| What makes great horror fiction? As a critic and reviewer, I have been called uponregularly to pass judgment on the writing of horrorfiction s leading talents. I ve probed the phenomenalsuccess of Stephen King in a book-length study, andI ve also published a history of contemporary horror,as told through the lives of its brightest and bestsellingwriters. As a compulsive reader and filmgoer, I veexperienced nearly everything the field of horror hasto offer. My own fiction returns w~th regularity tothemes of violence and fear. Nevertheless, I m tempted to answer this questionwith the unblinking certainty of Supreme Court JusticePotter Stewart, who once offered as his definition ofobscenity that he knew it when he saw it. Many readers see the horror story as something thatis packaged only in repetitive paperback editions, repletewith potboiler prose, lurid covers, and corny titles that seem always to begin with the word "The." And most of the time, they are right. Today s tales of terror rarely offer anything new. Few plots bearing the "horror" label are fresh and exciting; indeed, most editors lament how easily these stories can be pigeonholed into recog- nizable types. (T.E.D. Klein, the original editor of Twilight Zone Magazine, once told me that he could fit over ninety percent of the submissions to his magazine into ten clich6 categories). The writing itself is, on average, slick and superficial; at worst, the stuff of pulp adventure, written to the lowest common denominator. |
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