At least, that’s what The Guardian says. Apparently the cool literary types haven’t reached out to touch the horror genre in a way that matters, which, according to this author, apparently means it needs to be drenched in literary theory and contemporary economic and political issues:

I’m convinced horror can raise its game. Our postmodern, capitalism-in-crisis, media-saturated world is ripe to describe it anew. Our very language seems to demand it. A mortgage, literally, is a death grip. Negative equity means being haunted by your own house. Corporations have legal personhood: they can be held responsible for criminal actions and claim “human” rights, but ironically they have no body. PR and political spin are referred to as “dark arts”.

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To this, I can only say “Huh?” Look, if you really want to get down to the basics, great horror fiction crawls into your mind and moves in, or produces a physical, visceral response. It can be literary, but if it doesn’t do either of those things, it’s not horror. And you can call it whatever you want, but if a book does those things, you are reading a horror novel. Fear may nest in the great issues of our time, but horror is something experienced as intensely personal.

Marketing has more to do with what people are calling that book than what it actually is. I wrote about this a while back— “literary” books are seldom marketed as horror. Osama by Lavie Tidhar won the World Fantasy Award, but it gave me nightmares, and rightfully so. Chris Bohjalian doesn’t call it a horror novel, but The Night Strangers(reviewed here)still makes me uneasy. And Kelly Link, mentioned in the Guardian’s article as a refreshing literary voice in fantasy fiction, slips between genres, identifying with horror as well as sf and fantasy(read our interview of her here). And books published as horror, such as The Reapers are the Angels, by Alden Bell, can certainly be literary.

So, nope, horror isn’t dead. Can it be pulpy and commercial? Sure thing. Can it be predictable and badly written? Absolutely. Can it be original, unsettling, and downright terrifying? It better be.

Horror doesn’t die, folks. Pitch in Rise of the Guardians(which you should really see) makes that point effectively. You can banish the nightmares, but the bogeyman always rises again.

(Thanks to Rose Fox at Genreville for the link, and her spirited response).