The Horror

Strands:

1. One of the books that I read this summer was about incorporating the classics into education. It was essentially a home-schooling manual, with afterthought inclusions for those who teach in the private or public schools, and it made all sorts of wild assertions about certain books. I think, were I on the same wavelength as the author, I would have understood what he was saying a little better, but for me and my brain, he was blowing a lot of hot air.
   
   An area that stood out to me? When he started classifying books as "bent, broken, whole, and healing." "Broken" is a book where "evil wins" but it motivates a person to improve the world; "whole" is where, as the author puts it "good is good and good wins", while "healing" is one that is "whole" and makes an important, personal impact on the reader's life. But it was the definition of "bent" that really made me sit up: "Bent stories portray evil as good, and good as evil. Such stories are meant to enhance the evil tendencies of the reader, such as pornography and many horror books and movies...avoid them like the plague" (DeMille 73).
   
2. I happened upon an article that made a simultaneously laudatory and condemnatory claim: the only genre of film in which women have parity with men for both screen time and lines, is the horror genre. The article goes on to detail some of the more visible examples of this trend, though it failed to mention the only "horror" that I really know, which is the Resident Evil series. I would probably classify the first Resident Evil film as a horror/action movie, but all the rest are probably closer to action than horror, so maybe that's why. Still, it's the longest running action franchise with a female lead, and that's worth noting.
   
   But the big picture--that human representation in film is, numerically, at least, only seen in the least-well regarded mainstream genre--is telling.
   
3. I listened to Nos4a2 this summer. It's written by Stephen King's son, Joe Hill, and was...fine. There were some interesting ideas, the book was too long, and it wasn't particularly scary. I don't know if it was supposed to be. It has the insipid blurb "A Novel" on its cover, so what it was attempting to do in terms of genre is, apparently, be a fiction book. I didn't dislike it, but I wasn't in love with it. The main character was great--a woman who struggles with her bizarre powers and rocky past--and there were some cool moments, but if this is what horror literature is, I wasn't impressed. It wouldn't be a "bent book", however; not only is evil called as much, it loses at the end. Nevertheless, I wouldn't call this book as containing the earmarks of a classic.
   
4. Unsure why, I made it a point to go to the bookstore before the last leg of our trip home from Disneyland. I purchased a copy of Stephen King's It. If I'm going to read a horror novel, I decided, I may as well pick the best that the genre has to offer. I'm now almost halfway through the book, and not only do I find myself trying to fit reading it into my life (something that hasn't happened in a long time, to be honest), I have been consistently impressed with how the story is unfolding. I don't know how it ends, but it certainly has evil being described as such, so despite its genre appellation, I doubt it's a "bent" book.
   
5. Early on in my writing "career", during my first foray into my own fantasy world, my own characters, my own story (the Spider-Man fanfic doesn't count), I decided to challenge myself. In one chapter, I wouldn't use dialogue. Additionally, I had a creature called a breathrobber attack the main character, who was alone in a library. I described the encounter in detail, complete with a description of what the blind, be-clawed creature looked like.
   
   Back then, I didn't have a writer's group, so when I finished the novel, I handed it over to a friend who expressed interest and would actually read it to the end. This alpha reader tore through the book, finishing the fairly lengthy tome in only a couple of weeks, maybe less. When she returned the manuscript to me, she told me that I had given her nightmares.
   
   "What? How?"
   
   "The breathrobbers. They're scary!"
   
   I've never had that experience from a book. I've had tense moments, I've had disturbing images put into my head...but it was never scary.
   
6. I don't watch horror movies. When I was younger, I watched things like The Grudge or played games like Silent Hill: The Room. They were intense, atmospheric, and, yes, scary. The visuals, the acting, the ambiance, the music...they all incorporate into a more visceral, engaging experience that genuinely frightens me. I don't go to haunted houses or haunted corn mazes during October, either, for similar reasons. So I find it interesting that I read It all the day long, before I go to bed, and it doesn't affect me very much at all. Yet if I were to watch the trailer of the movie before trying to sleep? Impossible.
   
7. Each genre has something to teach a writer about how to tell a story. Having drenched myself in fantasy tropes and, to a lesser extent, science fiction, it's time for me to broaden my reading vocabulary, my tropical (trope-ical) toolbelt. I tried writing a mystery, failing to read any mystery books before the attempt. While I don't want to write a horror book, I do want to steal borrow ideas from popular, important literature and incorporate those tricks into my writing.
   
8. It bugged me that the majority of an entire genre--one likely unfamiliar to the author entirely--would be outright dismissed, particularly when the genre is better at representation than all the Dead White Males in the cannon.
   
9. I bought It out of spite and am enjoying it.