Cody Clark

'The grossest thing I ever saw was Brian Keene eat a cup of nightcrawlers during his reading," horror writer Rain Graves said in an e-mail. "When I got up to read, there was still a piece of one moving on the podium. That was pretty gross."

The live worm thing happened at a past convention during the Gross-Out, a signature WHC event in which participants read stories or poems that are intended to turn the stomachs and curdle the blood of listeners. Graves, 33, is the so-called Hostess of the Grossest -- you might say that she's master of scare-emonies for the Gross-Out. Only, that is, because they don't let her participate anymore.

After a number of, uh, strong showings dating all the way back to 1997, Graves said, "the usual suspects that host and judge the contest decided I was too gross for the competition and retired me from competing. It's quite an honor to be so gross that you have to stop competing so that other folks have a chance."

The people behind the World Horror Convention do not, however, just want to make you gag. Convention chair Charlene Harmon, a 45-year-old stay-at-home mother of three who lives in Magna, said that one reason Salt Lake City won the bid process for the 2008 gathering is because local organizers pledged to give the WHC a more literary, more academic bent.

"We wanted to focus not just on the writing, but on some of the academic stuff," said Harmon.

For example, John Jude Palencar, an artist who's painted dozens of horror-novel book jackets, said that he'll be in on a panel discussion about "horror as a seed for creativity." (His own creative juices, he said, often flow when he takes something normal and injects into it "something unbalanced. You add an element that gets more and more out of control.")

And yes, there's a bid process. More or less exactly as there was for the 2002 Winter Olympics. The biggest concern about Salt Lake City? Where's the hooch?

"We had to change a lot of opinions because people think that Utah is a dry state," Harmon said. Moisture is important, apparently, because the WHC is a hub of networking, and lots of people like to have a drink while they talk shop.

"A lot of them, a couple of hundred of them will go out and find a bar and sit down and chat," Harmon said. "It's very important to them."

From Stephen King to Harry Potter

Conventions for readers of science fiction, fantasy or horror are often freewheeling affairs, but there will be at least some semblance of intellectual inquiry at this year's World Horror event. Harmon said that Al Carlisle, a former Utah State Prison employee for some 20 years, will present some of his research into the mental processes of serial killers.

Poet and Salt Lake City resident JoSelle Vanderhooft will be in attendance and Michael Collings, recently retired from a decades-long career in teaching at Pepperdine University, has been named the convention's Academic Guest of Honor.

Collings, who said via e-mail that he's never actually attended a "full-blown fan-con" before, thinks that horror tends to be even more overlooked by the academic establishment than science fiction and fantasy. "Other than the occasional courses on Stephen King as a contemporary phenomenon," he said, "there seems to be far less interest in horror per se as a literary genre."

That could be because there's at least some disagreement about what is and isn't horror.

"Hundreds of geeks have perished in battles over that very question," said Jeff Strand, who combines horror and humor in his novels and stories. "Some people insist that horror has to include the supernatural, which actually eliminates most of my work." For Strand, the operative word is "macabre" -- horror should suggest death or decay.

Harmon said that people associated with horror see the genre as taking in everything from King and Edgar Allen Poe -- the "Ghost of Honor" at WHC 2008 -- to the "Harry Potter" novels and the likes of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight."

"It's anything that deals with vampires or ghosts," she said. "Anything that has a dark or scary element."

Collings said that he likes the iconic King's definition that horror is "visceral." "The tingle of the spine," he said. "The intake of breath created, not by suspense -- " which Collings thinks is rare and hard to pull off -- "but by a contraction of the nervous system."

However you define it, there will be lots of it at the World Horror Convention. Authors, artists, editors and publishers will all be on hand. The Stoker Awards, the horror equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, will be presented at a special banquet. Films with titles like "Slime City" and "Mindflesh" will be screened -- along with more mainstream horror movies, like a day's worth of films by John Carpenter, director of "Halloween" and "The Thing."

There's even a walking tour of "haunted Salt Lake City."

By the way, did we mention the Gross-Out? "You should go to the Gross-Out contest," Strand said. "Your life will be forever changed. Forever changed."

Strand said he's never taken the top prize at the Gross-Out -- but he did win a banana-flavored gummy slug in last year's event.

Creepy-crawly careers

There are different reasons for getting into the horror game. Palencar said he's been into the spooky stuff for as long as he can remember.

"When I was a kid I used to do fun-houses in the garage and scare neighborhood girls," Palencar said. "I've always liked being scared. I've always liked scaring people."

For Graves, it was something that she discovered 13 (shiver) years ago after spending her teenage years playing guitar and singing in rock bands. After a move to California, she said, she found that she'd started to spend more time writing than strumming.

A friend pushed her to start submitting her work a couple of years later, and her first attempt got a second-place prize from the contest she'd entered.

"I figured if I could make money doing something I loved, I might as well keep doing it," Graves said.

Which is not to say that there's a pot of gold beneath every tombstone, so to speak. Strand said the best advice he's ever been given about writing horror was that he shouldn't expect to get rich: "Oh, how I wish that nugget of wisdom had been a lie!"

And you may have some weird working hours. Palencar said he tends to work at night -- he was just getting out of bed when the Daily Herald called ... at 3:30 in the afternoon.

As with other endeavors, however, success has its perks. Palencar, who recently did the cover art for "Eragon" and "Eldest," the heroic fantasy novels written by teenage author Christopher Paolini, said his art "will be, and has been, more places than I'll ever be." But if he did ever take a trip overseas, he said, "I could go to any country in Europe and get at least one free dinner from a publisher."

And even though the Internet has made it easier than ever to publish what you write, Strand said he often tells aspiring writers not to rush in without polishing their craft.

"I was convinced that the first novel I wrote was as good -- no, better -- than other stuff on the market," he said. "It wasn't. It was a mess. And it was deservedly rejected by everybody, sparing me the embarrassment of having real-life readers be subjected to it. But today, I could easily send the manuscript to any one of a number of places -- via e-mail, saving me the trouble of printing out and stuffing a manuscript into an envelope -- and, presto, I'm a published author. A bad published author.

"It's OK to write a few practice novels."

• Cody Clark can be reached at 344-2542 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it