Why Horror Writers are Nicer than Science Fiction Writers
Posted on January 2nd, 2016 by Adam-Troy CastroOriginally published in separate posts on Facebook on January 2, 2013.
Who’s nicer? Horror writers or science fiction writers?
Well, there’s a very small percentage of self-published horror authors who are some of the most frightening human beings who have committed prose to print, because their interest is exclusively in the gore, to the exclusion of any human element.
The fringie guys I’m thinking about, and I actually have a couple of specific names in mind, have little interest in anything but showing how extreme they can be, which means they start with some cool new idea about how flesh can be churned, and describe it lovingly — and often incoherently — to the most nihilistic effect. Their fiction is about turning a corpse inside out as soon as possible. It’s the kind of fiction that made me say of one of them, “This is not a story so much as a syndrome.”
Of course they self-publish, sometimes on web pages. Of course you will not find them in bookstores. Of course they have no real audience, except for each other. They are not storytellers. They are cultists.
Again: please note, I represent this as a small percentage, a demographic pushing the general assessment of the average horror writer incrementally closer to the swamp.
By and large, the real thing? Sweethearts.
Horror writers, or at least writers who have committed horror, like Nancy Collins, Clive Barker, Jack Ketchum, Joe R. Lansdale, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, John Skipp, Ray Garton, Robert McCammon, John Shirley, and so on, cheerfully describe scenes of stomach-churning violence with a facility that describes an uncommon amount of careful thought about all the synonyms that can called forth in the description of a wound. They can get inside a psychopathic personality and describe a thought pattern that will make the sane want to puke. And I have met folks who thought this meant that the writers were themselves disturbed. I once had a co-worker who I lent Bentley Little’s THE COLLECTION, and for years afterward she was theorizing that Little barbecued kittens. But the way to tell otherwise is that if you turn the page enough times you will encounter a scene where characters reflect real human behavior, real human needs, real human wants, real human priorities. And that tends to ring true, as well.
There is a nexus of normality, of compassion, without which the awfulness is just a day at the slaughterhouse. No slavering monster could have written King’s “The Last Rung On the Ladder,” Nancy Collins’s “The Two-Headed Man” or “The Sunday Go To Meeting Jaw,” or McCammon’s BOY’S LIFE. It’s would just not be possible for somebody who didn’t feel.
I attribute this to the truism that understanding people, with all their foibles, is more central a requirement of writing horror than it is for writing sf; it certainly helps writing sf, but there are people with thriving careers in sf who write about people the same way they write about engineering. At one end of the curve, sit folks who don’t understand people at all, but sure as hell can design an orbital habitat. It’s far from an iron-clad rule, but you will find among science fiction writers a somewhat greater percentage of unfeeling cads, as a consequence. It’s not a huge disparity. There are an awful lot of great folks in science fiction, too. But there are also more…well, robots.
There’s also a certain therapeutic value in getting one’s aggressions out on the page. “Keeping the gators fed,” as the master of us all once put it.
It’s a spectrum. With lots of overlap. Certainly Lovecraft belonged to the category of “couldn’t write about people, didn’t understand them.”
I’m only talking about where the masses congregate. Where the mean stands.
As a rule, horror writers tend to be nicer.