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INTERVIEW| Fear defines horror and the reader must be able to perceive that: Author K. Hari Kumar

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Inspiration comes from all quarters; films, folktales and even cartoons. I have read stories from Chandamama, and ghost stories of Charles Dickens, Satyajit Ray and Ruskin Bond. Pet Sematary was the full-fledged horror novel that made a deep impact in my mind. The Butcher’s Theater by Jonathan Kellerman made me realise that every horror story does not have a supernatural entity. This served as an inspiration for my book, That Frequent Visitor (2015).

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Why is the horror genre still an underrated one in India?

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Screenwriter and bestselling horror writer K. Hari Kumar finds the genre’s market marginalised and untapped despite our rich oral horror tradition. “Only few retain the taste in horror, while majority keep away because of the fear it instilled in their mind. The tendency to choose an international writer sometimes puts Indian English writers of the genre at a disadvantage. The equation changes when horror readers from regional languages switch to Indian English or our books are translated into regional languages,” he says.

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Spinning Yarns of Horror

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night. “They are like woollen blankets,” says author K Hari Kumar. “They keep you warm on rainy nights.” With his latest book, India’s Most Haunted: Tales of Terrifying places (HarperCollins), Mumbai-based Kumar wishes to reaffirm his place as one of India’s top horror writers. With a collection of fifty short stories, he hopes to frighten the socks off the reader by keeping it ‘simple so that everyone can understand’. “One need not tharoorify their manuscript,” he notes, setting the tone for the interview.

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