Horror doesn’t need to be literary, but it needs to be horror.

I’ve been ruffling a few feathers again.

This Guardian article, “Horror: a genre doomed to literary hell?”, is exactly the sort of bunkum that gets written when literary types point their condescending noses at those horrible plebby “genres”.  It’s a nonsense argument.  Asking why horror isn’t more “literary” is like asking why Slayer don’t sound more like Coldplay.  They’re different beasts, with different aims.  Horror works best when it’s hitting the senses at a visceral level.  Sometimes it’s raw and not very pretty, but that’s fine so long as it evokes the right response in the reader.

That’s about as much of a rebuttal as needs to be written and it wasn’t the article but the clip-clopping of comments beneath it that dragged me out from under my bridge.  People offered up their lists of talented writers and argued this as evidence of horror fiction being in rude health.

I’m sorry, but this isn’t true.

It’s closed bubble thinking.  It’s one of the perversities of modern technology.  While the whole world is opened up to anyone with a keyboard, it’s easy to fall into little circles where shared thoughts and opinions are bounced around, amplified and magnified out of all proportion to their relevance to the rest of the world.

Step outside the bubble.  Who’s reading?  Who’s commenting?  Who’s reviewing?  Who’s recommending?

Who cares?

On my last visit to England I popped into my local branch of Waterstones.  Next to several shelves full of Twilight clones was the horror section.  The only books I saw by writers that hadn’t been fixtures on the horror shelves for at least two decades were Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Adam Nevill’s Apartment 16.

This is not a sign of health.

Step outside of the usual writer’s haunts and go clip-clopping into the tangled jungle of the World Wide Web.  Look for the places regular(ish) people hang out.  Look at how much is written about films, music, TV shows, computer games, anime.  Look at how little is written about books.

Even in The Guardian’s own book section.  Take a look at this thread recommending horror books to read for Halloween.  Spot a work that was written this century.

This is not a sign of health.

It’s not a mainstream thing either.  I have a fairly esoteric taste in music, yet if I want to find the best new death metal and black metal albums released there are plenty of online resources I can use to help me discover brilliant new bands.  Ditto for games and movies.  For horror books the best I’ve been able to manage is to slum around articles like this and see what gets recommended in the comments section.

That’s not to say there aren’t online resources.  Nick Cato and his team do a wonderful job with The Horror Fiction Review, there’s plenty of interesting stuff on the VanderMeer’s Weird Fiction Review, and there are also the websites of award givers like the HWA and BFS.  The crucial difference is these horror fiction resources are (mostly) written by writers, for other writers, while the others are written by fans, for other fans.  It’s crucial because the other media reviews don’t require me to disentangle the tainted web of who knows who to determine whether the recommendation/review/award is unbiased enough to be trustworthy.

This is not a sign of health.

We have a finite amount of leisure time and there are plenty of competing activities to devour it.  If we want people to read horror fiction we have to give them a compelling reason do so, otherwise they’re going to spend that time watching TV, going to see films or blowing zombie’s heads off on their Playstation.

Talk of horror becoming more “literary” raises the hairs on the back of my hands.  Trying to appease literary critics is a trap that has swallowed many a promising horror writer.  For me, the problem with a lot of modern horror is the writers are trying to court a literary audience that will never like, appreciate or understand them.  It’s like the hapless nerd of a teen movie trying to impress the prettiest, most popular girl in class when it’s obvious she’s a bitch and the right girl for him is the one hiding behind glasses and mousey hair.

This doesn’t mean horror fiction has to be shit, but first and foremost it needs to be aware of what it’s trying to do.  It’s a rollercoaster.  It’s a way for people to confront their fears from a position of safety.  It’s a spike in the heart rate, a prickle on the back on the neck, a lurking miasma of dread, a bowl of ice in the pit of the stomach—all from the comfort of the reader’s armchair.  The very good modern horror films and computer games know and provide this.

Horror fiction doesn’t need to become more literary, it needs to find and re-engage with an audience that, neglected, has turned to other genres and media for its thrills.  It needs to burst out of the bubble clique, grab readers by the throat and shout “Read Me!  Put down that remote and Read Me!  Put down that controller and Read Me!  Then go and tell all your friends to Read Me!  Because I’m the scariest, spookiest, creepiest, eeriest, most spine-tingling muthafucka you’ll ever spend an evening with.”