supernatural fiction | Musings of the Monster Librarian

The Monster Mash(up)

Kudos to Booklist Onliine for including this article, Classic Monster Mash-ups as the topic of their May 15 Core Collection feature. (Core Collection, for those of you who are not librarians, means “you gotta have this one in your collection, NOW!)

Christine Meloni put together a nice introduction to the subgenre, with an annotated booklist of some of the better known books (she did note that some of them, like Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer are not actually mash-ups. I was familiar with a lot of these but good Lord, someone out there really thinks Jane Austen and zombies are a rockin’ combination! I counted FIVE related books on Meloni’s list, and she didn’t even include the two sequels to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!

My only quibble, and I mention this mainly because I’ve recently become sensitive to it, is that once again, these books are never described as horror fiction- they are “supernatural literary fiction”. You know, if a teenage boy picks up a book promising zombies and “ultraviolent mayhem”, it’s probably not because he cares about the literary value of the timeless romance between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. Outside of that, I really appreciated Meloni’s comments about monster mash-ups- that they can be fun and are worth reading. Thanks, Christine!

The H-Word. Part 3

And now… The tipping point for me. The article that made me want to shake somebody at the Wall Street Journal. Did you know this summer is…

THE SEASON OF THE SUPERNATURAL!

Yep. “Real” authors are now coming out of the closet. The genre fiction my creative writing professor, Clint McCown, banned us from writing in his class because it wasn’t “real” or “literary” is suddenly okay. Except, wait! Let’s not call it horror fiction when literary writer Glen Duncan writes about a werewolf with “a lusty appetite for human flesh”. Nope- it’s “a high concept literary novel.” It just HAPPENS to have a man-eating werewolf as the narrator. Hmm… How can the literary establishment avoid the stigma of writing genre books? Certainly, those books, populated with werewolves, zombies, ghosts, and vampires, couldn’t possibly be horror fiction. Of course not. It’s “supernatural literary fiction”. I’d like to thank Glen Duncan’s publicist for taking the time to offer us here at MonsterLibrarian.com, a horror fiction review site, a review copy of The Last Werewolf.

The Wall Street Journal did briefly acknowledge the horror genre, but none of the books in this article were mentioned as part of the horror genre. And, while I understand that different imprints have different audiences, I was appalled at Knopf’s attitude that “we don’t do those kinds of books”. It’s so disrespectful to readers’ preferences, and readers are the lifeblood of any publishing house. The author of the Journal’s article tried to justify the popularity of these titles by counting Homer, Shakespeare, Dante and Milton as writers in the literary tradition who tossed gods, monsters, and the undead into the mix, but those guys cared about telling a story, not whether it was “literary”.

And that’s why my five year old is begging me to tell him about Odysseus and the Cyclops for the billionth time, and preparing for the zombie apocalypse (in spite of my attempts to protect him from all things zombie). The stories and the monsters are just that good. There’s no reason to be afraid of the H-word. There are a LOT of good storytellers out there. Even if they write “those books”, that’s no reason to write them off, or treat their readers with contempt.

Look, the horror community is not as organized as the romance community. RWA has hard data on sales and on who their readers are. Writers in the horror genre don’t. And it would be hard to collect… are there ANY major publishers who publish horror since Leisure went by the wayside? But horror readers, writers, and books are here, and it’s foolish for publishers, mainstream authors, and book critics to write them off. Horror fiction. Not “paranormal”, not “supernatural”, not, “thriller”, “science fiction”, “fantasy”, “dystopian” or “lowbrow”.(although it can be any of those things as well). It’s okay to read and write horror fiction with pride. No one should have to defend that choice.

No matter what anyone else doesn’t say.