Pace is crucial for maintaining suspense and reader interest. When a writer gets bogged down in the details during a crucial scene, suspense goes out the window. The worst is when it becomes a play-by-play report; Susan might have straightened her shirt after stepping under the low-hanging tree limb, but I'm more interested in the savage monster looming over her. The other edge to that sword is going too fast. Goldie Locks was on to something.
Trust in the reader's imagination weaves its way through the previous two elements, but I think it deserves special attention. Description is certainly an art, and part of that art is knowing when to stop describing. Give the reader a framework to build on and cover any key points, but let the reader fill in the unimportant details. They can personalise and better identify with the material that way.
What are the most common flaws you encounter when reading submissions?
Certainly cardboard characters, poor pace, and too much description are big ones, but there are other fundamental issues I encounter regularly. Hack dialogue attribution (he said, grimacing) and telling instead of showing are big ones. One of my pet peeves is the use of as or -ing where a conjunction or sentence break should go. For example:
Filling her glass, she grinned at Jacob.
or:
As she filled her glass, she grinned at Jacob.
Both can be better written:
She filled her glass and grinned at Jacob.
A book I often recommend to writers that speaks to these sorts of issues is Self-Editing For Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King.
Do you review horror books?
Not currently. As our submission rates and readership grow, I hope to add new features like reviews. Our upcoming Halloween issue will be the first to feature artwork along with the stories.
There are so many horror sub-genres - cutting edge, dark fantasy, extreme, supernatural, traditional, psychological, etc. Do you think some have higher literary value than others? Which one do you think is more popular at the moment?
I think the literary value of any horror work is entirely dependent on the author and not the genre. I do think certain sub-genres — psychological for instance — draw a bigger pool of good writers, but my guess is that this is due to other sub-genres having stigmas. I hope this is changing as more good writers break down boundaries and blur the lines between genres. As an example, is it really that big a leap between Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and extreme horror or grindhouse, other than in expectations of sophistication and quality?
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