Slow-Burn Horror and Other Genre F*ckery
Earlier this September, Hereafter Lies: R.I.P. launched into Canadian airspace from ground control at Little Ghosts in Toronto. There was a QnA filled with stellar Q’s and very flustered A’s. But now, I’m back in my preferred cafe downtown office, in my safe space with my emotional-support coffee and cookie, so I’m going to take another whack at some of them. Well, one of them.
Genre? What that?
Hereafter Lies is genre-fucked. Dark fantasy? Science-fantasy? Horror? Contemporary fantasy?
Yes.
I already did a bloogy-whatsit on science-fantasy and my thoughts re: that. That’s also what I sort of anxious-garbled in response at the time (not sure—I blacked out). The remaining element, though—horror—is possibly the hotter take and (to me) the more interesting member of that list up there. That fact is only partially because the ADHD makes things I’ve already worked out more boring, and I already did the science-fantasy thing. So, here we are now. With horror thing.
For me, effective horror—i.e. horror that effects me, don’t @ me—has these two things:
It’s about something other than what it’s about (score one for Freud)
I care deeply enough about whomever’s being horrified that I fear with and for them
Body horror, cosmic horror, supernatural horror, creepy clowns—what flavor that horror takes doesn’t matter for me, so long as those two things are present. I can go on forever about each of them, and I probably will. #ChekhovsList
Genre Fuckery
Part of why Hereafter Lies has a genre-fuckery problem isn’t just that it doesn’t fit neatly into any one genre (Genre Fuckery A). It’s that it does fit into the horror genre, just not folded up in a way most people are accustomed to encountering.
Subject-matter-wise, yes: it does a horror. Ghosts and possession and shit. Tick. Having those things does not a horror make, obviously. Casper the Friendly Ghost isn’t a horror (real missed opportunity there). Casper doesn’t induce fear or any of her horrific friends. We know this. And sure, there are people getting possessed and shit in Hereafter Lies, but that’s not really what ties it to the horror genre. This is genre Fuckery B.
Genre Fuckery C is the most problematic. Not because it makes for a bad book, but because it makes it hard to market. Let’s just bracket the fact that I need money, and focus on the fact that I need a lot of validation want to share my stories. I want people who would enjoy my book to pick up my book and read it and enjoy it. I do not want people who wouldn’t enjoy my book to pick it up and read it and hate it and tell me I’m bad at genre on Goodreads.
Genre comes with expectations. Romance readers expect a happy ending. If they pick up a book that told them, “Hey, Romance here!” and didn’t get a happy ending, they’d be miffed. It doesn’t mean the book was bad, or that the reader just “didn’t get it,” but that the reader and the book were not suited to one another in that moment. It’s good for books to find their readers, and for readers to find their books. Genre can help with that. Subverting genre expectations is fun, but risky if you actually, like, want people to read and enjoy your book. It can end up with an ill-suited pair locking eyes across the dance floor and boogying on toward each other: one seeking uncomplicated fun times, the other wearing a t-shirt that says Who doesn’t love uncomplicated fun times? while offering a gut punch and a rubik’s cube.
Not everybody’s here for that. Worst part is, warning readers about it sort of takes away the impact of the gut punch. People seeking gut-punches see that book, think, “Romance? I don’t want a happy ending,” and people seeking happy endings read it, expecting a romance without violence and, well… gut punch rubik’s cube.
Being a big-name author helps with that, because people may not know exactly what to expect from this book, but they trust you as a writer and are willing to go on the journey. If you as an author already have your readers, you don’t need to rely on “genre expectations” to guide them to you.
Hereafter Lies is designed to elicit fear, dread, anxiety, unsurety, confusion, grief—and other fun emotions. For readers picking up what I’m putting down, it does that. Re: Genre Fuckery B, it doesn’t do that so much as a supernatural horror because it’s not the supernatural elements evoking those super fun emotions. (I mean, if it does, I’ll fucking take it—whoops but also yay?) At the core of Hereafter Lies’s Genre-Fuckery-C-ness is that its Horror is…
Slow-Burn Horror
To make my desired flavor of horror land, it takes time to make readers care about the characters enough to fear for them, and not just near them. It also takes time to lure readers into angsting about their own mortality and that of those they hold dear in an organic and not didactic way, while ultimately providing catharsis. To fear with them.
That’s the GOAL, anyway. (no promises)
And it’s a goal that’s going to take me six books. (if ever)
Yes, there are ghosting bits (wink) of horror throughout. Book 1, R.I.P., has fleeting horror elements. But they’re not the big-H Horror of it. Poltergeist’s—not the remake, good god do not get me started on the fucking remake—fleeting horror elements are supernatural horror elements. Corpses, ghosts, chair go wheee! But the big-H Horror of Poltergeist is the fact that every loving family tie is really a noose. That loving someone completely (how the family loves Carol Ann) is inseparable from dread of an ever-present threat of loss. It isn’t just that when someone we love dies, we can hope they’re in a “better place” but we don’t know—though that’s certainly there. When loss happens to this family, when Carol Ann is lost, they don’t know where she is. They don’t know if she’s okay. They don’t know how to get her back—if they even can—nor do they know that she’ll ever be okay again if she comes back. They don’t even know if they would know whether she isn’t. So even when she does come back, that threat doesn’t go away. And it never will go away so long as Carol Ann is still with them—so long as they still love her.
The Horror of Poltergeist lingers when the movie ends. It has to. Because the family’s Horror doesn’t leave when their child comes back.
Poltergeist, for me, is an incredibly effective horror because it rocks both elements from Chekhov’s List. And it manages this within a non-Lord-of-the-Rings-length film. Pretty phenomenal. Part of how this is accomplished is skill. But (not unrelatedly) part of why this is possible at all is the fact that we can insert ourselves into the family’s shoes. They feel real to us—more easily to those who identify with the suburban, white, and/or cishet nuclear types, which is a whole other blog post. That ease of identification is like jargon. It cuts down on word count, and—for the right audience—doesn’t take away from the comprehensibility and thus the impact.
I can’t do that.
So, I need many words about it.
This is the opposite of what the myriad agents and editors and book reviewers who are so very vocal online inform me is bad and super not just because longer books mean higher printing costs it has nothing to do with money we promise it’s just objectively bad writing we swear. I disagree, hence me publishing this shit myself.
I have tremendous respect for short story writers. I especially love horror short stories. When done well—when they manage both parts of Chekhov’s List in so few words—they feel more masterful to me than well-done horror novels. That’s probably my own bias because I just don’t have that skill. Kind of like how I’m super impressed by people who can manage their own basic car repairs, but am not impressed by people who can make a gluten-free hazelnut brown butter creme bûche De Noël decorated with chocolate twigs, candied rosemary, and mycologically correct meringue mushrooms. Like, yeah, bitch, me too—you’re not special.
This particular big-H Horror that I’m going for in Hereafter Lies can’t be a short story. That’s why I chose it. I can’t write short stories for crap, so I tried to cultivate a sort of big-H Horror that can’t be a short story. Yeah, yeah—hot take, I know. Every form has its own advantages, though: its own tools for expression that another form lacks. For novels, one of the biggest is taking… a lot… of… time. A series of novels has even more, BIGGER time to take.
I’m taking it. I’m taking allll of it.
And I’m self-publishing, so nobody can fucking stop me.
Whether I’m successful is a different story. Only…
time…
will…
tell.
Read In Peace,
Elijah