Unless you’re such obscure genre writers as Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, and a little English scribbler: William Shakespeare. “This Is Horror” has the skinny.
Unless you’re such obscure genre writers as Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, and a little English scribbler: William Shakespeare. “This Is Horror” has the skinny.
That’s an attitude that has always stymied me, personally. It seems like it’s always uptight English professors and their ilk who insist that “genre” fiction is by nature low-brow, both written and read by unintellectual bottom-feeders. One friend of mine told me that his college English professor (English 101, or some such) insisted that SF stood for “schlock-fiction.” This attitude covers not only speculative fiction such as supernatural horror, fantasy and science fiction, but stylized action, mystery and romance as well. Anything that has a genre section at a bookstore.
It’s as if they’re of the opinion that the only literature that is of any merit features little if any content that might actually interest most people. I suppose they just want to feel that they are above the common rabble.
In reality, the supernatural, and the speculative in extension, serves as an incredibly powerful tool for creating metaphor, for looking at the world through new eyes. If you want to tell a tale about human nature, tell it with monsters and robots.
It’s purely coincidental that monsters and robots are awesome.