Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire

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Adventures in life as an old-school horror girl.

So there's this publisher, Leisure Horror, that prints, well, horror. Lots of it. At least one new paperback release a month (probably substantially more, given the size of their catalog), spanning everything from the classic movie monsters to the modern splatterpunk. I love them. They're my literary popcorn, and I devour them the way my grandmother used to devour category Harlequin romances. It gets me funny looks on the train, since if you run down the line of afternoon commuters-with-books, you'll usually get "woman with romance, woman with romance, man with science fiction with big guns on the cover, me," and Leisure's graphic designers don't believe in being stingy with the arterial spray.

Last weekend at Spocon, in the dealer's hall, I was lucky enough to find a man with an entire box of Leisure Horror that I hadn't read yet. Yes, that's right: a box. I went through it to pick out duplicates, squealing as I did about how unrelentingly, gloriously terrible some of the books looked. Brooke, who was with me, initially thought I was rating them. Then she realized I was buying them, and made the best "Oh God why have you allowed this to happen?" face I've ever seen her make. I got twenty-one brand new horror novels for twenty bucks, and he threw in the box. Total win.

(My total win only increased later in the weekend, when trektone expressed delight over my horror novel haul. Now I have someplace to dump all the ones I don't want to keep! FUCK YEAH, SEAKING!)

I have since devoured three and a half books from the haul. The first one, Snow, was an incredible reminder of why I'm not actually a very good straight horror author. See, these things come out of the snow, and they kill people. They stick their creepy snow-creature arms into peoples' backs, and drive them around like disturbing meat-suit zombies. And then they eat you. Unless you can kill them first, in which case, hey, points to you. That's it. That's all. No science, no justification, no "oh my stars and garters, the Wendigo myth was based on reality"—there are snow monsters, and they want to make you die. I loved this book. If I'd written it, it would have been twice as long, involved a lot more why-porn, and probably lost a few entrails in favor of a) the scene at the top-secret government lab where we learn about the aliens, or b) the scene at the top-secret monster-hunters' library where we learn about the folklore behind the snow-creatures. It always makes me happy when I get a reminder of why I'm not the kind of horror author I sometimes secretly wish I were.

The second book, Dwellers, was the first thing I've ever picked up from Leisure Horror that could actually be adapted into a Disney movie. It would be a sad Disney movie, sure, and it would lose a lot of, again, entrails, but it would work. Dwellers is like Harry and the Hendersons crossed with The Thing. It's sad and poignant and tragic and funny and altogether wonderful, and I really didn't expect it. Again, there's very little "why" in the book. Horror doesn't need "why." Horror needs entrails, and horror gets them, but oh, wow, is this a fabulous book.

The two I've read since then haven't been even remotely as good, which is why I'm not identifying them by name. Altogether, it's been a fantastic reminder of why I read horror, and why I'm not so good at writing it in any format longer than a short story. Why is there a monster in the closet?

Because.
Tags: brooke, contemplation, good things, horror movies, reading things, so the marilyn, support local bookstores
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  • 43 comments

Deleted comment

Awwww.

Silly boy.

Deleted comment

...which would be an awesome, if very short, story.
now, dont go and read them all at once, leave something for later.. or, if you read too fast you will give yourself brain freeze..

enjoy the trashy reads!
I am. :)
Ah-ha! This is why I like Feed but not most traditional horror: I'm there for the why-porn.
Same!

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

I'm with you in the "why" camp. For me it's not a matter of suspension of disbelief as much as needing to get rid of the dis- and actually believe. And I think this is a good time for horror writers, especially if they fall into this "why" category.
Absolutely.
They stick their creepy snow-creature arms into peoples' backs, and drive them around like disturbing meat-suit zombies.
I wanna see the learner's permit process for teenage Wendigo. Do they have to put big L stickers on the backs of their heads? Stuff like that.
Well, there's that option, or the other one where this older Wendigo teacher has a class where he shows films like "Blood on the Snowtrail" and "Red Powder". And you never get to drive people around like, ahem, disturbing meat-suit zombies.

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

ladymondegreen

6 years ago

I'm pretty sure a lot of what I enjoy is the 'why'. I can just go with stuff, but if there's a GOOD why--it's a better book, more real, scarier/etc. (Now, mind you, if it's a BAD why, I'd just as soon not.)

Oh, and I re-read Feed between last night and today... and cried again this morning. You'd think on the third time through it wouldn't do that, but NOPE!... there it was again. (And I'm not that girl. ... That Mira Grant chicky, she must be doing something right.)
A bad "why" is definitely worse than no "why" at all. Fully agreed.
I'm currently attempting something that I call The Mad Pulper Project: 12 novellas of between 25K and 30K in length. Each one a different genre. When I've got a nice enough buffer to be confident of not missing a beat, I plan to release them through Amazon as e-books.

http://bit.ly/cvxFob

That link goes to my blog, which also doubles as a workblog.

I can completely understand how you feel in regards to horror. I'm the same way. I also tend to overthink these things, instead of just jumping into the fray and gloriously kill everything on the page.
Good luck?
See, that's why I love your books the way they are. They aren't just mindless horror, they have Real Science and Real Folklorestuff and are totally believable where most of the rest of the genre has me going "that won't work" and "it's just guts for the sake of it". I'm very glad that you write the sort of books you do, and if that takes reading the trash to keep you happy then go for it!

(Actually, there's two extremes of horror I dislike. At one end there's the blud'n'gutz type, which if anything just makes me feel ill, and then there's the psychological type which freaks me out because I'm not stable enough to take it. Yours is off in a different dimension...)
I'm very glad I write the stuff I do, too.
Leisure Horror - The Good, The Good-Bad, and The Sucky!
It's awesome.

Deleted comment

That makes sense. Some stories get worse when you start reaching for a "why" that doesn't really need to be there.
A couple of years ago, on Halloween, I went to an audio-theatre re-creation of CBC Radio Nightfall:The Stone Ship audioplay by Len Peterson adapted from William Hope Hodgson's short story. There was absolutely no "Why". Those who averted their eyes and ran away survived to tell the tale of those who did not.

On a seperate note:
if you run down the line of afternoon commuters-with-books, you'll usually get "woman with romance, woman with romance, man with science fiction with big guns on the cover, me,"
You realize it is just a matter of time till one of those other commuters is reading one of your books.


Yes, and then I will explode.
Or as Stephen King so memorably put it:

"Why do terrible things sometimes happen to the nicest people? ...Because they can."
Precisely.
About the explaining thing:

I tend to like both styles. Depends on the book. Usually, fear of the unknown is a big trigger for me, though, so no explanation is usually scarier. The nerd in me gets off on the science stuff, though. Either way, Snow sounds like it's right up my alley, along with Feed, for different reasons.
Exactly. I like them both, I just seem incapable of writing without the "why."
Then she realized I was buying them, and made the best "Oh God why have you allowed this to happen?" face I've ever seen her make.

Followed by warily eyeing the blood-spattered snow-monster-book that sat in the bathroom, WATCHING ME PEE, for the rest of the con. Distracting me from thinking about the spiky-urine-eels you told me about.

I do so love rooming with you. It's a horrifying adventure! <3 <3 <3
I'm tragically delicious!

muddlewait

August 7 2010, 05:23:15 UTC 6 years ago Edited:  August 7 2010, 05:33:16 UTC

What I need most as a reader of supernatural or speculative, or even horror, fiction is a sense that the author knows which elements of the world deviate from reality and that those elements remain consistent, even if I as a reader don’t know exactly what they are. This gives the characters a framework within which they can meaningfully act. If the rules keep getting broken, I start feeling more tricked by the story than invested in it. Freddy and Jason-type horror absolutely does not do it for me: the sense of being helpless before an incomprehensible force doesn’t terrify me, it makes me think of a bad minister exploiting his congregation’s religious faith to frighten it into submission, and that makes me angry, not scared.

I also prefer for a story’s precise deviations from reality, once their details are revealed, to serve as shorthand for, or commentary on, elements of the real world. Feed provides several good examples of this, even at a macro level: for one, Kellis-Amberlee is, at its heart (at least as far as we know right now), about good intentions gone wrong. Once I understand that, I can grant a lot of the scientific details as read, because I can easily make the metaphorical leap that a chain of misguided good intentions can lead to something really terribly awful, even if I don’t get exactly how a retrovirus does its thing.

Anyway, all that said, “why porn” is a great phrase. My most intense experiences of horror (I guess, strictly speaking, terror) involve fully understanding the precise details of an event currently underway and the ways in which it could have been, and maybe even still could be, avoided, but being forced to watch it unfold anyway. I guess it’s about experiencing fear from the viewpoint of tragedy, rather than shock.

And boy, does Feed deliver along those lines.
Awww.

Thank you. :)
I've belonged to the Leisure Horror Book Club for a long time now (and sad about the recent decision by Dorchester to move away from the mass market to trade/POD and e-book).

Can be a mixed bag; there's selections that have blown my socks off (looking at you, Brina Keene, Edward Lee!), and others that have me banging my head on the desk sobbing over how THAT got published while mine just keep getting the rejections.

I will, however, love them always no matter what simply for reprinting the late great Richard Laymon's stuff and making it available on this side of the pond :)

-- C.
Absolutely.

dragoness_e

August 8 2010, 19:26:02 UTC 6 years ago Edited:  August 8 2010, 19:29:13 UTC

I can't write horror as a writer unless I know the why. Why is something happening, why is this creature behaving this way?

The characters, of course, may have no clue. The readers, at some point, probably should, in such a way that they have an even better idea than the characters just how deep in trouble they are. Suspense is when you know the suave young man at the party is a hollow-backed, liver-eating demon, but the viewpoint character who is watching her best friend get led off in a dark corner by the young man has no clue, or perhaps a vague feeling that something is just slightly "off" about the man.

A lot of monsters have a simple "why": they are predators, and you're lunch. Fair enough--but that is still a motive and makes sense.

What I get put off by of late (though I thought they were cool stories when I was younger) are horror stories where the horror is delivered by the cheap trick of not telling the rest of the story. You know, the ones where the ending is just left hanging or implied?

(I exempt Arthur C. Clarke's "A Walk in the Dark" from this because the build-up is excellent).
I hate those. There are a few where it works, but for the most part, I need a conclusion, or you have failed me.
Why-porn is why I like Seanan McGuire horror even though I don't actually like horror. (I have an PHENOMENALLY overactive imagination. Goosebumps gives me nightmares. It's ridiculous.) I love worldbuilding so much that I will read horror for it, if it's well written. And yours certainly is. (Oh god I read the last Sparrow Hill Road story in the middle of the night I regretted that SO MUCH damnit Bobby Cross D:) This is also why I have never read and will never read a Stephen King novel - I do not like nightmares. (I read a Clive Barker once, because I was introduced to him via Abarat and I didn't realize he was HORROR. The Great And Secret Show freaked me the hell out, let me tell you. And of course I read the whole thing anyway because HAET CLIFFHANGERS. And then I didn't sleep.)

tl;dr WORLDBUILDING (and also fairy tale/well known story (ie Alice) retellings) is my FAVOURITEST THING. The two together are my OTP.
Awwww, yay.

<3
I definitely need the Why-porn. it's why I loved Feed so much. I do enjoy the random horror, don't get me wrong - but it doesn't really scare me or GRAB me the way stuff does when you start adding justifications to it. Making it reasonable makes it TERRIFYING.
That makes sense; I'm much the same way.