This Horror Life

A quick diversion, to start. If you are a member of IMDB, I strongly encourage you to participate in the second Horror Board Book Club reading. The selection for the month is Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury and should certainly stir up some interesting comments.

Which ties in directly to the meat of the post.

Embarrassed by the YA label and “Children’s Reading Room” stamp on my local library’s copy of Something Wicked…, I opted to buffer the reaction of the new crop of the librarians - far too familiar with my grab a bizarre horror novel, a genre short story collection, and a literary classic - by borrowing lost boy lost girl by Peter Straub. A wise choice, considering I am struggling to put it down in the face of a large stack of academic (re)reading I must complete for Monday.

Then I looked at a quote in the dust jacket that left me perplexed: “…Peter Straub affirms once again that he is the master of literary horror.”

This is the first time I’ve encountered the phrase “literary horror,” and to be quite honest, I hope it’s the last. Much like so-called “literary fiction,” “literary horror” is designed to create an almost us versus them dilemma within the horror genre.

Considering the general reaction of literary press to horror, attempting to justify approval of a certain variety of horror seems inexcusable to me. Why create the distinction at all? Shouldn’t all good horror be considered well-written if it accomplishes what it set out to do? What would actually define literary horror? A few well-placed semi-colons and a dispensation of vocabulary that would leave the most well read among us to scramble for our dictionaries?

Perhaps the part I dislike the most about “literary” in this context is the poor use of the term. Literary is defined from literature and refers to the nature of books and writing. Literature itself either means the combination of form and substance in writing or all writing printed in a particular language. It’s clear that “literary” is used to distinguish what some consider the highest quality of writing, but it’s also an insult to other writers not considered worthy of the demarcation.

Am I trying to claim all written works are created equal? Absolutely not. But this “literary horror” distinction seems to be one of the newer steps in downplaying the merit of horror. It’s the same way a horror film will suddenly be credited as a thriller or drama in the face of award season buzz. It’s an admittedly clever workaround to pretend that horror, as a whole, has no value to society. This is the kind of rhetoric that makes me want this site to work so much.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Post them below.

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