Hello all, I have recently begun writing a horror/action story aimed at a teenage audience (13-16 in particular). This story revolves around a parasitic infestation that mutates the host and the actions of a superhero group to combat it. The trouble is I have never once written for this kind of audience and am at a loss as to how much gore and bloodshed is appropriate. So I have decided to seek advice from this community. So... how gorey should my gore be? How much is too much for the target audience?
In my experience, Darren Shan's Demonata series has an incredible amount of gore in it, and it does pretty well! I guess it depends on what sort of audience you want In book one of Demonata the main characters whole family are gruesomely murdered by demons. Book one is called Lord Loss if you fancy checking it out to see what I mean.
Depends on what sort of theme you're going for. It's always good to have violence/gore as a tool of story telling and not just trying to appeal to people. Is the level of gore a reflection of the world or character? That sort of thinking makes gore interesting beyond ACTION, BLOOD, EXCITEMENT!!
