User blog comment:JohnathanNash/Blood and Death/@comment-26475800-20150706033440

Okay, so here is what I was trying to get at. Some of the best horror stories of all time on many of the lists online have little to do with death and gore. House of Leaves for example, I could be wrong because I haven't read that book in a while, has no blood in it at all. Hell house has some and some nasty things in it, but it isn't the main focus; that belongs to the ghost. H. P. Lovecraft writes with death but he doesn't go into great detail, same with Poe.

With everyone writing in grotesque detail it takes away from when the stories and writers who can use that to their benefit do use it. I am guilty of doing this as well, so I was just putting out some thoughts I had on the genre which we all write for.

Also, if a person is going to be writing about someone just being killed that isn't much of a story. That is what I have been reading a lot lately, so that makes it no way near as scary as it could be. It goes from "oh shit, that guy just got killed," To "oh great, another gruesome death."

Some of the stories that have death can use it better by not going into such detail about it. Not all of them need to have softer deaths, not all of them have to keep from showing how a death happens. But when so many stories are using death like Squidwards Suicide. Personally I would much rather read a story like Candle Cove, Mother's Call, or The Comfy Cozy Cabin. Each of which use death and murder either not at all or just something to build the tension. And all of those are some of the best pastas I've read so far.

The main point is that buckets of blood don't make things scary. It desensitizes people to when the story can really use such things. A person who gets hacked up as a punch line, isn't much of a punch line. A story solely about people getting hacked up is not worth the time to read.

This is just my opinion. If someone wants to write about it fine, just do it well. Kill you characters will some class. Don't just paint the walls red for the hell of it, paint them red with some style. You spend the time building this story, so don't end it like a Stephen King novel which upsets so many people. Blood and gore are a tool, like a hammer, you wouldn't use a hammer to paint a wall or tighten a screw. And that is what a story should end with, one screw which holds everything together, or you are making the story better, so paint the walls with something that will be keep people guessing and bring an aesthetic value to it. Dark and disturbing things can be aesthetic if, like everything else in the world, you craft it right.