Scary Books–Pt IV

4 thoughts on “Scary Books–Pt IV”

1. I don’t read scary books. Creepy, yes, a la Charles Burns’ Black Hole. Or Disch’s Camp Concentration. The whole “boo” factor strikes me as annoying and genre-reliant.

   If I want scary I just visit the Winn Dixie on Normandy.

   I do remember being scared as a tweenager by Stephen King’s Four Seasons, particularly the short story Apt Pupil. Nazi psycho living next door in suburbia. Plus Anthrax wrote a song about it. Then they screwed it all up with a crappy (Brad Renfro?) movie.

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2. Genre-reliant? Hunh? Are you talking about the major tropes of horror, saying that they don’t appeal to you?
   I think Camp Concentration is a horror story, just as Clockwork Orange is a horror story.

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3. A trope untweaked is a trope uninteresting. Perhaps it’s the “major tropes” that turn me off, the “Tales of Terror” that make me go yawn. Perhaps others find comfort in the formulaic recapitulation of old ideas. Snap!

   And I don’t see the need to classify Camp Concentration or Clockwork Orange as horror. They escape the genre straightjacket. Unlike the multitude of books on the horror shelf at Borders, they resist classification.

   Didn’t somebody (Jameson?) point out that genre is just a means for framing a commodity?

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4. the old ideas are old for a reason. the “major tropes” are major because they tap into something primal. they textualize the symbolic order. the easiest sources to cite would be the bible and greek myth, but we could keep going…
   i agree with you that the hallmark of a great author is an author who “tweaks” tropes–although this is no mark of modernity–shakespeare and melville and poe, etc all played with and inverted classical tropes. dfw does so to this day.
   saying that a book is “horrific” (deriving from the indo-european root “ghers” meaning “bristling”) doesn’t mean that the book is genre fiction–horror is a descriptor of an affect. i don’t feel a “need” to classify camp concentrationi truly believe that disch is attempting to affect horror in his readers with camp concentration. granted, it isn’t the clive barker “horror”–but horror is not the wrong word.
   and sure, books are commodities, sold by genre. but great literature will always defy these conventions. wasn’t PKD at heart a failed genre writer–didn’t his genre simply reject him?
   it’s great that you are above a basic beach-read, that you ask for more from your lit, but i have to say that this blog is pro-literacy, even if it means that people are reading genre-crap.

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