Weird Horror #9, the Fall 2024 issue, is out now from Undertow Publications. It contains my latest story, 'All the Devils are Here,' alongside new fiction from Seán Padraic Birnie (a terrific writer whose work I first encountered in the pages of the much missed Black Static), David Nickle, Avra Margariti and Jorja Osha among others.
Simon Strantzas, writing in his regular column on horror, returns to a debate that seems to plague the broader category of what we might call the 'fantastic,' that is all the competing and related types of fiction we categorise as horror, gothic, supernatural, fantasy, weird or whatever label is currently in vogue. I should confess that this question of category, or definition, is one I contributed to often enough in my Night's Plutonian Shore column when it appeared at Alien Online in the early noughties and later in the pages of Interzone before moving to Black Static. The debate back then was just as lively, impassioned and informed as it is now, but ultimately, it feels as if we've been going around in circles.
In his piece, Stranzas discusses where we might situate Clive Barker in the context of 'The Fantastique and the Weird.' While acknowledging Barker's contribution to the development of contemporary weird fiction--"bringing the unusual into the usual, introducing the perverse into the conservative"--Stranzas seems to question his importance on grounds of his popularity with mainstream audiences, no matter that this was primarily achieved after the success of the Hellraiser films. It's perhaps easy now to downplay the impact of the initial movie, but at a time when Horror cinema was dominated by films of comic splatter and gore aimed at teenage audiences, Hellraiser's nihilistic perversity was a radical departure that set it well apart from the mainstream.
Whatever his feelings toward Barker's work, Strantzas' real intention seems to be yet another attempt to codify Weird fiction as something other than, or beyond horror, as a "genre of stories told in unexpected ways with uncommon combinations." He claims that what distinguishes "the Weird from the non-Weird is its stubborn refusal to reuse ideas that are familiar enough to have become mainstream."
These are neat enough summations but I'm not sure how useful they are, as the intention seems to be to position 'horror fiction' as mainstream. 31 years ago, in the introduction to an anthology of slipstream fiction he edited, Christopher Kenworthy wrote:
Slipstream transcends genre fiction, while operating in its wake. We are shaken by the slipstream, but it also gives us the opportunity to rush forwards. The writing is one step beyond mainstream, but the weirdness is presented with good intentions and it is grounded in the ordinary; everyday events take place in unordinary ways, with the impression that something is going on just beyond our normal level of perception.*
Kenworthy's attempt to delineate slipstream is not so different to the definition of Weird fiction proffered by Strantzas. Both are preoccupied with differentiating slipstream or the Weird, from the mainstream, seeing their preferred category as reacting to "the common tools" of mainstream horror fiction. In some readers' eyes this might be construed as a laudable attempt to distinguish genuinely innovative and progressive work within the fantastic from fiction marked by over-familiar tropes and cliches. The good stuff from the bad, right? Yet I suspect that the majority of those who read the types of fiction which fall under the broader umbrella of the fantastic, are indifferent to this self-indulgent, albeit diverting, debate. What matters to them is the content, not the label. Do readers of Stephen King confine their reading to King? How does one define the body of King's work? Is he merely a 'horror' writer? Can his 'Low Men in Yellow Coats' signpost readers towards The King in Yellow? Might not readers of Chambers also read Thomas Ligotti? Was Lucius Shepard a science fiction writer, or a proponent of the Weird? Caitlín R Kiernan eschews the label 'horror writer,' seeing horror as an emotion rather than a genre, and her fiction as not being characterized by one single emotion; yet for all that, her books and stories have been marketed as horror and included in annual collections of best horror.
Does it really matter what we call these fictions? Or do we cling to these distinguishing labels out of snobbishness, in order to signify the superiority of our own tastes? One type of writer is designated as 'horror', perhaps because of commercial success, while another is proclaimed as a writer of the 'Weird' and celebrated as an outsider because of their lack of mainstream appeal. What happens when a writer like, say Jeff Vandermeer, once lauded as a champion of the New Weird, achieves mainstream success, as with Annihilation? Is he now, like Barker, to be excluded from the club?
If I'm being somewhat facetious--which I am--then it's only to point out the experiences of readers in the real world. I suspect I'm far from alone in reading across a wide range of genres--crime, literary, horror, historical, fantasy, espionage, thriller, gothic, comic, absurd, surreal and science fiction--and what matters more to me than how a book is categorised, is the extent to which it excites, enthralls, challenges or moves me. I don't mind having my expectations subverted, but I also want to be entertained. I can handle some familiar situations and scenarios, but I want to see a freshness in the approach. I want to meet characters who are confronted with new, and even bizarre events, but who react to them in ways that are recognisably human and flawed. I will go from Martin Amis to Mariana Enriquez, from Cormac McCarthy to Shirley Jackson, from Graham Greene to Graham Joyce, or from Alice Munro to Alice Sheldon.
Ultimately, genre classification is a sales tool used by publishers and booksellers to get their product into the hands of those they think most likely to consume them. Does it matter that the majority of readers don't give a toss that the book they are reading is seen by one commentator as an exceptional thriller, and by another as exploitative and clichéd? I remember with fondness the days when writers and critics of the fantastic extolled the virtues of 'blurring the boundaries' between genres, and while publishers, and booksellers will go on marketing their books to their advantage, and critics and commentators will go on debating the lines of demarcation, it seems that readers, whether consciously or not, are happy to move back and forth across a range of genres, blurring or eliding those boundaries as they do so.
Long may it be so.
*Christopher Kenworthy, in 'Introduction: Black Coffee', Sugar Sleep, Barrington Books, 1993
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