Redesign

The Society for the Advancement of Young Writers has a new website. Same old address, whole new look.

Check it out at http://sayw.kidlitszine.com

Sex, Thugs and Rock & Roll... Side note: Where are all the writers.

So Google Alerts let me know I showed up in some promo material for Todd Robinsons latest anthology: Thuglit Presents: Sex, Thugs and Rock & Roll. I'm stoked. I know the cover has been out for a while on the Thuglit site but this just confirms it's real. Can't wait to see it.



Here's some of the other riff raff hanging out in its pages. The collection includes stories from Patricia Abbott, Jonas Knutsson, Jedidiah Ayres, Justin Porter, Albert Tucher, Joe R. Landsdale, Scott Wolven, D.T. Kelly, Marcus Sakey, Steven M. Messner, Hugh Lessig, Gary Carson, Matthew Baldwin and Jason Starr.

On a totally different subject:

I've really been disappointed by my fellow writers. I sent out a call for writers to participate in the Society for the Advancement of Young Writers with my alumni association. These people are all writers. Some of their peers have already joined but not a one responded to the call. Is the potential one day workshop or two hour lecture such a horrible thing to donate to your community, more specifically to donate to a young writer who could use your inspiration? Where are you people? You can't tell me you're all so busy you can't give up some time for a child?

Next step is a letter writing campaign to as many writers' groups as I can find. I will not be denied of my goal of coverage for at least part of all 50 states.

A Statement of Need

This post and its message stem from several interviews with Elementary school teachers.

A Statement of Need

The legacy of the Bush administration can be seen in the scars left on elementary schools across the country. So much focus is placed on assessment that many lesson plans can only make room for “teaching to the test.” Adopted assessment tools like “Six Traits of Writing” successfully teach the basics but whole portions of writing education are being lost.

Creative thinking is quickly being replaced by critical thinking. Essays rule over poems or stories. Teachers are frustrated by the lack of support for such programs as creative writing. Kids’ imaginations are evaporating under the pressure to meet state and federal testing standards.

If you’re a writer, think back to the first piece of creative work you published. Many of you were still in grade school when you saw your first byline. Remember that feeling? The founder of the Society for the Advancement of Young Writers (SAYW), Lyman Feero, certainly does. “In the Forest,” one of his first poems, appeared in the pages of an anthology put out by the Young Author’s Society of Maine in 1979. That first acknowledgement in print in that anthology, has compelled him to write, publish magazines and become involved in the teaching of writing for the past 28 years.

SAYW seeks to give that level of inspiration to the young writers who are being abandoned by the need to meet standards. It’s not an easy journey due the pressures put on our teachers. Through SAYW’s programs, those pressures can be assuaged. Creative writing can return to the classroom and assessments will only improve. SAYW is developing a supplemental curriculum for creative writing that dovetails with current assessment writing programs. SAYW is also involved in a web publication for fourth, fifth and sixth graders (Kidlits Webzine) that will give children who wish to be published an opportunity to see that critical first byline every writer remembers.

Most importantly, SAYW is compiling a database of professional writers who are willing to help improve the schools in their local communities and perhaps their state. The database is intended to provide contact information so that schools and professional writers may join together in educational partnerships to inspire and support young writers. This contact information will serve as a free clearing house for teachers and administrators. The information required for this database is minimal as to preserve privacy.

This is an opportunity to make a difference to kids who may not have any contact with working writers otherwise. Often teachers are afraid to ask local writers for their time for workshops, lectures or simply a classroom visit. SAYW wants those teachers and administrators to feel comfortable contacting professional writers for those purposes.

Writers of all walks are needed. Poetry, nonfiction, fiction all need to be in the mix. Whether your genre is horror, romance, sonnet, haiku, spec articles or memoir, your experience as a writer is what matters most.

Please take the time to consider becoming a SAYW writer. There are no dues and your membership may lead to a child beginning a lifetime of creative fulfillment.

For more information on SAYW and its Professional Writer Outreach program please visit http://sayw.kidlitszine.com for further details on the philosophy behind this endeavor.

Thanks for reading this post.

My Graduate Thesis

This is one of the final copies of my MFA thesis. The final version can be found at the University of Southern Maine Library. If you wish to quote from this document, please be kind enough to reference me and this site.


A Horror Runs Through It: A Survey of Horror Genre Bleed in Support of the Literary Classification, Alternative Fiction.



I. Introduction and Definitions

When we think of the term genre fiction, groupings such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, westerns, mystery and thriller spring to mind. Once viable in their shelf space and marketing strategies within the big chain booksellers, they are proving to be unreliable in their viability as independent genres. When we look deeper into the content of the novels that are published under these headings, we begin to see curiosities taking place: mystery romances, dark fantasy, science fiction westerns. Bleed between genres in modern genre fiction is so prevalent that any one genre can be employed to aid in the telling of a tale in its sister genres. Science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin states in an essay on genre, “Much of the best fiction written doesn’t fit in the genres anymore, but combines, crosses, miscegenates, transgresses, and reinvents them.” (Fowler 62) The individual genres have started to decay; some of them are no longer officially recognized in marketing schemes by publishing houses or bookstores. It is time for a new marketable classification of genre fiction to move to the forefront to bolster the genres and give credibility to the crossgenre work that is being produced by today’s writers. A category such as Alternative Literature or Alternative Fiction allows for broad coverage of the genres and any new genres that might crop up out of the crossgenre work of today.
As with the music industry, the term alternative in this case would include all the genres plus any new genre that may arise from it. If we consider literature based on realism the mainstream, any literature that deviates from the mainstream is alternative by its very nature. What we are seeing in today’s genre fiction is a proliferation of new forms that cannot be completely defined by any existing genre. Next to impossible to place in the rigid genre structures, these titles need a marketing device such as alternative fiction to flourish.
The recognition that new marketing strategies are needed is not new. Within science fiction an attempt was made to broaden the scope. The creation of the phrase “speculative fiction” is attributed to the renowned science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, who felt that the definition of science fiction was too narrow to encompass his works, which at the time contained very little science in their pages. Writer Harlan Ellison, whose stories contain science fiction elements, has also championed the phrase “speculative fiction,” because the term science fiction is too restrictive in reference to his work. The need to develop a new name for the blending of elements within the science fiction genre led theses authors to create a classification of literature that was more inclusive. The concept of “speculative fiction” was never fully adopted by the literary world. The pigeonholing of Heinlein’s and Ellison’s writing led to a frustration with convention that now applies to all genres within popular fiction.
For ease of furthering this discussion, the scope of this paper will be limited to one genre, horror, and its influence across genres. Adopting a new classification for genre fiction is necessary for marketing but also for the literary understanding of modern texts. The literary barriers between the popular fiction genres have started to blur. The horror genre is considered a mainstay of genre fiction yet it has spread its tendrils out into its sister genres. Before we proceed, a working definition of genre fiction is needed. According to Wickipedia, an online database, genre fiction is defined and described as:

Genre fiction is a term for fictional works (novels, short stories) written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre in order to appeal to the fans of that genre. In contemporary fiction-publishing, genre is an elastic term used to group works sharing similarities of character, theme, and setting—such as mystery, romance, or horror—that have been proven to appeal to particular groups of readers. Genres continuously evolve, divide, and combine as readers' tastes change and writers search for fresh ways to tell stories. (Genre Fiction, Wikipedia Staff)

Using this definition as a starting point, what distinctly makes a piece genre fiction? Unlike realism, genre fiction creates worlds that can not exist. “Writers of Speculative Fiction, through the creation of unknown worlds or the recreation of events, etc. are able to place men, women and children against powerful circumstances that bring out the best (and the worst) of human characteristics.” (Shade) This world building allows the genre writers to examine social and political themes that may not be accessible through realistic means. Genre fiction serves as a sort of laboratory to test the human condition. What is the primary vehicle of this exploration?
It starts with one question, “What if?” It can be argued that all fiction revolves around this question, but the “What if?” of genre fiction deals with the fantastic and unexpected. What if a woman were to meet a man who whisked her away on his yacht for a week of treasure hunting and passionate romance? What if a rabid dog were to trap a woman and her son in her car? What if a moon colony were to rebel? What if the gunslinger decided to hang up his guns just before the worst gang in the southwest rolled into town? The fantastic or unlikely are staples of genre fiction.
If we look at popular or genre fiction as a whole we start to see that the definitions of these individual genres revolve around lists of elements. If you plug element A, B and C together you get science fiction; D, E and F equals romance and etc. It is this equational approach that led publishing houses to turn the popular fiction genres into formulaic marketing fodder. Readerships knew that if there was an H on the spine of the book all the elements of a horror story would be there. The market was flooded with carbon copy plotlines and plot elements. Many of today’s genre writers are coming up with their own equations that take elements from all genres to create fictive forms that are unique and undefined. The new writers are merely agreeing with what Heinlein and Ellison were saying all along. The individual genres as currently defined are too limiting. It has been accepted for decades, even within academic circles, that the popular fiction genres have interchangeable parts. Popular fiction instructor Karen M. Hubert, in her 1970’s textbook on writing, Teaching and Writing Popular Fiction, stated: “Very few stories stay religiously within the confines of their genres. More often one meets such compounds as Horror-Adventure, Mystery-Romance, Adventure-Romance, Mystery-Horror and so on.” (24) This crossing of elements occurs naturally, as many angles are needed to approach the sweeping “What if?” of genre fiction.
Though we are focusing on horror fiction, the focus could just as easily have been any of the other genres. Many novels bridge the gaps between genres to successfully answer their “What if?” through the use of multiple genre elements. The age of genre separation is coming to an end. Blurring of the lines between genres is a natural evolution away from the formula fiction of the marketing glut to a more literary approach to the genres. For better or worse, genre fiction has become synonymous with cookie cutter plots and “bad” writing. The readership of genre fiction eventually tire of the same stories repackaged with a different cover. Sales hit a plateau and started to decline because marginal writers were rewarded in the genre boom leaving good writers to seek greener pastures in more literary writing or by hiding their craft under the façade of a different genre. Publishing houses are realizing that the individual genres cannot support themselves.

Chain bookstores have for the most part now done
away with horror sections, allowing writers to stand
on the strength of their prose instead of how their
work is labeled. Major New York publishers are
releasing books about witches and gargoyles and ghosts
with the word horror notably absent from their spines. Recent entries onto the New York Times bestseller
lists have included two separate novels about
nanotechnology run amuck, the story of a brutally
murdered young girl watching her family's life unfold
in the aftermath of her demise, the latest in a long
series about the end of the world and the coming of the antichrist, and, of course, the latest paperback
collection from Stephen King. Not surprisingly, none
of these books bear the horror label, yet every one
of them fit the definition of a horror novel.(HWA Staff)

As the publishing industry moves away from marketing fiction by genre, we will see an increase in the number of books that utilize techniques of the genres freely, mixing and matching their traits to create literature that is highly innovative and marketable as what they are, alternative fictions.
Horror has some unique qualities that keep it teetering on the edge of not being a genre at all. Douglas Winter in his anthology, Prime Evil, states: "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." (qtd. from Tem) Of all the genres, romance is the closest to sharing that same precarious emotional ledge as horror. Whereas science fiction is defined by the science elements in its text, mystery by the plot devices that create its puzzles, westerns by their locale and fantasy by its fantastical elements, horror and romance are the only two that tie to the two deepest human emotions, fear and love.
Horror in and of itself has floundered as a genre. Its writers adapted, shifting their prose to more literary styles. Writers have used horror elements to tell stories in all of the genres in hopes to revitalize the craft. “As the horror boom of the eighties turned into the drought of the nineties, horror went underground. In order to save itself, it became a chameleon, masquerading as other genres, hiding itself in other styles. And therein lay its salvation.” (HWA Staff) Horror became less about a genre and more about elements of storytelling that can be employed to tell a tale in any classification of literature, genre or realist. “Horror has once again become primarily about emotion. It is once again writing that delves deep inside and forces us to confront who we are, to examine what we are afraid of, and to wonder what lies ahead down the road of life.” (HWA Staff) It has found this new life in the pages of romance, western, science fiction, mystery and fantasy novels alike.
Before the marketing craze of the eighties, genres crossed on a regular basis. There are thousands of novels that defy definition because of the thorough mixing of genre elements. Their history stretches back before the creations of the genres themselves. As we explore each genre and how horror has woven its thread through their texts, we will examine the history of horror’s involvement within each genre and how it is currently influencing modern works. First, a set of elements of horror fiction must clearly be defined. H. P. Lovecraft sums up these elements in the introduction to his text, Supernatural Horror in Literature.

A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable
dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and
there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness
and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a malign
and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed
laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. (Lovecraft, qtd. from Thin, iv)

Elizabeth Barrett, a self-described speculative fiction writer, breaks this statement down further in her article, Elements of Aversion: What Makes Horror Horrifying? She asserts that horror garners its terrifying nature from “Elements of Absence and Elements of Presence:

Elements of Absence…
The Unknown…
The Unexpected…
The Unbelievable…
The Unseen…
The Unconscious…
The Unstoppable….
Elements of Presence…
Helplessness…
Urgency…
Pressure…
Intensity…
Rhythm ‘pacing’…
Release… (Fiction Factor)

Essentially the Elements of Absence are what Lovecraft refers to as “contact with unknown spheres and powers.”(Lovecraft, qtd. from Thin, iv) The Elements of Presence are the characters’ and our own emotional responses to those unknowns. Intensity and Rhythm are excluded as they refer specifically to pacing in a story and do not fully apply to this analysis. Both Lovecraft and Barrett strike upon the key concepts that not only define the art of horror writing but define the emotion of horror as well. It is this strength of internal emotional connection that allows writers to use its elements so freely in other genres.
If the elements of horror can be easily applied to other genres, those genres with their own clearly defined elements can be adapted with equal ease. By demonstrating the means in which horror swaps its parts, we’ll also see the inverse is true.

II. Crossing Over: Horror Influences in the Genres.

The genres to be presented are in no particular order of importance to the issue of crossover. All five genres presented have swapped components with each other over the course of their literary histories. The mere fact that there is a history of crossover suggests that the genres have always served as marketing tools that pointed readers in a general direction of interest. Essentially the genres served as signposts created by the publishing houses and critics to address the popularity of stories that used common elements in their telling. Each genre grew from a readership that made purchases based on a specific set of values and by writers feeding the genre by either adapting their works to fit the mold or writing what they wished and then marketing their product to a publisher that was publishing the genre closest suited to the story. With genre crossover so prevalent in the market, it is becoming exceedingly difficult for stories to be pigeonholed in any one genre. There is the necessity for a tier that can serve as an umbrella for these cross-genre works so they are not forced into genre classification that truly do not match their intent.
Genres are born and destroyed through evolution amongst the readership. Lelsie Kurke in The Traffic of Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy defines genre as "the set of audience expectations, which shapes and constrains each individual composition"(1). Publishers put out product that the reader wishes to read. Writers create stories that publishers will buy. What we are experiencing now is another evolutionary shift driven by a readership hungry for quality writing and a writers’ rebellion where formula plotlines are being abandoned to develop their own original stories. We will see in the course of the following survey that genres sprout and grow from other genres until they have reached a popularity that creates a self-supporting synergy. Many of today’s modern genres owe their beginnings to common ancestors.
We will start with Romance since it holds a unique kinship with the horror genre.

Romance

At first glance horror and romance seem to be incongruous. When we think of the romance novel, publishing houses like Harlequin Romance or authors like Danielle Steele are first to come to mind. Books with flowers, bare-chested men and buxom beauties emblazoned on their covers are what we expect. The marketing machine has burned this image of romance into our collective popular culture. So much so that we have forgotten that Romance and Horror have the same ancestry, the gothic novel.
From the early eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, the gothic novel was in its prime. Though many will argue the age continued well into the early twentieth century, authors such as Anne Radcliffe penned the representative works of the genre much earlier. The romance contained within these texts followed a simple formula. “Centering on courtship hindered by both interior and exterior obstacles, the romance ends, traditionally and unexceptionally with marriage.” (Richter 152) Where horror enters the picture is under the guise of the “exterior obstacle.” Many of the gothic novels had supernatural elements. The specters and ghosts of the supernatural world were often puzzles that needed to be solved. They were allegorical obstacles that represented some hidden secret that could either destroy or set free the lovers.
This is demonstrated in the works of British novelist Anne Radcliffe, (1763-1823) which were arguably the most influential gothic novels of the period. Her works contained elements of the supernatural that had been previously untouched. She delved deeply into terror and made it chic. Her consummate work, Mysteries of Udolpho, published in 1794, pits a young Frenchwoman, Emily, against a supernatural force that stems from her childhood, maybe even from her birth itself. With the help of her lover, Valacourt, they unravel the mystery and are able to move ahead with their lives.
This theme of ghost or supernatural being as a roadblock to romantic bliss would be played out in America by Edgar Allen Poe who penned many stories about the inability of the living to let go of the dead. Perhaps, the most poignant of these is “Eleonora.” The first person narrator recounts how he fell in love with his beautiful cousin in a valley of magic and color. He vowed to always remain faithful to her, even after her death. He remained true even though he met a woman with which he fell madly in love. Plagued by guilt, he could not be happy until the spirit of his wife released him from his vow, allowing him to pursue his new love.
The gothic novel was the perfect marriage of horror and romance. All of the aspects of love and relationship were there, and the unknown and the unseen lurked in the shadows. When the Bronte sisters began writing, they took an approach to the gothic novel, which more closely resembles the modern romance novel. The romance elements were emphasized in such works as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, making them the grandmothers of all romances to come. As a response, the supernatural tale became an offshoot, as other writers expanded on the forgotten gothic elements cast off by the Brontes.
From having this commingled beginning to being splintered apart by divergent approaches to the genre and by reader expectations, the horror and romance genres have always held hands. The gothic romance is still alive. All we have to do is look at the works of Anne Rice. Though classified a horror writer, Anne Rice got her start penning in a subgenre of romance, erotica. As both Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure, she has five erotica books in print. One could argue that all of Anne Rice’s books are about romance. The intense love of the vampire Lestat for his creator, Marius, is merely one example. More notably, The Witching Hour could be deemed a gothic romance. “…Rice’s Mayfair witches are, for the most part, desperately unhappy, longing for love and acceptance but thwarted at every turn by the evil spirit, Lasher.” (Smith 47) The Witching Hour is a faithful representation of the supernatural as obstacle to love and happiness. However, this example points more towards how romance invades horror.
Many new romance writers are bringing elements of the horror genre into their work. The vampire has always been a favorite romantic character and has held court in romance fiction for almost two centuries. The timeless allure of an immortal blood sucking Casanova has led to romance novels like Crimson Dreams, by Margaret L. Carter; Sex, Lies and Vampires, by Katie Macalister; Waltz with a Vampire, by Maggie MacKeever and How to Marry a Millionaire Vampire, by Kerrelyn Sparks. Because the vampire is well suited to romance, vampire love stories have become their own private subgenre of romance.
There is no better example of how horror has invaded romance than in the popular romantic Dark Hunter series by Sherrilyn Kenyon. With eleven titles in the series already on the shelf with three more to be released by mid 2006, Kenyon has established a formula for romance and spices it up with a good dose of horror and humor. The essential premise to the Dark Hunter novels is taking nearly immortal half-gods, lycanthropes, demons and vampires and turning them into sympathetic, emotionally challenged lovers. Though some may refer to these novels as “horror light,” the books do carry a good dose of horror and supernatural elements. Even with so many titles and basic formulaic romance plotlines, the Dark Hunter series stays fresh. In her book Night Play, the eighth release in the series, Kenyon asks the question, “Can a gorgeous werewolf with magical powers and an overweight boutique owner with a broken heart have a future together?” (Publishers Weekly) The story is about a werewolf, Vane, who is primarily alone in the world until by chance he meets a woman, Bride, who is his destined lover. They must overcome the obstacles that face them while discovering what it means to be in love. Some of the scenes with Vane’s father are quite horrific and really solidify the fact that this is a crossover or blended novel.
Romance is about the unknown and the possibilities that the future holds for its lovers. A primary tenet of the horror genre is the unknown. The two genres will never stray too far apart because of that shared trait. The fear that comes with being in love is part of what makes the emotion so appealing. The horror at losing someone you love is probably one of the greatest fears anyone can face. Love is fear. Love is timeless.

Mystery

The mystery genre is beholden to the common ancestor that it shares with horror and romance. Often referred to as a subgenre of horror, mystery first found its way into literature in the form of the gothic novel. Many of the gothic novels had at its core an investigation into the nature of the supernatural events that are occurring. In many cases this discovery had to occur before the main characters could continue on with their lives and their relationships. The use of mysterious events in the plot that would need to be explained by the end became a mainstay of the gothic novel.
Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho was one of the most influential gothic novels of its period with its influence reaching out to affect the works of the Marquis de Sade and Edgar Allen Poe. The story was rife with mysteries both in the castle Udolpho and in Chateau Le Blanc. Both natural and supernatural mysteries served as a wedge between Emily and her love, Valacourt. The mysteries had to be solved for the two of them to be together. The basic premise of the gothic mystery was to ask the reader to guess who or what was behind the mysterious events. In a sense it was the prototype for the modern whodunit. These plot elements of mysterious events would inspire Poe to create the more modern approach to investigation that we see in today’s mystery fiction.
Unlike his predecessors, Poe decided that the mystery needed to be expanded beyond merely the “who or what” of the earlier gothic novels to also include the “how.” Through this deeper investigation of the crime, Poe brought the reader closer to the action, sometimes even into the mind of the criminal or in the same room as the crime was being committed. Poe’s primary detective was a man named Prefect C. Auguste Dupin of the Parisian Police. Detective Dupin used the powers of reasoning and logic to work his way through a crime or a mystery. In his masterful work “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe maintains a high level of suspense as Dupin slowly reveals that an ape perpetrated the horrendous crimes. The story takes the reader and the characters within the room with Dupin to the crime scene, allowing them to relive the crime vicariously through the detective’s reasoning.
The father of modern psychiatry, Carl Jung, states, “…the detective story makes it possible to experience without danger, all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be suppressed in a humanitarian ordering of society.” (qtd. from BBC TV) Poe realized that there was no greater terror than being in the mind of a criminal or understanding for yourself the crime that was committed. It makes the experience very real without having to live through the crime itself.
“Whodunit” mysteries still comprise a fair amount of the titles on the shelves, but crime, murder mysteries and thrillers have taken a firm foothold in the genre. By the very nature of the crime or murder mystery, suspense and horror are natural bedfellows. Few of us can think of anything more terrifying than being stalked by a killer or hearing the details of their horrendous crimes. The writers of today’s mysteries are using horror elements as their building blocks to leave us breathless as we join their investigator for the hunt.
The mystery-horror novels by Thomas Harris are precisely about the hunt. Starting with Red Dragon, moving on to Silence of the Lambs and concluding for now with Hannibal, Harris takes us on horrific journeys into the minds of murderers and madmen while establishing a close hunter-hunted, antagonist-protagonist relationship. What Harris does masterfully is to create a thriller/mystery that employs revealing the unknown as its core center to produce horrific results. Agent Will Graham in Red Dragon is on the hunt for a serial killer named the Tooth Fairy. As an FBI profiler he must get inside the head of the killer to understand why he perpetrates these horrible crimes. Will must first visit a particularly vicious serial killer who he collared, Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter. Harris uses Lecter as a doorway into the mind of the criminally insane. With each progressing novel, Harris reveals more of Hannibal himself. In the latter two books the investigator is Agent Clarice Starling. She is introduced to Lecter in Silence of the Lambs as part of an attempt to get inside the mind of “Buffalo Bill,” the serial killer she is hunting. Clarice is eventually wooed by Lecter’s charms and falls in love with him in the final novel Hannibal. Harris emphasizes the horror and allure of the criminal mind and how the difference between hunter and hunted is often who is on the other side of the gun. The gruesome horror elements in these novels give the books a resounding creepiness that sticks with their readers. One only needs to look at the movies that were spawned from these books to see that they wear the horror branding on their DVD spines. Harris melds elements of mystery, thriller and horror with these books.
Harris is but one of the many mystery novelists employing elements of horror in their work. Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island; Tom Chaney’s, The Wind Walker; S.A. Gordon’s Faces of Doom; Donn Cortes’s The Closer and John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer are shining examples of how today’s mystery novels are blurring the genre barriers.

Western

The western, much like romance and mystery, owes a lot to the gothic novel for its existence. Stemming from the tradition of the American gothic with writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce, the western novel addressed the fears of easterners that wanted to go west but were afraid of what they’d find there. Though many of the stories were full of cautious optimism, such as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and Mark Twain’s Roughing It, many painted the picture of a terrifying place laced with natural dangers and wild savages. Some of the focus on such darker themes can be placed on earlier writing that became very popular in England and served as a benchmark for the western novel. William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation and Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative brought the struggles of settlers home to Europe where those who had stayed behind could live vicariously through the lives of those who had made the journey. Rowlandson’s novel “…established a durable literary genre still popular today, the so-called ’captivity narrative’ which details the harrowing experiences of white captives among fiendish Native Americans.” (Folsom)
The frontier and its unknowns are prime fodder for western and frontier writers to delve into the darker side of the expansionist movement. The two primary plots come into play, man vs. nature and man vs. man. The latter is a story rich with savage natives and wild desperadoes where there is danger in every town and every watering hole. As in Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative, readers fear the savages will steal the women and do unspeakable things to them. To some extent the danger is controllable if there are enough men and guns to keep the criminals and the savages at bay. The greater horror comes at the hands of nature where the wilderness is larger than man no matter how many guns are involved. Jack London, in his tale To Build a Fire, shows that the hubris of man will be punished by nature every time. A traveler in the Alaskan gold rush is warned that the temperature outside was going to become dangerous, but instead of listening to the warning of the wizened trader, the man sets off to meet his companions. The temperature drops. The man falls in the water. He attempts to build a fire. Unfortunately, he builds it beneath a snow-laden tree. The snow melts and falls into his fire, extinguishing it. The man freezes to death. Nature wins the battle against man.
There is, however, another influence that creates a sense of foreboding when it comes to the wilderness. “While inability to control or use wilderness was the basic factor in man’s hostility, the terror of the wild had other roots as well. One was the tendency of the folk traditions of many cultures to associate wilderness with the supernatural and monstrous.” (Roderick, 10-11) For many, something as dangerous as the unknown depths of the forest must have some spiritual or supernatural quality to it. Men becoming lost in its trees and animals that outsmarted even the cleverest hunter were surely spawn of an evil beyond our comprehension. The wilderness is a great unknown, even in our technological society. The horror tales of the frontier served as messages to remind us that man is fallible and nature is a constant.
The history of the west was also filled with many horrific battles with Native American tribes and atrocities that were perpetrated against nearly defenseless people. The mere facts behind the western expansion leave a great deal of food for western horror. “The ghosts of the gothic westerns are overt facts of life in the Southwest. We dig up their potsherds while tilling our gardens, stumble over grinding stone metates while clearing our campsites, and contend with their empty cities looking down on us from cliffs when we sightsee and, sometimes, when we dream.” (Mogen 57) The hole in morality left behind by some of the ethnic cleansing leaves a dark influence in the modern western.
Books like Cormac Mccarthy’s tale of the desert southwest in the 1850s, Blood Meridian, Joe R. Lansdale’s classic western zombie novel, Dead in the West and Graham Masterton’s tale of a medicine man who gets his revenge, The Manitou, are all prime examples of how easily elements of the horror genre can be fused into tales of the old or modern west. The most popular modern western series to employ elements of horror is the Trailsman novels by Jon Sharpe. Western hero Skye Fargo is faced with many new adventures of violence and terror as he aids in the westward expansions. The series, consisting of over two hundred seventy five novels, is comprised of native massacres, out of control outlaws, cannibal mountain men, kidnappings and abducted women.
The western horror tale also finds a great deal of attention in the form of the short story. The tall tale is one of the mainstays of the western and the brevity of the tall tale lends itself well to the short story. Anthologies such as Frank McSherry’s Western Ghosts, Joe R. Lansdale and Pat LoBrutto’s Razored Saddles and Richard Laymon’s Skull of Spurs give writers of the western horror crossgenre wonderful markets to peddle their wares. The tall tale with its world of the fantastic will always lend itself well to the blending of horror and western elements.

Fantasy

Fantasy and horror share a special bond when it comes to crossgenre writing. Dark fantasy is commonly accepted as a subcategory of both genres. One can define dark fantasy as, “…stories that focus on elements usually found in the horror genre but which take place in a setting more like sword and sorcery or high fantasy. It may or may not take place in its own fantasy world.” (Dark Fantasy, Wikipedia Staff) There is no clearly defined subgenre as far as marketing is concerned, so dark fantasy titles are placed in horror or fantasy, depending on the arbitrary determination of a story’s leanings by the editor or publisher. As a general guideline, “Dark fantasy may be used as a synonym for supernatural horror, to distinguish horror stories that contain elements of the supernatural from those that do not.” (Fantasy, Wikipedia Staff) Ghosts in the hallway of an old mansion, the dead becoming reanimated or vampires terrorizing a village would be described as dark fantasy, supernatural horror, or horror fantasy, whereas a story about a cannibal is purely horror. Dark fantasy and contemporary fantasy have a considerable amount of overlap as many fantasy stories employ elements of the supernatural in their magics.
We can see that dark fantasy then holds many similarities to the gothic novel which revolved around supernatural events. Contemporary dark fantasy is an offshoot of the supernatural tale championed by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and H. P. Lovecraft. The dark magic of fairy kingdoms and haunted forests of Middle Earth were prime places for ghosts and demons to abound. By drawing in the elements of the supernatural into their works, fantasy writers were able to create worlds that were even more unfamiliar and unknown than ever before. There was more at play, however, than just a way to create new worlds. Dark fantasy became a way of breaking traditions and setting the genre on its head.
Micheal Moorcock’s Elric series would deviate from the traditional cliches of Tolkein’s Middle Earth Mythos and Robert E. Howard’s mythic hero, Conan. Elric is a flawed hero, almost an antihero.

Instead of a mighty thewed barbarian warrior who
fights his way from obscurity to achieve fame and
power, Elric is a frail, sickly albino, a highly
educated and cultured emperor who abandons his throne. Whereas the conventional fantasy hero rescues fair
maidens from evil wizards, and defends his country
from invaders, Elric (inadvertently) slays his true
love, is himself a powerful wizard, in league with the Chaos Lord Arioch, and leads a successful invasion
against his homeland of Melniboné. He is a complex character, prone to self-loathing, brooding and despair, compelled to adventure by his own dark fate rather
than a desire for riches or glory. (Elric, Wikipedia Staff)

The dark world that Moorcock creates is full of violence, drugs and broken people. Elric must work his way through his cursed life, his dark magic a tool of destruction and salvation. This approach to the epic hero set Moorcock apart as a master of dark fantasy and helped solidify the subgenre.
Today’s dark fantasy plays on themes of immortality, evil and black magic. No modern writer combines these elements better than China Mieville. His novels Perdido Street Station and The Scar take place on the world of Bas-Lag, which is populated by very bizarre and alienesque races. Though many would say that these two novels are in the subgenre of science-fantasy, the horror elements within these two novels far outweigh the science. Perdido Street Station features the creation and escape of a monster of a Lovecraftian nature. So vicious is the attack of the monster, the terror it wreaks on the people of Bas-Lag gives the reader a sense of claustrophobia and inevitable demise. The Scar takes place shortly after the events of Perdido Street Station. The central setting is an island populated by gruesome vampire-like beings. Horror elements abound in both of these critically acclaimed novels.
Novels like Kerry Hawkins’ Blood Legacy, Kim Harrisons’ Dead Witch Walking, T. G. Browning’s Red Tide and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Dark of the Sun continue in the tradition of the dark fantasy, incorporating elements of the supernatural with the mystical and magical worlds of fantasy. It is no wonder dark fantasy has set itself apart from its parent genres.

Science Fiction

The genres of science fiction and horror have been inseparable since their inception. It can be argued that there is one consummate work that sets the stage for the modern horror and science fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. When Ms. Shelley set about writing a ghost story as a challenge from Lord Byron, she intended to write a horror story. “I busied myself to think of a story, – a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One, which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror” (Shelley 8) Undoubtedly, her monster must have stricken fear in her nineteenth century readers as the idea still does today, but unwittingly what scared Shelley the most was scientists who “…endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” (Shelley 9) She feared that science could exceed its bounds and disaster would ensue. Even though she set out to create a new form of supernatural gothic novel, which she accomplished, she inadvertently created the guidelines that would form the modern science fiction novel.
The terror she invokes rides solely on the fear of man’s inability to reign in his experiments. The arrogance of humanity was a dangerous thing when wielded by scientists. Her novel is a sober look at “…the human condition in its portrayal of a scientist who oversteps the bounds of conscience, and of a monster brought to life in an alien world, ever more desperately attempting to escape the torture of his solitude.” (Shelley, Back Cover) The strong focus on science themes and the fear of what we will discover ties directly into the “unknown” element of the horror genre. “Much Science-Fiction narrative… is constructed on the principle of recurring assimilation of the unknown into the known and resulting recurrent redefinition of these terms.”(Clareson 4) The unknown, as it is revealed, becomes familiar; however, in the case of Frankenstein’s monster, the familiar became a representation of humanity where we see all of our failings within the crushed spirit of a being completely foreign to us.
This introduction of the man-created monster would be a significant influence upon the science fiction of H.G. Wells, specifically in his novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Once again science has overstepped its bounds to tame the animal and make it more human. Science is playing God and the horror of this ill-conceived effort runs throughout the novel. The beast becomes a symbol of humanity. Wells creates a “murky borderland where human nature and animal nature merge. This, then is the achievement of the… text: that it momentarily reconstitutes within us the dark and potent portion of our nature – that part that is Ape as well as Angel… the antagonist is… a visual metaphor for our divided condition.” (Foust 452) The horror of realizing that we are the monsters and the monsters are us, propelled the novels Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau.
This theme of science overstepping its reach and creating monsters that we can’t control has remained a common element in modern science fiction and horror. Bruce Balfour’s Prometheus Road, a wonderful science fiction-horror cross, is a prime example of how man creates monsters beyond their control with the creation of beings, half-man, half-machine, that are governed by artificial intelligences that are revered as gods.
The monster allows for an easy crossover between science fiction and horror, but the author that is doing possibly the best multigenre in science fiction is Richard K. Morgan, with his novels Altered Carbon and Broken Angel. Set in a far future world, Altered Carbon can only be described as science fiction, horror and hard-boiled noir. In this novel, the horror stems from the fact that a person’s consciousness could be hijacked and inserted into another body. The investigation that ensues is a gritty exploration through a dark city. Not just dark as in lacking light, but dark on the level of the crushed human spirit. In Broken Angel we visit the same corporate strangled world, only now a planetary revolution is underway. The novel could be described as a military science fiction horror novel, where the horror of war and disaster strikes home. Concentration camps, genocide and deception are par for the course as the anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs, first seen in Altered Carbon, fights for his survival and for his own personal gain. Both of these novels blur boundaries so thoroughly that one is never quite sure which genre these books truly are. Multigenre work is entering the market, and the science fiction genre is no more immune to it than any of the other genres.

III. Conclusion

It is clear to see that the formulaic genres of yore are in a massive state of decay. The writers of today’s genre fiction are redefining the genres on a novel-by-novel basis. Granted the labeling of fictions by genre was an easy marketing tool to assist readers in identifying the kind of writing in which they were interested. It allowed a boon where more writers were published and a glut of stories hit the shelves brandishing classification on their spines that spoon-fed the masses. However, this marketing tool has also led to the implosions of many genres due to the need to be sure every book was the same with identical plot elements and formulas that yielded the same basic content with new holographic covers.

As horror became a commercial entity, a marketing
niche, some of the books published still possessed
enough depth and validity for aficionados to appreciate
the difference. After all, most of them had done the
basic coursework. But during horror's boom years (particularly in the 1980s) much published horror was
not written as literature. Instead, it was produced to
feed market demand, by publishing entities reluctant to reward originality, who preferred their product
definable and formulaic. Most readers… saw horror as a tacky little subgenre popular primarily with teenagers,
and ineligible for consideration as literature, or for
that matter, "serious" reading. And, truth be told, probably of what was published as horror did not deserve
to be called anything other than trash. (Guran)

The overall process genre marketing simplifies the genres to the point where the creative endeavors of the quality authors of these books are swept under by a flood of novels by lesser writers riding the wave of consumer driven formulas. It reduces the genre story to the filling in of pre-outlined plot progressions, essentially robbing the intellect from powerful writing.
Using horror as an example once again, what did a person do to find horror before the genre was solidified as a marketing force? Steve Rasnic Tem in his essay “The Subject of Horror” recounts those earlier times.

There was a time before the formulaic marketing of
horror when a reader had to seek out the experience
of horror in the available reading material. In the
world before the time of a "Horror" category label
printed on a book's spine, or painted in dripping
letters across a book's cover, horror might be
discussed as simply one aspect of literature or of an individual work, whether it was in the work of a John Fowles, a Kafka, a Kosinski, a Jim Thompson, or a
Fuentes. Perhaps the horror was the most interesting
aspect of a specific work, but it was heightened, made
more effective, within the context of other concerns.
(Tem)

Genres are returning to that age as the authors of today ignore boundaries and dare to cross them in any direction they see fit. The elements of all the genres are better played out in stories that employ their strength in combination with strength from other disciplines, be it genre fiction or work of the literary genre.
There is a certain freedom of thought that comes with ignoring literary or marketing boundaries. There is less of a fear in today’s publishing market that a story won’t sell if it can’t be readily assigned a genre. It is a return to the more literary approach to selling fiction. As the genres fade so will the genre ghettoes, as there will be no mortar with which to build barriers. It is frightening for some writers to abandon the old definitions and see their work in the light of multiple genres. The temptation is to fall back on the old formulas rather than trusting one’s instincts and break new ground.
Writing free of genre is fun, as evidenced by writer Glenda Woodrum, on her web page. “…my stories run the gamut of the genres, often mixing Science Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Romance, Mystery and Erotica, and I admit to having dabbled in Westerns of all things, but only in the context of horror. Yeah, Western Horror. Weird combination but fun.” (Woodrum) It is that willingness to experiment that is making the concept of restrictive genres obsolete.
Genres feed off of each other. Through comparison and contrast new genres are born. From the tradition of the gothic novel, writers clipped bits and pieces and nourished them into new genres. Though derived from the same core, these genres added new dimensions that solidified their literary presence. It is this borrowing of ideas that make the creation of new genres possible. “Genre must be defined recursively: genres are made out of other genres.” (Beebee 264) There was no external force that split the gothic novel into its various parts other than the interest of writers to develop elements of those works more thoroughly and the readership’s willingness to go along on these journeys of exploration.
One might ask if the genres are blending, will they ever be unified? The answer is no. What we are seeing in the genre bending works of today is the evolution of genre. Something new is arising from the ashes of dying genre classifications.

Even to account adequately for everyday texts, rhetorical genre theorists have argued for the need to embrace a definition of genre that encompasses difference as well as similarity, variation as well as standardization, and creativity as well as conformity…Genre theorists need to see genre as both/and rather than either/or, to encompass both the conformity and the resistance, the expected and the surprise, so that we can account for rhetorical and literary genres that themselves encompass both norms and variation. We also need to describe rhetorical and literary texts that both reproduce and resist their genres, a need better met by a genre theory that sees in every text and every genre both similarity and difference. (Devitt)

So what becomes of fiction if the genres dissolve? Ursula K. Le Guin asks the same question in her essay “Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love.”

So what are we going to do now? What use is the
whole concept of genre if you can’t damn whole
categories of fiction with it so that you never
have to bother learning how to read them, and if
the fiction writers are going to keep crossing
over, ignoring boundaries, slipstreaming, interbreeding like a barnful of cats – but at the same time
publishers and booksellers and librarians cling
immovably to the old, false, rigid divisions, because they’re commercially unrisky, and because they make
it easy for people to find certain types of books
without being exposed to an alien forms of literature
that might possibly take over their minds and put
new ideas in them? (Fowler, 68)

The answer is not as complex as it may seem. Once upon a time all the books that contained genre elements were shelved in alphabetical order, genre fiction alongside literary giants. Should we return to that? Maybe. Today’s writing is a natural evolution. Bits and pieces of the genres are being taken and combined together to create something new. To classify it as literary is most likely an injustice. The works forge new ground within a tradition of the genres. Instead, a fertile breeding ground needs to be created where these creative endeavors can develop freely without the concern that authors will be roped into a genre and kept there. Alternative Fiction as a heading would merely tell the audience that the story they are about to read is fantastic in nature and not the same as the realistic fiction found in the fiction section of the bookstore.
The genius of the publishing marketers cannot be overlooked. They turned groupings of books based on their content into a multibillion-dollar trade. The genres in their heyday made publishing houses wealthy and writers, if not rich, able to support themselves with their words. It would be a shame to lose the synergy that a clearly identifiable product brings to the market. However, the marketing genres that once brought consumers to the bookstores are now slowly driving them away out of fear that all that exists on the shelves is a ton of bad writing with a few hard to find gems in the mix. As is evidenced by the invasion of horror into all of the genres, it is easy to think that genre writing is returning to its pregenre roots where the elements of each genre were freely sprinkled amongst the realist texts. Rather than a regression, we are seeing a progression, an evolution towards a new way of viewing genres. What we start to see is that genres are fluid and dynamic with only artificial barriers separating them. Theoretically all written works can be classified in multiple genres. Genres are not static; rather “genres are never really stabilized. If each text always participates in multiple genres, then even in that text a genre is moving, shifting, and becoming destabilized.” (Devitt) As evidenced by the gothic novel, bits and pieces fragment, mushroom and morph into new genres. With so many of the genres having links to historical forms, it is difficult to see today’s genres as remaining in their current forms. Their offspruing will exceed them and eventually replace them.
The genres shouldn’t be cast back upon the shelf in alphabetical order. They still exist as a unique brand of writing. Instead, the individual outdated genres should be eliminated and the books placed on the shelf collectively with their kith and kin in a new marketing and literary classification such as Alternative Fiction. If we open the door for modern writers to ply their trades, the alternative fiction market will produce works unhampered by pigeonholing yet keep the readership content knowing they will get something different than a literary novels written by realists. Alternative fiction represents the best of both worlds. For the publisher it is a solid and concise marketing tool. For the writer, it is a liberating phrase that allows them to use the elements of all genres to tell the stories they wish to tell. It is time that the elements of genre be utilized for what they are, tools to create stories with a vibrancy and depth that only multigenre fiction offers. We cannot do away with genre completely as has been called for by the literary community. There remains a true need for classification, not only for the marketing of alternative works but also to sate the human need for definition. No matter how obscure a work becomes it still falls under definitions predetermined by the readership.

The writer may stretch the generic rules, he may produce some unpredictable ‘match’ between different existing conventions of existing literary genres (or even between literary conventions and conventions taken from other media), but in order to understand the overall significance of his text, we should be aware of the generic system against which he is working. A writer does not create in a textual vacuum, and a rebellious child is still part of the family (Fishlov 82-83)

Be it horror worming its way into romance or science fiction being the backdrop for a mystery, limited genre boundaries do nothing but stifle the rich creativity that exists in modern fiction. It is time we bring the genres together to form a common family that remains as diverse and evolving as the works it defines. For decades, visionaries like Heinlein and Ellison advocated the adoption of all-inclusive genres. Let Alternative Fiction stand as a section in the bookstores where readers can find tales of starship love affairs and headless rustlers. Alternative Fiction is the true alternative to realism.

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