"Flowery" you say?

"Flowery" I think is a good term for a writer who cant handle the intricacies his style demands.

When you are blending a slow or non- action sequence with interior thoughts of a character,or resolving description and sensation and impression into precise language and metaphor, fusing layers of interconnectedness, the "show dont tell" rule is utterly useless, a bogus guideline for hacks and plot-reliant thrillers.

When you are describing an intense scene (scary in our case as horror writers), with fast-paced action then the rule becomes all-important. If you want to be Richard Laymon, or write like him, then you should worship like one would a wrathful god, the "show dont tell" rule.

The balance of the two modes-- ie, how well and how many balls or bowling pins you can juggle-- is crucial to writing something good and meaningful. Otherwise you are just passing off cliched images and trite plot points as something new.

Being "flowery" is NOT necessarily being overly descriptive, but also directly proportional to how inexact your thinking and writing is.

Incidently, to truly disturb a reader, which I feel is of utmost importantance in horror writing, it might actually be advisable to "alienate" your reader sometime. Now, you dont want to BORE them, that's another thing altogether. The most important rule in writing (and IM not saying I succeed personally) is to be interesting to your audience. Also, another point, even though everyone on this board is a horror writer, our potential audiences are very personal, some quite small, others having more appeal to a larger public consumption.