Dave's Anatomy: My History As A Writer #4: Entering Into Paranormal

James Joyce

My writing career had begun. I had published stories, but needed to determine what sort of writer I wanted to be, which brought in the vexing questions of categories of fiction. Traditionally, there is literary fiction, which is considered the best sort of fiction one may write and the only type of fiction that has any real merit. Literary fiction is Charles Dickens, James Joyce, the Brontë sisters, Ernest Hemingway. Literary fiction has the possibility of enduring—of becoming a classic like Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Detective story writer Dashiell Hammett

On the other hand, there is genre fiction. Genre fiction falls into several categories:  mystery, romance, horror, adventure and, until recently, was considered inferior to literary fiction. Writers who produced such books might be popular, might be wealthy, and might sell millions of books, but they were not writers of "real" literature. Their work ranked below works of literary fiction.

This outlook reigned—until the 1980s.

In the 1980s a new literary philosophy called postmodernism came along. Postmodernism is complex and has a lot of facets, but one feature of its theoretical base is the elimination of categories. Who, the postmodernists asks, makes categories and says one is superior to the other? By what standard and by what criteria are such judgements made. Often, they theorized, it's simply because a group of people (mostly men) who hold some kind of power in the academic world, get together and decide, often arbitrarily, what is right and wrong, good and bad, worthy and unworthy. The postmodern critics simply asked, Who says? What gives someone the right to say what is literature and what isn't?

So as the years progressed, one began to see the categories dissolve. Suddenly you could teach Steven King in a literature class. Popular themes enter the curriculum.  Suddenly women and other marginalized groups had a voice. Writers whose works had been pushed off the scene by coteries of influential critics re-emerged—Zora Neale Hurston, Kate Chopin, and George Washington Cable are some notable examples. The idea that there was such a thing as literary fiction, intellectually and thematically superior to all other types of books, was challenged.

I began writing after this sea-change had occurred. I had written stories that aimed at the literary fiction category. But after a while I began to wonder about a horror story. I had my on-going character, Sossity Chandler. But did I want to take her into the realm of the supernatural and paranormal? This was a thing I wondered about. I had an idea for a story—one I had thought on even as a teenager growing up in Indiana, where winter is harsh and there's a lot of snow. But I wasn't sure I wanted to go that way as a writer.

One day I came across a statement by Steven King that said it is not true that ghost stories are an offshoot of literary sort stories. Just the opposite, he insisted. Short stories like the ones written by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Willa Cather are in fact offshoots of ghost stories. The ghost stories people told around campfires and in dark rooms at night began it. And, of course, the inventor of the genre of short story, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote ghost and horror tales. This was good advice from the author who has sold more books than anyone in history.

I decided to go with this and wrote a story called "The Snow Demon."  My ongoing character, Sossity Chandler, is playing a gig out west. She had driven to Wyoming after a painful quarrel with her parents and is in despair. She finds some jobs playing music in a small town and also runs into a college professor doing research on Native American lore. He takes advantage of her lack of funding and of her emotional despair by, respectively, hiring her to do some work for him and seducing her. 

He is interested in the legend of the Snow Demon but finds that the locals don't like to talk about it. Sossity has befriended and helped out the daughter of a local official in the native tribe there. The girl works as an exotic dancer in the club she plays and Sossity gives her a place to sleep and some money and urges her to get help for her drinking problem. By offering a large sum of money to the girl, who has a drinking problem and is destitute, the college professor finds the location of the Snow Demon's lair and pays Sossity to come along with him to view it.

Sossity doesn't like his attitude toward the local tribal peoples and his disrespect toward their customs and religion. On the way there, he desecrates the sacred place of the Demon. Mistake. Soon a ferocious snowstorm begins. Sossity and the professor can't find their way. Wolves show up and attack them. Sossity fears she will die, but the native women, whom Sossity helped, and who knows she is not culpable, rescues her. The college professor is killed. Sossity leaves knowing the legend of the Snow Demon is true but also with some hope that comes from her observation that doing what is right makes matters turn out for the better.

The story was published in a print anthology, no longer available. It began my career as a writer of paranormal fiction. In what direction does writing such fiction take one? More to come on this topic.

For more paranormal reading, check out ShadowCity. Paranormal fantasy.

For more such reads, check out my Writer's Page.

Another great source for good paranormal, my Facebook Page.

I would love to see your questions or comments.