Nina Allan's Homepage
photo by Sergei Berezhnoi
“He was an absolute, pure genius. With his departure, everything has become darker and more airless.” (Dmitri Bykov)
This feels like the end of an era. Read Miriam Elder’s reflections for The Guardian here. Russians really, really care about their writers.
In a recent blog post for The Guardian, Stuart Kelly asked us to ponder the question of horror fiction, and whether it was a genre doomed to literary hell. The post itself is interesting; even more so is the comments stream that follows, a discussion that also expanded sideways into further personal blog posts and on Twitter. If nothing else, it shows how this issue has the power to get people talking. I was struck in particular by a comment made by Jonathan McCalmont:
I really like the idea of horror lit but I’ve never found any I really liked.
Which he then extended by saying of a recently published and much-lauded commercial horror novel:
I thought the first half was cliche-ridden and the second half was just silly.
This certainly rang true for me. From personal experience I’d also add that almost all of the commercial horror novels I’ve tried to read recently have been rendered unsatisfactory, for me at least, by an identical fault: often graced with a compellingly readable beginning, they inevitably unravel into a farrago of ridiculousness, cliche and generic predictability in the second half. That this just happens to be the same lethal virus that has infected ninety-nine percent of commercial horror cinema can be no coincidence. Paradoxically, the danger for many new horror writers is that they grow up loving horror. They devour horror any which way they can, and in the process they grow used to a particular grammar of horror, a set of tropes that, like all tropes, were probably exciting once, but are now staid and safe. These writers repeat in print what they’ve seen on the screen because that’s what got them into horror in the first place. It’s understandable. It’s also threatening to make horror a laughing stock.
I grew up loving horror, and when I finally decided to start taking my writing seriously it was horror that I wanted to write. I lost count of the number of horror novels I got through in those first few heady years when I was rediscovering the genre and trying to work out where I fitted into it, if at all. Looking back on that period now, I can see that what I experienced was in effect my own mini, speeded up history of horror: in the beginning, everything seemed new, and thrilling, and just about the best damn thing I’d ever read. As I became more knowledgeable I started to discern recurring themes, a certain repetitiveness, a certain lack of freshness in approach that made me begin to worry that maybe horror was all used up. The final stage of this intensive period of discovery was a coming to terms with the fact that horror, more than any other genre, is actually a closed system, and that the only way of ensuring originality in horror is by busting out of it.
It sounds obvious to say it, but whereas science fiction and fantasy are abstract concepts, horror is an emotion, something you feel. Science fiction as a genre – and in this SF is no different from social realism or historical fiction – is an umbrella term for a whole gamut of varying approaches. It is a house of many mansions, many shades of dissenting opinion. Most importantly, it does not have a dominant, nay determinant, tone colour. Compare one hundred SF stories and there is room, in theory if rarely in practice, for one-hundred percent diversity. Compare a hundred horror stories and they will be bound together, to some extent at least, by the genre’s self-defining demand that it feast only upon itself.
If what we’re looking for in horror is originality, this is going to be a problem.
The logical extrapolation of this problem is that horror will be less widely read even than SFF, because large numbers of people will convince themselves from the outset that it’s not for them. “I don’t like being scared.” “All that monster stuff is stupid.” “I can’t stand blood and gore.” At least with SF, you might have a reasonable chance of persuading a non-initiate that it’s not all men from Mars now, that there’s all sorts of fascinating stuff they might be interested in – the ethics of cloning or human fertility or near-future scarcity or plain old crisis of identity, you know, just like in Dostoevsky’s The Double. It’s difficult to try convincing anyone that you can have horror literature without any horror in it. When I try telling non-horror buffs that the audience at FrightFest don’t all wear Texas Chainsaw T-shirts (well, we do, but that’s not the point), that the atmosphere is one of the friendliest and most inclusive I’ve ever experienced, that the level of discussion at the Q&As reveals an articulacy in the language and culture of cinema a hundred miles in advance of anything you’re likely to find in an average audience for, say, The King’s Speech, what happens is that they look at me and shake their heads: you’re just a horror nut, what would you know?
It’s an uphill battle, doomed to be lost because generic horror seems largely content to sit on its arse and not do very much other than talk to itself.
And yet there is no shortage of marvellous horror fiction out there, no shortage at all, especially if you’re prepared to look for it in more out of the way places. When people say horror’s dead, I say they’re reading the wrong stuff.
Peter Straub’s Shadow Land, Ramsey Campbell’s Incarnate, Patricia Geary’s Strange Toys, Mark Danielewski’s The House of Leaves, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Handling the Undead and Stephen King’s The Shining are all brilliant horror novels, most of them probably familiar to horror readers. But Nicola Barker’s Darkmans is also a horror novel, so is John Banville’s Mefisto, John Burnside’s Glister, Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, Roberto Bolano’s 2666, Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs, M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart, Susan Hill’s The Beacon, Patrick McGrath’s Martha Peake, Hilary Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street and Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. What is Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones if not a horror novel? Or Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace? If you’re secretly thinking that ‘literary horror’ is somehow a soft option, or ‘not really horror’, then go away right now and read Joyce Carol Oates’s mind-scorching Zombie or Gabrielle Wittkop’s extraordinary novella The Necrophiliac. One of the most original and striking voices in contemporary short fiction, Robert Shearman, is also one of our finest horror writers. The book that won this year’s Edge Hill Short Story Prize, Sarah Hall’s The Beautiful Indifference, contains four horror masterpieces. Stuart Kelly quite rightly mentioned the American writer Brian Evenson as a contemporary master of horror; recent collections from Paul Meloy, James Cooper, Margo Lanagan, Thomas Ligotti and Kelly Link similarly showcase modern horror in intriguing, diverse and strikingly original ways.
What unites all the above is 1) excellent writing and 2) the fact that these are books that make highly effective use of horror, but not horror exclusively. They are all, first and foremost, stories. Narratives. Experiments in novelistic form. Extended character studies. Subversions. Tales of madness. Explorations of situations or people or ideas or places that absolutely compel both reader and writer to find out more. I’d argue that Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie is one of the darkest and most disturbing horror novels ever written. It got to me so much I almost couldn’t finish it, which has to be just about the highest compliment you could pay a horror novel. It has stuff in it that many generic horror writers would shrink from using. But what makes Oates’s book a masterpiece and raises it far, far above the level of the black-jacketed clones more commonly shelved under ‘horror’ at your local Waterstone’s is the sheer quality of Oates’s writing, her attention to characterisation and to those aspects of the story that do not directly inspire horror in the reader – in fact in the case of Zombie they inspire pity. One of the many things that makes Stephen King a writer rather than just a best-selling horror phenomenon is the fact that backstory, surface detail, sense of place, and the poetical rhythms of vernacular language matter as much to him as monsters, sometimes more.
This may sound controversial, but I believe that if you set out to write horror (as some say you should) with the sole aim of horrifying, terrifying, or penetrating the dark arse end of the human psyche then what you’ll end up with won’t be very strong. The books and stories I’ve referred to above were written, I would argue, for a whole variety of reasons and with a whole variety of inspirations as the starting point. That the reader will, in the course of reading them, be horrified, or terrified, startled out of their comfort zone or on occasion even feel that they are indeed penetrating the dark arse end of the human psyche (I defy you to read 2666 or The Kindly Ones and NOT feel something of that kind) is more or less a certainty; that this is a part, but never the whole, of their literary journey is a certainty also.
When a horror writer begins work on a new story, she should be thinking about the story as a whole and not just the horror. Above all, she should be ambitious. Because a certain depth of purpose is a prerequisite for interesting writing, and because dynamic writing, writing that lasts in the mind and stands the test of time is rarely monochrome. It contains a whole spectrum of tone colours.
Because horror should be deep, not cheap.
Since finishing work on Maree last month, I’ve been working on a couple of horror stories. One of them, which is really more dark fantasy I suppose than horror (although it does have horror in it), was more fun to write than anything I’ve attempted since ‘A Thread of Truth’. There was just something about the narrative voice that made it feel as if I was listening to the story as well as writing it. This doesn’t happen often but when it does it’s exciting. The second story, which I finished earlier today, couldn’t have been more different. Even though it – just – has an affirmative ending, its tone is so bleak, so sad that I found the story preying on my mind in a way that felt unusual and not a little disturbing. But I think that’s a good sign.
I’ll say more about these two stories in due course. For now, I guess what I’m driving at is that horror can be – should be – anything you want it to be. The only rule is to make it indisputably your own.
Couldn’t resist a quick post about this.
It’s now exactly three months since Chris delivered the manuscript of his new novel The Adjacent (out next summer). In the weeks since then, an increasing number of sea- and ship-related books have been appearing on desks and bedside tables here, and last night I read the first three pages of the first draft of what will be Chris’s next book, The Mariners.
Anything more different from The Adjacent is difficult to imagine.
It is so good! The most intriguing, inviting and alluring beginning of a story I have read in ages.
To say I’m impatient to read more is putting it mildly…
This month, Locus Magazine are hosting an ‘all-centuries’ poll for the best SF/F/H novels and short fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries. It’s the first such poll since 1998 and therefore the first chance readers will have to reveal their thoughts on which works of the current century might be destined to emerge as future classics.
This is fascinating of course, especially since 1) the poll is open to everyone, not just Locus subscribers, and 2) the organizers have been sensible enough to respond to suggestions that this year’s ballot NOT be seeded with possible options (as has happened previously) and thus, theoretically at least, offering us a level playing field.
Is a level playing field truly possible, though? If you click on the link above, as well as the ballot form itself you’ll find four extensive and informative ‘suggestions lists’, one each for novels and short fiction for both the 20th and 21st centuries. It is clear that the poll’s organisers have been rigorously fair and thorough in compiling these lists (full details of the selection procedure can be found at the head of the 20th Century Novels list). Some questions, however, remain.
In the run-up to this year’s Fantasycon, the BFS ran a poll to determine the nation’s favourite ghost story, and because I’d been invited to take part in the panel discussion prior to the announcement of the winner I did a fair amount of research before the event. I started by rereading a number of my own favourite ghost stories. Then I checked out the ToCs of some landmark anthologies to see which stories featured and what I thought of them.
What I discovered was that although these anthologies featured many fine stories, they were also surprisingly conservative in their selections. The same stories tended to crop up again and again at ten-year intervals. It was as though editors had found themselves stymied, bound to choose certain works simply because they were already considered to be unassailable in their position as ‘classics’ rather than because they felt genuinely inspired to include them. So orthodoxy is born: stale, inflexible, and unthinking. A by-product of orthodoxy is the risk of losing sight of those works that didn’t fit the prevailing fashions of the time, those works that were odder, more uncomfortable, less easily categorized. Less orthodox, in other words. Awards, anthologies and works of criticism present an interesting picture certainly, but (as has been highlighted by recent debate) it can only ever be a partial one.
The result of the ghost story poll came as no surprise to anyone, and for me at least the winner served to epitomise the problems of orthodoxy. M. R. James’s ‘Oh! Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ still has its thrilling moments and James’s influence on later writers is undeniable. Yet ‘Oh! Whistle’ is also very much a product of its time and place. It is a story of surface affect but precious little psychological depth. Its convoluted mode of address makes it feel irredeemably dated now – it’s retrospective, not revolutionary, more of a comfort blanket than a tale of terror. I’m not suggesting that we should stop loving M. R. James (or Heinlein, or Clarke) – just that we should consider them honestly before including them in our personal canon, that we should not take the assumed importance of any writer for granted. Historically significant these ‘classics’ may be, but how good are they now, really? Does the writing still speak to us in a language that is actively inspiring, or is it time for a changing of the guard?
Polls like this current Locus poll give each individual voter the chance to be his or her own editor, compiling a personal ‘century’s best’. Which is a great thing – just so long as we remain aware of our own biases as we make our selections. What are our own personal criteria when we sit down to fill out our ballot forms? The most obvious point to underline is that no one has read everything – no matter how much we read or how widely, we all have built-in blindspots, gaps, hobby horses. Given that this is so, is it more worthwhile to try and make an ‘objective’ listing – those works we genuinely consider to be groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting, historically important, regardless of how much we personally actually like them – or would selecting works on such grounds prove so subjective and in its own way dishonest that it’s better simply to go for works we love, regardless of how they sit ideologically within the genre or how clever or well thought of they are. Should nostalgia play a part? What about books that completely changed our outlook when we were sixteen, but (being brutally honest) we’re no longer that keen on?
For my own ballot, I allowed my personal response – my gut feeling, in other words – to determine my choices as much as possible. I studied the suggestions lists carefully, but my final votes included a good number of works that are not on those lists. I voted only for works that I have read in their entirety. I also laid down an additional rule for myself in only voting for one work per author per category – it just seemed more interesting that way. I’ve listed my voting choices in a pdf, which you can view here. I hope to see more people posting their ballots online as the deadline for voting (November 30th) draws closer. The bigger the turnout, the more meaningful the result. The more dissenting the opinion, the better.
We heard last night that Lavie Tidhar has won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel with his superb Osama. This is such brilliant news, not just for Lavie himself (I forget exactly how many publishers turned this book down originally, or wanted Lavie to change the title – bet they’re kicking themselves now… ) but also for SFF. Osama was so clearly the right choice – and what a wonderful way to end this year’s awards season.
At his recent gig at Foyles to launch the Solaris paperback edition of Osama, Lavie talked passionately about speculative fiction and the European tradition, why genre is irrelevant, and some of the difficulties he experienced in getting Osama out to us. The man lives and breathes ideas, which for some might be explanation enough as to why he’s so readily found a home within the SFF community. But the other thing about Lavie – the most important thing – is that he’s a bloody good writer. Read Osama and you won’t just find one of the most daring and original alternate histories of recent years – you’ll also find muscular, evocative prose, a resonant sense of place, a revelling in detail and criss-crossing everything the acknowledgement that our existence here is above all a human story, not just an ongoing historical and technological experiment.
I’ve just been reading ‘Strigoi’, a short story by Lavie recently published in Interzone. It’s set in an Israel of the future, the ‘Central Station’ which is now Earth’s chief space port. But what we have here is not the bright, shiny, impossible and rather tedious future we’re already tired of (the way SF has so often been misrepresented in and by the mainstream). We don’t have a doomsday scenario either. What we have is pragmatism, a kind of positive uncertainty. Above all we have detail:
The Shambleau called Carmel came to Central Station in spring, when the smell in the air truly is intoxicating. It is the smell of the sea, of salt water and tar, coming from the west. It is the smell of orange groves, of citrus trees in bloom, coming from the distant plantations of the Sharon region. It is the smell of the resin or sap that sometimes drips from a cut in the eternally renewing adapto-plant neighbourhoods surrounding Central Station, sprouting like weeds high above the more permanent structures of the old neighbourhood; it is the smell of ancient asphalt heating in the sun, of shawarma cooking slowly, drenched in spices, on a spit, close to a fire; it is the smell of Humanity Prime, that richest and most concentrated of smells. There is nothing like it in the Outer Worlds.
The old collides with the new here in a form we can recognise and thus feel a part of. Here is a world that is still in the future and yet all around us, a world we have a stake in, even as it arrives. It is the fine detail, the minutiae, that make this world real to us, as much as any overarching concept. Tidhar’s world is a world we feel as well as imagine.
We sense its reality.
This is the kind of SF I want to be reading.
Congratulations to Lavie Tidhar, and to all this year’s World Fantasy Award winners. This has been a good one.
Oh, and you can read another of Lavie’s Central Station stories, ‘The Lord of Discarded Things’, right here at Strange Horizons. I recommend it.
I’ve just been enjoying the latest instalment in James Smythe’s marathon Stephen King Reread for The Guardian, a great little essay about Cujo that focuses on the rabid dog as a metaphor for alcohol and drug addiction. The series has been brilliant so far and I look forward to each new ‘episode’. It’s also inspired me to do something I’ve been meaning to get around to for years but have thus far never managed to allocate the time to: read the Dark Tower series. I’m almost at the end of The Gunslinger now (early days I know) and just… loving it. The sense of place – the acrid harshness of the hardpan desert – is majestic (King’s consistent attention to sense of place is in my opinion one of the things that makes his fiction great) and the idea of the book – as the first step on this monumental fictional journey – makes me jealous. That’s the simplest way I have of putting it.
I wish that I could write something like this.
As well as duelling with the green eyed monster, I have also been writing. I’ve just finished work on a new story (a long one) and am about to begin on another (not so long). I have also been trying to get my voting choices in order for the Locus All-Centuries Poll of SFF – a strenuous task, of which more in the near future.
Listening to: Cowboy Junkies Open, Bob Dylan’s Tempest. We bought this a week ago and it’s fantastic. I don’t think any lyrics could ever equal the incandescent poetry of some of those earlier albums (for me at least) but this is a good record.
This is a short animated film created by the very talented American-born-now-UK-resident writer and film maker Molly Brown called The Evil Table. I loved seeing this – it’s beautifully imagined, and rather clever, and just very funny. ‘Like’ it on Youtube in time for Hallowe’en and Molly gets her film shown at the Mayhem horror film festival in Nottingham next week – which would be great to see.
I just wanted to say a massive thank you to everyone who came to my ‘thing’ at the BSFA meeting in Holborn last night. You were a marvellously generous audience and it was a delight to be there. It was great to put some more faces to some more names, and many apologies to those people (too many) that I never got to say hi to or spend enough time with – see you for more chats at Eastercon I hope.
Huge thanks to the BSFA for inviting me to be a guest – it was an honour and a privilege. And thanks most of all to Niall Harrison, whose thoughtful preparation for the event, insightful questioning and calm presence did everything to make me forget how nervous I’d been and simply enjoy a conversation and discussion on those subjects that mean most to me in an environment that couldn’t have been friendlier or better informed.
We also learned last night that Elisabeth Hand, Lavie Tidhar and Aliette de Bodard have already been scheduled as guests for upcoming BSFA meetings in 2013. How great and how special is that? Those dates go straight in our diary and I hope in yours, too.
Just to mention that I’m (very proud to be) the guest at this month’s BSFA London meeting on Wednesday. The venue is the cellar bar of The Argyle pub on Leather Lane, just 2 minutes’ walk from Chancery Lane tube. (NB: the food there is excellent value.) The meeting kicks off at 7pm. I shall be reading a short extract from What Happened to Maree, following which I shall be interviewed by Niall Harrison, editor-in-chief of Strange Horizons. Hopefully there’ll also be time for a Q&A.
I’m very much looking forward to this event. Niall’s knowledge of SFF is legendary, and he’s always had insightful things to say about my stuff, so we should definitely find plenty to discuss.
Do come along and say hello if you’re in the area – this looks like being fun!
As a kind-of SF writer it pains me to admit this, but I never get overly excited at the thought of interfacing with new technology. I always maintain that by the time I’ve adopted something it’s safe to assume it’s ubiquitous, and then comfort myself with the fact that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a portable typewriter and has been using the same Macbook now for more than a decade. If I tell you that when I upgraded my mobile last week (under some protest) it was to an identical model, basically, only with the next serial number up and in a different colour (I was still pretty traumatised) it probably won’t surprise you to learn that it took me a little while, when I first re-entered the SFF community at the beginning of the 2000s, to appreciate the growing importance of online media. I read a lot of print magazines back then and it was some years before I caught up to Strange Horizons – but it was SH more than any of them that began to re-attune my senses to what was happening and what was possible in SFF today and into tomorrow.
Strange Horizons has done and continues to do a great deal to promote new and exciting writing in SFF, fiction that pushes the boundaries and widens the remit, and their occasional ‘retrospectives’ featuring more established writers are every bit as imaginative as their promotion of fresh talent. But it’s as a forum for review and debate that I personally have found SH to be essential reading, unique in the field, an invaluable resource that is now as much a part of my creative life as any newspaper or print magazine and probably more so. It was at Strange Horizons that I first discovered and read the reviews and criticism of John Clute and Paul Kincaid, Dan Hartland and Matt Cheney, Jonathan McCalmont, Martin Lewis and Niall Harrison, all writers whose engagement with, knowledge of and commitment to the field of speculative fiction is a constant and continuing delight and inspiration, not to say a provocation and a challenge. SH has an archived index of reviews dating back to 2004 – a first port of call for anyone needing to check the back catalogue of critical writing on a particular work, as well as a fascinating snapshot of how opinion and criticism in SFF has evolved and shifted through the last decade.
The reviews team now under Abigail Nussbaum (Nic Clarke, Erin Horakova, Niall Alexander, Sofia Samatar, Michael Levy, Duncan Lawie, Lila Garrott, Liz Bourke et al I’m looking at you) is just awesome, and I feel genuinely honoured to be able to make my own contribution from time to time.
Strange Horizons is a paying market that takes the trouble to acquire the best work and that treats its contributors as professionals. It is staffed by volunteers, and run entirely on reader donations as a not-for-profit venture. SH are currently holding their annual fund drive to raise the money that will finance this irreplaceable magazine for another year and I would encourage anyone who loves SFF to support them.
I can’t imagine the critical landscape without SH. I’m looking forward to 2013’s SFnal controversies already…
© 2025 The Spider's House
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑