What's wrong with horror? The horror community has complained for a long time about being stuck in the small press ghetto and how so few actually make it to the majors, when the authors think that everything they write is fabulous.

One of the things that comes first to mind is the attitude shown by the type who wrote and responded to a story about a retarded girl being raped by two red-neck youths. The guys lined up for that one and were congratulated each other on just how "sick" that story was or how they had written a "sicker than thou" story. It sounded like an adolescent ec comics con.

The readership for this kind of material is limited. Most of that limited readership posts obsessively to the various horror messageboards and appears to be larger than it really is. If every single person from those messageboards bought every single book, it would still be less than a drop in the bucket as far as readership goes. And, if they read the splatterpunk of the early 90s. they would find that it's all been done before and done better than what is being written in this vomitting contest called horror.

What the reading public, the larger reading public wants, is interesting, sympathetic characters that they can identify with and actually feel concerned about the danger to them. Which brings me around to another point.

Some writers say they write for themselves only and to do less is wrong, as if they should not be writing for themselves. It isn't a matter of writing for yourself or for the reader, but both. Writing professionally is a finely balanced symbiosis between the writer and the reader. The symbiosis is lilke inviting someone to dinner at your house and then serving a meal of rancid meat: they won't eat it. You can't make a reader read a poorly written book, or one that offends their sensibilities.

I'm not saying here, that you can't write what you want to, only that there must be a balance. The final draft should be when you ask yourself what the reader can handle and edit it so that the reader can better cope with what you are saying.

Storytellers, and most of us would like to beleive that we are all born storytellers, held their audience by giving the audience what they wanted and finding validation through the storyteller/listener interactions. It is the same with the writer/reader symbiosis.

Another problem with much of horror is the lack of sympathetic three dimensional characters, the lack of writing that inspires us to continue reading, and writing that is mean-spirited. There are writers out there doing thrillers, para-normal romance, medieval dark fantasy, that could easily be the next major horror authors. They are already including horror elements into the works. But they have already mastered the characterization and pacing and balance that the current small press ghetto authors still lack.

If writers prefer to be locked into the small press rather than write to connect up to the larger audience, then that is their choice and they should not complain about it.



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articles published in:
Movieline *** Cinefantastique *** Washington Post Book World *** Los Angeles Times *** Los Angeles Drive Guide *** Black Belt *** Martial Arts Weapons *** Monsterland *** Thrust: Science Fiction in Review *** Science Fiction Review

Former MPAA Accredited Journalist.
Currently Active member, SFWA