 300 people registered in advance, and many more have come in just to check things out," Harmon .said. "I can't tell you how many people have stopped me to tell me how great it's been."

Harmon said the event drew an international crowd and included a small but vibrant community of local horror writers, including JoSelle Vanderhooft, a Utah horror poet who presented her work at a reading evening and whose piece, "Ossuary," was in the running for a Horror Writer's Association award on Saturday night.

Workshops held throughout the convention addressed a wide range of topics including developing story lines, working with other authors, getting published and the emerging young-adult reader market for horror writers.

A Saturday discussion focusing on selling horror writing to non-horror publishers was chaired by a group of established writers including Alexandra Sokoloff, Sarah Langan, Deborah LeBlanc, Leslie Klinger and Heather Graham. The writers agreed that pigeonholing yourself as a pure horror writer was non-productive and that flexibility was a large part of the key to success in today's competitive publishing market. New York Times best-seller Heather Graham, who also writes under the name Shannon Drake, has written romance and historical fiction in addition to numerous vampire and horror titles and noted a stroll through the big booksellers illustrates the dilemma of horror writers.

"If you go into Barnes and Noble or Borders, how many rows of science fiction and fantasy are there? It's huge," Graham said. "Horror, though ... you have one shelf of horror at Borders ... in Barnes and Noble, none at all."

One option for writers who have trouble breaking into the world of big publishing is to find a home at one of the many boutique publishers who specialize in the horror field.

Bailey Hunter from Langley, British Columbia, had a booth at the convention featuring products from two such publishers she represents, Dark Recesses Press and Cutting Block Press. Both companies accept submissions from anyone and sometimes feature writing contests — a way for new or previously unpublished writers to get their work to the public.