Mslexia

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New Writing

Horror

Guest editor Muriel Gray introduces her pick of poetry and prose in Issue 23 ◊ Oct/Nov/Dec 2004

It would be helpful to know precisely when and why it was decided by the literary world that the genre of horror must be regarded as an inferior art; a trashy, mindless, empty entertainment for spotty boys in Parkas who enjoy heads being severed and guts being spilled. Perhaps it’s this unjust preconception that has dissuaded women authors from attempting to express themselves within the genre, and with a few notable exceptions, kept horror as an almost exclusively male club. As Margaret Atwood demonstrated with her insulting protestations that she writes ‘speculative’ fiction rather than, (heaven forbid), science fiction, ‘serious’ women writers can’t bear the idea of having their books displayed on shelves beside gold-embossed dragons or drooling monsters.

This genre bigotry is all the more curious when we consider the rich literary pedigree that horror writing has enjoyed for centuries. Names like MR James, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Walter Scott, HG Wells, Edgar Alan Poe, Charles Dickens and countless more quill-wielding heavyweights, all understood the irresistible draw of the dark. And all this before we consider the contribution made by female writers bold enough to tackle horror instead of drawing room manners. How can we dismiss the genre as shallow, exploitative rubbish, when horror’s origins embrace Mary Shelley, include the dark, terrifying tales of Flannery O’Connor, the disturbing fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, and boasts possibly one of the greatest short story writers of the 20th Century, Shirley Jackson?

Jackson deserves special mention in this gallery of greats, since this plain, all-American housewife is not only famous for the terrifying novella The Haunting of Hill House – she also altered the course of horror fiction with the publication of her short story ‘The Lottery’, in the New Yorker magazine. It was a stark, enigmatic tale of human sacrifice, which caused so much controversy that it resulted in the magazine receiving its greatest number of complaints in the publication’s history. The story was no blood-and-guts nonsense, but wielded tremendous power with quiet implications and unspoken fears.

So with the genius of Jackson fresh in our memory, how and why, we must ask again, did horror’s reputation move from this high of literary subtlety to the low of the gruesome, the obvious and the clichéd? I blame the men. Just as the architect Le Corbusier’s stark buildings concealed delicate genius, and whose less gifted followers did the cityscape such harm by imitating the brutality without understanding the hidden elegance, so was the great writer Stephen King imitated by a whole generation of terrible, mostly male writers, who took King’s seemingly simple premises of small towns in peril and inanimate objects with malevolent life, without noticing the deftness of his plotting, the beauty of his prose and the originality of his subtexts. What followed was a plethora of dreadful bilge. Clichéd, two-dimensional characters stumbled about being pursued by barely believable foes. The writing could go to hell, and what’s worse, the buying public didn’t much seem to mind. It was as if we had forgotten that horror could be meaningful, original and complex. Happily, some decent writers kept at it. Anne Rice was one who mined that same seam of dark, female erotic terror that Jackson had hinted at in The Haunting of Hill House, introducing a recurring theme of longing and loss in her soul-eating creatures that resonated from her real-life tragedy of having lost a child to leukaemia. Other similar writers followed and showed up the tales of daft slugs and decidedly unfrightening rats for the rubbish they are.

So since we desperately need talented authors out there battling against the prejudice that horror can never be literary, it was a joy to read the variety and originality of many of your submissions. Of course there was poor writing in there too. Some authors seemed to adhere to this view of horror being unworthy of depth or subtlety and hence we had the clichéd spooky houses, creaking prose, predictable plots and silly dialogue. But outnumbering these lazy bits of nonsense were wonderful gems of creative, thoughtful writing, taking us to darkly irresistible places in the psyche.

Amongst the short stories I chose, it was the sparing detail, at least concerning the supernatural element, that made Nicky Hallet’s marvellously wrought tale ‘The Heart of Darkness’ so unsettling. The beauty and restraint of her prose, from the opening line, ‘“Dead men walk home to be buried”. Emmanuel states this with certainty.’ demands we read on. The loving description of Africa that follows, almost travel writing as we watch the stars and smell the red earth, invites us to relax and enjoy the sumptuousness of an alien country until we are pulled back to that dark thing that Emmanuel knows for certain. Louise C Taylor’s ‘Next Stop’ is quite different in tone and pace, but no less effective. Her expert dialogue, a talent for listening to the way people speak, and a keenly observed sense of place, gives the horrible conclusion its power. Even if we see the end coming, the subtext concerning class and vulnerability diverts us sufficiently to still deliver a shock.

‘The Crying’ by Heidi Amsinck has marvellous gothic overtones, with nods to Poe’s classic ‘The Telltale Heart’. The gradual discovery that our protagonist is not simply a lovable rogue is paralleled by the creeping malevolence that we can never be sure is external or infernal. Jan Lovell’s ‘Burning’ just had to be in here, on the strength of its outstanding writing. Regardless of the well-worn theme of traumatised, silent children with secrets, Lovell treats us to descriptive jewels, where hair slides ‘ping into a glass dish’ and lovers have voices ‘full of spittle’ and ‘industrial black hair’. Compelling prose throughout never lets the reader’s attention drift for a second. Janey Huber’s ‘Amputees’ is one of the most original and ambitious of the submissions. Cunningly using Top Shop as a start point for the action, we don’t realise we are in the realm of science fiction until further into the tale. The ghastly, creeping realisation that the atrocities happening might actually involve a peculiar, psychosexual acquiescence is truly gruesome. I chose ‘Keeping Secrets’ by Lisa Shafer because of the expertly handled, controlled style of prose that mirrors the narrator’s circumstances, forcing us to accept that Hannah’s real life is more horrible than the thing we know she will end up inviting in. These are all wonderful stories and the clichéd slash-and-tear boys who dominate the market would do well to be wary of this new female talent.

The idea that horror has any place in poetry intrigued me. Even though Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ still chills with the line describing the soul on a lonesome road who, ‘Walks on and turns no more his head, for he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread’, we don’t readily associate poetry with building fear. The poetic soul is deemed to be one who finds beauty in this world, not terror from another. However, Jill Bonser’s ‘Anniversary’ chills to the bone. A ghost story in 15 lines, its economy fills us with horror at what the occupants of this country abode must suffer every year, and their weary acceptance of this violent annual nightmare is perfectly ghastly.

‘Holy Innocents’ by Marianne Burton is remarkably disquieting, as we struggle to picture exactly what it is that has landed on the doorstep, and shiver at Anna’s giggles as she nurtures this creature with her own breast milk. Whilst the visceral in that poem is of the supernatural, Penny Fearn demonstrates that nature itself, and our part in it, is as horrible as any midnight creature from another realm. Like Ted Hughes she confronts the nature of flesh and death, delivering this vision in tight, brilliant poetry. A knife sounds like ‘itching skin and tearing velvet’, and the hare foetuses are not simply fed to her dog, but ‘posted into its trickling mouth’. Wonderful stuff. Tina Cole cleverly takes us to the dark side of fairytale, with echoes of Little Red Riding Hood. The destiny that leads to the ‘snarling stench of him’ is perhaps not quite the one we think. Man, beast, metaphor? Nasty, whatever the truth. There’s no enigma in ‘Alphabet Man’. It’s clear as day and disturbing to the core. Ann Alexander forces us to look when we would rather turn away, makes us understand this man, his head ‘bursting blood’, when he obeys that urge and justifies its conclusion. Paula Jennings’ poem has a touch of warning about it, suggesting that all our modern trappings cannot protect us from those things that should be dead but will not stay dead. The description of what might come back unwanted, those ‘parcelled cooling limbs’, later ‘crying in their foetal packaging’, is as good as horror writing gets.

Reading your submissions has reinforced my belief that this is far from a moribund genre. Thanks to you all for making me proud to be a part of it. Absolutely bloody brilliant.

MURIEL GRAY, author, broadcaster and businesswoman, was born in East Kilbride, the daughter of a merchant seaman. She came to fame as the presenter of Channel 4 series The Tube (1982), and in 1989 she set up a TV production company; Ideal World is now the biggest in Scotland. By the late 1990s she re-invented herself as a successful horror-writer, with books including The Tickster (1995), Furnace (1997) and The Ancient (2001), all published by HarperCollins. She lives in Glasgow with her husband and three children.

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How and why, we must ask again, did horror’s
reputation move from this high of literary subtlety to the low of the gruesome, the obvious and the clichéd?

MURIEL GRAY