Award-winning author and Seton Hill University professor Michael Arnzen demonstrates that in horror, as in life, it's often the little things that matter most.

Take his short-short piece "Nightmare Job #3," which begins "Wanted: Town Sewage Treatment is now hiring expert diver."

It's only 100 words, so brief you could almost miss the part where he adds that job benefits include "free diving suit with harpoon gun."

Harpoon gun?

Mr. Arnzen has just released the CD "AudioVile," on which he performs 16 of his short horror pieces with music and sound effects he composed. Like "Nightmare Job #3," many of the pieces are from his story collection "100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories," newly reissued by Raw Dog Screaming Press.

He teaches in Seton Hill's Writing Popular Fiction program, a unique department that offers instruction to writers interested in popular genres such as horror and romance. He lives in Greensburg with wife Renate Arnzen.

Mr. Arnzen said that "Audiovile," recorded during a sabbatical from Seton Hill last year, was an attempt to make an audio book that "people would listen to more than once." Reviewers have compared the work to the spoken word performances of Jim Morrison, Alan Ginsberg and Henry Rollins.

Since his first novel, "Grave Markings," won a Bram Stoker award from the Horror Writers Association in 1994, he's received two more Bram Stoker awards and an International Horror Critics Guild Award, as well as accolades for his Web site, gorelets.com.

Part of Mr. Arnzen's success has been the result of his use of new technology to distribute his work. He came up with the mini-poems he calls "gorelets" as a literary form that could be downloaded and read easily on the screen of a computer or personal digital assistant.

"I'm interested in potent nuggets of narrative, and horror has always been a shorter genre," he said. "Look at Edgar Allen Poe's stories and poems."

The little things also loom large in the subjects of his work, in which he finds the frightening in minutely observed, everyday details, like a janitor's glove (or IS it a glove?) and a pair of too-real bunny slippers.

"I'd like to think I'm doing the same thing comedians are, exploring our hypocrisies through observational humor," he said, adding that horror is often funny as well as fear-inducing. "I crack myself up all the time when I'm writing."

"Small" may describe aspects of his work, but it doesn't apply to Mr. Arnzen's ambitions. He said he decided to become a horror writer during a stint overseas in the Army before college. "I was reading a horror novel, and I thought, 'I could do better than this.' "

He began writing stories for fellow soldiers but quickly realized horror was harder than it looked and set out to "professionalize" himself.

Once home he took creative writing courses, read piles of horror paperbacks from used bookstores and has said he "studied horror movies like a monk." He earned a master's degree from the University of Idaho in 1994 and a doctorate from the University of Oregon in 1999, all while steadily producing and publishing.

Part of his mission, he said, is to show people that there's more to genre fiction than meets the eye. "A lot of horror is very well-written, but because it's gross, it falls under the critical radar." He noted that people too often expect horror fiction to be like mainstream horror films, which, Mr. Arnzen said, "aren't plumbing any new depths."

Mr. Arnzen has won most of the awards given to horror fiction, but he said he's not too concerned about achieving mainstream critical success. After all, "there's no Pulitzer for horror," he said, adding that as far as writing quality goes, "time is the judge of these things."

"I want to keep making myself laugh," he said of his goals. "I want to keep playing around with multimedia, experiment with things where the rules haven't been made yet."

He added, "I'd be proud if I could say I brought more people to reading. Not just horror -- reading anything."

Mr. Arnzen said that after years of horror films and fiction, he's grown a thick skin against chills. "Not much frightens me anymore," he said. "But I'd be really scared if I started boring people."

Mr. Arnzen will host a presentation of his latest work, including a screening of a short film based on his poetry, "Exquisite Corpse," at 4 p.m., Nov. 30, in Room 308 of the Administration Building at Seton Hill University. It is open to the public; admission is free.