Bronywn C asked Matt Ruff:

Do you like horror? What do you like about it? I have this theory where the genre can either challenge norms or further norms. This is an example of a piece that challenges them, obviously. Do you agree? How do you approach this?

Matt Ruff Yes, I am a big time horror fan. I like a wide variety of creepy subgenres and will try almost anything, but my favorite go-to scenario involves a group of people in an isolated location being menaced and picked off one by one (some recent film favorites include The Ritual, The Void, R-Point/Ghosts of War, and the Netflix miniseries Ghoul). Something about the combination of external threat and internal group dynamics under stress just really works for me.

Regarding your theory: I get where you’re coming from, and I’ve heard other people express similar ideas about the potential of horror, but to me it just seems a bit too limiting. To begin with, I feel that what a piece of fiction does has much more to do with the author’s intention than with the particular genre it happens to be classified as. And as for challenging/furthering norms, I don’t think that’s necessarily an either/or choice – the same piece of fiction can do both, and a lot more besides.

For example, with Lovecraft Country, you could certainly say that it challenges the norm of having a white protagonist in a certain type of genre story. But at the same time, it takes a very traditional view of the importance of family and community, and of how a moral universe should work (good people prosper or at least survive to fight another day; bad people get punished). And while the horror elements in the novel often do carry a subtext of social commentary or criticism, I didn’t choose to write a horror novel simply for the subtext, I chose horror because I like scary stories for their own sake. Haunted houses are cool. Dolls that come to life and chase you through a lonely park at night are really cool – even if no norms are challenged in the process.

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