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This is just to say…

Philip Charles Crawford rocks.  This  unapologetic article, “A New Era of Gothic Horror”, which appeared in School Library Journal, is the kind of thing more librarians need to be reading, and encourages them to give the kind of support that kids and teens deserve when they want or need reading material in the horror genre.

I’d say this is a fresh new voice for the horror genre and for teens, except that he wrote it in 2008, and then apparently went on to focus on graphic novels. But discovering his article gave me the warm fuzzies today.

Thanks, Philip.

 

Posted on May 31, 2011 by , Reply

The H-Word. Part 3

And now… The tipping point for me. The article that made me want to shake somebody at the Wall Street Journal. Did you know this summer is…

 

THE SEASON OF THE SUPERNATURAL!

 

Yep.  “Real” authors are now coming out of the closet. The genre fiction my creative writing professor, Clint McCown, banned us from writing in his class because it wasn’t “real” or “literary” is suddenly okay.  Except, wait! Let’s not call it horror fiction when literary writer Glen Duncan writes about a werewolf with “a lusty appetite for human flesh”.  Nope- it’s “a high concept literary novel.”  It just HAPPENS to have a man-eating werewolf as the narrator.  Hmm… How can the literary establishment avoid the stigma of writing genre books? Certainly, those books, populated with werewolves, zombies, ghosts, and vampires, couldn’t possibly be horror fiction. Of course not. It’s “supernatural literary fiction”. I’d like to thank Glen Duncan’s publicist for taking the time to offer us here at MonsterLibrarian.com, a horror fiction review site, a review copy of The Last Werewolf.

The Wall Street Journal did briefly acknowledge the horror genre, but none of the books in this article were mentioned as part of the horror genre. And, while I understand that different imprints have different audiences, I was appalled at Knopf’s attitude that “we don’t do those kinds of books”.  It’s so disrespectful to readers’ preferences, and readers are the lifeblood of any publishing house.  The author of the Journal’s article tried to justify the popularity of these titles by counting Homer, Shakespeare, Dante and Milton as writers in the literary tradition who tossed gods, monsters, and the undead into the mix, but those guys cared about telling a story, not whether it was “literary”.

And that’s why my five year old is begging me to tell him about Odysseus and the Cyclops for the billionth time, and preparing for the zombie apocalypse (in spite of my attempts to protect him from all things zombie). The stories and the monsters are just that good. There’s no reason to be afraid of the H-word. There are a LOT of good storytellers out there. Even if they write “those books”, that’s no reason to write them off, or treat their readers with contempt.

Look, the horror community is not as organized as the romance community. RWA has hard data on sales and on who their readers are.  Writers in the horror genre don’t. And it would be hard to collect… are there ANY major publishers who publish horror since Leisure went by the wayside? But horror readers, writers, and books are here, and it’s foolish for publishers, mainstream authors, and book critics to write them off.  Horror fiction. Not “paranormal”, not “supernatural”, not, “thriller”, “science fiction”, “fantasy”, “dystopian” or “lowbrow”.(although it can be any of those things as well). It’s okay to read and write horror fiction with pride. No one should have to defend that choice.

No matter what anyone else doesn’t say.

 

Posted on May 29, 2011 by , 4 comments

The H-Word. Part 2

Watch out.

I’m gonna say it again. Horror. Horror fiction. It’s out there. And it not only crosses over, but exists outside the bounds of other genres. Don’t be afraid to say it. Some people just don’t seem to be able to get it down on paper.

In her new readers advisory guide, Fang-tastic Fiction: Twenty-First Century Paranormal Reads, Patricia O’Brien Mathews really tries hard to define the boundaries of what constitutes paranormal fiction, for the purposes of her guide. Her introduction makes it pretty specific, as a matter of fact. She excludes most science fiction, dystopian fiction, straight fantasy fiction, and horror fiction (which she defines as fiction with the primary intent to scare or horrify the audience). Alas, the world of literature is not so easily categorized these days, as she found when she searched for “paranormal” titles in bookstores and libraries. Does Kelley Armstrong write science fiction, horror, mystery or fantasy? Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books counts Armstrong’s novel Bitten as a favorite paranormal romance. Which is it? Are Rachel Vincent’s Werecats books(which we’ve reviewed here- check out this review for Stray science fiction, romance, or horror? And do they have anything in common with F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack series (and here’s a review of Infernal from that series) at all, except for both being classified as science fiction and horror?

Do all of these really belong to the same family of books? Because horror keeps popping up, even in a book that specifically excludes books in that genre in favor of “paranormal reads”. Maybe someone should go shake the catalogers until they develop some consistency. No offense. I love catalogers.

I’ll mention here that Patricia contacted us and offered to help us out while I was in the middle of writing this. I really do think it’s great that she put this guide together. And it’s even better that she is willing to share her expertise. She has a blog where she updates her annotations, which is worth checking out.

So on to the next book that drove me bonkers. That would be Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises For Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story, by Steven Harper. I’m not really trying to write paranormal fiction, but for what it’s worth I think it’s an interesting and informative guide, and right at the beginning, Harper writes about “supernatural people”. You know, vampires, demons, zombies, shape-shifters, malevolent monsters… There’s lots about world building and developing character histories, plot, pacing, point of view… there are exercises you can try and checklists to use, but the closest Harper gets to the H-word is a mention of The Talisman, co-authored by Peter Straub and Stephen King. Now, obviously there are many types of books that use the classic monsters of the horror genre for their own ends (and the term “paranormal” covers a broad swath of literature), which is fine, but COME ON! Is the horror genre so invisible that you don’t notice it even when you are writing about writing about its tropes, creatures, and cliches?

Apparently it is.

Posted on May 29, 2011 by , Reply
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