Michael Arnzen, Ph.D., professor of English and division chair of the Humanities, has published an instructional essay for creative writers in Writer’s Workshop of Horror. His essay, “Stripping Away the Mask: Scene and Structure in Horror Fiction” explores how authors can successfully generate suspense and terror in their stories by purposefully manipulating what readers see and don’t see.

“Readers peek between their fingers,” Arnzen writes, while “horror writers refuse to look away…horror is a game of peek-a-boo.”

Arnzen, who last year won his fourth Bram Stoker Award for his collection of short stories, ”Proverbs for Monsters,” teaches English to undergraduate students and writing to Seton Hill’s graduate students pursuing Master of Fine Art degrees in Writing Popular Fiction.

Writer’s Workshop of Horror, edited by Michael Knost for Woodland Press, has received rave acclaim and immediately went into second printing upon publication. The book is available at http://writersworkshopofhorror.com/arnzen/. Some of the contributors to Writer’s Workshop of Horror include Clive Barker, Joe Lansdale, Tom Piccirilli, Elizabeth Massie, and Seton Hill Writing Popular Fiction instructors Gary Braunbeck and Tim Waggoner. The publisher, Woodland Press, operates out of Chapmanville, W.Va.., as an independent press, committed to the authors in the Appalachian Mountain range.