Robert Dunbar's Blog - Posts Tagged "excellence"

Can HORROR ever be literature?

Didn’t it used to be?

Obviously, Henry James thought so … as did Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. So did William Faulkner and Elizabeth Bowen and Robert Aickman. The list goes on and on. Extraordinary writers have flourished in the darkness, artists of the caliber of Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson, Algernon Blackwood and ...

Let’s see, who else? D. H. Lawrence, anyone? How about E.M. Forster? This was once the genre of geniuses, of Meyrink and Kafka and Gogol.

My point? Horror doesn't have to be defined (or limited) by “Bigfoot Massacre” or by yet another totally new spin on zombies. No, it’s only in recent years that the genre has hit rock bottom. But a few brave souls still labor in the horror mines, and sometimes they unearth … treasures. You might not think this so shocking an assertion, yet it can be counted on to provoke outrage among reactionary factions, the sort of people who feel empowered to dictate what the genre MUST be. And, yes, I know the same thing has been going on in the SF world, where champions of “good old-fashioned swashbuckling yarns” just happen to be racist, sexist homophobes who loathe “all that artsy stuff.” Can you imagine what kind of fiction such people prefer? I’ll give you a hint: subtle and sophisticated it ain’t.

And they get abusive about works that don’t fit their template.

A mob mentality comes into play. With Horror, this mandated mediocrity – what I think of as “the rule of dumb” – has largely driven serious literary practitioners into the arms of Noir and Suspense and Mystery and has had much the same effect on intelligent readers.

Cue the accusations of “pretension.”

Pretentious? Moi?

I promise I’m not pretending anything.

But I do realize that pronouncements like these are exactly why I’m such a troll magnet. Recently, a (financially) successful author gave me some (unsolicited) advice about what I’m doing wrong in my career. Doubtless he knows what he’s talking about, so I just want to go on record now as being in favor of apple pie and the flag. Oh, and I revere the institution of motherhood. Plus our troops totally rock. Also Jesus is my friend, and Lovecraft is my favorite author.

There. That should do it. I can’t wait to see the spike in my book sales.

Anyway, back to what I was saying (before I so rudely interrupted myself), I’m not advocating snobbishness here. The pulp novels of one generation can become the underground classics of the next. It’s a perpetual rebellion. Raw talent and creative energy are often quite rude, and so they should be. Art should startle as well as illuminate. It should outrage and inflame, always. But a penny dreadful remains a penny dreadful. A lot of the titles choking the genre these days are barely literate, let alone literary, and no one believes otherwise, not even the “writers” who grind them out like sausages. There’s a place for this sort of thing of course. Everyone is entitled to read what they enjoy (even if it’s essentially the same book over and over). But shouldn’t there be room for quality as well?

Okay, so some of you MAY have heard me rant about this before. I think it bears repeating. Plus I’ve had provocation. Of sorts. Horror Novel Reviews, an excellent site, recently ran a feature where a number of authors were asked about books that scared them. (The link is here: https://horrornovelreviews.com/2016/0....) Much as I enjoyed the responses from luminaries like Ramsey Campbell, it still reminded me of the old Shocklines message board. Does anybody even remember Shocklines? They were forever running those “what are the three best books ever?” polls, and a solid 90% of the responses would list “The Bible, The Stand, and _____.” For that last entry, most people just filled in whatever Great Book they could remember being forced to read in high school. “All Quiet on the Western Front.” “A Tale of Two Cities.” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Whatever. Ancillary discussion uniformly dismissed numerous brilliant works for being “difficult" or "too literary."

Personally, I’ve never been able to work out what a book should be if not literary. Musical? Athletic? It’s like criticizing a statue for being too sculptural. Don’t get me started.

Sorry. Sore subject. Where was I?

Oh. Right.

A glut of indistinguishable titles has smothered the genre before. Why is this so recurrent a menace? Other genres have advanced in style and sophistication (despite having to fight anti-progressive blocs within their own ranks). That’s what sustains a genre’s growth. Why hasn’t Horror experienced similar development? (Yes, yes, I know there are exceptions. There are amazing writers, incredible books. That’s just it: all novels should be exceptional.) Could it be that the genre’s essential conservatism – all those plot arcs about preserving some nice white family by destroying the dreaded "other" – dictates mediocrity? Perhaps reactionary art is just too much of an oxymoron to sustain.

I want to believe the genre can recover. I know, I know, everyone else thinks the genre is just great, never better. Stokers all around. It’s one of the areas in which I seem to be out of step with my colleagues. There may be others, one or two. For instance, I don’t do many cons anymore. There are… reasons. To begin with, whenever I arrive at a conference I always seem to be wearing a t-shirt that says “tell me about your psychic powers.”

How do you stand it? Are SF conferences full of authors just dying to share their alien abduction experiences? Do Mystery writers keep checking their phones to see if Scotland Yard has called to enlist their assistance with a difficult case? No, I think it’s mostly just Horror: the lunatics really are running this particular asylum. But even that’s not the real problem. It’s this fan-driven glorification of the ordinary, the average. People stand in front of audiences and brag that “us Horror writers aren’t all literary and artistic.”

Like it’s a point of pride.

I can remember moderating a panel where a bunch of twenty-somethings in the audience started denouncing authors whose work they didn’t care for. The list included Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck… in short everyone they’d ever heard of who wasn’t a popular hack. "Hemingway can’t write at all" struck me as a memorable line. (The conversation then veered into “when a work is pirated, we should all feel flattered” territory. How often is one actually aghast? I felt like a character in a Gaston Leroux novel.) Yet those kids all thought of themselves as writers, as did many of the people nodding in agreement. Of course, the dumbing-down of pop culture is nothing new, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t resist. Isn’t fighting the good fight what artists do? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with liking a kazoo; just don’t decry the symphony for being "too musical." Anyway – mostly just to maintain some tenuous grip – I started putting together a list of books I consider essential works for anyone with a serious interest in literature, especially in creating literature. I’d love to get some feedback. How does mine compare with yours? Is it longer? Thicker?

Let me rephrase that.

How does my list compare to your list? (Oh come on, we all have them. It’s just that most sane people don’t write them down.) What gems have I omitted? Make recommendations. Please. I know I’ve missed things. But if you come at me with Dan Brown or James Patterson, be prepared for violence.

I’ve tried to restrict myself to one title per author, just because the list got too unwieldy otherwise. Some are great thundering epics. Others are elegant little volumes that slip in like a knife blade. Criteria? A lot of people might say that a great book is one that changed the world. If that’s the case, all such lists would need to include works by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sinclair Lewis (and possibly Radclyffe Hall), but in good conscience I can’t do that here. No, a book needs more than good intentions, more even than an important theme. I added and deleted INVISIBLE MAN three separate times. (No, not the Wells book.) A truly great novel – so far as my list is concerned – would be one I am personally enraptured by. Awestruck by. Challenged by. Inspired by. Forget changing society. For the moment, I’m more interested in books that changed me. All great art is a passionate force for evolution, personal and otherwise.

Anyway, here’s mine ... in a curious order all its own.

Watch it grow.

DHALGREN by Samuel R. Delaney
(Purely by coincidence, we happen to be discussing this in the Literary Darkness group.)
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
CALL IT SLEEP by Henry Roth
AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
THE GOLEM by Gustav Meyrink
BY NIGHTFALL by Michael Cunningham
MOBY DICK by Herman Melville
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
MISS MACINTOSH, MY DARLING by Marguerite Young
NADJA by Andre Breton
THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov
AGAINST NATURE by J. K. Huysmans
NAKED LUNCH by William Burroughs
NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
ON THE ROAD by Jack Keroac
(Capote's famous disdain notwithstanding.)
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT by Ernest Hemingway
ULYSSES by James Joyce
THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Maddox Ford
THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
THE MARBLE FAWN by Nathaniel Hawthorn
THE LONGEST JOURNEY by E.M. Forster
DIFFICULT DEATH by Rene Crevel
AT SWIM – TWO-BIRDS by Flan O’Brien
AT SWIM, TWO BOYS by Jamie O’Neill
POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt
A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
THW RAZOR’S EDGE by W. Somerset Maugham
NIGHTWOOD by Djuna Barnes
THE MINISTRY OF FEAR by Graham Greene
SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
CONFESSIONS OF A MASK by Yukio Mishima
DELTA WEDDING by Eudora Welty
THE DOLLMAKER by Harriet Arnow
[Okay, I know people will scratch their heads over that one, but if one test of a great book is that it had a profound effect on the reader at an impressionable age, then this absolutely qualifies. So do THE CATCHER IN THE RYE and THE GRAPES OF WRATH.]
THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK by Doris Lessing
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
COUSIN BETTE by Honore de Balzac
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME by Marcel Proust
EXTINCTION by Thomas Bernhard
DEATH SENTENCE by Maurice Blanchot
A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION by Gustav Flaubert
THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa
THE CASTLE by Franz Kafka
WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Bronte
(If only for the exhausting passion.)
DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
THE MAGUS by John Fowles
CLOSER by Dennis Cooper
GOING NATIVE by Stephen Wright
BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac Mccarthy
THE DWARF by Par Lagerkvist
BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL by Kathy Acker
THE OGRE by Michel Tournier

These titles frequently come up in discussion. The whole point of the Literary Darkness group I moderate here on Goodreads is – at least to my mind – that literary standards of excellence should also apply to genre writing. Some of the smartest people in the world will swear that the most goddawful writers are geniuses, simply because they enjoyed them as children. My advice is this: don’t be swayed by remembered pleasure. All too often enjoyment = entertainment = narcotic reading. Great literature, like great sex, requires some effort. If you’re going to just lie there…

I think perhaps I’d better abandon this metaphor as well. Here’s some other titles (more genre specific).

1984 by George Orwell
BLOODCHILD by Octavia E. Butler
THE KILLER INSIDE ME by Jim Thompson
NARROW ROOMS by James Purdy
THE DEMON by Hubert Selby, Jr.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY by Oscar Wilde
ON WINGS OF SONG by Thomas M. Disch
WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE by Shirley Jackson
THE EDGE OF RUNNING WATER by William Sloane
DEEP NIGHT by Greg F. Gifune
THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
THE WORM OUROBORUS by E.R. Eddison
THE WOOD WIFE by Terri Windling
MYTHAGO WOOD by Robert Holdstock
HOUSE OF LEAVES by Mark Z. Danielewski
TOURS OF THE BLAC K CLOCK by Steve Erickson

Oh, did I mention it was all different genres? Sorry.

Jeez, I’m all out of breath here. The problem with a list like this is… knowing where to stop. Do I not mention Lawrence Durrell? And it seems weird not to include F. Scott Fitzgerald. Or at least Zelda. Or possibly Penelope. (Not related, but still.) How about Iris Murdock or Muriel Spark? Paul Bowles and Don DeLillo? Paul Theroux or Robert Creeley? Malcolm Lowry, Saul Bellow, John O’Hara, John Dos Passos, John Cheever? What about Pynchon? Irving and Updike? Heller? McMurtry? Flannery O’Connor or Toni Morrison? What about Marge Piercy? Langston Hughes? Doesn’t it all nourish the inner writer?

Okay, let me just keep going until smoke starts coming out of my ears. One last push. Top of my head. Bottom of my soul.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
HOPSCOTCH by Julio Cortazar
THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES by Robert Musil
THE AGE OF WONDERS by Aharon Appelfeld
DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Keostler
NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS by Angela Carter
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
MILK by Darcey Steinke
LOVING; LIVING; PARTY GOING by Henry Green
A BEND IN THE RIVER by V. A. Naipaul
THE RECOGNITIONS by William Gaddis
ASK THE DUST by John Fante

Okay, that’s it for now.

No, wait.

THE RETURN OF JEEVES by P. G. Wodehouse
[Because I figure if you’ve read something more than twenty times, it belongs somewhere on your list.]
LUCKY JIM by Kingsley Amis
[See above.]
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES by Ray Bradbury
[Again, and in spades.]

Okay. At least that’s a start.

Additions, anyone?