Embracing The Itch, or, Horror Fans Are Strange

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I've been reading Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's collection,
"The Year's Best Fantasy And Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection."
Quite a fine read, the pair have impeccable taste[1], and they're
eclectic as well.

As I was reading, however, I noticed a recurrent feeling after
finishing a horror piece. I felt a nagging tension, a queasy itch
in the back of my head. A mixture of dissatisfaction,
disquiet, and well, horror. As much as I may have enjoyed each tale
for it's craft, invention, and masterful execution, I still came
out of the experience with a negative feeling. The bad guys won,
after all, all was not well and evil prevailed.

Now I am not so simple as to demand a happy ending for every story.
That gets old fast. But shouldn't the opposite prove true as well?
I have to wonder at the mentality of people who live exclusively, or
even primarily, on a diet of horror and nasty endings. Do they relish
that dissonant itch? Do they never tire of it?

How perverse and strange. And if you are a horror fan, I know you'll
take that as a compliment.

===
"It was tough taking care of a pregnant wife and a small child, but
I still managed to fit in eight hours of TV a day." -- Homer Simpson

[1] Although a bit more action and adventure would be nice. I'm
sure if I told this to either one of them they'd merely guffaw and roll
their eyes.

― Squirrel_Police (Squirrel_Police), Monday, 12 April 2004 02:11 (twenty-one years ago)

There are a lot of places you could intend to go with this, but -- whatever trends may be in the Datlow & Windling -- not all horror stories end with the bad guys winning. I'm not even sure most do. It might be an appeal for some horror fans, but it certainly isn't the appeal, much less a defining characteristic.

― Tep (ktepi), Monday, 12 April 2004 02:29 (twenty-one years ago)

Tep, I'm convinced that, indeed, most do.
Or if the protagonist survives, it's a pyrrhic victory at best.

― Squirrel_Police (Squirrel_Police), Monday, 12 April 2004 02:30 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm not actually "convinced," by the way. That phrase just
slips out sometimes.

― Squirrel_Police (Squirrel_Police), Monday, 12 April 2004 02:31 (twenty-one years ago)

I don't like getting into genre debates, but I'm pretty confident of this one, speaking not just as a fan (somewhat) but as a writer and editor. Lots of horror stories might have nasty endings; prominent ones might; ones which are easily labeled as horror might, and maybe that's key; but the Victory Over Monsters theme, the Narrow Escape, etc., are too integral and visible to be glossed over. And I'm not sure singling out pyrrhic victories makes sense when those are more a function of the broader "people in jeopardy" story than they are native to horror itself.

(It's hard to define horror as a genre, but I'm not nuts about genre definitions to begin with; even so, horror is tougher since it's just as often a tone or an approach, moreso than science fiction or fantasy. It's like calling comedy a genre; on the one hand, many things certainly do fall into a comedy genre and rely on those tropes and little else, but on the other hand, comedy is an approach that you can take with any story, regardless of its other characteristics.)

― Tep (ktepi), Monday, 12 April 2004 02:40 (twenty-one years ago)

Oh, the point of the parenthetical being: I don't know if the Datlow and Windling is ever particularly representative of what's going on in horror, since the "Fantasy and Horror" in the title is usually another way of saying "the stories neither Hartwell nor Dozois will pick up."

― Tep (ktepi), Monday, 12 April 2004 02:42 (twenty-one years ago)

There definitely are horror fans who look for what you're talking about, especially horror movie fans, where you have a much higher prevalence of the monster (slasher, whatever) becoming the protagonist without actually being humanized/romanticized/defended the way vampires and were-things have become in novels. I just don't see them, or their interests, as representative of everyone else.

― Tep (ktepi), Monday, 12 April 2004 02:44 (twenty-one years ago)

two years pass...

What _is_ representative of horror, Tep? You seem to be very
involved in the genre, and I'm curious about it. What are some
key authors?

― Squirrel_Police (Squirrel_Police), Wednesday, 2 August 2006 02:35 (nineteen years ago)

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