Can horror stories ever be literature?
Obviously, Henry James thought so. So did Jane Austen and Edith Wharton. For that matter, so did William Faulkner. And Willa Cather. And Elizabeth Bowen. The list goes on and on. Extraordinary writers have flourished in the dark, artists of the caliber of Shirley Jackson and Ray Bradbury, Algernon Blackwood, even D. H. Lawrence. Consider the works of Franz Kafka or Gustav Meyrink. What are they if not brilliant horror novels?
See? Horror doesn’t have to be trash.
You might not think this so shocking an assertion, yet it provokes outrage among a reactionary faction who feel empowered to dictate what the genre MUST be. Can you guess what kind of fiction such people approve of? I’ll give you a hint. It isn’t subtle or sophisticated. And they can be intensely abusive about works that don’t fit the template. This mandated mediocrity – what I think of as “the rule of dumb” – has largely driven serious literary practitioners into the arms of Noir and Suspense and Mystery (and has had much the same effect on intelligent readers). But a few intrepid souls still labor in the Horror mines. Please understand that I’m not advocating snobbishness here: there’s a difference between ‘art’ and ‘artsy.’ The pulp novels of one generation become the underground classics of the next. Raw talent and raw creative energy can often be quite rude, and so they should be. Art should startle as well as illuminate. It should outrage and provoke. Always.
But a penny dreadful remains a penny dreadful. A lot of the titles choking the genre these days are barely literate, let alone literary, and no one believes otherwise, not even the “writers” who grind them out like sausages. There’s a place for this sort of thing of course. Everyone is entitled to write what they want, to read what they want (even if it’s essentially the same book over and over). But shouldn’t there be room for quality as well?
