Writing and the Darker Side of Genre

Notes on reading, writing, literary theory, and the influence of folklore in horror and dark fantasy.

       

From the Blogthe most recent updates

Jan
24

There can be books where the zombies are zombies, and books where the zombies are metaphors, and books where the zombies are both, and that we as readers, and writers, and critics, ought to trust those books – rather than any of the labels that get put on them – to tell us how they ought to be read.
~ Fantasy Matters

Every new book has an obligation to teach us how to read it, and a good book does that without making us realize it.

Genre can be a helpful shortcut as a tool to help publishers and bookseller market a work, to guide readers toward a general set of characteristics … [Read More]

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Jan
23

The essential ingredient for success seems to be to give the imagination something to feed on beyond the story ... the sense of a wider world, of which the author was giving you only glimpses ... room for you to wonder.
~ Tom Shippey

From a review in the Wall Street Journal of the book As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality by Michael Saler.

Saler identifies three major strains of popular imaginative fiction and cites the founders of each: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, Sherlock Holmes; H. P. Lovecraft’s … [Read More]

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Jan
21

The interesting truth about the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo, at touch of which the novelist’s imagination winces as at the prick of some sharp point: Its virtue is all in its needlelike quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible. This fineness it is that communicates the virus of suggestion, anything more than a minimum of which spoils the operation.
~ Henry James

May your writing be sharp as a needle, spreading the virus of suggestion.… [Read More]

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Jan
20

A Horror Movie Montage

The Horror Portfolio” is a well-made montage of sixty-four films in a five-minute video, arranged into three broad categories: haunted houses and ghost stories, angels and demons, killers and slashers.

Lots of other films could have been included, of course, but I was glad to see The Orphanage[Read More]

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Jan
20

Lovecraft is Missing

If you like comics and H. P. Lovecraft, then you should know about Lovecraft is Missing, a webcomic that creator Larry Latham has been publishing since 2008. It’s a mystery webcomic that asks: what if Lovecraft’s stories were real?

Besides regular updates to the comic, he also posts about weird-fiction … [Read More]

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