by Gary A. Braunbeck

This is going to bounce around a bit like a paper cup caught in the wind, but will hopefully come together at the end, so bear with me.

One of the things I promised myself when I agreed to take part in this blog was that I would try to avoid offering advice to aspiring writers. This is not arrogance on my part, nor is it my assigned covert role in some labyrinthine conspiracy designed to make certain that basic necessary knowledge for starting one's writing career is kept concealed from you, thus eliminating any potential competition you and your work might pose in the marketplace.

The reason I am uncomfortable offering advice to aspiring writers is simple: I'm still learning how to do this myself (and I hope that I'll never stop learning). Many of the things I discovered through trial and error no longer apply, and I wouldn't dare try to tell someone else how they should go about managing a writing career.

But there is one piece of advice that, when pressed to, I gladly offer to aspiring writers -- and it's one that is often met by blank, confused stares: Forget Genre.

If you sit down and say, "I'm going to write a HORROR story," you might -- consciously or not -- start grafting traditionally horrific elements onto a story where they don't belong, and you can hobble a story by trying to force it to fit within the "traditional" (read: popularly accepted) boundaries of a particular genre, rather than expand those boundaries by not worrying about how it's going to be categorized. View it only in terms of the story you want to tell, not the one you think readers are going to be expecting.

Two things happened recently that prompted me to revisit this subject for myself: 1) Reviews for my novella In the Midnight Museum and my new Leisure novel, Keepers started appearing, and, 2) A member of a local writers' group made a statement so naive as to be almost -- almost -- laughable.

About the former: much to my relief, the reviews for both Museum and Keepers have thus far been overwhelmingly positive, but in almost every case, the reviewers have said something along the lines of "...it's both horror and not", or, "...I guess horror is as good as anything to call it..."

You get the idea. Neither work fits easily into any single category, and it's making some people crazy trying to figure out where to put them. My response is: how about just addressing them as stories and leave it at that?

My guess is that readers and reviewers begin reading a story labeled "horror" (or "cyberpunk", or "fantasy", or "mystery", or what have you) with certain ingrained expectations; they have come to anticipate certain elements to appear to a particular type of story, and are surprised -- sometimes not pleasantly so -- when those expectations are not met and/or indulged.

Only half a dozen times in my career have I sat down and said, "I'm going to write a HORROR story," and then proceeded to do just that, always bearing in mind what readers expect in a horror story, and making damn sure I worked in as many of those expected elements as I could. Six times I've done this, and six times I've produced stories that are just, well...awful. And they're awful because I did not forget genre, genre was the overriding factor in their creation -- and telling a good story was secondary.

Shame on me.

Now to the latter point before I bring all this together.

I belong to a local writers' group that is composed mostly of fantasy and science fiction writers. Many of these folks are unpublished or have just begun publishing; some of the folks have a decent amount of fiction already published; and a small handful of them, including myself and Charles Coleman Finlay, have got a fairly decent body of published work out there.

In a recent discussion, one of the members -- who writes heroic fantasy -- commented that she'd noticed a "...larger than usual number of horror-type stories" being submitted for critique, and could we possibly cut down on that because she and several other members don't 'get' horror. When prompted for further comment, she also admitted that she's read "...some Stephen King" but otherwise tends to read almost exclusively in the field of -- you guessed it -- heroic fantasy.

She is not alone in this; members who write exclusively mystery fiction have quit the group because they didn't 'get' fantasy, and the science fiction folks didn't 'get' mystery.

What's to 'get'? Somebody explain this to me -- on second thought, please don't, it wasn't an actual request.

It doesn't matter a damn if your story is horror, or mainstream, or fantasy, or erotica, or any other genre or sub-genre -- it is, must be, must always be, first and foremost a good story.

Why don't more readers and writers understand that? Have we become so tunnel-visioned in our expectations that we have given up the hope of ever seeing any genre attempt something new and/or different? Or have we been trained through a steady diet of the same old same-old to want nothing more than journeyman-level storytelling, storytelling that challenges neither the mind nor the heart (forget about those "traditional boundaries" I mentioned earlier)?

If you answered "yes" to either of those questions, I think it's quite possible that you're the type of reader or writer who's come to think in terms of "genre" far too much for your own good.

Far too many writers -- both new and established -- think too much in terms of the type of story they're writing -- and what's worse, far too many of them read almost exclusively in the field in which they want to publish. While it is important to be be well-read in your chosen field, it's vital that you read outside that field as much as possible, otherwise you'll eventually be writing nothing more than a hip imitation of a pastiche of a rip-off of something that was original two decades ago but has now fallen far too deep into a well-worn groove to offer a challenge to either writers or readers.

I read all over the place, and do not restrict my influences to those giants in the field from under whose shadows I hope to emerge.

As a result, yes, both of my recent works are and aren't horror; they're both also fantasy and not; each is and isn't a mystery, a romance, a mainstream character study. What they are, are two pieces of which I am very proud because they were the best stories I could make them ... because I followed my own advice and Forgot Genre.

Approach any work as being simply a story, and you'll always "get" it; think only in terms of "genre" and you'll have a hobbled story by the third paragraph.

That is the best piece of advice that I have or will ever have for aspiring writers. I hope you found something useful contained here.

Now go read Theodore Sturgeon's magnificent The Dreaming Jewels and put someone into brainlock when you ask them to tell you what kind of a novel it is.

Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of 14 books and over 150 short stories. If you enjoyed this article, take a look at his book Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror as a Way of Life.

Labels: fantasy, GAB, Gary A. Braunbeck, genre, horror, science fiction, writing

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The literary genre of fantasy, along with science fiction and horror, can itself be put under the larger genre umbrella of speculative fiction. Thus, the definitions in this article should be considered roughly descriptive rather than prescriptive. There's a lot of genre crossover in some of my favorite speculative fiction (for instance, Brown Girl in the Ring, which has been alternately classified as SF, fantasy, or horror, depending on the eye of the beholding reviewer), and the best writers don't confine their work to little genre boxes.

However, in general, fantasy stories take place in a reality in which magic and/or supernatural or mythical beings exist. Elves, dragons, and unicorns are of course what many people think of when one mentions fantasy. However, the possibilites go much farther than this; look at any of the works of Neil Gaiman. Tim Powers' modern-day novels of ghosts and Las Vegas Tarot games are also fantasy, as is (in my opinion) Hopkinson's aforementioned tale of a young voodoo priestess in a futuristic Toronto.

But the genre distinction is about more than the trappings of myth or the fantastic. Part of it is about how the speculative fiction elements are handled.

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, "Any science or technology which is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic." And some stories, most notably in space operas and science fantasies, do treat high technology as a type of "it's-just-there-and-it-works" magic; the focus of the tale is on the characters and their adventures, and science is never discussed. Conversely, some fantasies treat magic as an exacting technology; Michael Swanwick's science fiction often incorporates mythical elements, as does the work of some cyberpunk-era writers. So, the appearance of a god or a fairy in a story does not automatically make it fantasy; nor does staging an epic quest aboard space ships make for "true" science fiction.

Having said all that, fantasy literature has many sub-genres that characterize certain types of stories. The following are the classifications most widely recognized in the publishing industry.

• Epic Fantasy (aka High Fantasy) -- these are sweeping tales that involve struggles to control an entire kingdom or world. The stories call upon images and archetypes from mythology and typically involve huge battles between the forces of good and evil. Lord of the Rings is a classic example.
  
  
  • Historical Fantasy -- a type of epic in which important historical events are dramatized with fantasy elements, or in which a fantasy epic is written with a historical novel's grounding in real-world details. Stephen R. Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle is a historical fantasy that deals with the Arthurian legends, as is Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Much of Morgan Llywelyn's and Diana Paxon's work is historical fantasy.
    
    
  • Court Intrigue -- a fantasy epic that focuses on political intrigue, swashbuckling action and skullduggery along with magic. This is the fantasy equivalent of The Three Musketeers. Several of Lois McMaster Bujold's and George R. R. Martin's novels fall in this category.
    
    
  • Romantic Fantasy -- this is epic fantasy that focuses on a romance between the main characters; books in this vein are more often sold as romance novels. However, much of Mercedes Lackey's and Andre Norton's work is romantic fantasy.
    
    
• Contemporary Fantasy -- Magic or supernatural/mythical entities exist in the modern world. Much of Tim Powers' work (Last Call, for instance) is in this category, as is Eric S. Nylund's Dry Water.
  
  
  • Urban Fantasy -- This is contemporary fantasy that takes place in (and is not removable from) a city environment. Think of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, or China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Much of Charles DeLint's work also falls in this category.
    
    
  • Dark Fantasy -- Some argue that "dark fantasy" is merely "code" for horror fiction. I disagree; there is a lot of contemporary fantasy that has a distinctly dark or creepy feel without crossing over into out-and-out horror. I would further categorize much of Tim Powers' work as dark fantasy, since he makes liberal use of ghosts, vampires, and some fairly skin-crawling imagery in his work. Likewise, I consider much of Neil Gaiman's work, for instance his children's book Coraline, to be dark fantasy.
    
    
  • Slipstream/Magic Realism -- These are contemporary stories, often written in a highly literary or nonlinear style, that include some element of the fantastic. Such a story might read like it belongs in The New Yorker, but it's about a man whose wife is, under the crush of domestic duties, literally turning into a zombie. Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen is a fabulous collection of slipstream stories.
    
    
• Science Fantasy and -- These are tales that blend science fiction and fantasy, or which treat technology as magic, but which "read" mainly like fantasy due to their focus on characteradventure. (Tales of this sort that "read" like science fiction are often space operas.) Almost everything Roger Zelazny (Lord of Light) has written is some flavor of science fantasy. Such fantasies can be tales in which:
  
  
  1. none of the characters understands the fantastic technologies they use (for instance, the genetically-engineered, telepathic dragons in Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, or much of the "science fiction" Ray Bradbury has written)
     
     
  2. characters possess powerful psychic abilities that are analagous to magical powers (Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series)
     
     
  3. science fictional technology and magic both work (Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring and Fred Saberhagen's excellent, epic Empire of the East.).

  
  

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In the 1990s, dark fantasy became regarded as being "code" for horror. Why? Major publishers who flooded the market with awful, horrible, no-good novels in the 1980s to cash in on horror's popularity decided it was the genre's fault when readers were unwilling to buy mass-produced dreck.

But, the market watchers noted, fantasy sold just fine. So major publishers responded by deciding to market books with otherworldly elements as fantasies and books with nonsupernatural crime elements as thrillers; most anything else was rejected as unpublishable and left for the small press to peddle.

Both horror and dark fantasy explore the nature of evil and the darker sides of human nature and create a creepy or frightening atmosphere. Thus, when asked what the difference between dark fantasy and supernatural horror is, some people will say that there is no difference, or that the difference is that horror goes to greater extremes of sex, violence, and, well, horror, than dark fantasy.

To my mind, that's a bit of an oversimplification: there are some books and movies that are squarely fantasies that are also extremely gruesome and thus get sold as horror. While a broad gray area certainly exists between the two genres, there are a few ways to distinguish the two.

(The standard disclaimer applies: these are general characteristics I've noticed rather than "rules", and those trying to separate the fantasy from the horror should look at a work as a whole, rather than latching onto a single element and thinking something like "Aha! Everybody dies at the end, so this must be horror!")

Setting

Horror is about an intrusion of the frightening and unknown into a mundane, everyday world the reader is familiar with. It doesn't have to be a present-day world, though; you can easily set a horror novel in a historically-accurate past. The intrusion doesn't have to be supernatural (a deranged serial killer will do just fine) though it often is.

Dark fantasies have an established setting that is fantastic or otherworldly. Such a fantastic setting can range from the overt sword and sorcery of Michael Moorcock's Elric saga to the subtle magic of many of Ray Bradbury's tales to the action-comedy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you start out in a world where vampires or ghosts or magic are treated as a "normal" occurance by the characters, it's a fantasy world.

Book and movie series that start out as horror may then travel into dark fantasy genre because what was unknown and frightening in the first book -- say, a world crawling with zombies -- is established and known, though maybe only slightly less scary.

Characters

The protagonists of dark fantasies are often heroic. They choose to face the dangers presented to them in the book, story or movie in order to save others or to achieve some greater goal. They are often experienced with the occult or in possession of special skills, knowledge, or powers. Clive Barker's private investigator Harry D'Amour (portrayed by Scott Bakula in Lord of Illusions) is an example of such a heroic character operating in a horrific dark fantasy universe.

The protagonists of horror stories and movies are often survivors. They're regular everyday people who have been thrust unwillingly into a frightening, awful situation, and they may be hugely unprepared to deal with it. But deal with it they must, or they die in often spectacularly nasty ways. Kirsty, the young heroine of Barker's novella The Hellbound Heart is an example of horror's archetypical survivor character.

Plot

In many dark fantasies, there's an implied comfort to the reader: the rollercoaster will stay on its tracks. The characters the reader cares about will usually make it out alive in the end, and the day will be saved.

Readers don't get that comfort in many horror novel and movies; the cars might go off the tracks at any time. The protagonist may surive the zombie hordes only to be shot by a redneck deputy in the final scene. Everybody might die. It's horror.

Censorship Issues

Horror has a reputation for being "nasty" and has, in the past, been accused of promoting Satanism because it explores the occult. I've met writers with a prudish streak who steer clear of horror simply because they feel it would somehow give them a bad reputation.

There's a long-established assumption in some quarters that science fiction (and, by extension, traditional fantasy) is "juvenile" literature, and thus is mainly reading material for teenagers. So, many speculative fiction magazines have been reluctant to run stories with profanity or graphic descriptions of violence or sex. Much horror is squarely adults-only stuff that doesn't flinch from any subject or description.

It might seem, then, that horror is especially vulnerable to censorship due to pressure from groups who seek to squash objectionable content. Some feel that the dark fantasy label is mainly used to camouflage horror from conservative attack.

However, dark fantasy ultimately doesn't provide much cover; bear in mind what's happened to the Harry Potter books, which have been wildly popular (and increasingly dark) children's fantasy novels. A few fringe groups have been vocally protesting that Harry Potter promotes witchcraft, which therefore promotes Satanism. The protests wouldn't have even come up if not for the books' huge popularity, because magic is a staple in practically any fantasy novel I can think of, including Christian-influenced works like Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia

Thus, I submit that most horror/dark fantasy stays off the nutters' radar because it's not the kind of thing they'd ever seek out to read, and the press doesn't draw their attention to it; they never were part of the market for these books, and publishers listen to the market.

Protests, in fact, have been good for book sales in some cases, because people run out to buy a copy to see what all the fuss is about.

It's when groups can exert sufficient pressure on local stores and libraries to keep certain books off the shelves entirely that the trouble starts. But at least in the modern world, most adults can bypass local efforts at thought control and get their books online.

Labels: dark fantasy, genre, horror, writing

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"Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the western. It is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special shelf in libraries or bookstores. Horror is an emotion."
-- Douglas Winter, 1982

As a literary genre, "horror" can be loosely defined as any work that creates as atmosphere of fear or dread and provokes those reactions in the reader.

Many people associate horror with spooky tales of the supernatural: ghosts, demons, vampires and the like. Such stories are often the modern-day equivalent of old tales about the unknown dangers that lie in the shadows beyond the comforting light cast by the campfire.

But in this modern age, we have lit virtually the entire planet, and so the midnight world has lost much of its mystery and fear. So others insist they couldn't be frightened by a story unless it dealt with a scenario that could really happen: being stalked by a serial killer, being trapped in a basement with hungry rats, etc.

And still others insist they can't be spooked at all by a story ... but they can be plenty grossed out by one. These people associate horror fiction with the sense of revulsion that gory descriptions of decay and mayhem can create.

Thus, to a certain extent, horror is in the eye of the beholder; it can be quiet or over-the-top, fabulist, surreal, or mundane. Horror sends its tentacles into virtually every other genre: mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, romance, erotica, etc.

The basic qualities of a good horror tale are ideally the same as for any other story: a compelling plot and sympathetic and interesting characters. There should be plenty of atmosphere and suspense; if a good horror story can't make jaded ol' you want to sleep with the lights on, it should at least give you a delicious shiver now and then.

Horror became hugely popular in the 1980s due to the burgeoning popularity of authors such as Stephen King in the mid-to-late 70s. Publishing companies were eager to cash in on the trend, and by the late 80s, bookstore shelves were absolutely flooded with hastily-commissioned, poorly-written novels. The good stuff was lost in a sea of crap, and disenchanted readers naturally stopped looking to horror for entertainment.

The horror market crashed, and throughout the 1990s major publishers shied away from horror novels from beginning writers. King and other authors such as Anne Rice continued to sell very well, but the industry as a whole treated horror as a dead genre. Good novels continued to find publication, of course, but they were most often marketed as thrillers or as dark fantasy. Unestablished writers of works that could be marketed as nothing but horror had to seek publication in the small press.

The commercial prospects for horror started to improve in the late 1990s, but the re-emergence of horror as a popular genre has been slowed by real-life horrors such as the Columbine school shootings and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Horror is a bit like science fiction: it's popular as long as the real thing isn't readily available in the Real World. Just as many people lost interest in science fiction movies when the space program was going full steam, many people lose their taste for horror when the evening news is full of it.

A few subgenres

• Apocalyptic: horror stories that deal with the end of the world, or the threat of it if the protagonist fails. Stephen King's The Stand and Robert McCammon's Swan Song are examples.
  
  
• Splatterpunk: this term was coined by David J Schow at the World Fantasy Convention in Providence in the mid-80s to describe really extremely visceral graphic horror. Think of the literary equivalent of Dead Alive without the goofy humor. Some argue that this subgenre is outdated, and doesn't exist anymore because of the backlash against horror towards the end of the 80s. However, there are still plenty of people who want to see plenty of blood and guts and extreme violence in their stories.
  
  
• Supernatural: ghosts, goblins, exorcisms, vampires, zombies, and other elements of the occult populate supernatural horror stories. Parts of The Bible even fall under this umbrella, and the ghost story and haunted house story are well-established in mainstream literature.
  
  
• Gothic: creepy stories of romance and romantic suspense, set in a backdrop of cursed families, crumbling castles and decaying Southern plantations. Not to be confused with stories about goths.
  
  
• Lovecraftian: stories which are written in the style of H.P. Lovecraft or which use elements from the Cthulhu mythos he created. Look for references to Elder Gods, tentacled horrors, cults, and general doom for mankind.
  
  
• Quiet: the quiet horror story goes about its creepy business without much mayhem or blood. Such stories may very well be otherwise classed as mainstream stories; consider Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", for instance.
  
  
• Psychological: tales of disturbed human minds. These stories can deal with psychotic killers, but they can also warp the mind of the reader, leaving him or her wondering what's real and what isn't.
  
  
• Erotic: this type of horror fiction puts plenty of sex in the mix. The idea here is that the sex and desire are integral to the plot of the story, and the reader gets creeped out as much as he or she gets turned on. If you've seen the NC-17 version of David Cronenberg's movie Crash, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
  
  

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"Ian McKellen was really awesome in that movie, but he's never gonna win an Oscar for it because it's rubber mask theater."

"Rubber mask theater" is slang for any movie or television show in which some or all of the actors must emote through layers of latex or silicone prosthetics and heavy makeup. These productions are typically genre-based and deal with science fiction, fantasy, or horror topics. As such, the actors also often have to interact convincingly with puppets and react to CGI and special effects that they can't properly perceive as they work. Recent, classic examples of rubber mask theater include Farscape and the Lord of the Rings movies.

No matter how well written, acted, and directed such works are, their genre nature guarantees that some critics will never consider them to be "serious" works worthy of true recognition. (On the plus side, such works often do very, very well at the box office.)

Thus, actors who work in such films not only have to contend with the physical challenges and discomforts of working in makeup and appliances, but they have to deal with prejudice against them and their work. An actor has to turn in a really astounding performance in such movies and shows before he or she will be critically recognized with award nominations. Some performers, such as Andy Serkis as Gollum in the aforementioned The Two Towers, are overlooked despite the extraordinary nature of their work. Contrast this with movies such as The Green Mile which, while strongly (but subtly) genre-based, lack overt "rubber mask" trappings and garner plenty of critical respect for their actors.

It's all a little like the distinction between fantasy and magic realism in books. Straightforward modern fantasy is inevitably considered to be juvenile, commerical trash worth no serious notice by the Great American English Departments, whereas magic realism is often hailed as important literature.

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