Early de Lint report

[mrissa]

I called this "Gazing Off Into Space" because it is (or was) kind of an addition to Novel Gazing, my real journal, but I'm beginning to think it should be called "Why Mrissa Is Dumb." Because it seems like I'm forever popping up with "here's another thing I don't understand."

And this is no exception. I finished reading Charles de Lint's Mulengro yesterday, and here's what I don't understand: is that horror? I didn't think it was, but I know people, either here or in someone else's comments section, said it was, and there was an author's note at the beginning about how it was darker than other stuff and he'd published horror under a different pen name afterwards because of that. So clearly this is well within some people's definition of horror.

Okay...so...why? Because there are ghosts? There are ghosts in The Lord of the Rings. Because lots of people die? Lots of people die in The Lord of the Rings. Because there's a psychopath? Umm...do I even need to go on pointing this stuff out?

I had thought that the difference between (the supernatural subgenre of) horror and dark fantasy was mood. That if you have vampires or the extremely mentally disturbed but the atmosphere is not horrific, you don't have horror, and if you have everything looking totally normal but in a way that makes your skin crawl, you do have horror. Is it just that I'm a callous horrible sicko? (We know I'm a callous horrible sicko. The question is whether it's just that.) Should I have been horrified by Mulengro? Did de Lint think I should have been? Do I care at all about authorial intent here? I don't think an incomptent horror novel becomes fantasy (if I'm just not scared, it's just not horror), so that can't be it.

What's the deal?

The up side is that I thought Mulengro was a lot more interesting than a lot of the Return to Newford/Road to Newford/Rinkitink in Newford stories have been. The down side is that this was an old book. I still haven't gotten a copy of The Blue Girl, but I promised ksumnersmith and dlandon and probably some other people whose names don't rhyme with "eena" that I'd fall on that grenade for them, so there will be more de Lint reports to come.

seimaisin asked for happy thoughts earlier today, and mine were sushi and ice cream, and I've had both in good company, and I'm now having a Mack-assisted flashback to the second half of my college years (by way of the PO and a CD), listening to the Wilburys. We are still several songs from the Wilbury Twist, which is my favorite Wilbury song. One of my college friends used to actually do the Wilbury Twist along to the song sometimes. He would make sure he had a couch or flip-and-fornicate to fall on when the song got to "put your other foot up; fall on your ass." Still, that's commitment. Also, my book is behaving moderately well, accepting my additions and amendments with as close to good grace as its grouchy taciturn Finnish self can manage. So yay for that, and back to it.

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The notion of Rinkitink in Newford doesn't quite merit a ROFL, but it's pretty damn close.

I don't much care for de Lint, and haven't read the book in question, but the question what is horror? was actually kind of all over my dissertation, and I have a sort of capsule summary of what I think:

If the text wants you to be scared, and you are, it's horror.

If the text wants you to be scared, and you're laughing so hard the only thing you're scared of is breaking a rib, it's bad horror.

If the text wants you to be scared, and you're politely nonplussed, it's unsuccessful horror.

If you can't tell what the text wants, perhaps it's just not a very good book.

Authorial intent is an iffy proposition, but it's perfectly possible to look at a book or movie and see the points at which that text wants a particular response from you--whether or not you actually respond in the desired way or not. (Also true for genres other than horror, cf. Dickens, Little Nell, and Wilde's famous judgment thereon.)

And that's enough literary theory from me.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I am pretty sure I called it horror. It's been a long time so all I have is, yes, the faint memory of being horrified. I think that the violence was more graphic than anything I'd read in fantasy at that point, but--fuzzy memory.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a very good definition of horror.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmmmmm.

The thing is, I'm scared by things like characters lying to other characters and treating their friends badly and stuff like that. I don't think the sick feeling that gives me makes a book horror. The book that scared me most in my life is Fahranheit 451 when I was 12, probably for the reasons Mr. Bradbury would have wanted me to be afraid. Does that make it horror? Or is that the wrong kind of fear?

I can't trust other people's reactions, either, because one of my cousins was terrified by Harry Potter.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Mulengro at all, but the more horror I read, the less certain I am that I know the difference between horror and fantasy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm actually not like that. I'm certain. I may just be certain and wrong.

[palinade.livejournal.com]

It's horrific, but it's not really *horror*. See additional commentary.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

What I mean is, I have a very confident intuitive grasp of what is and is not horror. I'm just not at all sure I can back it with an articulate definition, much less an articulate definition that makes sense to people who don't live in my head.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It's far from a perfect rubric--and I was being a little flip about it.

But, yes, I think Farenheit 451 is horror. So are Nineteen Eighty-Hour and A Clockwork Orange.

The problem is, as you say, that horror is a completely subjective reaction. What scares one person leaves another yawning with boredom. I can be scared--really scared--even by ludicrously bad horror movies, because I am extremely susceptible to the camera tricks of sudden motion, or having things suddenly pop into frame. (I suspect it has something to do with my very bad eyesight.)

I class as horror texts that want to scare their audience, whether they succeed or not. And, of course, works in other genres may have scenes of horror (Shelob springs instantly to mind). It's not clear-cut. Conversely to movie-watching, I can read horror novels without finding them horrifying--but that doesn't make them not be horror.

(Okay, fine, here's what I said in my dis. introduction:

Horror is a category of fear, generatable by both real and fictional events. My interest is limited to the moments at which something patently and demonstrably "unreal" can generate, even momentarily, that sensation of fear and shock and revulsion. So "horror," in the context of my argument, is the emotion generated by watching or reading, in a work which we know to be fiction, something which we do not want to see or to know--and yet at the same time an emotion we have picked up the book, gone to the play, watched the film, expressly in order to experience.

The argument goes on from there to talk about transgression and category violation, but we can leave that sleeping dog lying right where it is.)

I also admit, I don't have the first idea what "dark fantasy" is, even though apparently I write it.

[palinade.livejournal.com]

The definition I've heard from the old fellas was that "horror" is actually inaccurate. Murdered babies, starving refugees... those sorts of things are horrific, horrible, full of horror. The stories that scare one are really terror stories. Those bump-in-the-night stories are meant to terrify, not horrify. What terrifies someone can also horrify them (the undead, blood sucking vampires, monsters, televangelists).

de Lint's Mulengro might be marketed today as "dark fantasy" but probably not "horror", I would guess. Horror is even more niche than fantasy, so some writers may be marketed as "fantasy" when they could also easily be marketed as "horror". Then again, some horror writers can tone down their terrifying stories and actually write dark fantasy, just darker toned traditional fantasy.

Note: vampires, monsters, blood sucking tax collectors alone do not make a horror story. It's what one does with it that makes the neck hairs stand on end.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

I agree about horror vs. terror. Some books can still unsettle me, leave me jumping at noises and make me not want to fall asleep alone (though even these have grown few and far between lately). (Movies are different, because I'm a sucker for visual stimuli.) "Horror" novels have never horrified me, however, even when they did scare me. Monsters don't horrify me. People horrify me. Andrew Vachss' novels, which can most easily be called crime fiction, horrify me like nothing else because while they are fiction narratives, they're also completely true.

I wish I could write scary books, but I don't know how. The best I can aim for is creepy atmosphere, and I suspect that falls flat most of the time.

[palinade.livejournal.com]

I'm so with you on the "can't write scary". The Wasp Factory is truly horrifying but not really terrifying. It's marketed as fiction. Um, Hannibal (not very well written imo) has some horrifying moments but it's not a terrifying novel.

Terrifying novels in the genre sense seem to have something supernatural about them, something unexplainable by rational science or thought. True crime stories, to me, are the most horrifying--the fact that a real life human being could be capable of depravity and amoral acts is truly the most horrifying thing imaginable. But is the story written in such a way to terrify? Maybe that's why True Crime and crime novels are categorized as something else. I won't even get into such things as genocide, infanticide, and so on (truly horrifying things).

And then there are all the stories and novels that crossover or bleed into other genres. Heh.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was 13 and had a high fever and was sitting in the doctor's office. Oh, that was a brilliant idea.

I think dark fantasy is what happens when fantasy novels have several horror scenes? Maybe? Or not; haven't read your books yet. I get frustrated because some people say they want dark fantasy and mean vampires but artsy, and others say they want dark fantasy and mean they want the tone of the piece to be dark, though not necessarily horrific, and others mean the horrific icky bits in the human soul, but for heaven's sake with the supernatural included.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So dark fantasy is a step less horrific than horror, basically?

[palinade.livejournal.com]

Edited to add that I'm sure *some* writers meant to both horrify and terrify. Those bump-in-the-night stories certainly can do both. Matheson's "I Am Legend" is, for me, both horrifying and terrifying. ;-)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was certainly concerned at several points during Dreams. Which is as much as I get about most books, really.

Visual "gotchas" serve mostly to annoy me; it's a cheap way of hitting someone's reflexes but not necessarily scaring them, and I don't like seeing the strings that badly.

[palinade.livejournal.com]

I think you're right in saying that the definition of "dark fantasy" is all over the place.

I also think it's why publishers haven't broken off a separate "dark fantasy" imprint and might just use that term on the spine because they don't want to stick the book into the oft neglected/missing horror section.

There's really still a debate on the definition and breakdown of the sub categories for "fantasy", so who really knows? Heh.

[palinade.livejournal.com]

Dark fantasy seems to be several steps less terrifying than horror, I think. Mostly. Tanith Lee writes a lot of dark fantasy. There's nothing very terrifying about The Books of Paradys, but it is more "gothic" than Beagle's The Last Unicorn (for example). Beagle's book is rather dark in nature, but not so much in tone/flavor.

Gaiman writes dark fantasy. Barker writers horror (or he did, I haven't read any of his recent novels). Shirley Jackson wrote horror.

I guess for me, dark fantasy has a gothic feel, a sense of dread/darkness/despair with supernatural elements that isn't frightening or disturbing. Usually elements found in horror (like monsters, ghouls, things from the occult, etc.) might be used with a lighter touch. "Buffy" is perhaps dark fantasy lite and not just fantasy because it happens to deal with darker subject matter than the traditional fantasy. Perhaps.

What sets dark fantasy apart from fantasy of its kind might be in the execution rather than the content.

Horror

[mackatlaw.livejournal.com]

Horror to me is when the good guys (the ones I identify with) lose and die.
Simplistic, but there it is.

Well. My backup definition of horror would be when it disturbs my sense of reality. This is H.P. Lovecraft, etc.

I'm not sure if this helps!

Mack

Re: Horror

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't buy it about the good guys losing and dying. The protags lose and die in all kinds of things. That's tragedy, not horror.

Lots of SF and fantasy writers would probably get uppity about how we should all always disturb your sense of reality, but I don't think always in the same direction, so that makes some sense to me.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

Good Morning mrissa. I think what happen with Mulengro was that the early deLint readership went into the book expecting something similar to what her had written up to that point (Riddle of the Wren, Harp of the Grey Rose, and Moonheart I believe, and a large body of shorter work.) and felt like they got something else. I would say that on the whole, Mulengro is darker and more violent than those early de Lint books, and I think this put some of those early readers off, causing concern for the publisher. Is it Horror? I don't think so, though as you said, it believes it is. It would probably be classified as Dark Fantasy these days. As for the two Sam Keys books, Angel of Darkness and From a Whisper to a Scream, I have only read the former. It felt more like horror than Mulengro in that it built up a certain amount of dread in the reader, though I'm not sure it's what I would call horror.

I have heard that The Blue Girl is his best book in sometime. I am actually about to pull it down and read it, since the brother-in-law was nice enough to give to me at Christmas. We shall see.

In Peace, and In Search of Breakfast,
Michael