Nameless Horror: Monsters, Metaphor & the Coronavirus in Modern Life (Are You Writing or Are You Blocked?)

Social unrest, political distrust, unbreachable financial divides, and now a global pandemic… Has there ever been a more fertile time for writing Literature?

Yet here so many of us are, so incredibly overwhelmed by the high, swift tides of information overload, emotional distress, and outright confusion about where our place actually IS in this historical mess that we are like so many deer in the headlights: frozen in stunned silence. If you are suffering from a new and frustrating writer’s block right now, you are not alone…

Is the constant inundation of data that we accept as the price of admission for living in the modern world creating circumstances that are any different than the times writers have lived and written through before?

And does it contribute to how we interpret a pandemic as a kind of “nameless monster” that runs rampant through our emotions, devouring our creativity?

And if that is what Horror is all about, why can’t we harness the chaos?

Nature as Monster

As Horror lovers in times like these, we are forced to confront the real truth about our genre: that the best of Horror is homegrown in the soil of Real Life Horror. Every monster in our genre was spawned from the very scary realities of actually living in the world. And we should not be surprised that as a genre that revels in the macabre accoutrement of death, Horror has been influenced a great deal by plagues and pandemics, disease and human vulnerabilities.

So here we are again… starting to understand how villages of old came to fear strangers, how peculiar or selfish habits carry very real threats, how peasants were once wont to queue up outside castles with pitchforks, and how throughout the ages the threat of death remains so very personal and terrifying.

Small wonder that some of us might flinch under the weight of it all…

Disease emphasizes very powerful fears: will there be anyone left to help or bury us respectfully? Is there a God and life after death, or is this really “all there is” and “have I wasted my life”? Why me, or why not me? What will we do without the ones we love most? How will we survive so much change alone?

Horror responds to these queries with Vampires, Ghosts, Zombies, and even Mummies. To make ourselves feel powerful, to mock what we cannot control, Horror offers up Witches and Sorcerers, Priests and Angels, Amulets and Ancient Texts… And to keep the battle accessible to even the most timid of our readers, Horror provides formulas to defeat monsters like Werewolves, Poltergeists, Demons, and Maniacs with hooks and hockey masks.

By injecting the supernatural into Real Life, Horror has always mitigated and satirized Real Life Horror.

So what is stopping us now?

Why is the coronavirus the game-changer for many writers?

The answer is: because this just got personal.

Viruses go anywhere…striking in what seem like random patterns like tornadoes. They are invisible, seemingly arbitrary yet horribly specific, and potentially lethal – if not to us, then to those we love and things we need to make our lives routine and familiar enough to be safe. Worse, viruses invade those “safe” places…

Viruses as an extension of what we thought of as “domesticated” Mother Nature are exactly as Philip Athans says about Stephen King’s The Mist in his book, Writing Monsters: How to Craft Believably Terrifying Creatures to Enhance Your Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction: [it] “is as much a monster in the story as the Lovecraftian horrors it hides. It’s something that you can’t stop, can’t predict, and can’t fight – and in a very real sense it acts in collusion with a panoply of dangerous outsider predators.” (Athans 104)

Perhaps our mistake has been in miscasting Nature altogether (which is really not all that surprising or unlikely if we consider how easily we tend to miscast members of our own species, for which we have oodles of proof of unpredicability).

Native Peoples have said from the beginning that the earth is a living, breathing entity; that it demands to be treated respectfully, or it will defend itself in quite lethal ways. They weren’t being “cute,” “quaint,” or “naïve” when they said this; they meant it. And now here we are… watching a naturally born virus erupt among humanity — the biggest most harmful infestation the earth has had to endure.

As writers, we are observers. And thinkers. It is so very easy right now to wonder if we have done this to ourselves in so many ways. And guilt is yet another suffocating emotion in the Arts.

Yet is this any different that the plagues writers like Shakespeare composed through?

I say it is. And it is because Shakespeare may have had to deal with the closures of theaters, the layoffs of himself and actors, the fear and devastation of those dying around him… But he did not have media 24/7 blasting the devastation at him every waking moment. He wasn’t told to isolate in place, to scrub his doorknobs and food items like a neurotic raccoon, to love and fear his grocer, to keep seven-figure body counts in his head, to be shown on a map that there is no escape, to hear a litany of symptoms that mirror so many other less deadly diseases, to be designated “essential personnel” enough to wait on his fellow Elizabethans wholeheartedly but without the panicked, demanded-for protections of other essential personnel… Shakespeare could retreat if he was able, to write if he was able, to take the time to assimilate what the plague meant to him and his audience…to turn it into poetry…

I am not saying he had it easier. But there is a profound difference in helping your village dig a mass grave and filling with known folk to watching a military as large and “great” as our own being ordered to use heavy machinery to dig trenches in preparation… To see technology used via refrigerated semi trucks to store bodies (still keeping it distant and less real for those of us hunkered down in front of our television sets and not being able to realize the magnitude because we are blessedly protected from the reality…)

Reality is needed…even ugly reality, and there is something profoundly important about burying one’s own dead, about witnessing death.

Our country’s leaders (like so many) wonder why we don’t “get” the danger…. It is because we are being sheltered from the truth… that people are DYING. And it is not a pleasant death. It is not an attended death. And death is not at all like cleaned-up-grandpa-in-a-fancy-box-with-flowers. It is not take the beloved dog to the vet and tell the kids he’s gone to live on a farm. Death is a battlefield. Death is watching the body fight for life with a person trapped inside. It is a twisted shell left gaping, ravaged by the wounds of that battle…And it is gritty and horrible, eviscerating, emotionally devastating, and will torment the dreams of those forced to live through it.

If such a witness to this kind of devastation is a writer, much of what is witnessed is not written on the battlefield. It is written after the nightmares wake the soul and spill their truths out onto the page. Such writing is another kind of death – one with rebirth. But it very often takes time… Reality comes rife with ghosts.

Some of us as writers have already been there at one time or another…in my case, watching my mother die of cancer. It devastated my ability to write. I couldn’t abide Horror, which suddenly seemed so incredibly trite. And that drove the stake deeper into my heart and twisted it. Because writing has always been my way to cope.

Reporters can tell me a thousand times the “GOT author is writing” and all it does is make things worse. Like many Horror writers, I know I should be writing. But I can’t right now. It just doesn’t feel decent somehow.

The thing is… that’s okay.

What I learned from last time – from that ten year writer’s block – is that we have to sort through our emotions. We have to experience what we are feeling. It’s the only way to come out the other side.

Because when nature is the monster, the overwhelming properties of that monster means we are often robbed of words.

Indescribable, Unutterable Horror

Says Athans, “Every story is about something.” (75) Monsters are often used in our genre to represent the real something… Monsters are metaphors… and “some of the scariest monsters are the ones that attack our psychological well-being.” (74)

Are we not there with the coronavirus? Are we not asking ourselves if we have been the agent of cause behind the rise of this disease? Do we not question everything from morals and politics to global warming and tinkering with Mother Nature? Are we not freaked out?

Yet we are unable to really envision this monster as it ravages continent after continent. All the slides in the world, all the explanations…. Most of us just cannot envision it… So we default to the imagery we all understand because it is not specific. We call it a Monster…

Says Athans: “You can’t see a virus, let alone slash it with your trusty broadsword, shoot it with a blaster, or drive a stake through its heart. It gets inside you and starts eating, and the only reason you know its there at all is the horrific effect it’s having on your body.” (123)

How can we really look into that horrible maw of disease we have named the coronavirus then, and not be made insane?

We have to realize that as writers, really seeing and on some level experiencing this Horror is also the way out of the block. It is our job and our nature to observe, to record the details, and regurgitate it all in some semblance of acceptable order…

We have to realize that this is what Critics mean when they talk about Literature… and why Horror should include more of it. Literature is about how humanity functions in the crisis of Life…

Soldiering through this incredulous time of pandemic is providing you as a writer with information that while overwhelming now, will inform every piece of writing you do from this day forward.

And if you are a Horror writer, it will also be colored by the indescribable moments, by the awful silence that fills the mind when the world as you know it stops.

Wordlessness for a writer sounds like death. But it is truly the sound of rebirth in the making. From that unutterable mass of emotion will come the monster you need to tell the story.

One theory of why Lovecraft is so successful in Horror and monster-making attributes his choice of words in descriptions – words like abnormal, accursed, amorphous, antediluvian, blasphemous, cyclopean, daemonic, eldritch, fetid, gibbering, indescribable, iridescent, loathsome, squamous, unmentionable, unnamable, unutterable…. (Athans 214)

Do we not talk about the coronavirus using similar vocabulary?

The deliberate rendering of the monster’s description as indescribable and defiant of all sane envisioning opens the door to our worst imaginings. It personalizes every monster, tailor-making each one into a very precise creature in our very different heads. All versions can be true at the same time. And such monsters are not only unforgettable, but immortal in our memories – fear first.

How we are seeing the coronavirus is doing the same thing to our mental processing. It has become a Lovecraftian monster whose terrible imagery has merged with our own vision of it.

When we deconstruct fictional monsters into their basic and indistinct parts, we can either deduce their weaknesses, or become disoriented by the Horror – losing ourselves in the very type of  insanity Lovecraft loved to dangle over his protagonists. This makes Lovecraft a writer whose astute observation of his own personal fears allowed him to create a most effective emotional maze to draw his readers into. It is why we remember Lovecraft stories for all of the right reasons – for the Horror of them (and not for the almost-dull prose created to stall the sense of urgency we have come to expect in contemporary American Horror).

There is just something particularly terrifying about the slow, steady advance of a lethal monster with no known weaknesses…

Says Philip Atkins, “Many of Lovecraft’s stories lack immediacy; the threat is always subtle, implied, still developing, rarely seen in its entirety, or shown doing horrible things.” (201)

Is this not how we frame the news of today?

The pandemic is not expected to crest until July or August… although most states have a stay-at-home order, you can go for a walk, go to the grocery…

No one wants to alarm the public, to start a stampede or a panic. Today we have grown accustomed to the fact that everything is administered in measured, acceptable doses. Wars and massacres and even pandemics are interrupted by commercials for better pillows and soothing medications, and ways to waste hard-earned money. We are provided the necessary distractions to pacify and anesthetize our reactions.

Yet when the monster is big enough, bad enough, universal enough… then the parts we do not see cast long, scary shadows. The horrible things come closer, seem more personally possible – even if there is denial. And when the monster takes someone we know, when it stands drooling outside our front door, and worse – when it is invisible – we feel real terror.

How can we defend against the seeming indefensible? A Zombie Apocalypse is preferable — or a rise of Vampires, the stirring of Mummies and the howling of Werewolves… we know each of us can figure out how to fight those.

Viruses take special knowledge. Wars take special luck.

So when the monster – the metaphor for all we dread, hate, or fear – materializes ever so briefly, ever so fatally from the darkness… we need a modicum of control.

And when our fingers cannot find purchase as we dangle from the cliff we never saw coming, we have mere seconds to save ourselves or be lost to irrational terror.

We may see the coronavirus – but we only see it in glimpses of statistics, in the sudden, inconceivable loss of someone we love who was just fine so short a time ago. We never quite see the monster, even when we are shown images of it on a slide… it remains indescribable.

The monster-virus is as much a mystery as the code behind the internet. We see proof it is there, but we cannot truly see IT. So we imagine it. And it wreaks its Horror from our emotions outward… it remains unthinkable, shapeless…amorphous…unreal….

And for many of us, the writing stalls. We cannot muster the muses from those gloriously fertile adjectives.

When we compare ourselves as writers to those who invoked novels from battlefields, from prisons, from oppressive governments and bestial thugs…even those who write in famines and even older plagues (yes, even Shakespeare wrote through two), we start to wonder what is wrong with us.

Yet unlike those wondrous writers, our own modern world seems to move through two very different realities simultaneously. Our world is “crafted” for us…filtered…. We don’t see the wars coming; we don’t comprehend the epidemic, let alone the pandemic. We are subject to numerous layers of “spin”… and the shock of the truth hits us in relentless waves when the storm finally approaches.

We are willingly lulled into numbness, into stasis…a bespelled slumber…

For countries like the U.S… this has been a rude awakening… a reminder that where monsters are concerned, we are all meat.

So not being able to write right now is more than understandable; this is unfamiliar to our senses. We don’t know how to process the flood of data pouring into and all over our Art. For too many of us, this is like listening to The War of the Worlds on radio…real only by its reporting…by images we cannot recognize of places made into Hollywood sets. We are waiting to hear someone announce April Fools…

Writer’s block is a natural reaction.

It is okay.

Not-writing might even be the righteous thing to be doing at this moment in our history. Writing will come back. Some people will not.

So if you are blocked, and not writing like that GOT author, or Shakespeare… Rest assured you are not alone. And you are no less a writer for it. You are doing research, willingly or not.

Live in the moment.

Be human.

The words will come later… When the rest of the world needs a little reminding of what Real Horror is all about.

 

The Care & Feeding of Genre: Pulp, Lit, and Why “Bad” Horror Matters

For every writer who feels there are just not enough venues in which to sell their work, there are often essays and outbursts from editors who vent their frustration at such claims, citing a certain laziness or lack of talent or persistence in the unpublished. Adding salt to those wounds, they complain that they are overwhelmed by mediocre if not poor writing, and a genuine lack of imagination—never seeing the forest for the trees: that “bad” writing is the price of admission in Horror. Then they go and pull off the scab and suggest that there are “plenty” of resources for the diligent…

I respectfully disagree. If there were, self-publishing would not be so prominent a “remedy” to getting new writing out there, and so many writers would not be giving up on Horror.

What will our Establishment do when the light show that is Stephen King is gone? When there is no Horror writer to point to who can make a living just writing or just writing Horror? When those who dream of a Kinglike career go elsewhere in order to find it? What’s The Plan?

These are important questions someone in the Establishment had better be paying attention to.

Because here is the truth from the trenches: markets are so narrow, so temporary, so often disreputable, too often not-paying authors for the work published, and incredibly difficult to find in the same place twice or even being willing to risk publishing work by novice writers… the result is a lot of us just give up – not on writing – on the genre.

The sad fact is that we are sick of the constraints, the ever growing long list of things we are not supposed to do in Horror. Worse, we had the answer to stagnation in the genre once and we let it wither on the vine: we had trade publications. We had Pulp. And it may be to the consternation of our own Establishment, but the fact of the matter is that Great Horror is just “bad” Pulp Horror gone rogue…

Our History is Pulp (And That Means a LOT of Magazine Markets)

There seems a curious reluctance to admit it, but the Horror genre would be nothing without Pulp.

Pulp publications offered writers like H.P. Lovecraft an opportunity for targeting a market and getting his work “out there.” Pulps churned out their editions (even if often irregularly), and in their many incarnations running from the 1890’s to the 1950’s – a “boom” unequalled until the 1970s-1980s Horror paperback bonanza. Such routine production schedules provided exactly the right kind of environment for writers and their creativity. This why between one magazine in particular (Weird Tales) and one rabid fan (August Derleth) that we even have anything of H.P. Lovecraft to drool over.

So why aren’t we looking to recreate that environment in the genre? What exactly are we afraid of if it isn’t living down the “threat” of “bad” writing? And what exactly is “bad” writing?

Today the answer seems to be “writing that embarrasses the editor and publishers harboring Literary ambitions.” And while that goal of selective perfection in itself is not a bad goal, it is a wrong one if it is the only one. According to David Bayles and Ted Orland in their book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (Santa Cruz, CA: The Image Continuum, c1993):

“Artists who need ongoing reassurance that they are on the right track routinely seek out challenges that offer the clear goals and measurable feedback – which is to say, technical challenges. The underlying problem with this is not that the pursuit of technical excellence is wrong, exactly, but simply that making it the primary goal puts the cart before the horse. We do not long remember those artists who followed the rules more diligently than everyone else. We remember those who made the art from which the “rules” inevitably follow.” (95)

In other words, it is the writers who take chances, who push the envelope, who break the rules because their story and their vision demands it that we remember. And when those stories take flight, they take the genre with it (Anne Rice and the whole rise-of-the-Vampire in the 1970’s is a perfect example). But when there are no fireworks for a story… it is labelled “bad”… Just exactly as in Lovecraft’s case – until such a story or writer is “suddenly” discovered to be innovative instead.

But what if we can’t get the work “out there”? What if it isn’t in print at all to be “discovered” later?

Perhaps it is my age (or so some might argue), but I view the Tech generation as a wee bit Pollyanna about the permanence of internet derived work. It seems only the nasty stuff put out there is forever “visible.” Important things tend to “disappear” into some SEO graveyard.

Print, on the other hand,  has a habit of resurfacing at just the right times…it has longevity.

And what of the prominence of deadlines in a writer’s life who aims at an environment like mass-produced pulps? What about the necessity of actually having the possibility of publication in a writer’s life because the bar IS lower? Because “perfection” is not demanded or expected every time –just good storytelling?

And while we (just like editors and publishers and Critics) may feel moved and inspired by what seems to be the success of the moment if not the Classic of Old, say Bayles and Orland: “Making art is bound by where we are and the experience of art we have as viewers” (52). In other words, we cannot BE Lovecraft, we cannot BE Stephen King; we have to be ourselves in order to write and in order to be found by our intended audience…in all our badness, in all our boring modern lives…with all of our common problems be they child molestation, sexual assault, drug addiction, PTSD, psychological illnesses, poverty, identity battles…

And no editor, publisher, or Critic has any business telling us not to write about those things.

In fact, maybe our writing in the genre is so prominently “bad” because they keep asking us to imitate King or Lovecraft without us being so bold as to actually suggest we are trying to “BE” them… And maybe we ourselves are at a loss as to how to find our own voice, our own stories because these writers are so shoved at us for their successes, their originality. Again, Bayles and Orland capture the problem precisely:

“As viewers we readily experience the power of the ground upon which we cannot stand – yet that very experience can be so compelling that we may feel almost honor bound to make art that recaptures that power. Or more dangerously, feel tempted to use the same techniques, the same subjects, the same symbols as appear in the work that aroused our passion—to borrow, in effect, a charge from another time and place…” (52-53)

As writers, we should never confuse wanting to recreate the feeling a work gives us with wanting to write exactly like a successful author…

It is difficult to break the cycle when the entire system used to build our genre’s best writers is gone, when we are left to chase a mythology that we can earn livings as writers just because one of our Greats still does so.

Aside from the cost, aside from the Tech assault on print (formidable excuses as those are), why aren’t we trying to build a grassroots system of grooming new writers in the genre?

The answer is apparently somewhere between pride and shame.

Ever since Horror went slasher and visceral in the late 1980s, there has been a steady push toward more Literary writing in the genre. It seemed a noble goal, except that there is Literary Fiction and there is Literature… These are not the same things, even as the former aspires to become the latter. And most Horror is not even Literary; most Horror is campfire tales, folk tales, and the manipulation of simple emotions – not the complex emotions employed by Literature.

This is not a bad thing. This is the addictive thing that attracts our audience to Horror – the fun of being tricked, of being jolted awake, of being scared without our own permission. And nothing does that like Pulp.

But it doesn’t do it every time or for every one. This is why we need so many writers, so many different tellings of the same tales…And this is where mass market Pulps come in. This is where the grinding production of a weekly or monthly cheap magazine with garish art feeds all of the genre monsters: writers work and often get paid for experimenting with stories and monstrosities, writers get published without “waiting” until they are perfect, best-selling authors.. This is where new writers cut their professional teeth and young people meet and fall in love with Horror.

Furthermore, it is where Great Ones are rediscovered in back issues if we miss them the first time around…

Yet we are repeatedly assaulted by the opinions of editors who cannot and will not build their catalogs or “risk” their reputations on what they judge or assume to be “bad” Horror, let alone on lots of “bad” Horror…Who would risk their future name on editing Pulps today? It’s a tough question. But it shouldn’t be: risk is part of the adventure.

Yet just like in the Golden Age of Hollywood where gems like Casablanca and Rear Window were made as part of a weekly churning out of mediocre and even sometimes “bad” acting, Horror pulps offer that same opportunity, at much the same rate of return. And it is not just because “great” actors or writers also start at the bottom, but because it takes a lot of chaos and a lot of failures to accidentally wind up in a Perfect Storm of Classicism…Just as it did for Poe and for Lovecraft… or Bogart and Bacall.

There is an importance of having your early attempts answer to publication, editing, and deadlines…newspaper reporters prove this all of the time. But so do art students. Bayles and Orland give a great example of this artistic lesson (known – if not acknowledged – by anyone who labors in the arts):

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of their work, all those on the right solely on its quality…Came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay…” (29)

There is simply no substitute for rote production of art and writing and the possibility of participation in the production process; this is why we produce some of our best stuff in school or writing clubs – we are acknowledging deadlines. The minute we leave school or our writing programs, we drift. Writing and art become subverted and fall victim to other priorities. And the problem is that dedication to your art of choice is hard to accomplish even with the support of your own conscience and your family if there is absolutely no chance of a paycheck, let alone a career – especially as bills and obligations pile up.

We don’t have a go-to method of apprenticeship for fiction writing in these times… even though the potential for making a lot of people a lot of money is often greater for writers than artists, writers are roundly condemned to the salt mines, ordered to labor alone until a masterpiece is presented in all its total, screen-ready, editor-free perfection. We are all in the Quality Group.

And our work shows it.

State Bayles and Orland: “Good artists thrive on exhibit and publication deadlines, on working twenty hours straight to see the pots are glazed and fired just so, on making their next work greater than their last…” (71)

But there is something else besides creating good writing habits that Pulps and their “bad” writing do for us: they ignite imagination – not because they are Literary, but because they are so not…

If you did not grow up in that era of the Pulps or its afterglow, you have no idea how much simple fun it was to read the stories your parents swore would give you nightmares, to sneak-read them under the covers with a flashlight…and if you were lucky, they DID give you nightmares, and great writing ideas…. Today we seem bent on ruining everything. Even though we have a few examples of similar tales still alive in print anthologies, artwork sentences them to graphic novels, or Young Adult fiction. Horror is being downgraded and hidden. Why? Because of the artwork?!

We NEED the art. It works in tandem with the writing of Pulp fiction. And the two together are indescribably awesome, creating new fans and new writers in the genre…all because of the PROMISE of a career of sorts.

If you don’t know Pulps, you don’t know what it was like closing the covers of one and feeling like we now do coming out of a darkened movie theater, breathless and full of ideas…

You can’t know it because between Technology (which ironically promised all manner of artistic freedom) and our beloved Establishment (which went from loving curators straight to dictatorship) we are led to believe that only certain Chosen Ones should ever see publication, let alone get paid to write…

Worse, we are led to believe that if we write something…”bad”… we will ruin everything the genre has worked for.

But it only ruins what some people want for the genre…what some people seem to think they were put on the earth to decide for the rest of us…

It might just be time to take our genre back.

Because we are seeing an unprecedented stagnation (if not suffocation) of new work, deviant-from-the- norm work, and novice works in the genre. Look, we are not the Country Music Industry: we don’t need moral and technical oversight. We are the Horror genre and we love warts and flaws. So do our readers.

We have seen opportunity taken away from writers who want to write for a living…

We are seeing publishers make decisions against our genre, sabotaging new works intentionally or otherwise by eliminating spine tags that tell readers something is Horror, by eliminating our section, by promoting classics over new publications, by restricting sales performance to mere weeks for discovery and success or failure of new titles by new authors, by reframing our authors as writers in other genres, by laying off our editors, by not offering imports from the UK, Canada or Australia or even translations of foreign writers in stores… I could go on.

We cannot rely on ANY establishment to help us (and apparently, sadly, not our own, either). We are going to have to decide to help ourselves, and that means supporting each other… from the trenches up.

It may mean reinventing the wheel. Or Pulp. Which in Horror is the same thing.

We also have to just get over the belief that we are guaranteed a good time every time…Stories are gambles, and the “bad” ones make the Great Ones shine. This is true especially with Horror stories – stories that are trying to scare us…because we all scare differently. There will be duds. But we need to not to have bet the mortgage or the kid’s braces on the cover price.

So we need freedom – freedom to experiment as writers and as readers. We need to develop a sense of humor, and tolerance. We need to appreciate the attempts at storytelling, because it is not easy and should not be. The good news, is that Pulp still lives….and the power to transform our genre is still potent.

Scary Is as Scary Does…

It is vital for our Establishment to recognize that there is a value and importance in Pulps because they deliver…scenes…images…folklore…

And most writers can tell you, it is not an entire story that leaps to or from the imagination, but a series of emotion-evoking images that emerge from their own minds that leads them to a story or to have nightmares about it…

This is why we read other writers’ work, and watch Horror movies…we are waiting for an image to grab us, to suggest something, and then we derive the story from the inspiration another piece of art suggested to us – art as interpreted by our own fears and reshaped into new art…

But we also value (if not envy) the freedom of storytelling Pulp writers have. It’s all about the monster…there is not so much agonizing over plot and character development as there is about monster reveal – ironically the one thing Literary Horror grapples with and fails at most.

Reading Pulp can lead to an inner explosion of creativity – all wrought by that inner child that drew scary pictures and told stories that raised adult eyebrows. It helps us reconnect to that kid who saw the monsters…

We also have to realize that as we age (even out of the teen years) we subvert our very real fears, mostly in order to keep other adults from finding out about them and exploiting them. But the fears are still there, and as writers, it is our job to excavate them – to not write about what we think will scare other people, but what we know still scares US. This is increasingly hard to do with the burden of perfectly executed Craft hanging above all our heads like an anvil of Doom…

We need air to breathe. Pulps are pure oxygen – heady and hallucinatory.

One of the greatest contemporary examples of American Pulp doing its thing is the website CreepyPasta , https://www.creepypasta.com/ which has recently been mining the print market with anthologies. Here, many writers write under the cloak of anonymity… pseudonyms…”handles”… Readers can give advice, feedback, and rate; there are “stars” and favorites, and story rooms where tales are dedicated to certain characters and certain monsters. For any Horror writer trapped in stasis, trying to manage a block, this is where you need to go for a Pulp Poultice.

Look, “bad” writing is more than okay. “Bad” writing is necessary because through that dark wood lays the secret to great storytelling… Our roots are in campfire tales, stories told to startle and warn – not in perfect grammar and stellar Craft, not in some plot defined lock-step whose prerequisites an editor can check-off.

We have to shed the shackles and mental editors that our Establishment tells us makes for “acceptable” Horror. We have to read everyone who ever wrote in the genre – and maybe especially if they left or were exiled or are just largely ignored. We have to read more Clive Barker. More Neil Gaiman. More Brom. More Tanith Lee.

We have to see ourselves in Horror in order to write it.

And we have to feel free to write it – not worry about whether it’s been done before, not worry about an editor who has gone “on the record” to say he or she doesn’t want to read this or that, not worry about getting into a magazine the Establishment says is cutting edge.

Cutting edge for an editor or a Critic is not cutting edge necessarily for a reader, or a writer. Writers need honesty, to be true to their vision no matter what.

Again, according to Bayles and Orland:

“The unease many artists feel today betrays a lack of fit between the work of their heart and the emotionally remote concerns of curators, publishers, and promoters. It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of this problem. Finding your place in the art world is no easy matter, if indeed there is a place for you at all. In fact one of the few sure things about the contemporary art scene is that somebody besides you is deciding which art – and which artists – belong in it. It’s been a tough century for modesty, craftsmanship and tenderness.” (70)

As writers, we need to write about what moves us…WE are the ones out here – among the rest of humanity…seeing what we are not supposed to acknowledge, feeling what we are supposed to rationalize…

We see crime, we see poverty, we see bigotry, we see racism, we see sexism, we see classism, we see suicide, drug abuse, homelessness and hopelessness, war…all manner of things that shape our intimate lives and which we have so little control over. We want to scream. We do it in art. In writing.

When our establishment slaps parameters on what we can write and how we should write it, it is censorship.

Pulp is the ultimate rebellion.

And if the establishment thinks there is no interest in Pulp, they should revisit the sales statistics on Anime, on Graphic Novels, on Comics.

Readers want to exercise the surface emotions. We can’t appreciate fine Literature if we have mentally exploded or imploded all over ourselves. We can’t muster the patience it takes to critically think if we cannot express ourselves in the most basic of our experiences.

Sometimes we just have to strip down and run naked among the monsters… daring them…counting coup…

It’s part of being human. And if a writer cannot connect with that on an elemental level, there will be no Horror, let alone Literary Horror.

https://dailydead.com/clive-barkers-seraphim-comics-to-release-hellraiser-anthology-volume-two-graphic-novel-this-september/

When will our genre wake up?

When will publishers?

“Bad” Horror is good for the genre. It’s good for writers. It’s good for readers (especially if “great” is not promised). “Bad” Horror matters because it moves the creative needle in Horror and within its pulpy heart hides the Next Great Horror. Are we really willing to risk the loss of all that? Are we so ashamed of the process?

Get over the judgement. Or say goodbye…to writers, fans, artists…and our genre’s future. Pulp is who we are. It’s how we birth a Lovecraft, a Poe, or a King.

And it is nothing to be embarrassed by.

Nemesis Lost: the Passing of Harold Bloom and an Unpopular Era of Literary Criticism

Last month marks the passing of Literary Critic Harold Bloom, dead at 89, gone from the fray on Monday, October 14, 2019.

A long-time nemesis of our genre, Bloom was best known for his caustic, vicious attacks on Stephen King, for whom he had no affection or Critical respect. Unfortunately, this had the opposite effect Bloom probably wished to impart to the pop-saturated American public – to educate us that there are certain accepted criteria involved in the making of and recognition of what we understand to be “Literature.” Instead, he got our hackles up and our mob-mentality fully activated… we made an art of despising him. He energized our base because he encapsulated everything we hated and thought we knew about the Literary Critic and the constant dangling of unattainable Literary acclaim out of reach of any genre writer where academia was concerned.

We convinced ourselves that it was the Harold Blooms of the world who kept us down and insulted us.

But we didn’t really know Harold Bloom, and we have in our own knee-jerk reactions underestimated the important, side-glancing impact he had on our genre.

Most of us had no idea that Harold Bloom was a rebel in his own time for attempting to bring an understanding of Literary Criticism to the American public, often criticized and ostracized himself by the Literary Critical Establishment for even attempting to speak to the common reader. Most of us still have no idea how much he made us think about Horror, about genre and speculative fiction, about what Literature is or should be…Yet Bloom fought the Literary Establishment to bring an understanding of Criticism to the masses.

Surprising, isn’t it? Harold Bloom… the people’s Critic….

When Our Worst Critics Make Us Better

With so many unpleasant exchanges that come to mind, we in the Horror genre are not wont to think of the merits of a Critic like Harold Bloom. Yet it is precisely because of his disgust at the decline of great Literature being taught in schools and written in our garrets that he was the way he was. And if we take apart and try to understand his angst, what we find is a man who simply loved the Classics so much, that he wanted us to join in the appreciation if he had to beat it into us. Horror was one of his sticks. And while it is easy to surrender to tit-for-tat verbal insults, the most important thing Harold Bloom did for the Horror genre was to get us thinking about the Horror genre…

Because of Harold Bloom , we were united; we were analytical in our own way, looking at his critical comments and looking at the Horror he despised and trying to see why he might be right OR wrong… In other words, we had discussions – offered up in un-academic arguments, perhaps – but discussions. Essays, Critically-worthy essays and polemics were born, and writers and readers questioned just a little bit what they were reading and writing and how or why it might be equal or inferior. We were forced to become experts on our own writers and genre writing in order to defend the lot.

Because of Harold Bloom, we needed to understand Literature so we could argue Horror’s merits…

Yet we just could not abide the man. He was so…Critical….

We thought it was because he not only represented the Literary Critical Establishment, but because he so sounded like the caricature we had of it in our heads – the one that brutalized our best writers like Poe and Lovecraft – authors that are now (partly thanks to our own reaction to the Criticisms of Critics like Harold Bloom) considered canon material by New Critics…

This has so much to do with the stagnation of the field of Literary Criticism that happened during the Publishing Boom. Harold Bloom was a child and student of The Old School… the one abandoned by readers and many students in the 1970’s for being so out-of-touch and elitist.

Harold Bloom was born on July 11, 1930, in the East Bronx, into an Orthodox Jewish household. He was the youngest of five children of William and Paula (Lev) Bloom, struggling immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father was a garment worker…. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/books/harold-bloom-dead.html

What should we expect from a man born so far back from where we are now? Harold Bloom was not a loveable curmudgeon. For those of us in the Horror genre, he represented everything that is wrong about academia and Literary Criticism. He was rude, abrasive, and said things he obviously and passionately meant without a word of explanation that was not laced with academic snobbery.

The fact is Harold Bloom surprised most of us…especially perhaps those who he loved to criticize most – the genre-lovers, the genre writers, the de facto enemies of Real Literature… We were so often the targets of his angst, his unabated fury with what he perceived to be an American willingness to abdicate the whole of Literature for the cheap, dazzling trinkets of pop culture.

In an New York Times article on his death, writer Dinitia Smith says:

“Professor Bloom was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called “the School of Resentment,” by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/books/harold-bloom-dead.html

Harold Bloom (like most of his fellow Critics) made himself very difficult to like. It didn’t help that he so constantly went after our most prominent and beloved writer, Stephen King. However the closer we look, the more we see he was a product of his times and his profession. And perhaps because times were indeed changing rapidly during his lifetime, including how we viewed “other” peoples and ways of thinking, the rise of Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, and Gay Rights, perhaps that is why there seemed such a generation gap of sorts between modern writers, their fans, and Literary Critics in general. They just seemed so out-of-step with the rest of us…

Yet sometimes it is that very conflict that becomes a catalyst for good changes. It is just not always easy getting there.

Lost in our own emotional blizzard of reactions to what Literary Critics said about our genre and our writers, what we never understood about those like Harold Bloom was that their fury was based in a much bigger frustration – both at the failure of academia to impart the “right kind” of education and our failure to “get” what seemed so blatantly obvious to himself and others of his field. And in truth, it was their presentation – their attitude – that made it easy to not really care.

This is the danger of ignorance: not understanding the criticism of a thing, and so attacking the messenger… And where Harold Bloom and Horror were concerned, the battle became both animated and amplified by ignorance on both sides.

Yes, both sides.

Critics have long assumed that full-of-themselves writers fancy their own work to be Literature because it sold well, someone said it was “good,” or because they themselves are convinced of it. In reality, most of us know what we write because we CHOOSE to write it…We simply disagree that genre writing has no value, place, or purpose in a Literate society.

Genre fans, on the other hand, have long assumed that Critics were a bunch of stuck-up, arrogant old white men who were Critics because they couldn’t write themselves, and who “made up” criteria for defining Literature (a theory that gained popularity because Critics refused to “explain” anything of their Craft) really disagreeing with our nonacademic measure of Literature because the secret truth is they actually have strict criteria designed to tame personal opinion. And it is apparently a secret.

All of our passions collided when publishing boomed and littered the literary landscape with all manner of writing starting in the late 1800’s and imploding in the 1990s. That’s about a hundred years of pulp and periodicals, paperbacks and bestseller lists. With abundant talk shows on radio and television, multiple newspapers in every city, and Hollywood trolling for new film material, the “modern era” was the first time the reading public had forums to read, watch and participate in where what we read became a topic of discussion. It was natural for us to ask the question what exactly IS Literature and who and how is that title decided upon?

When Nobody answered and the questions were met with highbrow eye-rolling and insults, when even teachers didn’t seem up to the task of explaining, the transformation of fandom into hordes of angry anti-Critics was a natural one.

On one side we had writers with bestselling works that “everyone” adored and their authors who secretly or publicly pondered why they were not considered Literature, and fans who tried to sort out the same question. On the other side we had a very old establishment of Literary Critics never before truly questioned about the process (even though many a Critic’s artistic vision and qualifications were routinely questioned by the same writers and fans). These Critics were used to operating in private ivory towers of academic setting, living in Shakespearean bubbles where all was Literarily right with the world, and where anything less than the Classics were vapid written renderings of cave paintings.

Bloom was no exception: “Armed with a photographic memory, Professor Bloom could recite acres of poetry by heart — by his account, the whole of Shakespeare, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” all of William Blake, the Hebraic Bible and Edmund Spenser’s monumental “The Fairie Queen.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/books/harold-bloom-dead.html

To understand Harold Bloom, we have to understand that he (like authors he might Criticize) is himself a victim and product of his own times… He was a white male whose life’s work was studying what other white males declared Literary perfection…coincidentally, also largely written by still other white males. As we see today, there is a tendency by certain-aged people to cling to what they consider to be the “perfection of the past” when comparing it to contemporary times. With Critics, their angst is acutely measured by their obsession with Classic Literature—something (to our shame and detriment) fewer and fewer of us actually study, let alone read anymore. This has led to our communication gap and a generation gap with Critics. And Critics like Bloom were witnessing what to their way of thinking was and is an alarming change in our Literary capacity:

“Professor Bloom was ultimately both optimistic, in a narrow sense, and pessimistic, in a much broader one, about the durability of great literature. The books he loved would no doubt always find readers, he wrote, though their numbers might dwindle. But his great concern was that the books would no longer be taught, and thus become irrelevant.

“What are now called ‘Departments of English’ will be renamed departments of ‘Cultural Studies,’” he wrote in “The Western Canon,” “where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/books/harold-bloom-dead.html

It seems his fears are far too quickly becoming realized, what with the preferential treatment being given to Science, Math, Engineering and Technology at the literal expense of the Arts today. The Critics, it seems, were right to worry.

Yet not only did we really seem to be losing interest in reading Classic Literature, old Literary Critics had a new mantra…To Literary Critics of the past decades, we were largely no longer producing Literature. So what of the bestseller phenomenon? Could it be that any of those titles were in fact Literature too?

Critics like Bloom absolutely bristled.

But this was because that by merely asking we were exhibiting the very ignorance (read: miseducation or lacking education in this specific area) that appalled Literary Critics like himself. The interesting fact is that Bloom set out to do something about it – writing an enormous catalog of books explaining Literary Critical thinking (even though he still talked well above many of our heads, and even though he does this by ramming the same “perfect” works again and again down our ignorant throats)…

The problem is the same vocabulary – whether whispered, shouted, or sang to us – is the same vocabulary. If academic Literary Critics refuse to show us Literary Critical Theory and how writing is expected to seat in the frame of it, we cannot understand the Critic’s argument: it just sounds like an arrogant opinion. It remains pointless to know that Shakespeare is Literature if we do not understand why. And if we do not understand why, we do not understand how, and we do not understand how to do more of it.

Bloom therefore, for all his good intentions, remained entrapped by his own engrained arrogances – ones his profession groomed in its practitioners. He could not abide the concept that we could even ask if Stephen King was or was ever Literature. The slight of the question seemed always to be met with an automatic default setting like those of most Critics: Shakespeare.

“Shakespeare is God,” he once said…Shakespeare is the perfection against which all others are measured. Bloom was a passionate defender of Classic Literature – it was genius in his mind, one of the highest achievements of humanity. How could so many of us simply not understand it? How could we confuse Literature with bestsellers? And how could we not adore the Classic writers as he did?

This has been the fatal flaw of Literary Critics for as long as there have been Literary Critics… The idea that genius is just something that should be understood when it is seen and that it is exclusive and that the realization is sufficient knowledge for “the rest of us” has made so many of us feel stupid and belittled that we have come to the conclusion that we don’t want to understand it.

Yet we still keep picking at the scab. We not only suspect there is a process: we are sure of it. And we are sure that someone has decided it should be a SECRET process…

When the field of Literary Criticism decided to make itself elitist and to feign insult when questioned, it signed its own death warrant. It didn’t matter that it was a victim of its own time, that professional academics in every field saw themselves as superior to the average person for many a century – largely because the rest of us were illiterate or less literate and tended to labor in manual trades… Literary Criticism – for all its alleged observational powers – failed to notice that times were changing. And in their exclusivity, they seemed to have forbidden teachers and professors from teaching any aspect of Literary Criticism – as though we might try to illegitimately do it without academic permission or authority…

They didn’t seem to be aware of the public’s hunger for reading, or our curiosity about Literature – but instead took our devouring of popular fiction as a sign and as proof that we were indeed ignorant, and hopelessly so. When the concept of the “Bestseller” burst forth, the Literary Critic bristled at questions the American public asked about why a popular work was not Literature when our educational system taught that the very definition of Classic Literature was framed in its endless and timeless popularity.

Ironically, Harold Bloom was one Critic who seemed to intuit that our ignorance was somehow attached to never being taught how to understand Literature. He spent his career laboring to educate us, to define Literature… becoming a champion of the Western Canon…enduring condemnation and criticism for attempting to decode the secrets of Literature. So why don’t we feel grateful?

I think it has to do with the fact that Literary Critics have always come across as aloof and elitist for most of us, let alone for those whose reading or writing passion is genre fiction. Speculative fiction has long been crowned the murderer of modern Literature, the spoiler, the probable reason Literature was seen as simply not-being written today. And writers like Stephen King have been the fly in the ointment: what did this mean that so many adore the man’s writing? How could something have such longevity with no merit?

It was clear this question was going to have to be answered, and that the answer could not be simply that we are all absolute Cretans (with apologies to Crete for the Literary insult). New Critics were starting to emerge who had grown up if not with King, then with other disdained writers like him, and they also wanted answers.

At the very moment Literary Criticism fell out of public favor, those New Critics started asking a very relevant question: was it possible that it wasn’t that we are not writing Literature today, but that the approved and established Theories were inadequate to the task of evaluating writing that had changed with the times? Was it possible that when working with living language that how we write and interpret our world might also be a living, evolutionary process?

It was a really good question.

The original Literary Critical Theories were designed for the purpose of studying Literature that was already to some degree or another Classic.

Those theories left no room to interpret modern problems and the way modern writers look at them. This was why (New Critics argued) it appeared that no Literature was being written – modern works did not neatly fit into those theories. So they began to come up with new ones.

And worse, Critics had begun to figure out that the modern world was delivering new complications to the field of Literary Criticism – like actually being a Literary Critic alive at the same time as the writer and their work, being privy to details Critics did not have with Classic authors, being able to encounter those authors in their own lifetimes, to have their fans cross swords in passionate disagreement. Like the boom in print publishing that unleashed all manner of writing to flood the coffers of Literary Criticism with new candidates – even bad ones – all clamoring for Literary attention and acclaim – using the Literary Critic for promotional blurbs instead of discussion and argument… All of a sudden the whole process seemed cheapened, adulterated…

The Literary Critic did not react well to the commercialization of fiction. It defied all things natural to the Critic’s sensibilities – offending him or her because until that time, Literature was more like fine wine… nurtured by the passage of time, sustained by the adoration and knowledge of experts. The publishing boom was anarchy. And then it was heresy.

Literary Critics like Harold Bloom looked more and more like dinosaurs to the rest of us, because the field of Literary Criticism saw itself as above explaining itself to mere commoners, and because the rest of us had no understanding of what Literary Critics actually do.

And even though in his own way and radically so to his own time Bloom was attempting to educate us on the matter, he still failed somewhat because he remained encased in that veneer of elitist Literary Critical superiority that had been carefully nurtured by the field for a good century.

People just don’t react well when talked down to. So even as he made converts among students who took his classes and those who braved reading his many written works on the matter of Criticism, he still managed to alienate the average American reader – the very audience he needed so desperately to reach and to educate.

Yet even in his provocative commentary, he managed to shake more of us out of complacency. We wanted to understand Literature and Literary Criticism – not to DO it…but to understand what makes a work Literature…

This is how you get Literary writers: you educate them early about Literature – what it is, why it is, how to read it, how it is written…

What we learned from Harold Bloom is that unless and until we all speak the same language, we are just yelling epithets at each other.

We can do better. We can be better. And what we need to take away from the long and storied career of Mr. Bloom is that we all have a lot of discussing to do.

The Stephen King Debacle

Look, if we take away the poisonous words, we actually have important information that spills from the altercations with Bloom about Stephen King.

King is an anathema to most Critics. The American public absolutely cannot get enough of him. But what I find interesting is that today’s Critics cannot see why he is an anathema…

THIS is why:

Literary Critics do not belong in the same universe and time as the writer’s works they are criticizing. They just don’t. Just like time travelling versions of the same person, Critics and the authors they Criticize should never, ever meet. Bad things happen.

And neither do writers have a right to know they are writing Literature during their lifetimes. (Sure, it is nice to know one is thought of in that way, but we have no right to know we are “guaranteed” a place in the canon or immortality.)

Consider that the best Literary Criticism – and so much of it still ongoing – is about Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare. There is a reason for that and the whole Death of the Author argument is likely why – nobody is left to talk about Shakespeare and his private life and choices. It is all theory now. Pure theory. And the Critical work is phenomenal because most of what is left is just the work. The reason is the intellectual distance…

Work Critical Theory on Stephen King and you have a lot of mess, a lot of personal get-in-the-way-of-objectivity stuff that does not belong in Criticism. We should not know why King writes what he writes, where he gets his ideas, whether he is too commercialized. Nor should we know about the Critic and his or her personal likes or dislikes. We need to see King in a vacuum, far away from the 1970s and 1980s in particular. We need to see King in the context of other writers and writing styles of his time. And we can’t do that fairly when we are from the same time… Only distance will tell us if King writes Literature or ever writes Literature. Until then, all we have are inklings.

Until we get some object distance, we can only suspect things about a work. We can only reveal our own preferences, likes and dislikes.

When Bloom went after King, what we were witnessing was this personal preference stuff, all mixed in with what Bloom understood from his love of Classic Literature (like Shakespeare) and that which he believes actually is Literature. And I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be compared to Shakespeare. Or Poe, for that matter…

Do I think we are better off without Bloom’s criticism of King? No. There are probably some perks to having Old School meet New Writer. But we need to keep things in perspective.

King is no Shakespeare. Nor are most of us. So we should take Bloom’s angst for what it was – the despairing of a Critic for… more Shakespeare.

King is King. But what the rest of us need to take away from the whole debacle is that there are and should be differences of opinion and discussion about what makes a work Literature. And that we can and should be a peripheral part of that discussion. We need to ask Critics and get answers as to when and why a work might be considered Literary potential. How else can we appreciate the point of Literary Criticism? How else can we hope to write new Literature?

We need to know it is okay that we have questions.

Just like we need to know that it is more than okay to aspire to write Literature…

That it is okay to muck it up.

And while Critics may love to rag on Stephen King for not being (in their modern opinions) Literary…

What King has been responsible for is the fueling of curiosity of why Critics think he is not writing Literature… What Bloom has been responsible for is making us get off the fence and demand explanation.

When a Critic like Bloom attacks, if we can shake loose from the immediate gut-response to punch back, what we get is more curiosity about Literature.

Wasn’t that the point? What newer generations (including my own older generation) need, is Literary Critics willing to talk TO US, not DOWN TO US.

That was Bloom’s fatal flaw… and it brought out the worst in all of us in the genre.

Yet…Literary Criticism is changing. Isn’t it ironic that it is doing so because of the one man so many of us loved to hate – Harold Bloom?

Harold Bloom is the last well-known Critic of a much older way of thinking and doing Literary Criticism… With his passing, we are seeing a closing of the book on the worst part of this legacy – that old attitude of elitism. I think he tried to some degree to rise above that, but couldn’t really help himself, so lost in his passion as he was.

But I also think we owe him a huge debt. He has left behind a large body of work on the field of Literary Criticism, much of it designed for the layman. He has contributed to massive changes in the academic approach of Literary Critics. He has fired up a lot of Horror fans to defend our genre and to demand answers about Literature – to even go into the field of Literary Criticism as Horror fans (some even raised on reading King). He has got us thinking and talking, if not arguing…and in some cases becoming Literary Critics.

And that is a good thing. No matter how you might feel about his disdain for our genre, you have to admit he pushed us from our complacency, caused us to demand Literary Criticism – fairly assessed – be done upon our genre works. The result is not only New Literary Criticism, but actual Critics like S.T. Joshi and China Mieville rising from the battlefield… Horror is on its way to joining the Literary Canon… and not without some irony, we have Harold Bloom to thank.

So from our beleaguered, defensive and proud genre, thank you, Mr. Bloom. You have proven Shakespeare right:

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” William Shakespeare (As You Like it)

 

 

Trick, No Treat: An Urgent Warning for Cat-Lovers, Writers, and…Everyone Else

Horror writers and cats… There seems to be a connection. But then, many writers are cat people.

Perhaps we find a lot in common with those awesome feline wiles and independent characters; perhaps we fancy ourselves as equally above the fray and conflicts of more social creatures. But they frequently end up our steadfast companions, our de facto muses, our deepest of confidants.

We take their presence for granted, depending on their ghostly travels in and out of our writing space, counting on their quiet judgment and unrelenting expectations. We love them. We confide in them. And they matter.

So when their lives spin into mysterious health problems, we are left feeling betrayed by the gods. And because cats so rarely confess (like ourselves) that they have become vulnerable to disease, they (also like ourselves) tend to hide the truth of disorder until things have gotten serious.

Such is what happened to my own writing companions. And what I learned about cats, this newest of feline disorders, and what is happening to our animals universally is important and timely… because our tinkering with the environment has hit home in a whole new way: it has invaded the sanctity of our delusion that we can abstain from what our species has done to this planet. It is now affecting not only our pets, but ourselves. This is a warning. This is about all of us and chickens coming home to roost. And if you love Horror, then surely you will appreciate the irony…

We have caused this one. I am talking about plastics in our environment. And I am talking about their insidious effect on the thyroid – HUMAN and animal.

This post is about an emerging health crisis facing cats in particular and everything and everyone else in addition, and we have caused it. So if you have a cat or many cats, if they are your better halves, if you yourself have mysterious health problems, you need to read this. There is evil afoot. There are tricks in our bags of Halloween goodies.

Hyperthyroidism: A Feline Epidemic

Let me be clear. Cats are not the only ones. I have personally worked with and met so many people experiencing thyroid problems, that when my cats were diagnosed, it got my attention in a big way. A little research showed that dogs and other animals are also affected. But cats are where I learned the harder lesson.

The animals we share our living space with, our food, our water, our environments with, are all being affected… But because this is suddenly new in cats, it has begun to hog the attention of veterinarians.

Our cat specialist advised us that prior to 1979, cats simply did not get hyperthyroidism, like sharks didn’t get cancer… and all vets were essentially taught to not bother looking for it in felines. But thankfully, one young vet did… and he discovered that all of a sudden, cats were developing the disease.

He also discovered that it was because of the growing presence of chemicals we have placed in our living environments – plastics in particular, but also chemicals related to firefighting and fire suppression and fire retardants – things in furniture, paint, construction, clothing, textiles, WATER… EVERYTHING we are surrounded by and now cannot escape…

Cats are developing hyperthyroidism as a direct result of environmental contamination. It is an epidemic. Almost every cat over ten years of age will develop hyperthyroidism. And now, it is even seen in kittens.

Your cat is now a canary…

And if you think I am kidding, you need to read the article just released recently about plastic in tea bags (https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/09/27/these-tea-bags-release-billions-plastic-particles-into-your-brew-study-shows/) … The article states “Earlier this year, a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature estimated that on average, a person might ingest 5 grams of plastic a week, the equivalent size of a credit card. Researchers at the University of Newcastle in Australia compiled dozens of studies on the presence of plastic in water, as well as in food such as shellfish and even beer.”

I found out one of my cats, Max, had hyperthyroidism when he went to the vet for an emergency tooth extraction. He had been throwing up constantly (unusual for him), suddenly stopped eating normally, losing a lot of his body weight despite a ravenous appetite, drank like a fish, and became scary-lethargic between fits of feline mania. It turned out that he had broken a canine horsing around with his sister, and the urgency of that matter got us roused from our cycle of excuses and theories and to the vet. He had begun to get thinner prior to the broken tooth, had begun to become obnoxious and over-interested in his sister, also chasing around his brother (a skittish shelter rescue cat), becoming…”mean” when he had been a loving, affectionate cat that snuggled with everyone. We noticed the slight change in his personality, an increase in caterwauling, and a rasping change to his voice. And like all pet owners, we assumed that changes came with age.

Max, now 13, was likely to be entering a possible period of geriatric crankiness. Or so we rationalized.

And we had rationalized it all. We do that as humans, especially when we don’t want to think something bad is possibly lurking… when we contemplate the rising costs of veterinary care. But thanks to that broken tooth and the required bloodwork prior to dental surgery, we found out that Max had a disease: hyperthyroidism.

Hyperthyroidism is an endocrine disease. And like human hyperthyroidism, feline hyperthyroidism wreaks havoc in the body. According to the website for our specialist, “Feline hyperthyroidism is the most common endocrine disease in cats. Early treatment is key! Left untreated, hyperthyroidism will ultimately kill the cat. The disease creates a hypermetabolic state which has a devastating effect on all the body’s systems, especially the heart and the kidneys.”

Cats with the disease show profound changes that creep up on our observation skills, so we tend to not-see them for a while until all of a sudden we notice:

• Significant weight loss despite a sometimes insatiable appetite (sometimes to the extent that they devour everything in sight yet their ribs or hip bones are poking out)
• Possible pot belly (despite weight loss everywhere else)
• Increased thirst and heavy urination (two to three times what is normal in the litter box)
• Increase or a start in massive and sometimes violent vomiting
• Diarrhea (so constant you start looking at their food for the reason)
• Hyperactivity, hyper-attention, hypersensitivity (this includes pacing, racing, fight-picking, girl chasing, atypical or sudden waking up at night, an increase in nocturnal vocalization, excessive sensitivity to touch or sound)
• Clingy-ness (like you start wondering if they know you are about to die or something)
• Voice changes (like you start wondering if they got into a household chemical or ate nonfood items, because that is all you can come up with as an excuse)
• Coat changes (often appearing unkept, matted, greasy…just plain wrong) and including a “blanching” of their coat color, especially in the face.
• Consistently dilated pupils.
• Personality changes – often aggression, and often mistaken for premature dementia.

After I really looked at the symptoms I found myself ashamed that they did not compile in my list-making mind and sound instant alarms. Never mind that it seemed to happen quickly, like over six months or so.

In fact, while I was busy not-noticing what was happening to Max, I was busier not-noticing that it had begun to happen to his sister, Lola. Lola had (at her dental surgery) been found to have a malignant, cancerous tumor between her shoulder blades. Her vet warned that this was probably in the process of metastasizing, and did we wish to be referred to an oncologist. So I was rationalizing her health changes to an assumption that cancer was now at work.

I was wrong. At least as far as we currently know.

Because when we took her in with Max for his annual exam and bloodwork for hyperthyroid medication, we found out Lola also had hyperthyroidism.

And suddenly, it all made sense.

So what were we looking at with this disease?

Here’s the scoop, and it is not pretty:

Untreated, hyperthyroidism will kill your cat. It eventually affects major organs – kidneys, heart… the over-active metabolism drives blindness, and even sudden death, torturing your cat, changing his or her personality, plaguing them with violent vomiting and endless bouts of diarrhea…

Treated, hyperthyroidism will kill your cat slower.

To treat your cat, you will have to see your vet twice yearly (or more if your cat has high numbers), have expensive bloodwork done, and you will have to medicate them daily. Often twice daily. The medication is not too expensive, but it adds up. And there is more…Again, from our specialist’s website:

“Hyperthyroidism is a multi-systemic disease that affects all organs of the body – from the brain to the tip of the tail and everything in between. It severely damages the heart, kidneys and liver by making these organs work harder and work overtime. The body can’t rest, and a negative metabolic state becomes normal. The end result can be total heart failure, kidney failure, liver failure, and the collapse of all systems. It is a common misconception that methimazole will stop this. Its effect is partial at best. Methimazole masks the symptoms of hyperthyroidism, while the tumor continues to grow and the disease continues to advance. Dosage of methimazole needs to be continually monitored. It must be increased or in some cases decreased or stopped as the disease continues to advance until many cats cannot be controlled with medication. When the cats become intolerant to methimazole, these patients are sick and can only be saved with radio-iodine. These are very high risk patients with questionable outcomes. Treat early for a cure!” https://catspecialist.com/radioactive-iodine-faq/

Here’s an interesting fact: methimazole was designed for human use. And it was never intended for long –term use because over time it becomes ineffective…

And this medication (along with its alternate name felimazole), is scary. You are not supposed to handle it with bare hands. Your other animals are not supposed to eat it. You are not supposed to allow waste to accumulate in the litter box especially if you have other cats or nosy dogs or toddlers. Or are pregnant. And, you are supposed to wear gloves when medicating the cat and cleaning the box. To not-do so is a direct and dangerous health risk to humans.

Surprise.

Knowing all that, what do you think this disease will do – when either left untreated in a cat, or undertreated, because an owner either does not know, does not care, or cannot afford treatment? What do you think is going to happen to all of the cats whose disease is not diagnosed and treated in some way, but whose owners are frustrated and tired of cleaning up feces and vomitus and dealing with agitated, sometimes hostile cats? I’ll tell you: they will be dumped, thrown out, abandoned, or euthanized because people do not understand or do not want to understand that cats are no longer low-maintenance pets…that we have sabotaged their lives and a wondrous God-given animal design.

Worse, what does this mean is happening even to people? About what is now invasively and unavoidably in our environment?

According to the Kresser Institute, “The prevalence of thyroid disease [in humans] has skyrocketed within the past few decades. According to the American Thyroid Association, an estimated 20 million Americans have some form of thyroid disease.This alarming trend begs the question—what is responsible for the epidemic of thyroid dysfunction? A growing body of research indicates that exposure to environmental toxins is a key piece of the thyroid disease puzzle.” https://kresserinstitute.com/environmental-toxins-harm-thyroid/

And the alarm bell should be that environmentally-driven hyperthyroidism has gone epidemic in cats…

While job-hunting, I inadvertently found out something that my vet at the time failed to mention – whether because she did not know (a real possibility for non-cat-specific vets as, just as with human medicine, advances in specialties are rapid and radical and hard to keep up with), or if she assumed I did not care or could not afford alternatives, or because like anything else, corporate pressures (a real threat to vet care) translate cat diseases like this into an endless cycle of veterinary charges necessary to keep your cat alive and distort the best intentions of otherwise caring veterinarians, I will not speculate…However…

THERE IS A CURE FOR CATS: radioactive iodine therapy, or I-131 treatment… (It is available for dogs as well as 131-I treatment, but there are many more complications involved for them…see your vet.)

Be aware that it is every bit as scary as the disease and its treatment. But at least it is available, and quick.

Unfortunately, it is also labor intensive and it is expensive.

I-131 Treatment: Radioactive Iodine

Now you’re getting the picture…

This is serious stuff. And if you have a cat, you are probably going to face this enemy. So here is the truth of it:

We treated Max for over a year with medication. We were not warned to not-handle the drug or the litter directly, so I have no idea what that means for us health-wise. It may be a future surprise… yet another not-so-goody in the Trick or Treat bag of Life…

Nonetheless, the treatment was not really “working”… it was more like a Band-Aid for a bullet hole, and I began to worry we were going to lose Max sooner than we were supposed to. It is also the opinion of some vets that medication is just not effective enough, because it cannot stop the disease or peripheral health conditions that it masks and/or enables….but many of them may not know or know much about the options. And when pet owners shrink away from annual visits to the doctor because they consider $50 too much to spend on a cat, they rightly assume that same owner is not going to want to do necessary diagnostics tests that can run hundreds of dollars, and subsequent lifelong medication with its stress and charges, let alone a costly cure that typically runs to the thousands of dollars.

But then I found out about I-131 treatment, and that it has a 96% cure rate.

96%… odds we can literally live with….

Price was going to be an object, but it was also going to be no object, because I would have sold everything I own… And price is in fact up there. As the treatment grows in popularity, there will be probable and increasing ranges in cost, and some variance is already out there. But keep in mind that this is radiation.

There is just no way to get past that fact.

Again our specialist’s website states it well:

“Radio-iodine therapy is the gold standard in human and in veterinary medicine, and is very cost effective. Compare the costs and continued costs of medically treated hyperthyroidism, thyroid surgery, twice daily insulin treatments for diabetes, fractured limb repairs, treating congestive heart failure, treating chronic liver and kidney disease and then compare the curing of hyperthyroidism. The cost to value ratio is amazing. When was the last time you heard the word “cure” used with any major, chronic medical condition?” https://catspecialist.com/radioactive-iodine-faq/

The “medicine” needed is nuclear and government regulated. That means it is not cheap for you OR the vet. Your cat is also made radioactive. In fact, for four days following the treatment, even the vet cannot touch your cat without radioactive protection, keeping your cat in a specially regulated, tightly controlled environment where everything they touch and excrete must be handled like the nuclear waste it is…

Once your cat is discharged, you cannot snuggle or sleep with him or her for two weeks, then you must limit time for two more weeks. Waste must be kept in a special container for up to six weeks after the last elimination at four weeks… months of poo will sit in your garage or on your balcony. (Thank God it is no longer summer…)

And, after four to six weeks, you must have the cat retested for bloodwork to see if the treatment worked, because there are some cases where the treatment might bear repeating. Again, early diagnosis and treatment is key.

Some veterinarians say you should do a second follow-up with a full exam and bloodwork in three more months. If the numbers are in normal range, then the cat is considered “cured.” If not, you may face that second treatment. OR, you may find that hyperthyroidism caused or masked other life-threatening issues… like cancer. Or kidney disease. Or diabetes. Or cardiac issues…

And if all of this suggests an urgency here in diagnosis and treatment to you, you would be right.

The cost of I-131 treatment is higher than most people who own cats can easily afford – especially because cat owners usually own more than one cat and as mentioned, this is now a universal disease for all cats to endure (and if you can only afford one, which do cat you treat? It’s like choosing one child over another…). But over time, the cost of having to go to the vet for bloodwork, the cost of drugs, the cost of drugs not working completely, the insidious progression of the disease and its wear on you, your family, and the cat does add up…it all makes I-131 treatment the very best option.

As I said, it varies…clinic to clinic, state to state… But here in Colorado, at the clinic we went to (Cat Specialist, Castle Rock) it ran $1500 per cat.

It cleaned us out, but we sent Max and Lola together for treatment. They are now working through their post treatment, radioactive afterlife. Their coats feel burnt and dry, they still exhibit hyperthyroid symptoms now and again (which they will as the disease purges from their bodies). But overall, they seem more their old selves – Max, more loving…Lola, less living under the bed… So far, Lola shows the most improvement. We are not sure with Max, who is still thinner and not plumping up like Lola seems to be doing.

I have not yet had our third cat tested, but he has an appointment around the time Max and Lola will have their follow-up bloodwork. And hopefully by then, we will have enough to treat any cat needing a first or second treatment if necessary.

I want to be clear. Most cat owners have more than one cat. Most cat owners have cats because they have been traditionally low-cost, low-maintenance pets.

We have ruined that. We have ruined the environment and promise of a life-long home and health for cats, and who knows what that really means for us or our children.

Guess what? Native peoples were right. And now the chickens have come home to roost in your cats and dogs and even you…Just look at all of the plastic in our lives… and we are eating a credit card’s worth a week!

Wake up!

I guarantee you watching your beloved pet succumb to hyperthyroidism is devastating, as well as emotionally and physically exhausting. What will it be when it is you, your spouse, or your kid?

It is already probably why a new group of cats and even dogs are being abandoned and abused more often: their symptoms are being misunderstood as behavioral issues… as dementia… old age… or

Cattitude…

It’s why people open the door and hope a cat does not come back—that misunderstanding of the call of biology and nature. And now it will be because the cat keeps throwing up all over, or having ungodly diarrhea, or manic moods and caterwauling (which may indicate pain)…

But cattitude is also why writers like me love them. And why and how we come to rationalize changes that are really indicators of the emergence of a serious disease.

And we are talking about a disease here. We are talking about environmental pollution.

And we are talking about love.

Hyperthyroidism is now a condition of cat-owning.

Let me say this again: cat-ownership is no longer a low maintenance thing. You need to be proactive, take the cat to the vet as often as the dog. Cats need to be seen annually; PERIOD. In fact, many vets are now pressuring owners to bring in both cats and dogs twice a year for a complete work-up because advances in veterinary medicine mean earlier, more accurate diagnosis and better treatment options. And these can be very expensive, but this is not about money-grubbing: this is about monitoring your animal for problems which left untreated will rapidly accelerate into more expensive problems if not a death sentence. Because veterinarians are seeing more sick animals than ever before…

The fact that veterinary care is getting as expensive as human medical care is not helping, but it does mean that veterinary care is getting better… And we simply cannot afford to tell ourselves “it is just a cat” or “just a dog”… we have made them dependent upon us. And now we are making them sick. We owe them.

Take your cat to the vet annually…be sure to have bloodwork, a fecal test, and urine test done annually. After age eight in a cat, do it twice a year. Have them look for hyperthyroidism specifically. Tell them. Don’t wait for your vet to wonder about it: tell them to test for it.

And if your cat suddenly starts showing changes… take them to the vet immediately, express your concerns, and do not let anyone pooh-pooh your worries. Be adamant. Watch for hyperthyroidism to emerge. Because the statistics say it probably will, and the sooner you treat your diagnosed cat or radiate your diagnosed cat, the better his or her chances.

This is not going to go away. And if you have ever loved a cat, you know how emotionally charged this issue is about to become.

I highly recommend the I-131 treatment, because it is a chance at a cure, and because I have already seen the aggravation, cost and seeming pointlessness in “treating” the disease with medication.

And I know personally how much I don’t want to lose my cats to this disease. I have also been that poor where options just weren’t on the table, and may be that poor again one day… Do your best to plan ahead when you get a kitten. Set aside monies like a college fund…Make no mistake; I am fully aware that I could do this for my cats because I am married and we have two incomes right now… Others are not so lucky. One day, I might not be again either. But I will never be without a cat in my life any more than I will be without pen and paper.

Ever. And I know there are other cat lovers out there just like me, and cats just like Max. And Lola… And they…mean… everything.

Trick or treat.

 

For detailed information about feline hyperthyroid disease, what to expect, and the process of I-131 treatment… I encourage you to visit the Cat Specialist Castle Rock website https://catspecialist.com/ . Then find a clinic in your area, and be prepared to travel… we travelled 40 miles to get to our provider. And I highly recommend them for Colorado residents.

Monsters on Milk Cartons: Where Is Our History of Horror & Who Is Writing It Now?

Once upon a time, when the Horror genre was at war with the Literary Critic over whether any Horror was ever Literature, essays, reviews and opinions abounded. Everyone got in on the act – from writers like Poe and Lovecraft, to pulp writers and editors and reviewers.  Their commentaries and essays often appeared in genre magazines, anthologies, and in the front and back matter of novels, anthologies, and classic reprints. Horror lovers had opinions, and they argued them passionately.

Horror, like the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres, had very articulate “experts” and defenders; we were a sentient genre. But ever since the 1980’s Slasher end to the 1970’s Horror Boom, we seem to have lost our voice. In fact if it were not for Critic Harold Bloom’s attacks on Stephen King, there would have been an even more alarming radio silence since then.

What happened? Where is our genre narrative? And why in the age of “communication” and social media, is there less conversation? Why is there no apparent documentation of our history?

In fact…where IS our history?

http://ninapaley.com/Portfolio/Nina6B.htm

The Inevitable Identity Crisis

It may be unpalatable to some, but one reason we have lost cohesion in the genre is because we have gained the interest of Literary Critics. In other words, we have proven just enough of our genre argument that Horror does descend from and occasionally revert to Literature that we “won” the war. However now the Hard Stuff begins. Now the Critic is asking questions we have no one willing or prepared to answer.

The problem is that the Literary Critic is asking questions we didn’t even know we had ourselves. We have been left alone so long to stew in our imaginative juices that we never stopped to think that maybe our own ideas about Horror were just our own and no one else’s. We had our own concepts of what tropes were and should be, of what conventions were required or self-eliminating, or what formula existed or did not; but there were no real, firm rules written down anywhere. We had writer’s beliefs, public opinion, and editorial preferences.

We have been our own authority for so long, it never occurred to us that we had no authority — just opinions. But now the Critic comes along asking what should be simple-to-answer questions. And they are turning out to be not-so-simple.

Questions are essential to the Critical purpose of recognizing our genre. To be clear, they do not establish what the Horror genre is defined by; they detect patterns.

Critics then are looking at what our editors, publishers, and writers have called Horror through the years. They are plumbing the depths of our print history looking for the bread crumbs that tell them what we think Horror is. Then from that, they will look for Literature…

This does not mean that pulp would be excluded as a sort of waste product; rather it would find itself relegated to a subgenre defined by strict and predictable formula. It would exclude itself from Literature, but not from the genre itself. But it does mean that all of our writing will have to be measured against an agreed-upon criteria, and some of us will not find the works we think we should find as the apple of the Critic’s eye…

What the simple beginnings of this process has done is to rightly shine a light on our genre’s internal conversation – which seems to have almost completely stopped or been stopped. And make no mistake, we are all stumped at the absence of words.

Our history is nowhere to be found at the moment. Our commentators are not commenting. At the precise moment when we have the Literary Critic’s long-awaited attention, we have no one to respond to it. And this is as alarming as it is embarrassing.

The reason for this silence is multi-fold, but the effects of it have been nothing less than devastating, because for the bulk of our historical record destruction, we can thank the internet. Nothing is turning out as promised. And the erasure of the old system of traditional publishing is having a crippling effect on our genre — precisely because of our years of battle. It absolutely does not help that the internet wooed us into certain false beliefs about how immortal all writing would become — how accessible…

For example, we have long had it preached to us that the internet would open all doors and that people of similar minds would find each other and unite, and wondrous alliances would form and knowledge would spill forth into and all over the universe.

It didn’t.

In fact, all it did do was kill print – the very medium in which the bulk of Horror lives, and the exact place documentation of our entire history was placed for safekeeping. Print, you see, was believed to be the medium that would last long after most if not all of humanity perished.

Since around 3400 BC, we have been collecting writing as a species. So the rise of Amazon and the virulent attack on the hard copy medium of all of the Arts, the open invitation to theft of intellectual property was certainly on nobody’s radar. But the Tech Revolution has made it a point of its rise to obliterate Art as a living for Artists, and in that process, everything our genre produced in writing in the very public battle of that Critic versus the Genre War has been all but lost.

This has been a devastating blow to the genre. And from the current trajectory of technology, we may be losing literally everything we have worked centuries for.

You think I am kidding about where we nested our history? Go here https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Horror-Collection-H-P-Lovecraft/dp/1788285387/ref=asc_df_1788285387/ and read the introduction…

Our History in Reprints

In the Horror genre, we have always had dedicated fans. And for us, our most vocal writers and editors independently kept the flame of defending our genre’s Literary integrity alive for decades. We did it in print, and relied on its immortality in reprints.

People get to know each other by reading their words. Oral tradition becomes written tradition. And through that process, we all get to see where we fit in, where we have come from, and what our predecessors were thinking.

But we also through print get to peek through the window of time to see where we have come as cultures and societies. This means that essays included in the front of those books often say as much about our changing values as they do about Literature or individual writers’ lives. But it also means we sometimes have the privilege to discover lost or hidden gems in details about certain publications, publishers, editors or writers; we get to see the unvarnished history of the genre…

In Horror, we had begun to assimilate and collect our own history because no one – especially not the Literary Critic – was doing it. There was a strong sense of torch-passing, of keeping the words and opinions of our own greatest writers alive. There were those who collected the good stuff and saw to it that our most influential writers were reprinted often with or within the genre Classics – the ones that were so indisputably Horror and so probably Literature that we wanted to educate new initiates to the genre. Along with those works came the arguments for their defense – either Literarily, or simply for the pleasure of their existence.

Editors came to play a big part in this, primarily because they oversaw the genre during the publishing boom that happened from the 1950s to the 1980s. They were in perfect position to have opinions and gain battlefield experience and expertise, and so they wrote about it.

For anyone who wants to “read” the history of the Horror genre, you need to find old magazines and old reprints of Horror books and read the front matter – the prefaces and introductions and forewords written by our genre experts. In those you will witness not only what Horror was doing in every decade, but what writers and editors felt about the definitions and directions the genre seemed headed in. You will find essays on classic writers, including hard-to-find details about writer biographies and publication history, battles with Critics and editors, opinions about formula, conventions and terminology.

This peculiar way of documenting our history was oddly what the internet was supposed to be about…everyday fans and genre Establishment discussing the genre…

And because print lives in a world where reprints also live, even if you missed a great essay, chances were it would be reprinted enough times elsewhere than the original publication that the everyday fan could find it…eventually. Now, however, the silence on our historical journey is deafening.

With the single exceptions of editors Stephen Jones and Ellen Datlow, no single editor is being published in print regularly enough to establish those historical breadcrumbs. No one.

And I absolutely bristle when anyone in the Establishment says we can of course have access to our own history through the internet.

Take editor Paula Guran as the most horrific modern example. One of our genre’s finest editors and one who will historically go down as one of our century’s most prominent editors as well, Guran once produced email Horror newsletter Dark Echo “for horror writers and others”… http://paulaguran.com/about/ This was not only well-received by the Establishment, but was touted as one of the finest publications in the genre; I personally visited its pages on the net frequently. And I never would have guessed based on the mythology that I would one day not have it as a reference. Well, the day came.

Within those pages, Guran often discussed pertinent changes happening in the genre – living history…It was part of the literal pulse of the genre. And now that it is no longer in production, you cannot retrieve it on the internet. Period.

ALL OF THAT INFORMATION IS LOST. GONE. IRRETRIEVABLE.

Guran, an undisputed contributing authority on an important period of our genre, has been silenced – first because the what’s-on-the-internet-lives-forever myth really was a myth, and because the internet’s evisceration of print has led to the loss of yet another regularly employed editor in the genre: her. (And when the genre is willing to lose its Number Three editor – Number Two in the U.S. – then Houston, we have a problem.)

We are fast approaching an unsustainable new fiction-breeding population: less than two established editors in a genre equates to homogeny in that genre. And that is a direct result of the Tech Revolution’s plan to end print… which is starting to suspiciously look like a plan to end a lot of writing and writers along with it.

But there is another problem – the problem that ending the print industry means an end to the collecting of those previous and historical works (let alone modern ones), and an end to accessibility through availability, and the established cycle of reprints.

Not only can we not get reprints of older historically-relevant essays, but we cannot get what was printed (or internet generated) a decade ago.

How long are we going to put up with this?

Why is the solution someone else’s problem?

And where the hell is our Establishment? Rubbing their hands in glee anticipating a total takeover of the genre from the inside out?

It certainly feels like it.

I will say it again: our complete history exists in the front and back matter of countless, previously published books. NO ONE has collected them all in one place. NO ONE has sat down to collate the information into one or more volumes so that real Horror fans and writers who want to be educated within the genre can at least self-educate.

And what about future editors?

Does no one think that what has transpired over this tumultuous three decades of internet intrusion deserves documentation?

Really?

If all we have are MFA programs that despise genre writing, and virtually no print magazines, and limited markets for new and upcoming writers, and one remaining reputable and traditionally trained/established editor, and an elitist professional organization… How exactly are we to prevent uneducated-in-the-genre-history editors from misguiding the genre? How do we stop what will most certainly become ignorance?

With the loss of print, we have lost not only paying jobs in the genre, and training grounds in the genre for editors and writers, but we have lost the collective memory of our history.

How then can we also possibly help the Critic help us?

More importantly, how do we keep Horror on life-support until a real plan shakes out?

 Critics and Comic Books

This is what the internet has reduced us to:

One freaking editor still working in this country who knows her stuff.

And no one is saying anything. Are you kidding me?

It seems right now that the only passionate people who give a flying **** about the genre are comic book/graphic novel writers and our one single official Literary Critic – S.T. Joshi. And while we have “people” doing what is being called Literary Criticism – as in the case of Jeff Vandermeer – keep in mind the field of Literary Criticism is not the field of criticizing Literature, but a Ph.D. level educational credential.  (Vandermeer does awesome critical work but I do not yet see the credential behind his name, so can recommend him as an awesome essayist but not as a Literary Critic.) There is also real Literary Critic and writer China Mievielle, but at this time I am unaware of any published Critical work by him (which I fervently hope he will change soon), and can only point to a few front matter works by him, which are impressive and worth the read.

Go here   https://www.amazon.com/At-Mountains-Madness-Definitive-Classics-ebook/dp/B000FCK5US/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=mountains+of+madness+mieville&qid=1567428014&s=books&sr=1-1-catcorr#reader_B000FCK5US    to read his fantastic Critical essay on Lovecraft.

Comic books and graphic novels is where a lot of writers and opinionated fans have retreated. Perhaps it is because of this age’s reliance on the visual, or perhaps it is because these subgenres of Horror have always been underrated and a bit rogue. Campy and rich with pulp, they represent the roots of our genre in a unique way, and within their own worlds, they may well be living and holding the hidden history of the genre right now. But if you are looking for “official” history, you will have a hard time cumulating it in the here-today-gone-tomorrow Print On Demand environment of our hide-and-seek world of the internet.

You are, I think, better served to look to the Critics. And in this case, our one Critic.

S.T. Joshi, once a writer in the genre himself, has taken it upon himself to try to do some of the heavy lifting in getting Horror established as a Literary genre. He has begun not only looking for the history of the genre and the works and writers that make up that history, but has begun the much harder conversation of defining the genre…

What is Horror? And is “Horror” the right name for the genre?

He has begun looking for terminology, to come up with a common lexicon so there is absolutely no confusion about what is meant when Critics and others sit down to talk genre shop.

There was a time when we would have had “people” to engage in this conversation. But either they are not out there, or the internet has made darn sure they cannot be found.

This is a problem. And I am sure that not even a Literary Critic believes that his or her singular voice should be the only voice in a discussion.

But right now, Joshi is the only one consistently publishing his continuing analysis of the genre, and he is a bit handicapped, because being human, he has preferences and aversions. He is, at least, uniquely honest about them as he sets about his mission to establish definitions and ground rules for the genre. And as such, we are privy to some very revealing internal discussions he is being forced to have with himself, and the opportunity for fans and writers of the genre to learn something valuable about the genre and Literary Criticism is priceless.

I recommend Joshi highly, because whether you agree with him or not, he is helping the genre understand not only Literature, but its own role in it. He is inadvertently speaking TO us as a genre, showing us how Criticism works and why it needs from us what it needs.

He helps us see the reasoning Critics use to determine Literature, and in doing so helps us to look at our own writing and works differently – in such a way that we can either say we don’t write Literature and don’t want to, or that we would like to try our hand at it and therefore how to get into the mud with it.

Either way, he is educating us about how Literature and Critics work — how they think. What we do with it and how we argue and debate about it can and should be informed by just this type of academic writing structured for the layman.

So here are his works that you need to read and force yourself to read completely (whether you agree with him or not) because IF you don’t agree, learn what he (a Critic) needs to hear back from you on why or why not. If you don’t speak his language, and he does not speak ours, then we are just yelling at each other.

 

What To Do About Our History Amnesia

The most important thing a fan can take away from this is that Horror as a genre has had many growing pains and has had many people that stood up to document those pains. We have a written history that is splashed all over the front matter of books we cannot get or find anymore.

But there are people. We still have “people.”

And our history was never intentionally lost but deviously and unceremoniously erased by the Tech Revolution fallout.

We need to set about reacquiring it, republishing it, and making it available to novice writers, editors and new fans.

I recommend reading the essays of Lovecraft and Poe where ever you can find them. But I also recommend reading essays by Stephen King, and S.T. Joshi (who admittedly dislikes his writing). I recommend reading anything written in front matter by editors Ellen Datlow, Paula Guran, Jeff Vandermeer, Stephen Jones, and occasional editor British Literary Critic China Mieville. And anything written by writers like Ramsey Campbell, Robert Bloch, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, and Joyce Carol Oates are also vital to the ongoing discussion of our history.

For “documentation” of the genre’s ongoing history, I strongly recommend the Mammoth Book series of Best New Horror (an annual publication of international repute). Currently edited by British editor Stephen Jones, the voluminous front matter includes the Year in Horror summation with genre news, new and defunct publications, industry changes and effects, books, movies and anthologies published/produced, awards and obituaries. Read it and you will be fully “up to speed” on the year.

Because this is all that remains of our historical narrative…

And if we don’t do something definitive and soon, we are going to be lost to another kind of history.

It’s time to start reconstruction. It’s time to start working with Literary Critics. It’s time we starting talking to each other as a genre again… It’s time to be monstrous.

https://www.amazon.com/Lunarable-License-Monsters-Parenthood-Aluminum/dp/B078J5YV7V

That Woman In Black: Susan Hill — a Gothic Writer for the Canon

It’s time we got one thing straight: what all seminal writers of what should become our Horror canon have in common is this – whatever they write, from wherever they come, however long they are with us, their stories shape the genre in some important and unforgettable way.

Yet at this moment in our history, we have apparently “decided” that along with writers who also write in other genres, the ones we should ignore are the ones who “reject” our genre or who write limited works in our genre.

This is stupid and a horrible, intentional oversight.

We can excuse Literary Critics who embrace their favorites based on their academic interpretations and understanding of not only what makes Literary writing great, but what qualifying mechanics they also prefer to see in their own love of Horror. But in truth, for the rest of us what truly belongs in our canon are works that drive the evolution of our genre, stories that beget stories and ever newer interpretations of Horror, tales that reinvent established subgenres so that modern times can participate in the traditions of the genre.

Yet this is not what is happening. There are certain authors whose names seem “forcibly” and reluctantly mentioned when the Establishment is pressed to supply qualifying names for our as-yet-established canon…and Susan Hill is just such a writer.

It’s All About the Writing, Right?

Susan Hill was born in Scarborough, England, February 5, 1942, educated at a convent school, a graduate of King’s College, London. Her first novel was published while in school in 1961, and she was a freelance journalist from 1963-1968, becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972. She has been described as a “prolific writer of numerous novels, collections of short stories, non-fiction and children’s fiction as well as a respected reviewer, critic, broadcaster and editor.” (British). In 1975 she married Shakespearean actor Stanley Wells, leaving him in 2013 to move in with her current partner… “The unexpected happened to me: I fell in love with another woman who fell in love with me.” The woman is screenwriter and producer Barbara Machin, creator of Waking the Dead, for whom Hill left her husband of almost 40 years, the respected Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells….” (Kean)

Why Hill appears to be so easily dismissed by the genre seems to have an unnecessarily complicated motivation – one that may have more to do with her rejection of us…because she has indeed repeatedly tried to distance herself and her works from the Horror genre.

The question I have, is did we at any time encourage her or writers like her to just go away?

Have we gotten so arrogant in our Establishment that we banish works from writers who want nothing to do with us and do we ever ask why? When a writer recoils when called a Horror writer, should we be offended or take a much harder look at the type of works we are allowing the genre to be represented by? Furthermore, shouldn’t our Establishment be taking that very opportunity to educate both writers and readers about the true nature of our genre’s historic meanderings through so many genres, its influence on and from so many genres – and its very impressive depth?

But we also have to ask if there is something even more insidious at work here. Is our Establishment choosing and excluding writers also based not only on written content, but perhaps their own personal lives? Are we miscommunicating and even limiting the genre by our inherent “favoritisms”? And are those favorites more likely to be at least white, preferably married men, preferably within a certain agnostic or atheistic circle? Are we playing conformity games with presumed moral authority?

Is it a coincidence that Susan Hill is yet another writer in our genre who is living a nontraditional lifestyle? Whose private life is public knowledge? Who might be lesbian or bisexual or any other label so easily affixed?

We need to be asking and answering these questions. And this is not the job of the Literary Critic, but the job of those of us who collectively make up the genre. This may mean it is time for editors to explain their selections, for governing bodies to explain their rejections, and for fans to demand access to the best writers in our genre regardless of sexual orientation, lifestyle choices, or even “home” genres…

Without pressure from the Horror base, we are going to see increasingly institutionalized discrimination against new and old writers in the genre. We are going to see publication choices made that will have a chilling effect on the future trajectory and evolution of the genre. We need variety of story and voice, not censorship. And Susan Hill’s modern journey in the genre is a perfect example of what happens to writers who fall “outside” the lines… Because those other questions remain: do you know who Susan Hill is? Do you know her work? If not, why not?

Is our collective silence in the face of Susan Hill’s subsequent rejection of the genre the only reason we tend to reluctantly “mention” Susan Hill when we are talking about modern canon-elect authors? Did her rejection of us happen because she dislikes what Horror the genre is being interpreted to represent, or because she in her personal life didn’t fit the desired stereotype? And has anyone at all got a really legitimate reason why Susan Hill is never really mentioned as a foundational author in our genre?

We as a genre have begun to put out certain “vibes” that only passionate followers willing to conform to historic whim and dedicated acolytes willing reinforce emotionally-driven criteria need apply, and that everyone else who might reject or refuse to “toe the party line” will be summarily excluded. We have given the Cold Shoulder to quite a few writers and their works in our rush to enshrine Lovecraft and Poe… writers like Susan Hill, author of many well-known, well-respected ghost stories such as The Woman in Black and The Mist in the Mirror…Does this bother anyone else out there? Does it bother anyone else that “certain” writers are given honorable mention in the most reluctant of ways – even when the general public can see a relevant contribution when it is made?

We have spent so much time in the genre clamoring for Literary writers… and Susan Hill is exactly that. Yet once again, despite the raw obviousness of her ghost stories being Horror stories, we have shrugged her off. We have come to pretend that works labelled “Gothic” aren’t really Horror because they aren’t “hard core” enough. But…the Gothic, people…. this is our foundational HISTORY.

Susan Hill walked away and we just let her go…

And yet, instead of holding the Establishment accountable, we default to blaming Hollywood, using the success or box office failure of the film to justify rejection of the work. Such is the unfortunate case with The Woman in Black (where the book is in fact, better)… Hollywood managed to botch the film – an otherwise capable tale told with substantial actors – with what looked horribly like poorly rendered, drawn-in, cartoon Dementor-like ghosts and whereupon reviewers spent most of their critical currency discussing Daniel Radcliffe and comparisons to Harry Potter films. But sadly, the presence of the film has overshadowed the wonder of the work.

Indeed, it seems that most people don’t realize that there even was a book that preceded the movie – let alone that it was fantastic in its own right. We are unfortunately today more likely to assume a work began on film instead of looking for the book that the film was created from. And perhaps – just perhaps that is a little of why we don’t really know the name of Susan Hill, but honestly the more I dug into her biography, the more I suspect something more sinister has happened to erase Hill from our present catalog of works.

Susan Hill, you see, is another author whose sexual identity is at crosshairs with the old way of seeing things, and whose works have been summarily exiled to “Literary Fiction.”

Are you seeing the same pattern I am seeing? It looks like once again exile has nothing to do with Horror. And I am embarrassed for our genre.

Furthermore, I really don’t know when we are going to get our noses out of everyone else’s personal business. But this type of “problem” we have in our genre is yet another reason I support the Literary Critical position that the author does not matter in the analysis of their work…

How can we read The Woman in Black, The Mist in the Mirror, Dolly, or The Small Hand and ignore the legacy of Susan Hill in our genre? She has a place with us… She fills a spot emptied by the passing of the great Ghost Story Gothicists… She is a British Joyce Carol Oates, a more modern heir to the tradition of Daphne DuMaurier, her work so molecularly related to the important strands of Horror DNA that her exclusion from reading lists and recommendations is flat-out glaring.

Yet she is not touted by the genre as one of our own. Our Establishment barely acknowledges her.

Could it be because Hill rejected us first? Or because she did so very publicly?

Are we three years old and playing in sandboxes?

Fixing Our Image Problem Is Not Done With Censorship

Susan Hill, you see, seems to shrink from any association with our genre – and while I would like to think that this is because of her age, that it has more to do with her own memories and rejection of the 1980’s shift to the sloppy work that spewed from the exhausted Boom or the emergence of the slasher subgenre – I suspect it might be the ghost of Clive Barker rising again… that once more our Establishment decided to play both moral and creative judge.

We are, I believe, losing authors due to two things in the Horror genre – arrogance in the Establishment that is both unfounded and totally undefined by established criteria, and a lack of official history in the genre that tells everyone interested in Horror exactly what genres and subgenres Horror encompasses.

The Horror genre is dominated by a collective ignorance – not because people are stupid, but because none of us are being educated about the genre today and because the Tech Boom’s obliteration of traditional publishing models is pushing our more modern “classics” from print and/or availability. Readers in the genre today are having a much harder time finding historically rendered Horror written by established or accepted top tier writers (like Poe, Lovecraft, King, Campbell, Barker, Rice)…let alone newer (and what would have been) mid-list authors or Literary cross-pollinators like Hill.

Worse, we have NO requirements. No matter what the Establishment says or implies, no one has drawn up any definitive and historically derived guidelines… they cannot even agree on tropes and conventions. They cannot even assemble those in one place with easily interpreted, applicable definitions. Instead any student of Horror will find not only variable lists of “accepted” authors and works, but additionally a wide interpretation and usage of terms whose definitions and usage vary according to the “authority’s” needs. No one EVER explains anything thoroughly in the genre…because clearly THEY don’t know either…and pretending it is a secret or that only Real Writers Know is just plain conceit.

This has resulted in a total identity crisis… And all the time we keep saying it is all about the writing.

Horror is what anyone says it is. And that has led to the exposure of yet another truth: our history (with the exception of recent efforts by Critics like S.T. Joshi and a few dedicated fans) remains predominantly and officially undocumented…

In other words, when a writer (let alone a reader) sees the “Horror” label, even today most do not see Classic Literature, Science Fiction, Detective/Mystery Fiction, Fantasy/Dark Fantasy Fiction, the Gothic, New Gothic, Southern Gothic, Gothic Romance, the Ghost Story as tributaries of a huge, historic Horror river. Instead they see Halloween, Chuckie, Nightmare on Elm Street, and all the really kitschy summer blockbusters of yore…

Is this what happened to Susan Hill? Was it her interpretations of self and works — or ours?

Our editors tend to look upon writers whose works mimic in any way the styles of earlier Horror incarnations as “bad” writers…as “uninteresting”…”too slow-paced”… “not modern enough”… They want something equally as yet undefined but that will please Critics, reinvigorate the genre, and sell like Stephen King… But they can’t tell you what it is…only what they think it isn’t.

And if you don’t like them…it isn’t. And increasingly, it also looks like if you are a gay or transgender writer, you probably don’t belong to us either…

Perhaps it was her own opinion of her own work, then, that reinforced one part of our Establishment’s opinion of her. As stated in piece by The Guardian, she tries mightily to distance herself from the genre:

“It is a ghost story – not a horror story, not a thriller – and not a gothic novel; although the terms are often used very loosely, they are not by any means the same thing…” (Mullan)

In the article, Hill explains herself, stating:

“I set out to write a ghost story in the classic 19th-century tradition, a full-length one. There have never been many, writers perhaps having felt the form would not stretch successfully. By the time I began mine, in the 1980s, full-length ghost stories seemed to have died out altogether. I read and studied the Jameses, Henry and MR, and Dickens, and I also had beside me the “bible” – Night Visitors by Julia Briggs (still the best study of the form).

“The list of ingredients included atmosphere, a ghost, a haunted house and other places, and weather. A footnote to “ghost” was a) of a human being; and b) with a purpose. There are dozens of little books of “true” ghost stories, usually sorted by geographical location, but almost without exception the ghosts have no purpose and so the stories are ultimately unsatisfying… There has to be more to fiction than that. There also has to be more than an easy manipulation of the reader’s superficial emotions – unless making someone jump out of their skin is the writer’s only aim. Not that trying to induce a delicious thrill of fear is bad – it is another form of entertainment, and what is wrong with being an entertainer? Dickens certainly considered himself to be one.” (Mullan)

Did she give our Establishment a way out of recognizing her work?

Worse, is she a product of the times when Horror had a less-than-savory reputation for mass market writing that was seriously less than Literary? Is she missing the forest for the trees? Does she not see her own importance to our genre based on the resonant DNA? Don’t WE?

Or is this about her sexuality? I cannot help but wonder…Because the writers I have loved as a fan are almost unanimously turning out to be gay or transgendered or wrestling with sexual identity (as well as excluded from the genre)… a fact I neither knew nor cared about growing up in the 1960’s and 1970’s…because for me it has always been about the writing….

Reclaiming the Gothic

I think the technical problem we have in the genre is a misplaced sense of “purity”… of pedigree that has not yet been firmly established by Literary Critics. But that fact does not give our Establishment free rein to declare who is and is not in-genre – not when the same Establishment cannot or will not provide clear definitions and guidelines for what it argues IS the Horror genre. Neither does it excuse the eviction of authors who are not straight, white, Christian-or-rebel-atheist and male…

Ultimately it will be the Literary Critic who decides about technical definitions – something perhaps we all conveniently forgot when we threw ourselves at the Literary Critic and demanded a belly-rub. And now that we are firmly in the sights of Literary Criticism, having finally arrived at a point where Poe would be proud, we are trying to shove innumerable authors under the carpet. Why?

In a time when we are hearing a demand for better, more Literary fiction in the genre, why are we dismissing so many writers as “other-genre”? Why aren’t we fighting for them?

Despite Hill’s own assessment of her work, I argue she most certainly does write Horror. Literary Horror. The kind of Horror that blooms from very old roots. And her writing these ghost stories prompts some very important questions for our ghost story subgenre – especially in lieu of S.T. Joshi (our one dedicated Horror Literary Critic) to state his belief that the ghost story is “done” as a subgenre, and cannot be improved upon after M.R. James… While many there may be limits on how ghosts are pressed into service, why are they any different than Vampires? Why isn’t it about telling stories and original angles? About scaring anew?

This could not be more important or timely. Do we really believe the Ghost Story is dead? Can it be properly adapted in both short story and novel to sustain originality expectations? Believability?

And what does this say about the Gothic thereafter? Is this the reason we have seen both Gothic and Southern Gothic go “silent” in the genre?

How we got to a point in Horror where we disavow the Gothic for heaven’s sake, I don’t know. I cannot imagine. While Gothic Romance teeters on the fringe of Horror to the point it leans into another genre entirely, the straight Gothic and Southern Gothic are right here… in our subgenres…most often as Ghost Stories.

Yet no one speaks on their behalf. Not the genre, not the readers, not the publishers… and sometimes, not even the writers…

Perhaps Hill does not wish to be identified as a Horror writer, and I understand: the 1980’s left a particularly bad taste in the mouths of many readers and Critics who wanted so much more from us. Maybe we need to acknowledge the price this decade has also had on what were then “future” writers; because even I have to admit, the 1980s is precisely when I began to drift away from Horror. Perhaps the slasher/trashier sloppiness of the published writings drove away a lot more people than has been explained as fans aging out. Hill is a perfect example; she was born in 1942, writing her first novel her first year at university (which was criticized as “unsuitable” for having been written by a schoolgirl), and writing eight novels between 1968 and 1974. She wrote The Woman in Black in 1983 – just as the publishing mills were spinning gold, but not much in the way of Literature – especially in Horror.

Yet one can only split hairs so much. The Woman In Black may be Literary, may be Gothic… but it is indisputably also a Ghost Story. We can empathize with her ambitions to write “better” than what was exemplified by Horror at the time. However Hill is definitively Gothic… even somewhat in her more recent move to Crime Fiction. Since its inception, Horror has been irretrievably linked to both Science Fiction by way of Lovecraft and Detective Fiction by way of Wilkie Collins. In leaving the genre Hill (on her own or otherwise) has not really, fully left the genre…

I argue this is not a bad thing. And I hope Hill herself will come to see it.

I would say that Horror needs writers like her in it, needs her works filling out the spice rack. Writers in the Horror genre today are writing in the dark. We have no real, definitive guidance as to who among modern writers have or are shaping the genre today… we barely have acknowledgement of which writers have partially solidified the still-fuzzy boundaries of the genre. All we have to tell us are the plethora of theme-based anthologies, tribute anthologies, editorial stylings, and Hollywood.

It’s time this changed. We are just now beginning to have Literary Criticism look at the genre. We need to help Critics plow through the massive dump of writings out there… to make suggestions as a genre as to who we find to be significant influences on modern works so that future Literary Critics can take a hard look at the nominees and see if they have the merit we sense they do.

Clearly, we cannot rely on our Establishment to do this, at least right now. For whatever reason, heads are firmly planted in the sand. And with the internet severely cutting into the way Classic Horror is published (so many falling out of copyright protections so that “anyone” seems to be publishing them, leaving their rightful legacy unacknowledged by the authorities of the genre) that some very important names are not being given their due respect. New readers in the genre do not know who they are. And all too often, many are falling out of publication (where in the past history of publishing houses these authors might have been backlisted but they were still proudly available).

Meanwhile in our own genre, we are seeing a tendency toward separating the Literary from Horror, and wielding what looks like moral judgment.

In fact, the presence of so many Literary talents who also write occasionally in our genre should be a welcome thing. Naming them as part of the genre could be an educational thing — an elevating-our-game thing.

When Gothic Is Horror: Is Horror Literary or Not?

After everything Poe and Lovecraft went through, and all of those marvelous essays by our genre’s writers and editors… What the hell is going on?

All of a sudden a Literary writer is not a Horror writer.

Funny. I don’t see the Establishment banning Poe or Lovecraft, two of our most Literary writers. And this means we all have a burning question for the Establishment as readers AND writers:

What do you want?

And don’t think Literary Critics won’t notice the choices being made and who is making them: Literary Critics thrive on pattern recognition…

To deny a writer because they either consistently write as Literary writers, in other genres, or even if they totally disdain our genre is totally irresponsible. By their works ye shall know them… And if that denial has anything at all to do with sexual orientation, we have and even bigger problem…

Susan Hill wrote Horror. (Sorry, Ms. Hill, but this is true. And it is awesome.)

But is this also a case of moral exclusion?

Are we again seeing a case where a writer’s personal life has colored the perceptions of our Establishment?

Especially with today’s proliferation of the internet and social media – with the amount of pure, adulterated, unfounded gossip… The very idea that Literary Criticism might be conducted with a writer’s reputation and scandal-meter in mind is absolutely horrifying. If we are, for example, excluding a writer like Hill based on the “limited” scandal of her sexuality in her time, what damage could be done to the whole of Literature if we do not firmly and immediately embrace Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author”?

If we are excluding her because she doesn’t like us, maybe we should be asking if we are like-able…Or if we are all doing our jobs properly.

It is time to put a stop to this, no matter where it is coming from. Writing, like music and any of the Arts, should stand alone, to be let to speak its truth. Knowing about the biography of the writer, musician or artist should enhance the work… not define it. A writer’s sexuality, except perhaps in its Literary influence in his or her work has nothing to do with the work.

Susan Hill belongs in our canon.

I am not a Literary Critic, so I am not sure where in it she belongs. But I DO know her writing helped bring our attention back to the ghost story. She is part of the new movement of gothic ghost story currently gaining a bit of leverage, but left to languish in the orphaned “Gothic” (which is ours and us, by the way)… writers like Canadian author Simone St. James, Australians Darcy Coates and John Harwood, and English author Judy Finnegan, and American Jennifer McMahon…

Have you heard of THOSE writers? If not, why not? We need to be asking – no – DEMANDING answers from our establishment…and we can begin by demanding recognition of Susan Hill.

To say that they are mainstream, or too other-genre, or not interesting enough is flat-out insulting. This is Horror now: we are not Poe or Lovecraft… and many of us are WOMEN… but all of us love the stories that make Horror Horror…

And that is how “trends” start… One writer at a time… with a writer who remembers the way another writer once made him or her feel…

 

Bibliography

2014 The Soul of Discretion

2013 Black Sheep

2012 Dolly

2012 A Question of Identity

2011 The Betrayal of Trust

2011 A Kind Man

2010 The Small Hand

2010 The Shadows in the Street

2009 Howards End is on the Landing

2008 The Battle for Gullywith

2008 The Vows of Silence

2008 The Beacon

2007 The Man in the Picture

2006 Farthing House: And Other Stories

2006 The Risk of Darkness

2005 The Pure in Heart

2004 The Various Haunts of Men

2003 The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read

1998 The Service of Clouds

1997 Listening to the Orchestra

1997 The Second Penguin Book of Modern Women’s Short Stories

1995 Contemporary Women’s Short Stories

1995 Reflections from a Garden

1994 The Christmas Collection

1994 Pirate Poll

1993 Mrs de Winter

1993 King of Kings

1993 Beware, Beware

1992 The Mist in the Mirror: A Ghost Story

1992 A Very Special Birthday

1991 The Penguin Book of Modern Women’s Short Stories

1991 The Glass Angels

1991 Air and Angels

1990 Ghost Stories

1990 The Parchment Man: An Anthology of Modern Women’s Short Stories

1990 Stories from Codling Village

1990 I Won’t Go There Again

1990 Septimus Honeydew

1990 The Walker Book of Ghost Stories

1989 Family

1989 Suzy’s Shoes

1988 Can It Be True?: A Christmas Story

1988 The Spirit of the Cotswolds

1987 Lanterns Across the Snow

1987 Shakespeare Country

1986 The Lighting of the Lamps

1986 Mother’s Magic

1985 The Ramshackle Company

1984 One Night at a Time

1983 People: Essays and Poems

1983 The Woman in Black

1983 Ghost Stories

1982 The Magic Apple Tree: A Country Year

1980 New Stories

1979 The Distracted Preacher and Other Stories by Thomas Hardy

 Awards

2006 Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year

1988 Nestlé Smarties Book Prize (Gold Award)

1972 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize

1972 Whitbread Novel Award

1971 Somerset Maugham Award

 

References

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Retrieved 7/16/2019 from https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf

British Council of Literature. Retrieved 7/25/2019 from https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/susan-hill

Kean, Danuta. Interview. “Susan Hill: I am Not Pro-Trump! Really? Do People Think That of Me?” The Guardian. March 4, 2017. Retrieved 7/15/2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/susan-hill-i-am-not-pro-trump-really-do-people-think-that-of-me

Mullan, John. Book Club Books. “The Woman in Black by Susan Hill.” The Guardian. Feb 17, 2012. Retrieved 7/15/2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/17/woman-in-black-book-club-susan-hill

Tales of the Unexpected: Roald Dahl, Literary Device, and the Horror Canon

Most of us remember the first time we read a real Horror story. But the one author who opened that door and lured so many of us through it is typically forgotten when it comes time to assemble a Horror canon…

The author is Roald Dahl– that Roald Dahl – the one of children’s book fame; author of Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The BFG… and like Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm before him, we have decided that his stories are for children. But what we tend to forget are the tales he wrote for adults – his much celebrated Tales of the Unexpected – that can effectively teach modern Horror writers how to take simple situations and common characters that occur in our day-to-day lives and lay out a startling, resonating and lasting Horror on the page.

His is a modern style – one that is often considered an anathema to the genre because Lovecraft opposed the tendency toward Horror that utilizes anything deemed “common”… Yet his stories are enjoyably effective, and reading him is a lesson in language usage – primarily satire and irony.

Have we decided his adult stories are not Horror because he also writers children’s stories, or because his adult stories are not Weird? And are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater? Are these not only the Horror tales we seek, but ones that we seek to tell and all too often fail at?

Roald Dahl, I suggest, is one writer whose adult work not only belongs in the Horror canon, but whose writings should be studied for their ability to use language devices… the very ones we hear tell of in English class, but seldom see so efficiently and accurately wielded. Roald Dahl is yet another author you should know, and have on your Horror shelf.

Irony and Satire: Do You Know Where Your Outrage Is?

Author of 19 novels, 9 nonfiction works, 13 collections, and 3 poems, Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Wales on September 13, 1916 to Norwegian parents. “Following his graduation from Repton, a renowned British public school, in 1932, Dahl avoided a university education and joined an expedition to Newfoundland. He worked from 1937 to 1939 in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika (now in Tanzania), but he enlisted in the Royal Air Force (RAF) when World War II broke out. Flying as a fighter pilot, he was seriously injured in a crash landing in Libya. He served with his squadron in Greece and then in Syria before doing a stint (1942–43) as assistant air attaché in Washington, D.C. (during which time he also served as a spy for the British government)…” he died November 23, 1990…. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roald-Dahl

In order to talk about why Roald Dahl affects and enhances our canon, we have to talk about using Literary Devices. Dahl’s work is not only riddled with them, it teaches us by example how to employ them…and this is a lesson we desperately need in this age of gutted Humanities education.

Along the way to modernity in the Horror genre, we as readers and writers have lost the understanding of the many possibilities proffered by alternative functions of language – not just those constructions which communicate a story, but which can also communicate the subtleties of human interaction. We in American Horror are so impressed with pointless diversions like found footage and swinging light fixtures in the “fun” of Horror, that we forget what Horror was meant to do – to reach down deep inside and pull out our still-beating hearts. Horror is meant to connect…to draw blood. Yet modern American Horror is still not fully succeeding at this; our Horror tends to be fleeting and disconnected. And missing that use of the versatility of language is yet another reason our Horror tends to just lie about on the page, not-working to its fullest effect.

This is also why Literary Critics are so frustrated with us. And it remains the unspoken criticism of editorial rejections. We may have a command of language in terms of vocabulary and grammar and sentence structure, but we have lost all of the shades of meaning, the Art of Language that is so central a part of sound storytelling.

And while we can enjoy the superficial window dressing of modern Horror fiction, getting deep into the story is our responsibility as readers and providing those many sub-basements and hidden attics are our responsibility as writers. Only by having and peeling back such layers can we gain that frisson of terror – and it is not about having to know the names for things, the rules of technique, the secret of the magic trick; it is knowing that a magic trick is happening and still not catching the magician at the illusion. It is a subconscious exchange of awareness.

When we talk about inserting Literary elements and World View into Horror in the hopes of building better fiction, we absolutely have to talk about HOW to do it.

Time and again we are” taught” by inference that genius wills out and the rest of us need day jobs. Yet we are also underestimating the value of a sound Classics education on the young writer’s formative mind; on how early and thorough education about language and storytelling pound in place a subconscious narrative on how to use language to do more than basic communication. Put Lovecraft in a cave, and I wonder if we would have gotten the Weird…I wonder if we would be calling the man a genius. He had access to a Classics education, to all of the most modern science of his day, to the entitlement mentality of the rich (even as he languished in the loss of his family fortune). We cannot say the same of our young writers today. We cannot say it even of MY generation.

For those whose intentions are both artistic and honorable, the confusion comes when genius is not equated with sales but with Criticism. And when publication is equated with either talent in telling the tale OR telling a really merchandisable one; the two are not exactly or always compatible.

There is no absolutely black-and-white formula for getting there. There is no education. There is no mentoring. There is not a whit of conversation, encouragement, or guidance. We know we have a story to tell, we might even be Literarily angry… but we have no clue in how to start, revise, or finish.

Fiction writing is not generally taught – or not taught early enough.

And this is why in lieu of actual fiction writing instruction a novice writer does best to read the Classics of the genre… Read enough, and hopefully an epiphany will occur – either subconsciously or consciously – enabling the elevation of one’s personal craft…Because we don’t tend to see much in the way of education fitting the bill. And for the most part, we can forget guidance within a genre that does not commit to discussion, the formal establishment of our history, let alone invite experimentation in its writers. There is an informational and authoritative black hole.

We are, instead, left to deduce how language works…there is no clear disclosure of the fundamentals beyond grammar and its crazy rules, but instead a patchwork of seemingly unrelated and un-relatable terms and concepts. But I found that the adult short stories of Dahl can briefly turn the light on in these empty rooms. And when it comes to pressing Literary elements into Horror, this makes Dahl’s stories integral, and consistently unlike most others in the genre. His use of the Literary Devices of irony and satire are as close to a formula as we could ask…his execution almost textbook.

None of this, however, is any good if we do not understand “Literary Devices”…

My own experience with education and fiction writing has been more about reading and creating essay papers systematically called the “Literary Analysis”… Here, teachers briefly suggest one look at the use of Literary Devices: satire, irony, allusion, diction, euphemism, metaphor, analogy, allegory, imagery, personification, etc… all terms with which to construct observations in the form of an essay. They did in fact attempt to give examples, but many teachers and professors clearly feared giving too good of an example would lead to plagiarizing that example in the assignment. Therefore, students tended to leave the classroom even more confused about what was expected, even more mystified about the actual techniques utlilized by the Masters of good writing which we were expected to deduce (for instance, were they intentionally planted by the author? Or did they just happen in merry coincidence? No one ever said). For most of us – even inexcusably English majors – the entire concept of Literature continues to grow even more muddy.

Worse for us, however, that exact educator fear of explaining too much also means no one really, thoroughly ever talks about Literary Devices. Terms like “satire” and “irony” become key words we as students learn to name-drop in class and in papers without really understanding what they actually define and how they are connected, how structure in writing happens. We are never given the mental picture of any hierarchy of language elements. Terms are free-floating in balloons, sailing well over our heads. And when we consider how many people are not teaching us about language and writing…well, it is a wonder we still manage to produce ANY level of Literature in this country.

(I say again: we need classroom education in the art of writing fiction. We need instruction in technique. We also need it by middle school. And that requires more time, not less… it means STEM needs to learn to work with the lion’s share of educational funding attention it gets and leave what is left of the Arts alone.)

Most of us exited class and even high school and sometimes college wondering how important this all was, and why we should care. Yet we need to care. Understanding all of the hidden meanings and disguised references are a crucial part of discovery in Literature; that private “aha!” moment that might be unconsciously derived or blurted out in excitement is what makes reading a more deeply rewarding experience.

You have probably experienced it when you realized what else a story might be talking about, like theories that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are possibly allegories for World War II…or if you wondered who was right about the Don McLean folksong American Pie (is it about the history of rock and roll, or about the Kennedy assassination?) What we need to understand is that a “device” in Literature moves subversively – like it does in poetry. It is communicated like Morse code; there are patterns, bread crumbs that web the ideas in the mind. And then epiphany happens when the possibility that this is what the author is really saying materializes.

Then everything changes. And that, friends and neighbors, is what “allegory” is all about, strung up on the trellis of Literary Device.

Literary Devices, therefore, are not merely created to become subjects for term papers. They are writing tools. They are there for your reading pleasure, and sometimes as fragments of unconscious expression of the writer’s deepest beliefs – perhaps deep enough the writer is not aware of having revealed them, sometimes intentionally crafted to goad the reader into action while reveling in the story itself, perhaps indeed acting in service to allegory.

Roald Dahl is a writer who uses satire and irony. And he also does it with a touch of Horror and psychological terror. Through it he is pointing out the annoying, tortuous foibles of modern society – from institutionalized cultural behaviors, to the psychological gymnastics we all perform to stay sane. We can read the story without taking its elements apart and be strangely sated. But what happens if we look deeper? First we must know about the Devices he is using.

So what is satire?

“Satire is all about mockery and shaming– typically of social conventions, politics, and the people who serve as figureheads for disagreeable behaviors. And it uses irony as its main delivery system. Dahl uses a great deal of dramatic irony – where the reader or spectator knows something one or more of the characters do not.” https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/why-does-author-roald-dahl-use-verbal-dramatic-536945

What is irony?

Dahl introduces us to two forms: “Situational irony”( an event that is opposite to what is expected), and “dramatic irony” (where the reader knows what the characters in the story do not). (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/satire)

It is through these two main devices that we meet the real Roald Dahl – the one who seems to have an uncanny understanding of how any social injustice or slight can make us feel; he takes us unceremoniously to the cliff edge and we willingly topple right over at his urging. This is artistry in language at its best: every story is an exercise in the economy of words, nothing extra is there. Every word works. Every Device is working right alongside: irony and satire in Dahl’s writing are the draft horses.

This is also exemplary of Dahl’s style – so simple and plainly exposed on the page. This is an art we seem to have lost – the art of simple, uncontrived storytelling. And I blame the modern mad rush to action-adventure in the genre, the muddying and blurring of lines of genre made to serve as a guideline for writing in the genre. There has always been more than one way to do most anything, and if we all do the same thing even on orders, where does originality go?

We are talking about the modern imposition of style preferences… and if criticisms and editorial displeasure is to be believed, even that has gone awry. And maybe it has gone awry because when we aren’t writing to spec for Hollywood, then we are tending to refuse to accept anything Lovecraft wouldn’t have approved of as Horror – anything not Weird. And it is time we started asking how many Roald Dahl’s can we afford to lose?

Diversity in storytelling is important for the genre – it is the way we find our audience and our next artistic direction. We are at risk of losing a lot of Horror if we are going to eliminate everything not written in the style of Lovecraft – and perhaps we should even be asking if that is why Young Adult Horror is well out-performing Adult Horror – precisely because they don’t have Lovecraft hanging over their heads…

According to Joyce Carol Oates, we can hear the bell ringing with Roald Dahl:

“Though a number of Dahl’s most engaging stories, particularly in his early career, are cast in a realist mode, his reputation is that of a writer of macabre, blackly jocose tales that read, at their strongest, like artful variants of Grimm’s fairy tales; Dahl is of that select society of Saki (the pen name of H.H. Munro), Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch, satiric moralists who wield the English language like a surgical instrument to flay, dissect, and expose human folly. As a female character says in the ironically titled “My Lady Love, My Dove”: “I’m a nasty person. And so are you—in a secret sort of way. That’s why we get along together.” Given Dahl’s predilection for severely punishing his fictional characters, you might expect this nasty lady to be punished, but Roald Dahl is not a writer to satisfy expectations.” https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/the-collected-short-stories-of-roald-dahl/the-art-of-vengeance/

Some of us hunger for that kind of Horror now and then, because instinctively we know that fairy tales so very often got it right…

Using Dahl to Understand Literary Horror and the Power of Simplicity

One of the reasons Dahl has risen in my estimation as a Horror canon writer is because writers who belong in our canon should be writers who in some way shape it. Dahl brings to the fore the importance of the mainstream and commonality of our shared world, elevated by shock value as delivered by Literary Device reflecting the flaws of our times and executed with the precision of a technical writer. This is what reading short stories should feel like. When we read Dahl, we bless him for not making us think: we can enjoy the show. But we can also lift the curtain and see the man behind it if we choose. We can poke about for analogy, and we can study his sleight of hand for his magical technique.

But unavoidably, we see, hear, and feel the Horror. And it is powerfully experienced. It is memorable. It stays with us like it was our own personal and painful memory. Dahl haunts us for years after reading him.

This Literary lesson is not readily found in most of our genre – at least, not so clearly. This makes the lesson of how to employ Literary Devices accessible – even attractive to novices. And isn’t infusing Literary elements into the genre the main goal of both Literary Critics and contemporary editors?

When we look at Dahl, we can see how uncomplicated effective and “effortless” original storytelling could and should be. Yet his stories are also a great read. Why then is he never really mentioned within our genre, let alone adult fiction writing? Why, especially, in times like these when we seem to have lost our ability to understand how to create original fiction from commonplace life?

And is that why he is not considered a Horror writer – because his stories are about common people, places and things – in exactly the way Lovecraft said dooms great Horror? I have little more than theories. But at this moment in time our genre seems to not know what it is or what it wants, beyond the scope of demanding undefined “good,” “Original,” “approved” Horror…and that also makes a ton of money.

Yet don’t we have to write about our own times? Aren’t we obligated, if we are to create Literature and Literary Horror?

We need to be asking what we want from our modern writers when it comes to non-Hollywood-oriented writing. And we need to read and study writers like Roald Dahl. That means we need to acknowledge him as part of our genre. Says Margaret Talbot in her 2005 article titled “The Candyman: Why Children Love Roald Dahl’s Stories – and Many Adults Don’t” (further proof the man is writing Horror):

“Most of Dahl’s early writing was for adults. He specialized in wartime stories and macabre tales with surprise endings, or what the British call “a twist in the tail.”… But by the early sixties… The New Yorker, which had earlier accepted several stories, now sent rejection notices. Dahl’s adult stories were crisply, shiveringly enjoyable—rather like “Twilight Zone” episodes—but they showed little compassion or psychological penetration. It was children, it seemed, not adults, on whom Dahl could lavish empathy.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/07/11/the-candy-man

Yet he wrote stories for adults… and they are great stories that remind us that concepts handled correctly can drive great stories – whether driven by satire or not, irony or not, Literature or not…but the better ones do have such elements.

If we wish to do the deep-dive of Literary Criticism, we can look into the rise of feminism at this early time in Dahl’s life – we can see evidence in the repetitive patterns of female characters he sketches for us – the stereotypical wife gone off the rails, acts of revenge that tickle the spine and the imagination.

Here is an excerpt of my favorite story of his titled Lamb to the Slaughter, delivered with his typical simple and direct style:

“This is going to be a bit of a shock to you, I’m afraid,” he said. “But I’ve thought about it a good deal and I’ve decided the only thing to do is tell you right away. I hope you won’t blame me too much.”

And he told her. It didn’t take long, four or five minutes at most, and she stayed very still through it all, watching him with a kind of dazed horror as he went further and further away from her with each word.

“So there it is,” he added. “And I know it’s kind of a bad time to be telling you, bet there simply wasn’t any other way. Of course I’ll give you money and see you’re looked after. But there needn’t really be any fuss. I hope not anyway. It wouldn’t be very good for my job.”

Her first instinct was not to believe any of it, to reject it all. It occurred to her that perhaps he hadn’t even spoken, that she herself had imagined the whole thing. Maybe, if she went about her business and acted as though she hadn’t been listening, then later, when she sort of woke up again, she might find none of it had ever happened.

“I’ll get the supper,” she managed to whisper, and this time he didn’t stop her.

When she walked across the room she couldn’t feel her feet touching the floor. She couldn’t feel anything at all- except a slight nausea and a desire to vomit. Everything was automatic now-down the steps to the cellar, the light switch, the deep freeze, the hand inside the cabinet taking hold of the first object it met. She lifted it out, and looked at it. It was wrapped in paper, so she took off the paper and looked at it again.

A leg of lamb.

All right then, they would have lamb for supper. She carried it upstairs, holding the thin bone-end of it with both her hands, and as she went through the living-room, she saw him standing over by the window with his back to her, and she stopped.

“For God’s sake,” he said, hearing her, but not turning round. “Don’t make supper for me. I’m going out.”

At that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him and without any pause she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head….” https://4.files.edl.io/4a65/10/23/18/235824-cd055462-e062-467c-a8ae-492f46d8caad.pdf

What is most useful about Dahl, is the direct way we can see everything laid out in his stories. If a writer is looking for a how-to, Dahl is your man. His works are uncomplicated – even while wielding Literary elements. We can see the story. We can go back and see the elements.

Clarifies David Ulin in his 2016 article titled “Roald Dahl’s Twisted, Overlooked Stories for Adults”:

“What we’re seeing is a style, a sensibility: that sophisticated, offhand voice, that air of a story heard and repeated; fiction as gossip or conversation, a game of telephone. It’s reminiscent, in a way, of Sherwood Anderson, that master of the story within a story, but even more, perhaps, of Kurt Vonnegut, who was writing his early short fiction at the same time Dahl was producing his. Vonnegut ultimately gave up on writing stories, put off by what he saw as their contrivance: “Short stories are artificial; they are very clever misrepresentations of life,” Vonnegut told me, in 1997. “You can be fairly truthful about life if you have a little length, but a short story has to be awfully cute—it has to be a con.” https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/roald-dahls-twisted-overlooked-stories-for-adults

Yet Dahl does con us. He makes Horror look easy. Because maybe it is easier than we have been wont to make it, so accessible we could all of us BE any of his characters… Yet this is not the only reason Dahl succeeds in hooking us. Says Joyce Carol Oates in her 2007 article titled “The Art of Vengeance,”

“Dahl has a zest for blackly comic sadistic situations in which characters, often hapless, are punished out of all proportion to their wrongdoings. In one of the more subtly crafted stories, the ironically titled “The Way Up to Heaven,” first published in The New Yorker in 1954, an exasperatingly slow, doddering, self-absorbed old coot, seemingly so rich as to live in a “large six-storey house in New York City, on East Sixty-second Street, [with] four servants” and his own private elevator, is allowed by his long-suffering wife, to remain trapped in the elevator as she leaves for six weeks in Europe to visit her daughter:

The chauffeur, had he been watching [Mrs. Foster] closely, might have noticed that her face had turned absolutely white and that the whole expression had suddenly altered. There was no longer that rather soft and silly look. A peculiar hardness had settled itself upon the features. The little mouth, usually so flabby, was now tight and thin, the eyes were bright, and the voice, when she spoke, carried a new note of authority.

“Hurry, driver, hurry!”

“Isn’t your husband traveling with you?” the man asked, astonished.

“Certainly not…. Don’t sit there talking, man. Get going! I’ve got a plane to catch for Paris!”

In a mordantly funny coda that must have stirred visceral dread in male, upper-middle-class New Yorker readers of that pre-feminist era, the elderly liberated woman, returning from her highly enjoyable trip, is pleased to discover when she reenters the townhouse a “faint and curious odour in the air that she had never smelled before.” https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/the-collected-short-stories-of-roald-dahl/the-art-of-vengeance/

Does he get it “right” every time? No, no one does. But that doesn’t mean those stories considered less artful aren’t somebody’s favorites. And isn’t that also the point – that writing is an Art? That it is relative?

Maybe the most important thing Dahl’s writing does is to open the conversation about the proper application of craft and technique, about originality versus the contrived that we need to have within the genre and within novice writing and education. He not only awakens the pores of the Horror skin, but he sets it a-tingle. He makes us feel like we can do it – we can pull great Horror out of ourselves because it isn’t far away from us. It isn’t about genius but more about observation and using every tool we have in the writing toolbox.

Continues Ulin:

“Not all of Dahl’s stories are equally effective, of course. More than a few (“The Sound Machine,” “Edward the Conqueror,” “Vengeance is Mine Inc.”) echo as unrealized conceits. Still, even at its least resonant, his writing raises questions about what we want or expect from fiction, what a story ought to be.” https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/roald-dahls-twisted-overlooked-stories-for-adults

Maybe that is the question we should all be asking, but don’t tell us Roald Dahl is not of the Horror genre; his work reeks of Horror conventions modernly rendered.

Let’s add him to the list. Let’s ask Literary Critics to look again at Roald Dahl for a foundational author of our canon. But for Horror’s sake, let’s read him.

Works:

Novels: (Young Adult):

The Gremlins

Sometime Never: a Fable for Supermen

James and the Giant Peach

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

The Magic Finger

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

Danny, the Champion of the World

The Enormous Crocodile

My Uncle Oswald

The Twits

George’s Marvelous Medicine

The BFG

The Witches

The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me

Matilda

Esio Trot

The Vicar of Nibbleswicke

The Minpins

 

Short Story Collections:

Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying

Someone Like You

Kiss Kiss

Twenty-Nine Kisses From Roald Dahl

Switch Bitch

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

The Best of Roald Dahl

Tales of the Unexpected

More Tales of the Unexpected

A Roald Dahl Selection: Nine Short Stories

Two Fables

Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life: the Country Stories of Roadl Dahl

The Roald Dahl Treasury

 

 Edited by:

Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories

 

 Nonfiction:

Boy-Tales of Childhood

Going Solo

Measles, a Dangerous Illness

Memories with Food at Gypsy House

Roald Dahl’s Guide to Railway Safety

The Dahl Diary 1992

My Year

The Roald Dahl Diary 1997

The Mildehhall Treasure

 

References

Dahl, Roald. “Lamb to the Slaughter.” https://4.files.edl.io/4a65/10/23/18/235824-cd055462-e062-467c-a8ae-492f46d8caad.pdf

Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 6/15,02019 from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roald-Dahl

Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Art of Vengeance.” The New York Review of Books, April 26, 2007 edition. Retrieved 6/15/19 from https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/the-collected-short-stories-of-roald-dahl/the-art-of-vengeance/

Talbot, Marion. “The Candyman: Why Children Love Roald Dahl’s Stories – and Many Adults Don’t.” A Critic at Large. The New Yorker: July 4, 2005. Retrieved 6/16/19 from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/07/11/the-candy-man

Ulin, David.”Roald Dhal’s Twisted, Overlooked Stories for Adults.” Page-Turner. The New Yorker: July 21, 2016. Retrieved 6/14/19 from https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/roald-dahls-twisted-overlooked-stories-for-adults

Webster’s Dictionary. (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/satire)

 

 

Sredni Vashtar: the Beautiful Terror of My Childhood (Why You Should Know the Writings of Saki/H.H. Munro)

One of the biggest detriments to not-having your genre acknowledged as its own Literary genre early enough is the probability of certain authors and certain stories being simply…forgotten… in the rush to recognition.

In today’s world of out-of-sight, out-of-mind thinking, we are at perhaps an even greater risk of losing track of what has gone before (and especially for American Horror readers, if those writers and stories are not American). Those authors and those stories hide in plain sight, often labeled as “kid’s stories” or Young Readers stories…Young Adult… They are categorized within the anonymity of broad genre labels, all too often not narrowed down to the familiar genres like Fantasy or Horror.

Instead, they are tucked into anonymous collections of other stories – those peculiar selections of odd works by established, Literary names whose proximity-by-binding is designed to “hook” young readers into the discovery process of reading and creating an undefined, unshaped hunger for Literature. Yet many of these stories – while so relevant to youth – are also so keenly relevant to their individual genres that even adults are susceptible to their magic… which means something — especially when such tales are remembered decades after the reading of them.

It is a difficult and miraculous thing for an author to create such a story – so immediately ordinary by its concept and yet so hauntingly extraordinary by its telling that its mere existence bears mention and demands acknowledgement. So why don’t we know those author’s names and their stories?

For the last five decades one such tale has haunted me, reminding me of what we all as Horror writers aspire to – that one significant story that no one ever forgets... And re-reading it as an adult changes nothing. Indeed, tucked neatly in between those half-remembered reading lists and Literature textbooks with short story collections are stories I now never hear mentioned, and I wonder if we have misplaced these authors accidentally or on purpose—because just such a one provided a story whose name and details stayed with me for over fifty years after one reading…

Sredni Vashtar, by H.H. Munro, also known as Saki.

Understanding How Horror is Discovered in an Unused Toolshed

What is it about reading a great story for the first time, about being seven years old and having a story crouch in your imagination decades later? How exactly does the mind become the tool shed, repository of forbidden feelings and childhood resentments – shaping the imagination like moonlight shapes silhouettes in a dark room?

Surely it is because it is already there…a makeshift box for all of the sins we endure, all of the sins we imagine…

It occurs to me I had some wickedly awesome English teachers in my youth.

And I am not saying it is their fault I became a writer of Horror fiction, but it certainly helped.

It was the story that seemed to have changed everything – “Sredni Vashtar,” the first Horror story I remember reading — and having it rock my world. I also remember how it made me feel – guilty and satiated all at the same time, dissociated from my own bullied life, and vividly aware of how inadequate the class discussion afterward seemed. Did they not “get” it? I wondered. Am I the only one who sees?

I know now that every child feels that way…alone, isolated…vulnerable because we are taking the whole world into the damaged vessel of ourselves trying to make sense of who we are while so many are trying to force us into shapes we do not recognize. Listening to that class discussion, I checked out. I missed the first real opportunity to understand how to read critically because I was already obsessed. I was already a Horror fan, and simply did not know it…

Because in my mind Sredni Vashtar lived…where there are bullies, such things happen.

Horror today has been neatly packed into a restrictive set of monsters and tropes. It is as though we are afraid that if we venture too far out of genre conventions, we lose ourselves. We avoid gray areas, and sneer at labeling certain tales as childish things. Yet that is exactly how the genre grows – by invading other gardens, casting spores among the resident flowers, and riding strange blooms as parasites until the new buds open blood red and spill out a new species of life…

We seem bound and determined to narrow definitions instead of expanding them, locking out certain families of Horror. Some of this comes as we prepare to establish our genre within the field Literary Criticism. But some of it also seems to rise from nefarious fears that we are losing…something…perhaps identity…perhaps control.

In the mad dash to the finish line, we have grabbed our tomes of Lovecraft and Poe and tossed Stephen King into our box of must-saves-from-the-purging-fire of the Tech Revolution. But we don’t even know the names of those who came in between, let alone that they simply have to be saved.

Hector Hugh Munro is one such author… One whose work reaches beyond childish things and right into adulthood, because with stories like “Sredni Vashtar” he has reminded us that Horror starts early – that it is those very emotions we learn to control and subvert as children that make us who we are, and feeds the monsters of our genre.

H.H. Munro is also another potential foundational author of the Horror genre, writing under the pseudonym Saki. “He adopted the name in 1900, and it’s believed to have been taken from a character from the works of the Persian poet, Omar Khayyam.” (Reimann)

Another British author (what a surprise!) Munro has been described as a “Scottish writer and journalist whose stories depict the Edwardian social scene with a flippant wit and power of fantastic invention used both to satirize social pretension, unkindness, and stupidity and to create an atmosphere of horror…” (Encyclopedia Britannica)

The son of an officer in the Burmese police, Munro was born in Burma (what is now Myanmar) in 1870. He and his sister were returned to England and the care of a “strict, puritanical” grandmother and aunts after the untimely death of their mother when he was two years old; “He later took revenge on their strictness and lack of understanding by portraying tyrannical aunts in many of his stories about children.” (Encyclopedia Britannica)

As an adult he served as a police officer in India, and was posted to Burma before contracting malaria which forced his return to England in 1895, and which is alleged to have led him to become a writer. Munro “never married and may have been gay, but homosexuality was a crime in Britain during Munro’s lifetime and the decorum of the times would have required him to keep that part of his life secreted away… ” During World War I, he was killed in action at the Battle of Ancre (November 14, 1916) by a German sniper. (Summary; Raimann)

Other sources seem to confirm Munro’s “secret.” And they also reveal a very familiar “theme” for white male writers of the time: racism and a touch of misogyny. “Munro was certainly wary of the growing Jewish presence in England, and he ridiculed the mounting women’s suffrage movement. Still, however chauvinistic his politics were, Munro knew something about marginalization. As a homosexual in Edwardian England, in which one risked being tried for gross indecency, Munro chose to be secretive to the point of repression for his entire life.” (Reimann)

So why is a man so much a cookie-cutter of our genre’s representation of his period — one where Horror had begun to seriously flower — no longer worthy of mention?

The mind boggles. But it also begins to have suspicions…And Sredni Vashtar howls from the shed — because Munro’s works have indeed held their own against so many bigger names of his time (Wilde, Kipling, Wodehouse)… Why don’t we know him?

“As Christopher Hitchens wrote, Munro ‘is among those few writers, inspirational when read at an early age, who definitely retain their magic when revisited decades later.’” (Reimann) Yet those in this country who read him as children are growing older…and young people don’t seem to speak his name…

And all the while, those of us who read him cannot forget him. Perhaps that has to do with the relevance of his writing, with the collective memory of every childhood.

“Sredni Vashtar” is iconic. He is archetype made manifest, made justice…

From the outset of “Sredni Vashtar” we are faced with the problem of an unfortunate child becoming a horrible child. ..an evil child who delights in the vanquishing of his perceived enemies with an unbridled relish that resonates within every child who has endured the bullying of adults or peers.

Yet we cannot stop there because Munro did not. In fact, “Sredni Vashtar’ might also be considered a darker version of the familiar trope found in children’s fiction: the idea of the child having a wish granted. It might also be viewed as a satirical take on religious practice and observance…” (Summary)

Truth can be a very scary thing – especially truths about how we really, bluntly feel – especially when we are children…and believe in magical thinking.

Yet growing up, we cannot escape the raw conjuring of that original thought of revenge; we remember it vividly – the need for it, the primal hunger for it, the knowledge of how it should taste.

We are confronted with the possibility that we ourselves will have to admit we have also had these fantasies – at least once as children, and now even as adults.

Of course it is unsettling; this is what psychology is all about.

But it is also what Horror is all about.

We discover the most terrifying of Horrors in the most unobtrusive of places…the “normal” places… those we would never suspect of having rich and lethal depths teeming with cries for justice that become twisted and mutilated by our own desperation…

Horror is also about the discovery of unsavory truths.

What does bullying do to us—always that perpetual child eternally wounded by words and actions that bombarded us in our most vulnerable moments, when no one came to our rescue and our souls cried out for vengeance.

Do we not carry those images and fantasies into adulthood? Who among us has not fed a coworker to a monster in the quiet depths of a lonely cubicle? Who among us has not cried out its name?

When we look for the value of Literary elements, we are confronted with them in Munro’s works. But we are also confronted with Horror. And when that Horror transcends childish things, we know it is no longer “just” Young Adult or Young Reader material.

In fact, I have had a hard time considering Munro a children’s author at all. I suppose it depends on how deep one really wants to go… But when we talk about children’s Literature – about the purpose of it – should we not also be talking about the importance and relevance of genre?

The Importance of Spine-Tingling Tales

We often worry about what our children might see or read – forgetting that they do in fact see everything…

But what we also tend to forget is what scary stories did for us as kids. Scary stories brought out into the open the things that knifed us in the dark. They gave our fears images and resolution – even if such solutions were unsavory or socially unacceptable. With scary stories, we had permission to not only be afraid, but to fight back…to defeat our monsters…to win despite our insecurities and flaws.

In fiction, we get to weigh the consequences of our actions. And sometimes, our thoughts.

Fear is what I remember most about my childhood. Fear of displeasing authority, fear of divorce (since every other kid seemed to be going through it), fear of other kids, fear of math and math teachers, fear of getting lost, fears of being left, fears of being disliked by my own family (reinforced by a sister who clearly wished I had never come along), and fear of never being good enough. Life in the military made it better; where my sister dreaded every new school and every new post, I loved it. I loved the chance to start over where no one knew my embarrassing flaws which I blithely hoped each time we moved I had left in our last quarters.

Of course they came with me, messing up potential new friendships, leaving me perpetually shy and easily humiliated. Bullies found me quickly, my own sister often among them, leaving me feeling so often pummeled by adult criticisms and children’s insulting nicknames.

Until I found reading, I felt alone – horribly, vulnerably alone. But when I discovered the kind of stories that spoke to my fears, everything changed. The bullying continued, the shyness grew and the humiliations continued to roll in – but then I had a secret: I knew something of who I was. I knew that I had a shed, and Sredni Vashtar was in it.

The stories I remember most were Horror stories, ghost stories, tales of terror…strange tales of the unexpected… And they felt like they were written especially for me… It was like having a cozy grandpa reading me each one…It was like my feelings were more than okay to have.

So I devoured them. Each time a reading assignment happened, I was looking for the Horror, dismissing the ones that weren’t scary, embracing the ones that were…It’s how I became a fan of Greek Mythology (thank you, Mrs. Allison) and fairy tales (thank you, Mrs. Miller) … It’s how I tripped into history and found myself reading about the 1914 Russian Revolution, about Wounded Knee, about the Civil War…about Lizzie Borden…

Despite my immersion into art at that point in my life, books spoke to me. And I hunted them down with fervor. Stories – mostly short stories in that time before too much Young Adult – that were written by long-dead folks with wicked imaginations. Each time I read a good one, I wondered if the adults knew what they were promoting… I feared them being taken away…

But the one that dominated my passion was “Sredni Vashtar”… and I had to have it. I ordered it from my Weekly Reader book club in 1967. I believe it was 35 cents, and I got a whole book of Saki’s stories for the hefty price…

(This was the one…exactly the one….yep…35 cents….)

Why might such a story be such an epiphany for a seven year old?

Perhaps because the only control a seven year old has is in their own minds. Perhaps because when you are seven, everyone else has power over you.

Conradin horrified me…that left to his own devices, he would devise a means of revenge that only a child could appreciate.Yet in my own way I knew Conradin; as does every child. We utilize and wield wishes then, as though they hold their own magical power…and then we are shaken when it appears that they do…even as we make new wishes…

The reading of spine-tinglers are an important rite of passage for most children. For some reason it is those maligned tales which open the vein to Literature for many of us. Perhaps reading them feels covert – like we suspect the teacher doesn’t really “get” it – not like we do as children (because it is not that we forget, but that we never really know for certain that our teachers were ever children…there always remains something shallow and possibly untrue when they say “when I was your age…”)

Spine-tinglers open so many doors…sometimes doors that lead to toolsheds…

When a writer transforms the ordinary, the real emotions which roil about shaping fantasies in our heads makes them come alive, turns them into marionettes that dance on desires that rise from the bully’s oppressive acts and exact the justice we so desperately need, that writer is a salvation…the work an epiphany. We can take the story at face value, sensing and riding the undercurrent that rises like an ocean swell to carry the imagination through decades of other Horrors…or we can learn to see what Literature is all about; we can talk in terms of evil, and child psychology, and the effects of bullying…

We can even dive into the details of  a writer’s life… measure the effects of secrets on souls, explore and theorize about the true personal cost of speculation and rumor and innuendo of an author’s possible sexual orientation in oppressive times.

But we cannot do so without wondering if that speculation has anything to do with Munro’s absence in the light of our new day – at least in the educating of American Horror audiences. Has Munro – like Tanith Lee – been censored out of our canon-elect? And has he been buried for the same bigoted reason: the fear that reading his work will alter our children’s minds and morals?

It seems a very real and very dark possibility.

And if so, it is one that is cheating us out of important works – the kind that drive creativity in the genre.

“Sredni Vashtar” is about bullying, plain and simple. It is about childish, passionate revenge. It is about the wishes of childhood and the corruption of innocence as created by the bully, not the victim.

If we are looking at the work of censors, isn’t it time we stopped the stupidity? If we are going to elevate writers who strongly disliked women (Bram Stoker and Lovecraft) or those whose lives are marred by substance abuse (Poe and even King), why is author gender and sexual orientation such a source of ostracism? Are we really so moral a genre, so perfect a species?

I am saying we can’t afford to lose writers like H.H. Munro – especially because of any possibility of some misplaced moral judgment. We need to read him. We need to claim him. We need our future Horror Literary Critics to add his name to their lists for canon consideration because in Horror we all have Things living in our tool sheds…

As a genre built on the primal fears we all face as children, how can we ignore a writer so in tune with the social terrors of childhood? And aren’t we all of us damaged in some way by the world we live in?

Perhaps it’s time we embraced Saki because of the scars.

Sredni Vashtar demands it.

 

The Works Of Saki (H.H. Munro)

Novels

The Chronicles of Clovis

When William Came

 Short Stories

A Bread and Butter Miss
A Defensive Diamond

Adrian
A Holiday Task
A Matter of Sentiment
A Touch of Realism
A Young Turkish Catastrophe
Bertie’s Christmas Eve
Canossa
Clovis on Parental Responsibilities

Cousin Teresa
Cross Currents
Down Pens
Dusk
Esme
Expecting Mrs. Pentherby
Fate
Filboid Studge
Forewarned
For the Duration of the War
Fur
Gabriel-Ernest
Hermann The Irascible
Hyacinth
Judkin of the Parcels
Laura

Louis
Louise
Mark
Ministers of Grace
Morlvera
Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger
On Approval
Quail Seed
Reginald
Reginald at the Carlton
Reginald at the Theatre
Reginald in Russia
Reginald on Besetting Sins
Reginald on Christmas Presents
Reginald on House-Parties
Reginald on Tariffs
Reginald on the Academy
Reginald on Worries
Reginald’s Choir Treat
Reginald’s Christmas Revel

Reginald’s Drama
Reginald’s Peace Poem
Reginald’s Rubaiyat
Shock Tactics
Sredni Vashtar
Tea
The Background
The Bag
The Baker’s Dozen
The Blind Spot
The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water
The Boar-Pig
The Brogue
The Bull
The Byzantine Omelette
The Chaplet
The Cobweb
The Cupboard of the Yesterdays
The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh

The Dreamer
The Easter Egg
The Elk
The Feast of Nemesis
The Forbidden Buzzards
The Guests
The Hedgehog
The Hen
The Hounds of Fate
The Image of the Lost Sole
The Innocence of Reginald
The Interlopers
The Jesting of Arlington Stringham
The Lost Sanjak
The Lull
The Lumber Room
The Mappined Life
The Match-Maker
The Mouse
The Music on the Hill
The Name-Day

The Occasional Garden
The Open Window
The Oversight
The Peace Offering
The Peace of Mowsle Barton
The Pennance
The Phantom Luncheon
The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat
The Purple of the Balkan Kings
The Quest
The Quince Tree
The Recessional
The Remoulding of Groby Lington
The Reticence of Lady Anne
The Romancers
The Saint and the Goblin
The Schartz-Metterklume Method
The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope
The Seven Cream Jugs
The Seventh Pullet

The Sex That Doesn’t Shop
The Sheep
The She-Wolf
The Soul of Laploshka
The Stake
The Stalled Ox
The Stampeding of Lady Bastable
The Story of St. Vespaluus
The Storyteller
The Strategist
The Talking-Out of Tarrington
The Threat
The Toys of Peace
The Treasure-Ship
The Unkindest Blow
The Unrest-Cure
The Way to the Dairy
The Wolves of Cernogatz
The Yarkand Manner
Tobermory
Wratislav

 

 References

Reimann Matt. “Hector Hugo Munro: The Strange Ideology of Saki.” Dec. 18, 2015. Books Tell You Why.com. Retrieved 5/29/19 from https://blog.bookstellyouwhy.com/hector-hugh-munro-the-strange-ideology-of-saki

American Literature. Retrieved 5/30/19 from https://americanliterature.com/author/hh-munro-saki

Encyclopedia Brittanica. Retreived 5/31/19 from from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saki-Scottish-writer

“A Summary and Analysis of Saki’s ‘Sredni Vashtar.” Interesting Literature. Retrieved 5/26/19 from https://interestingliterature.com/2017/04/20/a-summary-and-analysis-of-sakis-sredni-vashtar/

Racism, Bigotry & Misogyny: Why Being Morally Dubious Does Not Affect the Prominence of Lovecraft

As new biographies and Critical works and essays are published, more and more people are learning the awful truth about H.P. Lovecraft – the man ascribed to be the Father of the Modern Horror genre – that he was a racist, classist, arrogant bigot and misogynist.

In a world where we are increasingly affected by the consequence of such views, where do we draw the line? Where should we draw the line? And why – because of his contributions – do we seem so willing to look the other way?

What makes Lovecraft different? And how can we look to Lovecraft as a creative example with all of the things we now know about him?

The answer is complicated. But for those who recoil in disgust or offense, there are very important reasons why Lovecraft cannot be damned for his faults. And while we may wish to condemn him for his offensive-yet- period-driven personal views, if we are wont to do so we must also look at his own personal arc of growth.

The lesson is this: once we open the door to weighing an author’s work based on his or her personal life, we must include the totality of that life.

The Literary Defense

For those who dislike Literary Critics for seeming arbitrary in their judgments, Lovecraft seems the perfect example of the divide between Critics and fans of the genre. Have they not dirtied their hands and sullied their reputations elevating the creative status of a man who was not shy in his contempt for almost everyone else?

Lovecraft himself makes it easy to think so. As Charlotte Montague states in her biographical work, HP Lovecraft, the Mysterious Man Behind the Darkness, “Indeed racist sentiments can be found in his stories. ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ – described by the English fantasy fiction author [and Literary Critic], China Mieville, as ‘extraordinarily racist’…going further in my opinion than ‘merely’ ‘being’ a racist – I follow Michel Houellebecq…in thinking that Lovecraft’s oeuvre, his work itself, is inspired by and deeply structured with race hatred…” (Montague 101)

Make no mistake: this is not a maligning of Lovecraft, but a fact he himself boldly advertised in his own words and letters, confessing to being “known as an anti-Semite” (despite having married a Jewish woman), and displaying “contempt and even disgust for black people…Asians, Arabs, Mexicans, Italians, the Irish and Poles…” (101)

Yet such a reprehensible man sits at the top of our genre…

Do we not have an obligation to question why we select the people we do to elevate by excuse? Is this a case of “the end justifies the means”?

Surprisingly, the answer is no.

And a great deal of that answer has to do with Lovecraft himself – a man who “derived greatest pleasure from ‘symbolic identification with the landscape and tradition-stream to which I belong…” (Joshi 216). He was therefore a man caught in the constrictions of his own race and class at the time, a man whose search for understanding led to tremendous attempts at self-education and philosophical thought, whose own views changed during his relatively short life. This meager transition of personal growth (which some may see as underserved and inadequate), has importance in the Literary Critical scheme of things. Because an arc is an arc…

While we can recoil in disgust or “enlightened” superiority at many of his early enunciations against other races and classes, we also must acknowledge that we ourselves live in another time; we cannot know the struggle he might have had to understand his own world in the context of his personal, yet tightly shaped world view. Yet the needle did move.

For example, according to S.T. Joshi (todays’ most erudite scholar of all things Lovecraft), “Initially, Lovecraft felt that a frankly hereditary aristocracy was the only political system to ensure a high level of civilization” – an important observation when “in his preferences for political organization, Lovecraft again made it clear that the preservation of a rich and thriving culture was all that concerned him.” But during his lifetime, he did in fact begin to change, leaving fascist views behind “…as the prosperous twenties gave way to the Depression of the thirties, he began to realize that a restoration of the sort of aristocracy of privilege, cultivation, and civic-mindedness advocated (and embodied) by Henry Adams was highly unlikely, in the days of labor unions, political bosses and crass plutocrats of business who did not have sufficient refinement to be the leaders of any civilization Lovecraft cared about. The solution for Lovecraft was socialism.” (Joshi 217)

This one example reveals the simple fact that Lovecraft explored his own theories of not only what classes of peoples constituted “civilization” but how it should unfold during his brief life. We cannot know where his unrealized contemplations and potential epiphanies would have taken him; we simply know that he was a person whose ideas were in constant transit. We simply have as evidence an abbreviated life’s peripheral writings like correspondence and essays in which to frame his writings.

Should we then be privy to that private journey? Some Critics say yes, some say no.

But whether we do look at the private side of Lovecraft or not also can be said to have less direct bearing on his body of Literary work. Its total impact on the genre is not about his personal views but his world view as depicted BY his work…not so much about race as about humanity’s futile place in the cosmos. And while his personal views certainly “color” how he depicts this world view, it does not serve any greater purpose in his writing.

For Literary Critics, the reasons for this have more to do with what Lovecraft does with his writing that makes him what he is within the future Horror canon. The changes he makes there are Literary changes.

Again, we must remember that Literary Critics do not read for Criticism in the way WE might do while on vacation at the beach – the way we do every day. This is not “rationalism” but a reality. Neither is it the sign of a dog whistle – which is never heard if one is not a dog.

We read texts at face value – as fun romps through Horror universes. We are not seeking out double entendre, hidden meanings, subtext, or moral messages. In fact, we used to cede that intermediate ground to reviewers, who would point out details that made us sigh, “oh yeah…neat…” and triple our admiration of our chosen authors. Now we simply read in abject ignorance.

And we can do that with Lovecraft, seeing only the surface story. Lovecraft made such intriguing monsters – so many of them derived from real-life night terrors he experienced as a child – some still so reeking of childish imagination that we can easily identify with them– like the monster described as a mass of cosmic bubbles and sometimes seen in streams…Yog Sothoth… And for many of us any further allegory to racial superiority or class superiority is lost on us; we are indeed too obtuse to see it, too untrained, too not-caring.

It is easy to be bewitched by both monster and story… we identify with them without seeing anything nefarious, without suspecting too much in the way of bigotry or misogyny, forgetting our indoctrination by period pieces like Disney princesses because we are in fact indoctrinated…

This is not always part of a subversive plot, but more a matter of sociological evolution… we are all victims of our times – Lovecraft being no exception – and it is hard to clearly see something so thoroughly incorporated into our culture that it seems like this is the way it always was…like it has some divine endorsement.

Shaking loose of that takes generations. So when Literary Critics are faced with someone who so reeks of his time period that we can be properly “taken aback” at his “normalized” view of his fellow human beings, at his atheism, his love of Classic history, at his embrace of the scientific and the promise of astronomy… they see time capsules. And while we can cringe in discomfort at what a man like Lovecraft really, truly believed about his fellow human beings, we can also see the world he was living in.

Lovecraft in His Time

It always sounds like an oversimplified, if not convenient excuse to say, “he was a product of his times.”

But we need to acknowledge that the further back in history we go, the more this is true. We are spoiled today with access to information – to such an extent, in fact, that we have little sympathy for those who think in narrow ways, because we cannot imagine what it is to live in small, isolated, rigidly contained islands of carefully constructed and forcefully maintained social hierarchies. Perhaps a brief recollection of high school would be helpful, because if we think our own times do not contaminate our beliefs, then we are fools.

Yet we do have to look at that – at what surrounds a writer or an artist when they are creating their life’s work – especially if we are threatening to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Lovecraft was a sickly child of failing upper class parents. Early in his life, his father suffered from a “psychosis” ascribed to syphilis by some, dying when Lovecraft was a toddler. Lovecraft, however, would claim his death was the result of a “paralyzing stroke.” The loss of his father and his father’s income resulted in he and his mother removing to the Phillips family estate, placing him under “the smothering attention of his mother and two aunts, his grandmother, and the maidservants… (Montague 15) With the death of his grandfather at age five, he began having night terrors, suffering what he called a “near breakdown” in 1898 and another two years later…Students of his life have in fact suspected he might have also suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome as well , as he showed a number of known symptoms such as antisocial behavior, reluctance to leave familiar places, etc. (26) At times exhibiting signs of depression and suicidal thought, he was frequently plagued with intolerance, insecurity, and “nervous fatigue”… (34)

People do not live in vacuums. We have families and circumstances unique to ourselves. But we also are ships on our own cultural oceans.

And if we are going to weigh the soul of Lovecraft, we must also look at the culture that was influencing him; it does not exclude him from being an often reprehensible, unpleasant creature, but it just might explain why Lovecraft successfully exploits the fear of the Other without being an instigator of it. In Lovecraft’s writings, his racism is used as setting to fuel “fear of the unknown” and “fear of invasion” and “fear of something without conscience.” Had he been alive in the 1980’s, he might well have written a literary version of Jaws….

“Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.” – H.P. Lovecraft

No, we cannot escape the impact of a writer’s experiences on his writing. Sometimes our own culture informs our writing, and sometimes it confirms our own terrors so that we write with a perceived, implied authority – convincingly… and in ways that span lifetimes. It does not help our case if we write stories published by our own, read by our own, judged by our own and preserved by our own.

Indeed, a whole lotta Lovecraft resonates with disenfranchised white males today. And here is an example of the how and why any buried dog whistle – that institutionalized dog whistle inserted by rote in his works – might sometimes have that particular sociological effect. But what should concern us here as we judge Lovecraft the man, is that it shows no evidence of ever having been meant to.

In preparing for this post, I was immediately struck by the truth of how shaped we are by our peers when I happened across these two paragraphs while reading The Trial of Lizzie Borden: a True Story by Cara Robertson. And while that real-life Horror story does not sound like it would hold any relevance, keep in mind the Borden drama took place a mere 18 miles to the southeast of Providence and some 200 miles east from New York City, sharing by proximity the same social Petrie dish…

“In this era [1892 for Lizzie, Lovecraft—1890 to 1937], America derived its vision of the criminal classes from European models of criminality… [Cesare Lombroso, a leading proponent from the Italian school of criminology] drawing upon contemporary anthropological studies of ‘other races’…believed the physical structures of their bodies displayed their criminal natures… ’he is like a man who has remained animalized…’” (Roberston [25])

and

“In one of her popular lectures, the prominent suffragist [my emphasis] and temperance advocate, Mary Ashton Rice Livermore contended: ‘an invasion of migrating peoples, outnumbering the Goths and Vandals that overran the south of Europe, has brought to our shores a host of undesirable aliens…Unlike the earlier and desirable immigrants, who have helped the republic retain its present greatness, these hinder its developments. They are discharged convicts, paupers, lunatics, imbeciles, peoples suffering from loathsome and contagious diseases, incapables, illiterates, defective, contract laborers, who are smuggled hither to work for reduced wages, and who crowd out our native workingmen and women.” (Robertson [26])

How amazing (and disappointing) when we are faced with the fact of how little our political rhetoric has changed…even as our targets have changed, as evidenced again by Robertson:

“…Large influxes of immigrants into Fall River – mostly Irish Catholic, French Canadian and Portuguese – altered the composition of the city in the course of the nineteenth century…Irish Catholic and English immigrants comprised the majority of workers in the textile mills by 1850. By 1885. French Canadians were the most important single ethnic group employed in the region’s textile industry…Each of the city’s social groups inhabited distinct geographical sectors. The segmentation into ethnic ghettoes paralleled the pattern of settlement in other industrial New England towns of the same period…” [20-21]

This means that Lovecraft – despite what appears in his work as uniquely bigoted and racist and misogynist – was a social conformist in his time; he was not alone in his prejudices and suspicions, which were at the least regional and publicly reinforced. The fears of the sociological moment fanned his own, and did so at such an extent that those fears are inseparable from his work.

But it is also a unique characteristic of inherent and institutionalized racism that the arrogance of the moment leads to the assumption that all people of reason, all people of your own class – agree.

So there is no preaching to the reader evidenced in his writings, because in Lovecraft’s mind, only white males like him would read and assess his works and any dog whistles were naturally, subconsciously infused with no conscious effort: Lovecraft’s intended audience was mostly himself and those like himself. There was no need to explain or recruit. He simply “reported” his observations and documented his fears.

It doesn’t mean that there are not images or allegations within his stories that now rub with the intensity of a Black Lives Matter moment… but they are more like Disney films…like the horribly racist drawings meant to be amusing in those wink-wink-nod-nod ways that are so clearly institutionalized racism today that we can finally see what minorities and Others have been telling us for centuries.

No doubt Lovecraft could not have seen the forest for the trees; he was far too self-centered, too paranoid of all outsiders, of all people he deemed not his equal – which his peers acknowledge was pretty much everyone else.

But it also means that Lovecraft probably could not help himself, either. He wrote the world as he – a white male whose wealthy family lost its wealth and who needed a reason to explain his own misfortunes, turned to other white males to establish an acceptable reason. He found it in racism against immigrants and people from other classes… including women, who at the time were often ghosts in their own lives. Continues Robertson on this matter:

“In the words of a contemporary journalist Julian Ralph, her [Lizzie Borden’s]situation exemplified ‘a peculiar phase of life in New England – a wretched phase’ suffered by ‘the daughters of a class of well-to-do New England men who seem never to have enough money no matter how rich they become, whose houses are little more cheerful than jails, and whose womenfolk had, from a human point of view, better to be dead than born to these fortunes…” [24-25]

As any writer can tell you, the best stories come from the singular place in self where real fears are harbored. Lovecraft mined terror from his personal nightmares, his personal dread of women and immigrants, his awe of the universe, his doubt about God, his loss of wealth and standing and the struggle to cover it up, his need for his talents and efforts to be recognized if not valued, and the irritations that come with native bigotries – close proximity to people abhorred, sounds of languages, smells of foods, suspicion of religious practices, constant and inescapable human presence.

Once again, we have to look at Lovecraft closely…to see that much of his behavior – while blatantly racist – also masked what was probably a host of antisocial if not psychiatric disorders.

It was a perfect storm of sorts for concocting his monster mythos replete with sinister, exotic characters. We have to “own” the social messaging of the times before we can shrink from Lovecraft and his flaws. We have to see the context – even if in Lovecraft’s case it is because he so impacted the genre…

Again, this may feel far too much to be like we are using the lexicon of Literary Critics. But in this case they are correct. And the more our skin crawls, the more we need to see why they are right.

It was not only natural at the time to believe the immigrant mythologies created by frightened white people, but it was white people who controlled all media, all “official” and socially acceptable behaviors – like moving white households uptown, and passing rumors about Other cultures downtown so not-understood.

This provided a ready-made foil for Lovecraft to terrify his characters with – cultured, upper class men lost among exotic (immigrant) cult worshippers, and rural-therefore-dark and ignorantly populated (lower class) settings to seat his creative world in. In a time where “science” was looking to explain human inferiority in animalistic terms, where fear became revulsion and an almost psychiatrically derived aversion to Others, prejudice takes on a frightening life of its own reinforced by mainstream culture. These are all the ingredients a Critic can dream of. And they were the very real interpretations of the ruling class – well-to-do white people – at the time.

But do those facts exonerate Lovecraft, once it becomes impossible to not-see the truth?

As reprehensible as it might feel, the answer is yes.

Seeing What We Want To See

Sometimes it feels like the bigger question is: do we all have our own motivations for seeing what we want to see when we look at Lovecraft?

And to some degree we do. Critics are as mesmerized by his writings as we are – so much so because for the first time they have the whole butterfly under glass – one whose life is documented, whose influence on a genre is indisputable and profound and authenticated, who provided so much information that can be used to analyze not only invention of story and impact of society on writer, but on the creation of genre…something that happened previously in the anonymity of indistinct pasts…It is the Literary equivalent of getting to see the Big Bang. They are – in a word – dazzled by the prolific collection of cross-pollinating information never before succinctly gathered in one place.

Yet for those who want to see just another angry white male, they will find plenty of evidence speaking to that – plenty of imagery that seems to reinforce that very institutionalized racism and misogyny we know we need to fix right here in our modern world…And those who just love a good mythos can get lost on a stormy afternoon as well…

For genre readers in general, there will always be some semblance of separation of author and intent, a blissful ignorance of what motivates the Horrors he or she writes about. We have come for the thrills, for the entertainment, for the escape. There really isn’t any subversive motivation to our willful blindness.

Again, when we read Horror, we read at face-value…

But we cannot escape Lovecraft’s influence. Lovecraft brought us a refinement of The Weird, he delivered us to the Literary Critic; he gave us the tentacle, and reconnected us to our English Literary roots via Dunsany and Blackwood. He opened the door to the unholy marriage of philosophy and Horror, of science and monstrosity, stretching the supernatural into the unknown cosmos.

Most of us are neither privy to nor interested in the man or his motivations. We fall in love with the monsters, the mythos, the scope of the dream worlds, because they resonate with us – not because of latent racism in ourselves, but because we are looking superficially at the monsters. We are fine with engaging in a shallow way with the decorations on the page.

In fact, we prefer not to see them… we don’t want our vision of Lovecraft or his writings sullied or ruined. Besides, we would then know we would have to ask ourselves that if we enjoy them…does that mean WE are racists, too?

The surprising answer is no. Sometimes a monster is just a monster… a cigar, just a cigar.

It really does depend on what level we are reading on…

Institutionalism from the inside is hard to spot and easy to rationalize. We might then wonder if we are doing that with Lovecraft – rationalizing for the sake of the genre’s Literary gain, and wonder further if we should be subsidizing his work, calling him the Father of the Modern Horror genre, emulating him, etc…

Indeed, Lovecraft is perhaps THE representational argument for debating the relevance of an author’s life and views on his or her work – should an author and his or her life be considered in Literary Criticism?

This is part of the big upheaval we now see in the field of Literary Criticism, where the discussion has great relevance. And I think – especially when one sees the volume of evidence and peripheral information on the life of Lovecraft – that there can most certainly be importance in Literary Criticism steeped in that author knowledge. But I also think that what cannot be applied to all authors should not be applied as a general rule of Criticism… knowing the details makes his case so very different from others and there will always be and have always been authors about whom we know precious little.

Lovecraft is that rare exception.

And through the lens of Literary Criticism, Lovecraft rises bereft of racist promotion. Rather, it is a geographical feature in his work, an accent, a layer of setting. His World View, in other words, rises free of his own prejudices to question the purpose of humanity among the cosmos…Incredibly, Lovecraft is more about religion than race.

But why, we ask, do we not penalize Lovecraft?

Again, the difference is that Lovecraft ‘s works do not preach his bigotries – but reflect them – and which are unfortunately, a product of their historical times. What we know about Lovecraft is there because other people noted and kept those details, not because of some arrogant plan for infamy and immortality; he wrote letters to acquaintances, not manifestos.

That he also did things never done before in our genre is what makes his contributions irreversible and inseparable from modern Horror fiction.

Lovecraft’s morally dubious quality of racism remains unavoidably burdensome and is not attractive, and neither was his arrogant classism. But we are stuck with him. Because there is absolutely no avoiding him or the impact of his work in the Horror genre.

So here is the truth: Lovecraft is a one-man branch of Horror tradition who represents a mere moment in time but also an incredible leap in philosophical Horror; where we go from here we go because of him or in spite of him.

But we go in his shadow. It’s time to get familiar. We don’t have to like him; but we cannot and should not ignore him.

 

References:

Bilstad, T. Allan. The Lovecraft Necronomicon Primer: a Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, c2009.

Joshi, S.T. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, c1990.

Montague, Charlotte. H.P. Lovecraft: the Mysterious Man Behind the Darkness. New York: Chartwell Books, c 2015

Robertson, Cara. The Trial of Lizzie Borden: a True Story [Advance copy]. New York: Simon & Schuster, c2019.

 

Horror as a Second Language (Fresh New Horror From Other Places & Cultures)

When we look at the tradition of Horror, we tend to embrace its ethnocentrism as a characteristic of the genre – a living trope, if you will.

We think that the construction of the genre happened in a Western vacuum and that there exists some kind of “proof” that no one else shares in the tradition of true scary tale telling. It is as though it is not legitimate if it is not published in an English-speaking country and contains predictable Western characters living out a familiar plot. We point at the acknowledged (and therefore “official”) history of Horror without recognizing that those who have judged our stories and uplifted the genre’s profile to (at times) cult status have also been “traditionally” white and male and Western – the same ones who historically controlled the presses and the public’s choice of content and access to the written word. Are we right, then, to assume that no one else is (or has ever been) writing Horror of value?

The answer is a resounding no; Horror is neither exclusive nor rare – not in experience nor the storytelling. And perhaps the key as to why we seem at a creative and Literary stalemate in our modern writings is ensconced in the significance of “how” – in having fashioned this odd, culturally exclusive bubble – all of our best efforts have resulted in a kind of genetically compromised inbreeding of ideas. In our hand-over-fist attempts to understand what we think Horror formula is or should be, perhaps it is we who have become the victims of our own intent to discredit others.

This means our contemporary problems (especially in American Horror) may well have grown in its isolated and lonesome Petrie dish to be not only about who is telling what stories, but about the future of the American side of the genre. We are unquestionably at a Literary and creative impasse.

And we had better start asking what happens when all of the 1970s-1980s bestselling authors stop writing. What exactly will we do then?

Robbing Horror From Other Cradles

At a time when we are unwilling or unable to create the kind of Horror that excites our readers and grows our constituency, we need an infusion of original DNA – the kind of DNA that descends from folklore and fairy tales – the gritty stuff of childhood fears. And we need to do this shamelessly – borrowing from those older traditions tucked neatly into vague heritages because while we were being all puffy and proud about our modern sophistication and electronic gadgets, what we call The Old World was still telling scary tales of things that go bump in the night. And people who grow up with those storytelling traditions clearly have a thing or two to teach us about where we all (and our monsters) come from.

For those of us on this side of the pond, it’s time to climb out of the creative box we have put ourselves in – from what we call our genre to who writes in it. We have no proprietary rights here; just because some smarty-pants marketing department decided to print the word “Horror” on the spines of countless Western paperbacks in the 1970’s does not mean it is the correct name to call our genre, or the one with which the rest of the world concurs. Nor does it mean that the rest of the world interprets “Horror” in the same way as we do in the West.

Why has our Horror all become one-dimensional? Homogenous and flat? Because “we” have decided what formulas constitute Horror, all to the denigration of other traditions of storytelling.

Yet isn’t that where we got our ideas about Horror in the first place? It’s time we confessed the truth: the West did not invent Horror. We may have perfected a branch of the tree, but we are not the whole of it. Our roots go much, much deeper and come from afar…

And every person who came here brought a little piece of that with them.

We cannot claim to not-know this entirely. Our genre’s historic use of Orientalism and racism to further heighten a presumed white reader’s fears or to elevate the exotic mystery and exploit the willing ignorance of a class of readers groomed to see themselves perfected in an ethnocentric mirror is no different in Horror than in any other genre. But in Horror, it has fast become this almost-necessary ingredient we are directed to mimic. Because we have not been able to “move the Literary needle” in American Horror since Lovecraft, that is where we are directed to learn about how to write the good stuff.

But what if we don’t want to because no one does Lovecraft better than Lovecraft, and most importantly, because the rest of us are no longer as threatened by different peoples or cultures? What happens when dread and fear turn away from dimly lit rural areas with secret histories to vibrancy, exploration and inclusion? What happens to Lovecraft mimicry?

What happens when we have outgrown that narrow Worldview?

Today most of us are able to acknowledge the pinch of this and dash of that from other cultures and folkways that have driven the more muted successes that line the cages of our genre and we are increasingly curious about it. From Japanese filmmakers to Russian folklore, we are intrigued by the monsters some part of us always suspected were watching us from the shadows. More importantly, we are starting to ask what happens when in following the Lovecraft-enamored lead of the Western Horror Establishment we continue to drown out international and “minority”- voiced Horror, displacing it as an anomaly or christening it Other-relevant “Literature” to keep it at a safe distance.

Horror should never be “safe.” And trying to hold onto Lovecraft and the singular whiteness of Horror is contributing to the lack of historical awareness so necessary in our genre.

It so reminds me of that unfortunate music fan who suggested that Paul McCartney was lucky to receive a “break” from Kanye West and might someday make something of himself “Cuz Kanye just handed this guy a career”… (not a shining moment.)

 

Why don’t we KNOW where we come from? And isn’t it possible that this very tone deafness is one of the contributing causes to the endless cookie cutter “plateauing” of scary in the genre as we know it?

If we really dare to look at the Horror genre’s origins, we will find the richest veins in folk and fairy tales from our Old Countries – the very things an “advanced” and “civilized” culture likes to mock. But in the dark of the night, isn’t that where Horror gets under our skin uninvited, rummaging about and prickling our skins? Does it really matter where the scary images come from if they are coming after us?

It’s time we started researching the rest of the world’s stories – rediscovering some, and hearing others for the first time. Because these are the stories and the traditions we carry with us as we move through the world, colliding with each other. Of course this means learning about other people, how they live and think. It means letting ourselves sink into other life ways in order to find the Horror we crave.

And it means allowing ourselves to be corrected… To acknowledge real history, real traditions, and the real Peoples who live them intimately. It also means admitting to ourselves that we live in bastardized, cannibalized times. We bring fragments of Horrors from our lineages, and those halflings collide unceremoniously with Things That Were Already Here. Isn’t it time we exploited our own ignorance? Paid the price of our own desire to minimize our once hidden roots? Our personal roots?

We don’t need sacred Indian Burial Grounds or gypsy curses to amp up our Horrors… we have our own sins making monsters in urban factories right now.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read those first-hand accounts and value them for themselves…to inspire and remind us that we have our own stories if we will just stop and look. It helps us to see how other people tell these tales, to “spin” our vocabulary, to look askew at what we cannot see directly. We need to, not only for ourselves, but because of the obvious: we no longer live in a vacuum no matter how many walls we endeavor to build. We need to see that even Lovecraft would have a hard time being Lovecraft today.

And is it really such a bad thing – really – to stop “using” other peoples whose customs we don’t know to scare our readers with? Because in a global economy, there are no secrets – not really. If a writer makes something up for the benefit of plot, he or she will ultimately be exposed for the careless or arrogantly conceived error and deservedly so. But there are wondrous stories to be had, to savor just as they are – cultural accents and all.

Of course, this means getting out of our comfort zone. But that is the nature of Horror, isn’t it? And haven’t we learned that wondrous things await if only by way of Japan and its gift of Godzilla, and its ghost traditions pushing into our own culture by way of films like Ringu (The Ring)and The Grudge and the world of Manga?

 It’s All About Language and Culture and Horror Underfoot

While it’s hard to believe that modern music fans don’t always know the names of the bands and musicians that shaped the genre they are in, we of the Horror genre should not throw stones. We are doing the same thing right now, oblivious to our own genre history, crashing about like the proverbial bull in the china shop looking for a new mythos when we don’t even know the last one. We don’t learn our genre history, which squares so nicely with no one teaching it to us. We just keep clinging to the Lovecraft life raft, even if it happens to be the Titanic.

How long before we have a Paul McCartney-Kanye West moment of our own? You realize it is more likely to happen the smaller we make our universe, right?

We like to think that the Horror galaxy revolves around a white, Christian, English-speaking sun – because the little of “everything” we know tells us this…

Yet we could not be more wrong. All of our best tales descend from our Old World roots…and that must mean that out there somewhere is the motherlode of scary… It’s not, after all, like we haven’t drank from that well before – Horror was seeded in our early days of human history, and we have carried remnants of it out into our new and ever changing world with countless diasporas. Yet we tend to not use this personal version of Horror DNA. Instead we look askew at stories presented by “other” countries, often in “other” languages.

Up to this moment, we have hidden behind our world dominance. We have blatantly bragged that those who want to be heard need to speak the way we want to hear language. We don’t read foreign authors, we don’t like names or place names we cannot pronounce, cities we cannot picture, weather that does not mirror our own. We also don’t like the pools of secrecy we ourselves create when we push groups of humanity into the shadows of our entitlement and the people there speak words we don’t know the full meaning of. This is true whether such people on the margins speak Spanish or Black English or something from the Middle East.

Let’s just admit it: we are control freaks. We have a driving need to understand the nuance of every word we read, every meaning implied. And even though in the Horror genre, that can be an absolute necessity to “getting” it, there is still more to our aversion to works that come from “Other” places…

From International writers writing in other languages, to works written that speak of other traditions and cultural importances… we dislike the feeling that there are secrets being coded for certain readers. We feel that way about slang and inner city lingo as surely as we stink eye the immigrants speaking Spanish in the lunch room. Yet we need to get beyond our own Lovecraftian self-importance… we are missing out on some great storytelling – the kind that sends you to your own keyboard and pokes the Muse.

And alas, we are going to have to work for it…because language has its own cultural complications— the most obvious being when dealing with those which are “not-English.”

One of the biggest problems for international writers is being read by English Speakers. We are less likely to be bilingual than most other cultures, assured as we are that it is English that will continue to dominate everything that matters on the world stage.

And what this means is that we take our arrogances into the Literature we read… We not only fully expect to read things in our language, but we judge it differently even when it is delivered thusly. We underestimate what it means for a work to be translated.

In fact, we all too often misinterpret a writer’s talent by the fluency of the translator. However sometimes translators are “functional” but not “artistic.” Where all writers need translators with the eyes and ears and imaginations of poets, all too often we get novels that instead of reading like Dostoevsky, read like Google. This is due to cost, availability of a good translator, and having someone who can judge the finished product properly. Once one leaves their native language, this can be a real challenge – for writers and editors.

This is a real problem. The author needs a fluent translator to make their work accessible in other languages – languages they likely do not speak. And because they do not speak it, they cannot easily judge when a translator is fluent in both languages – fluent enough to tap into nuance and vocabulary yet still capture both those necessary interpretations as well as the voice of the author.

Translation matters, whether we are talking editing an inner city/urban work or a foreign one. And just as we ascribe proofreading errors to writers and their talent, we associate a translation with the quality of the original work if not the literal intelligence of the author. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth: nuance of the native tongue once lost results in a confusion of original intent, of the poetry of the prose and disagreement about what the original text meant.

 

Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s I Remember You: a Ghost Story – an example of how translation should work FOR the work…

 

So we have to expect this kind of disparity to happen in translations of works that come from other language traditions. We have to be patient…flexible.

But we also have problems with writers who use what we have been institutionally guided to consider “bad” “incorrect” or “flawed” English…the most noticeable of which has been “Black, Regional, or Urban” English. In fact, we have the exact same problem in native speakers of English when it comes to interpreting and accepting slang, and cultural diversity within a work.

While sometimes we cannot connect to the story because we are not the intended audience, it is a fact that we tend to shy away from stories that involve language we are unable to “decode”…

Sometimes it is because we simply cannot pick up on the important nuances, the cues, the double entendre – the dog whistles. Never mind that this is because we are used to our own dog whistles…We feel shut out in the same way people from other cultures feel shut out when reading about ours. We simply have gotten used to the idea that being “top dog” in the publishing of Horror, it was “everyone else’s” job to understand the nuances of what we meant.

The shoe always pinches when it is on the other foot…But pinching is a sign that there is something alive in the shoe – that maybe the shoe is wrong, not the foot. We need to have the patience to unwrap the mysterious gift. Yet we have been institutionalized right out of the curiosity.

We bristle for example when non-Christian references are in the stories, unless we can give them the appropriate “Lovecraft spin” where exotic means “sinister” and “threatening”… And if the character does not look and act like us, we feel summarily “excluded”… as if “our” genre has been pirated…invaded. This is one reason why women wrote pulp and men wrote Literature back in the day…and why the inference remains a ghost on the battlefield of diversity in Horror today.

Because “today” we are excluding Horror from all over – including right under foot. We have been taught that reading should be easy and entertaining. We have forgotten that reading – especially Literature with its references to history and socio-economics and tyranny and justice– is work…

Publishers “get” this – that we are now not only lazy but expected to remain content to be lazy from here on – and clearly consider that this is far too complicated an issue to fix. So instead of new and exciting and different Horror, we have Horror from “Other” countries and cultures being farmed out to other genres or marketed as Literary statements – fodder for Critical Thinkers and Lit-lovers to decipher and ruminate upon. The face value of the story-telling is simply dismissed.

The very idea that Horror should include more than monsters is being banished while having the Bible of Lovecraft waved in our faces. Talk about contradiction. No wonder American Horror writers are all-too-often writing peculiarly ineffective and vacant fiction…

Banishing all works by “Others” which doesn’t carry a pre-approved Lovecraftian exploitation of fearing the same “Others” only re-confirms our suspicion that this makes these works not really Horror…Because Horror comes in only one color and one flavor: vanilla.

We further conjecture that all American Horror should be non-threatening and easy-to-digest, even when salaciously gory. And as the market for Horror tightens, the belief is becoming reinforced – making the whole idea that we all should be writing in some way like Lovecraft while being all pulpy and writing fast moving, two-dimensional action figure prose right into that very pair of cement shoes dragging the whole genre to the soggy bottom…

We have a tendency to decide that we are better off to reject works which require a bit of decoding.

We don’t want to think and we don’t want to go outside our comfort zone. But isn’t that exactly the price of admission? Isn’t that the very essence of Horror?

We have done this with African Americans for decades. We shrink from the use of Black English because we are just not sure what to do with it. Is it a dialect? Is it just “bad” English? Is it a regionalism? Slang?

And what about regionalism? Does a Southern character or a Southern accent make the Horror Southern Gothic and Literature because we don’t want to work to understand it in Horror? Why is Horror only Horror if the dialogue fits in a comic book balloon?

Why does it matter in Literature? How many Cockney accents have we navigated in English Literature because it was part of the story? Part of the setting? The time-and-place of historical value?

Experts are still in debate over it. And meanwhile editors everywhere – especially in traditional publishing – are at a loss as to how to edit such fiction. It is far easier to call “Black” and “Other” writing niche and reject the work, or pronounce it too burdened with Literary elements because most likely it will take African American and “Other”editors to edit such works submitted for publication…editors from the culture the story comes from in order to edit the right things out and clarify the things that need to stay in.

Decisions have to be made as to whether the language in the work is supposed to (pardon the pun) add “color” to the language, to orient characters and setting, but also as to whether or not it is also meant to exclude certain readers not in the intended audience, or to educate them into a different culture and viewpoint.

This is not as easy as it would seem. And this affects international and national works as quickly as it effects regional U.S. ones…

For one thing, we have been taught that language is either right or wrong in its execution. Yet we have so many regional subcultures in the English language alone we should be familiar with the fact that such “color” when added to Literature seats that work firmly in a time or place – it becomes part of setting and character. The only good excuse for exclusion on these grounds is when the work cannot be in some way “accessible” and its meaning appreciated by outsiders to a storytelling degree.

For example, when a work comes from another culture, country or language, the author or translator should allow for some “redundant” coaching… some of the native language should stay in the story – reminding the reader where it is coming from.

Example: “Mira,” said Pablo, “Look.” (Mira means “look.. And we learned something from the redundancy without losing the author’s proficiency of language.)

But there are also other cultural things that need explanation for new and “reverse-Other” readers.

Example: “When she calls out to Ashoke, she doesn’t say his name. Ashima never thinks of her husband’s name when she thinks of her husband, even though she knows perfectly well what it is. She has adopted his surname but refuses to use it, for propriety’s sake, to utter his first. It’s not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or a caress in a Hindi movie, a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ashoke’s name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as ‘Are you listening to me?’” (From Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake)

(Here we have learned about the character, her husband and her culture…yet presented in a way that does not offend the outsider or someone from that culture because it adds color to the prose.)

This is how good writing and proper editing is done. It is not the job of the reader to figure things out, but the job of the writer to draw us in – to make us want to learn more and to learn something by way of the story in spite of ourselves. And it is the job of the editor to help us all get there, especially in translation and even in our own language.

Those of us who like Horror already speak a second language – the language of our genre. Most of us who like Horror like it for the escapism – and the one predictable trope that never, ever changes: not the one about white creation myths, but the one that proves time and again, through ghost and monster and sheer coincidence that justice will prevail through the impersonal and savage law of nature because we are none of us innocent.

In the world of Horror where cross-pollination is key, we need different voices – ones whose different cultures or ways of speaking frame Horror in a new light, cast shadows in familiar yet peculiar angles…

Sometimes I think it must just feel like too much work to resolve in the eyes of traditional publishing – too much work for too much of a gamble…And that is exactly how we keep winding up with the same voices in Horror and Literature, all speaking the same way…It’s how we lost our DNA, our sense of direction and originality nested in our commonality.

So take a minute. Peruse the following list of writers from all over – including a few right here in these United States whose work was probably labelled a bit “niche.” You want new Horror? Original Horror?

Start here. And yes, there are Americans on it – either from or influenced by somewhere else, and in one case from traditions outside the mainstream but homegrown nonetheless…These are voices of different cultures…

Get your crucifixes… because these writers are the future of Horror – if we will only open our eyes and read.

Horror Authors Unseen – A List From Here to Everywhere Else

Asa Nomani (Japan) Now You’re One of Us

Otsuichi (Japan) Goth

Asamatsu Ken (Japan) Queen of K’n-Yan

Mariko Koike (Japan) The Graveyard Apartment

Yrsa Sigurdardottir (Iceland) I Remember You

John Ajvide Lindquist (Sweden) Let the Right One In

Karin Tidbeck (Sweden) Amatka

Eden Royce (African American/Gullah and Southern Gothic influence) Spook Lights, Tying the Devil’s Shoestrings –YA coming Summer 2020

Tananarive Due (African American/Nigerian influence) My Soul To Keep

Violet Kupersmith (Vietnamese American) The Frangipani Hotel

Stephen Graham Jones (Native American) Mapping the Interior

David Bowles (Mexican American) Chupacabra Vengeance

Jeremias Gotthelf (Germany) The Black Spider

Daniel Kehlmann (Germany) You Should Have Left

Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Netherlands) Hex

John Harwood (Australia) The Ghost Writer

Michelle De Kretser (Sri Lankan-Australian) Springtime, a Ghost Story

Simone St. James (Canada) The Haunting of Maddie Clare

Cherie Dimaline (Canadian First Nations) The Marrow Thieves

Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Canadian-Mexican) Certain Dark Things

Samuel Marolla (Italy) Black Tea and Other Tales

Giorgia de Maria (Italy) The Twenty Days of Turin

Samanta Schweblin (Argentina) Fever Dream

Guillermo del Toro (Mexico/Mexican American) Pan’s Labyrinthe

Luis Abbadie (Mexico) El código secreto del Necronomicón(The Secret Code of the Neconomicon)

Julio Cortezar (Argentina) Tomada House

Bernardo Esquinca (Mexico) Demonia (and Other Stories)

J.F. Gonzalez (Spanish American) Clickers

Carmen Maria Machado (Cuban American) Her Body and Other Parties

Andres Barba (Spain) Such Small Hands

Zhou Haohui (China) Valley of Terror

Han Kang (South Korea) The Vegetarian

Rene Depestre (Haiti) Hadriana in All My Dreams

Carolina Sanin (Columbia) The Children

Sadegh Hedayat (Iran) The Blind Owl

Otessa Mosfegh (Croatian Iranian) Eileen

Ahmed Khaled Tawfik (Egypt) Beyond Nature

Ania Ahlborn (Polish American) Within These Walls

Anna Starobinets (Russia) The Recrudescence of the Cold

Tony Vilgotsky (Russia) Eye of Satan (aka Warriors of the Church)

Ludmila Petrushevskaya (Russia) There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

Nuzo Onoh (Nigerian British) The Reluctant Dead

Amos Tutuola ( Nigeria) My Life in the Bush of Ghosts