The Future of Horror: Will You Be There For the Renaissance?

For those who might have noticed the strange and mysterious “disappearance” of Horror titles currently missing from American bookshelves…Might there be cause for worry?

Even in big box stores that formerly carried at least The Best Of series of Horror anthologies (edited respectively by Ellen Datlow, Paula Guran, and Stephen Jones), there appears to be a growing availability desert.

Sure, they can be ordered online. But what has happened to carrying at least those titles in major bookstores (titles, by the way, which always sold copies)? Where are our new authors? Our old, established authors? Why are we constantly seeing reconfigurations of the same authors and stories? What are they doing to our genre?

For many, there is the sensation that the future is bleak. Has the genre fallen on hard times, or are we being gaslighted into oblivion? Are Horror fans still out there, and what can we do as writers to try to bring things back to better sales plateaus?

The truth is that Horror as a genre is reinventing itself. And that means the real question is not are fans and new writers out there, but will you be part of the Renaissance?

Masks of the Internet

One issue we are dealing with in our genre is the problem of the Internet. That’s right – problem.

Today’s internet control of Literature is like going into your local library and finding everything dumped on the floor. The only thing anyone tells you is that it is in the heap…somewhere.

While too many people are proud to say this type of availability puts everyone for the first time on equal footing, it also makes a mess that is overwhelming to navigate. Expecting the average reader to have the patience to sort through all of the possible titles and an army of unknown names as authors or editors is just too much. Never mind the issue of quality in Craft as well as production.

We need the kind of categorization that came with the thousands of years of development shaped by libraries, the kind of reviews that come from average folks that used to be employed by newspapers to rate or recommend new publications, the kind of analytical criticisms that come from actual Literary Critics, and the word of your local bookseller who knows what is selling and what is not.

All of these are being erased by Amazon and its shoppers. So for those still “using” the knowledge provided by libraries and brick and mortar stores to make online purchases, get ready. Your secret weapons are being eliminated. Prices are going up, selection is going down, and nobody knows or cares what you know or spend precious money on.

So go ahead. Wave your phone in my face and tell me how my job is soon to be extinct because my company won’t price match. I can’t wait when you get to pay new, higher prices because Amazon has you over the barrel…

The examples of what is to come are already out there.

It is far too easy to make books look totally awesome that are absolute crap.

Here is a for-instance: I recently bought a not-so-cheap Print-on-Demand book about navigating the “basics” of one of the Adobe suite programs….But instead of an introduction to that program, it was a hundred-page recitation of what you find on the box…system requirements, et al…

Talk about nerve. And if this kind of thing happens enough times, readers will stop buying books off the Internet. Justifiably. They will stop trusting us as writers.

So what can we do? How do we find Horror and keep our genre going in these hard times?

For one thing, we need to keep up with our editors.

It really doesn’t matter if you like an editor’s choices and/or selections of authors or stories. What matters is that these are “considered” The Best….

As a reader, you need to see what that is to see if you agree or disagree with the assessment. And if you disagree, you need to support other, different authors. If you agree, you need to look up those authors’ other works and give them a whirl. As a writer, you need to know what has been done, what strikes you as overdone, and what inspires you to do something completely different.

You cannot know if you are a rebel if you don’t know the norm…

Know the norm. Know the editors. Know their styles. And either get with their program or write your own. But read them. Read them regularly… They aren’t who they are for no reason…

The other thing you can do is to try other publications, other anthologies, other editors. They are out there, although in increasingly smaller, more irregularly published numbers. They do have a habit of disappearing frequently, of reinventing, of staggered publication schedules. But if you do not purchase them, they cannot survive.

And try the offerings of small, independent publishers.

Horror is still more of a red-haired stepchild than its own powerful genre for many publishers, and all of that bruhaha about this being a Golden Age of Horror really does pertain mostly to film. As for print and Horror fiction in general, there is evidence of trying to stuff Horror into other genres like Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Thrillers. Mention of Horror tends to be an afterthought, not the leading marketing angle.

And the sad thing is this is all the doing of publishers trying to rebrand our genre as everything else, as though to hide its wolfish nature amongst the sheep is a good thing…

We have writers – many of them from that Golden Decade of the 1980s and the Real Golden Age of the 1950s – whose works are still out there being read often because they are being recycled... But it would appear that the general consensus is that we are not at this time writing very compelling Horror fiction. And some of those “older” writers used to be proud Horror writers…until something ugly happened and they were sidelined by publishers who shied away from midlist sales figures and potentially controversial prose if not controversial writers. And then until something uglier happened and someone started bleeding off our writers claiming they wrote other types of fiction instead of a “purer” kind of Horror.

You didn’t know there was classism in our genre? Well, there is in fact…

But the good news is that along with the sweeping (and often detrimental changes) the internet has brought to our genre the opportunity for coup.

You see it is the fans of Horror who decide what Horror is and will become.

Fans decide with their wallets.

When I see more pulp, more comics, more graphic novels selling in our genre than the Best Of anthologies, I see revelation.

When I see classic authors outselling everyone but Stephen King, I see revelation.

When I see Stephen King carrying our modern genre, I see revelation.

The revelation is: you can lead a horse to water or a pulp fan to Literature, but you cannot make him or her drink.

And if a fan does not understand Literature, chances are, there is no incentive to drink more than once.

In other words, we as a genre – our Establishment – is doing a piss poor job of marketing the reinvention of Horror. We are not exclusively Literary, nor should we be. We have to love the whole child. And what better source of inspiration is there but pulp? Graphic Art? Fine Art? Comics? Summer blockbusters?

That is what is selling…

Horror is a fun genre as well as a heavy one. One end feeds off of the other.

Our Renaissance cannot exclude our pulp roots, or demand an explanationless manifestation of Literature because we are not (yet) robots.

Our Renaissance is destined to be a marriage of the two. Opposites attract. Sparks make fire.

We are as writers being presented with one “acceptable” track of creation, and that is in itself stifling.

If we want to “see publication” then we must conform to demand.

How ugly is that?

As a fan, if you want to know where your genre is, it is out here – with you – in the cold, wet rain. Writers are writing in rebellion. But we have few places to go to show you, unless we want to “give it away” and we cannot afford that.

We are seeking markets. Making markets. Trying to decide how we can navigate the world between the hammer-strokes of Amazon.

Your genre is reinventing itself, therefore it is being forced to hide its unpalatable gyrations, its shape-changing behind internet masks – lest it bring shame to the Establishment.

But it is out there. Graphic novels, comics, pulp… its audience is loyal. It sticks together and whispers about new plots, new characters, new writers, new artists….Not so much general Horror fiction.

But in their loyalty to King, we see their preferences…the need for accessibility in fiction. As writers we are trying to get there. We are writing stories nobody wants to pay for, but may in fact be good Horror. We support King, read King, and will always have a special place in our creative hearts for his work. He (in all likelihood) inspired multiple generations to become writers if not lifelong Horror fans.

Yet we need more.

We need variety to keep on growing. We can’t all write pulp, or Literature, or Kinglike books.

But we can be inspired by them, and that is how genres grow.

The Way Forward is Dark

One of the reasons we are having trouble selling our Horror fiction (besides the obvious obliteration of markets and reduction of publishers and editors) is that we are all not looking in the right place OR for the right things.

Like it or not, this is the era of attempted Literary Horror…and not because editors and Critics want it, but because the world we live in right now is presenting us with Horrors the likes of which only George Orwell, Isaac Asimov and Harry Harrison imagined.

From this decade we will either see the rise of some of the greatest Literature of our modern times, or the end of it. Because all of us are being affected down to the molecules of our day-to-day lives. We cannot escape or ignore truths any more than Dickens or Dostoevsky. And the fear, the fury, the moral outrage is coursing through our creative veins, coloring our monsters and our plots, dragging us into dystopian scenarios, making real the rest of the world in ways the rest of the world has only dreamed of.

Every day we are waking up in a universe created by Bosch.

Every day, the garden of earthly delights becomes less and less attainable… replaced by the promise of man’s inhumanity to man.

Climbing up out of that hellish, all-encompassing vision is difficult. For artists and writers who are prone to so much psychic noise and psychological sound waves, the experience can be overwhelming….suffocating….and sometimes liberating…

Literature and Fine Art is born of this angst, this disgust and this Horror.

This means that a lot of writers are either writing about Potteresque young wizards or drowning in creative milieus of powerful emotion, struggling to get it down on the page and tucked neatly into story.

But they are OUT there…struggling to the surface for air. Keep looking for them; they are looking for you…

The transformation from trying to figure out what editors want and whether a story is one story or a trilogy has evaporated into how to bring the Horror to the foreground, how to make Horror scary again when Real Life seems to outpace anything we can imagine.

This is a creative challenge.

And like our fanbase in the genre, we are struggling to navigate each day, pay the bills, digest each new oppressive threat by politics that seem hellbent on creating dictatorship by promising various, construed bases changes won’t adversely affect them but only those they do not like….all while pushing plots and experimenting with characters and scenarios that often feel as surreal as Science Fiction or Fantasy because real life is mimicking it.

It is a tall order. But one I assure you your genre writers are up to…And I have seen the evidence personally. Right now what we are lacking most is that over-the-edge push…the one thing that horrifies absolutely the way a King novel horrifies, because the Horror is real… It is because we are struggling to learn the Craft we are not being taught while creating what we hope are sound concepts executed the way we want…

It takes work. Practice. Mastery.

It takes Renaissance.

And we cannot let ourselves go numb and mute. We have to say exactly what we mean. We have to not-care what others will think. We have to be willing to write outside of the Establishment’s dictates or preferences, and understand getting found in a confusing mass of titles is going to be a challenge unlike few others.

It’s going to take raw determination by our writers.

It’s going to take blind faith.

And as a writer I feel it coming.

As a bookseller I still see fans looking for new Horror.

This tells me it isn’t over – our genre is far from done.

In fact, I believe it tells me we are just getting started. And once we find a way to get it out there – as a genre – as a collective….then I think we will see new sales. New fans. New writers.

Whether we are The Best or not.

Some of us are content to place our immortality in the hands of our readers. Because that is where it belongs. Out there. In the dark.

Are You Keeping a Crawling Eye on the Print Industry? A Bookseller’s Lament

Complacency. This is what – if anything – will kill print.

People who leave it up to other people to purchase books in hard copy, to frequent brick and mortar stores of any product while patting themselves on the back for “saving” money need to wise up. The entire retail landscape is under fire. You now have to drive further, pay more, and find less for any product – including books.

This is not a “sign of the times.” It is an orchestrated effort to rearrange the retail market into a handful of distribution outlets that feed the pockets of wealthy individuals whose ideas of enlightenment include the replacement of workers with robots because “they never get sick” and “they never take vacations,” as well as the ultimate privilege of determining not only what the public will want to have access to, but what they will be allowed to have access to.

We are living on the cusp of censorship…the Horror Story is yours…

And in truth, some of the earliest and loudest voices of warning came from artists, musicians, and independent bookstores.

Step One: Divide and Conquer

It is increasingly hard to recall what it was like to venture into the mom-and-pop book or record stores of the past, to see the variety, to taste of the unique personalities that nested there, providing pleasant and integral niches of the labors of the humanities. Fewer still seem to recall the bitter and angry fights that occurred between the rise of the big box stores and small, locally owned ones. But they were there, ripping flesh from bone and real people from real careers even then.

As a shopper I knew it, and left it up to others to save the small stores. I rationalized that the big boxes were more convenient, and enabled my tiny, minimum wage paychecks to buy more deeply discounted books. What I didn’t acknowledge was that if a lot of people thought like me, our collective buying power would strangle small shops to death. What I didn’t consider was that this was part of a battle plan to “do away” with choice and channel profits and editorial power to a bunch of rich non-book people.

But the result was real.

The result was a domino effect of dead independent booksellers, and a transfer of the murderous intent of modern “competition” to destroy all others to a war between the big boxes. Once again I rationalized that I could buy books no other way, and flocked to the cheapest bargains. And then Borders was suddenly and horrifically gone – and it was as though the scales fell from my eyes and I realized what my rationalizations had cost me ultimately.

Now we live in a retail bookselling environment where the last of the big boxes are struggling, are consolidating territories, reducing inventories, not unwilling – unable – to cut costs any more to stay alive. And the vultures are circling, waving their iPhones in our retail spaces, daring us to price match or they will “go to Amazon.”

Just what do they think Amazon is going to do if and when the big boxes disappear? Let me awaken you, Sleeping Beauty: just because they sell books does not make them book people…

I’m not even sure if they are people people.

Just who exactly do these self-described “savvy shoppers” think took things this far? Non-book people do not care about choice. They care about dictating choice. They care about making money – not to share it, not to “create jobs” but to buy robots and take your last greenback even if it means your future home is under a bridge.

Choice is a freedom, folks. Are you willing to sell it for the savings of a few pennies and free shipping?

This is the exact same argument (simply resuscitated and slightly tweaked) which small bookstores made against the big box bookstores. And we as customers didn’t listen. And now in equal measures, customers come into bookstores and complain loudly about the lack of choice, the missing classics, the critical and growing hole where actual contemporary Literature used to be, the absence of those “fun” sections of cheap mass market genre paperbacks, the invasion of non-book items onto our floors, taking up precious “book space.” Some even wax poetic about the loss of those very same old independent bookstores.

Yet where were they – these very people – when the e-publishing-induced crisis upended the publishing industry and shuttered the doors of dozens of big box competitors to those brick-and-mortars left standing?

They were elsewhere. Rationalizing. And all the while, the snake in the garden was slithering along… the e-snake…Amazon with all of its tentacles and its great, bulbous, glowing eye…

It’s time to wake up. Because there is still time to save print with all of its ambient, job-creating light, but only if we are willing to rip the e-scales from our eyes and vote with our feet and wallets.

For me, retail has been an education during these times of transition. And here is what it has taught me…

This is Not a Coincidental Evolution: This is a Contrived Assasination

After years of working in retail book sales, one thing is clear: the battle to survive rages on, and far too many eager people with plans to pocket a writer’s profits continue to promote the rumor that the print industry is dead, and the only salvation is online.

But why don’t we really look at that hideous monster? Are we afraid to gaze into that naked eyeball looking back at us and all we can sacrifice in its name?

The tech industry continues to advertise with their deep and diversified pockets that “no one reads anymore” and “print is too costly” and how “economically friendly” e-printing is… Never mind the severe ecological damage of many computer parts tossed into our landfills as opposed to the growing and harvesting of trees, never mind the current push-back of people preferring to own hard copies of books, never mind the threat to vision too much computer-time represents, never mind the consolidation of thousands of middle-class jobs into a handful of exclusively-awarded upper class incomes.

Working in retail book sales, I can tell you honestly that the prediction of the death of print is premature and greatly exaggerated. Yes, the profits are not what they were. Yes, the selection is not what it was. No, the career path is not as clear or certain. However, neither is the future of e-anything.

But there is still a segment of population that never wanted anything else but print books. And there is a new generation of people who are discovering the pleasure of print books. And there is yet another group of people becoming disenchanted with electronics, with hacking, with tech glitches, with unending costs for expiration-date-stamped toys with infinite, expensive upgrades.

Yet the biggest snake in the room is still in the room. (Shhh!!! It’s looking at us….)

The problem is greed. Like anything else, the tech industry is hyper-focused on how to enrich itself. It doesn’t care about the future of books period, nor does its avatars care about the future of writers or artists who spend their lives creating that content. It cares about content that it can acquire for as near to free as possible and sell either at its own profit or giving it away while charging for ever more expensive hardware and upgrades in order to access that allegedly “free” information.

This has been promoted as “good business” or “business savvy.” But what it is, is self-serving greed.

It is industry-killing, job-killing greed.

It’s time to wake up. If you are a writer or artist, a fan of the product, or a purveyor of either or both, it’s time to put our collective foot down and stop participating in the demise of the middle-class in order to pocket the promises of the elite whose intent to abolish whole industries means the ultimate loss of jobs, careers, education, and even more important – choice.

Part of that is saving brick-and-mortar bookstores. That means going to brick-and-mortar bookstores. And buying books.

Why It Matters/How You Matter

I cannot tell you the publishing industry will return to its former glory days, that writers will write better, and once again it will be safe to become a complacent shopper.

But I can tell you that an increasing number of people come into my store and complain to me (probably because of my age) that they cannot afford to keep upgrading e-book software and hardware, that they cannot figure out what happened to their cloud-saved books or movies or music, that they can’t find something for sale that used to be for sale last week in e-catalogs, that they can’t understand why “timeless classics” in books, movies, or music are not carried in-store and are print-on-demand, that they want to come in and browse items, not see pre-selected “excerpts” of things to decide if they want to make a purchase…

I can tell you that people are starting to realize that their own personal choices are not what they used to be: that instead of an entire writer’s or artist’s catalog, there is only a single title or single “best of” anthology, that their section is less than half of what it was or is gone, that “reviews” are sales-motivated and not true to quality, that items bought online are often badly used or never show up, and that there is no one to ask questions of or discuss books or music or movies with.

But are these realizations happening in time to divest the tentacles from our hag-ridden, tech eyeball-affixed lives?

Can we still change things? I believe the answer is yes – if we do not dally.

I can tell you that all it takes for brick-and-mortars to blink in this war is a “downturn” in the retail economy (currently around 10% nationwide and across the entire retail landscape), less foot traffic, smaller purchases, and an old threat gotten a lot worse – theft – to change the trajectory of things.

People like me used to think that theft – as an inevitable part of retail – was just another write-off, part of an insurance policy that would keep my favorite stores afloat. But that is only true when theft is marginal. When the loss to theft ratio exceeds sales figures, the corporate hatchet comes out. Something is leaving: sales clerks, product, discounts, departments… perhaps even locations. And currently, brick-and-mortar everything is being hit by thieves in huge, professional numbers.

Many of them steal to resell – wait for it – on the internet. At Amazon’s many marketplace vendors. On Craigslist. At flea markets.

Bean counters don’t look at the number of sales transactions and say, “we have a healthy gatecount of customers”… They do the math and reconcile the cost of stolen items to profit. They make decisions about item availability based on numbers. Because they are not book people, even when they represent book people.

And thieves are doing so well because so many people are not coming into bookstores, are not buying higher priced items, and brag how they will just “find it cheaper” on the internet.

(No kidding. Let me ponder why those items are cheap…and note, there will be consequences.)

Already we are seeing in the book retail industry a trend that foreshadows what is coming in actual retail choice. CDs, DVD/BluRay, Literary Classics, Indie Press offerings, self-published, and niche-published items are all going to Print-on-Demand. This means now even bookstores cannot order these items into their retail space.

To make things more complicated, brick-and-mortars depend on a kind of cousin of consignment when they acquire product– if things do not sell, they return them for credit and try something else from the same publisher or vendor. With POD items, the product is nonreturnable. And it is also non-vetted, with questionable, uncertain editorial and production quality. These are pay in advance, ship to home offerings only.

This means even less variety, less vouched-for quality, even less choice. But it is one sure way to keep thieves hands off bookstores’ and publishers’ bottom lines. And that makes it attractive, this selling of images of things…

All of this affects the creators of books and film and music and art. It makes for even less places to market their creations, and while perhaps “offering” more control, requires so much more in time to market, promote, and additional costs to edit, assemble, and then to undersell in order to be “competitive” that the “advantage” is really quite obscured by the endless paychecks of the elite few.

 

How can we reverse this trend of slow strangulation? By purchasing from bookstores – large, small, independent or corporately run… by making an actual physical appearance and literally buying items right there instead of taking a picture of it and purchasing it on Amazon.

We do have to pick our poison, to choose from the many monsters that feed off our work and desires like parasites. But at least the older professions of publishers provided middle-class jobs and a solid market base from which writers could concentrate on writing, and readers could somewhat count on more-truthful blurbs and actual Critical reviews.

And in truth, it is not all bad news… there are signs of life in the small, independent bookstores carving new niches, starting to return in lesser numbers. There are an increasing numbers of independent presses springing up. But the threat to print remains viable. How it plays out will be up to you – the customer.

If you love print (or anything else you want to hold in your hands first), you need to support it right now. Your brick-and-mortar retailers need you… in their stores. Making purchases. Sustaining industries…

You may think you are all right if your choices are all online and you get to choose between vendors for the “best price.” But once brick-and-mortar bookstores are made extinct, your choices will join them in the tar pits. Non-book people have no interest in books. It’s all about them. It’s all about money – theirs.

Is your freedom of choice for sale? Keep in mind real Horror may be the alternative.