Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: thoughtful
  • Music: Katy Perry, "California Gurls."

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

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.

seanan_mcguire

August 9 2010, 18:02:06 UTC 6 years ago

Awww.

Thank you. :)