As long as I can remember, I’ve been resistant to horror books and movies. They upset me. They give me bad dreams. There are enough horrors in the world without inventing new ones… Etc., etc., etc.
But a book I read recently is making me rethink that absolute stance. The book is Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher, and no, it’s not horror; I’d call it dark fantasy. I downloaded a sample and the writing captivated me.
“Her cloak was made of owl tatters and spun-nettle cord… From dawn to dusk and back again, with an awl made of thorns – yes, I’d like to see anyone do better. Even the dust-wife said that I had done well, and she hands out praise like water in a dry land.”
The sample I downloaded was full of passages like that, hinting at a story rooted in folk tales but going far beyond them. The beauty of the writing seduced me into buying the book the minute I’d finished the sample. And when I’d finished that book, naturally I went looking for more – only to discover that the writer’s recent books were all horror.
I guess I’ll follow sufficiently beautiful prose anywhere, because now I’ve read two of those books. And they haven’t given me nightmares. So.. now I’m open to reading in a genre that I’d have absolutely refused to consider two weeks ago.
How have your genre tastes shifted over time, or not shifted?
I’m still not going to read Stephen King, though.
Mad Genius Club 
11 responses to “Onward into strange genres”
Horror is not the genre for everyone. But, as a teaching tool, horror can teach well what few others can:
Pacing.
Horror makes or breaks a story on its pacing. There’s only so far you can tease the reader along before you must put in a slower passage. It’s like a breath mark. Unending chases are exhausting, and eventually the reader stops really caring about the story.
I got away from horror because I wanted to write stories with less real life in them. Horrible things are real. I’ve seen, and smelled them up close. They’re rather hard to forget. Good stuff doesn’t stick in the mind quite so vividly.
But we cannot live well without the good stuff. Good horror writers know this too. You can’t make absolutely everything crapsack vile and utterly jaded. Well, not and get the sort of readership that most writers want. There have to be good things somewhere, even if only so you can corrupt them.
But the existence of the inevitable good speaks to something very human in all people. Inevitable good is really true. You cannot stamp it out completely. Not even in the worst horrors of human history.
Finding the light that must exist in order for there to be any shadow is something we all do. It’s why all my stories have the good guys winning, even if only by the skin of their teeth, these days. A good story shows you where that inevitable goodness is- and that it can even win, some days.
I never could get many pages into a King book. and later wouldn’t bother because he was such an @$$. Though it sounds like his latest is turning off even his diehards and possibly soon no one will bother reading him.
Like most broad genre headings, “horror” contains multitudes of subgenres with divergent characteristic themes and feelings.
I love Cosmic Horror, Dark Fantasy, and what you might call horror-tinged Weird Fiction (e.g.; many of Howard’s Solomon Kane tales), but am less moved by the sort of nightmare-logic horror that characterizes Ramsey Campbell, and find Stephen King’s work completely uninteresting. Other readers would have those sliders set completely differently.
This is why it’s usually worthwhile to poke around the corners of your less-liked genres every now and then to make sure that what turned you off wasn’t an idiosyncracy of just one subgenre.
I used to read the Wine reviews in the WSJ, even though I drink very little, just because the writing was so great. Then those columnists went away… Anyway, just to say that great writing definitely leads to reading new stuff…
Horror is definitely a niche genre, and not for everybody. But there is good stuff in it, as with any genre.
Stephen King, however, can be avoided for reasons other than “he writes horror”. He is, or used to be, very good at some things, like vivid characterization of working-class characters.
But he also has many, many problems, starting with (as his friend Harlan Ellison pointed out) the fact that he does not write novels so much as short stories that are novel length. He also rarely writes an ending that’s worth a damn, partly because he’s a pantser.
But worse than both of these, he refuses to learn or face uncomfortable truths. His book *On Writing* is definitely worth reading, but also exposes his blindspots. For instance, he defends his endings by saying that the journey is the important part, utterly ignoring the fact that if the journey is worthwhile, the destination should tie into that. He also tells a harrowing story about himself at three years old (of which he has no conscious memory) apparently witnessing the death by train of his best friend, about the same age. After relating this how he heard it from his mother, he goes on to say that this incident had no effect on him whatsoever and has nothing to do with the fact that he keeps writing horror. (!)
Probably this lack of self-awareness and refusal to introspect are why his novels have spiraled into what they have.
No horror for me!
Oddly enough I have gotten complaints when I was in an online writers’ group about not tagging stuff as horror. It was always a re-told fairytale.
I went the other way. When I was younger, I read horror. Now, I shy away from it. Maybe it was just bad lock in book choices, but the last few seemed more sadistic than eerie/creepy horror. If I want sadism, I’ll read current events or certain sub-genres of history. Cosmic horror I can still do in small doses.
I found Stephen King’s Carrie to be very good, BUT I was 16 when I read it, and there was a lot of vicarious revenge satisfaction when I finished. I was 13 when I read the Shining, in a large, dark house during a storm. Don’t recommend that. 🙂 Now? No. Not a fan at all.
Excessive sadism and a delight in explicit rape scenes has been a problem in ‘popular’ horror since at least the late 80’s from what I’ve seen. What grinds my jaws is when the author sticks in such scenes and then does a postlude to the story where they sniff and explain that of course they’re above all those sort of literary excesses, but the audience demands it so the plebians must be sated.
I also recall some imbecilic reviews on Amazon of writers like Manly Wade Wellman where the anthropoid providing the comments stated that the book had no explicit sex scenes, no gore scenes, and no profanity. And you can’t DO horror without any of them! I wonder what Lovecraft or Mary Shelley would have thought?
Lovecraft would have messed with their minds. Deliberately, with malice and glee, assuming that they understood the horrific part of cosmic horror.
I have a simple way of differentiating between “dark fantasy” and “horror”:
If the clear intent of the writer is to tell a good story that just happens to scare the reader’s pants off, it’s dark fantasy. If the clear intent of the writer is to scare the reader’s pants off, and telling a good story is secondary, it’s horror.
Tim Powers writes dark fantasy. Stephen King writes horror.
I can like dark fantasy. I detest horror in any and all forms.
I read a fair amount of the gothic source material growing up: Frankenstein, Carmilla, Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde, Phantom of the Opera, Turn of the Screw, assorted ghost story collections. Like some of the other posters here, I also had a bit of a taste for “weird fiction” of the A. A. Merritt and friends variety. They don’t, for whatever reason, have a lot of reread value for me, but they definitely do influence the kinds of things that go into my own books.