Building character is important.
There are not a lot of authors of any genre who would argue with that fact. Who is going to want to read a book if you don’t care about the main characters? Will they live or die? Will they fall in love, or move back to the big city? It matters that your readers get to immerse themselves in this person’s life so much that they are invested in the outcome.
The side characters are important too. Especially these days, when the most popular books are never stand alone work but turn into an endless series of sequels. If your hard assed PI has a plucky sidekick for 5 books or more then that sidekick needs a name and a history. That sidekick needs to be beloved as well.
That is another thing that most people are not going to argue over, because.
However, something that some people might turn their nose up at is the idea that sometimes, even characters who are only around for a portion of a single chapter deserve a little bit of character building, and that without it you are doing a disservice to your main character.
This stands true in horror more than any other genre.
Why?
Because horror has a body count.
Sometimes the first body drops on page one. Sometimes it takes a chapter or two, but for many horror books, there is going to be a huge accumulation of dead people before you reach The End.
You run the risk of those people meaning nothing.
There could be a whole mountain of dead bodies, but it wont matter if the reader is desensitized. When death stops meaning anything, then it stops being scary. And if it’s not scary for the reader, then how can they assume it is scary for the hero they are supposed to be rooting for?
Take these two examples for example:
1.
“Poor kids never stood a chance,” Royce said, looking down at three young bodies on the food court floor. More than likely they were siblings. It looked like the oldest may have died trying in vain to protect the little ones.
2.
They weren’t supposed to be at the mall to begin with. The new GTA game dropped today, and Bryson wanted to be the first in line to get it, but when his mom needed him to babysit, he said he would. The game would be there later, he knew.
He had his license though, and the second car was currently running for a change. He could be there and back before she got off work, with time to spare to buy the twins an ice cream before they left.
When the carnage started, he had his game and the kids had their rocky road smeared all over their faces. It was his fault they were there, and he knew it was up to him to keep them safe. He shoved them under the tiny table they were sitting at, and climbed in behind them, covering their 6 year old bodies with his own.
They had never felt so small.
The table had been blown aside in the attack, but that is how Royce found them, one large body covering two small ones. He had tried his best to protect his siblings, but the burning hole had gone through all three of them.
“Poor kids never stood a chance,” Royce said, looking down at three young bodies, and found himself thinking about his own little brother. Not so little now, but he’d still give his life to protect him.
In #1, we get the scene across just fine. Our MC comes across the bodies of 3 dead young people.
In #2 we get to “meet” these people. We know why they were where, and we feel a pang of regret and sorrow for them. It also offers a moment of expansion on our main character. These random children, in the book for a smattering of paragraphs, has let us know that Royce has a brother he cares about very much.
That’s not to say you have to create a detailed background for every single person you pass in the book. Or, that you should kill everyone you make.
It is the uncertainty that leads to the fear that carries a good horror story forward.
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