What’s in a Genre; or, I Found Out I’m Not a Horror Writer (Part I)

When I say I’m not a horror writer, I’m not saying I haven’t written it. I have published quite a few stories in that genre. In fact, I’m featured in Ladies and Gentlemen of Horror, 2011, and have published in The Horror Zine, Indiana Horror, Horror Through the Ages, and other journals and anthologies that support that genre. The first story I ever published in a print journal, in fact, was a horror tale, “The Snow Demon,” in an anthology called Dark Distortions.

But with a difference.

My stories usually had a happy ending.

Most often in what I wrote, the monsters, killers, zombies, or vampires are defeated and the good people survive. The ghouls might take out a few of the bad people, but they are not the victors.. And I did do dark horror now and then. In a story called “The Woman Who Loved Books,” the protagonist is enslaved by a supernatural being who thrives off books and requires people to read to her; another tale called “Prima Noctis” has vampires destroying an entire medieval household. But most of my stories, I noticed through the years, do not end this way. Most of my stuff ends with good overcoming evil. This is why I say I’m not a horror writer. In true horror, at least as I understand the term, evil mostly overcomes and wins.

Horror is, admittedly, a hard genre to pin down. And it contains sub-genres, such as dark horror and soft horror. To me, at least, true horror has evil prevailing.

 

A true horror novel by Steven King is Pet Sematary. Nothing good happens. In fact, the worst possible series of events unfolds. A family is destroyed, along with many other people, by evil. The same is true with his memorable short story, “Children of the Corn.” The demonic children of Gatlin kill Burt and Vicky. They have killed all the adults in town and then sacrifice themselves to the evil that dwells in the corn. One girl hates the corn and wants to set it on fire, but she is too afraid because the corn can see into the human heart.  Evil wins because it is unstoppable.

This is what I read in horror. Evil is stronger than good. If you happen to encounter a manifestation of evil, you’re done for. There is no fighting it. And it will always return. In one of my stories called “City Limits,” the characters suffer horrific things at the hands of zombies who “drink” their souls to survive. They escape in the end. The editor who accepted it for publication told me, though, that I needed to add something unsettling to the ending:  the zombies find the escapees; or at least the hint they may show up again sometime. I did the latter. That made the story more horrific. Good had prevailed—well, maybe it had. This is a requirement of horror.

And so you have it. The simplest sort of horror is where person A is going somewhere.

Along comes an evil entity B, a monster of some sort, and kills them. I’ve never thought stories like this had much depth, but they are usually violent and gory, and the bad things win. Another is like Ring, the Japanese horror film where a murdering ghost cannot be destroyed but must be appeased by an endless line of victims. Unstoppable evil is required in stories such as this. There are lots of variations on the themes, but in the end, evil wins.

I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I am vilifying or demeaning horror. It is a genre loved by many. I've written it myself. Increasingly, though, I see that it doesn’t coincide with my vision of the universe.

So if I don’t write horror but still write about monsters, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and supernatural creatures, what should my writing be called? What genre is it?

I will explain this in my next blog.