Advertisement
I like writing about teenagers because everything is so vivid and immediate to them, and they make bad decisions on the reg, which is more fun in fiction. Also it was nice outside, and I was sitting on the porch looking at all the mayapple umbrellas popping up, and I thought, “How could I ruin this?”
Every once in a while in this life, and more so since the advent of social media, we find ourselves asked to name our favorites: our favorite color, our favorite food, our favorite book, our favorite movie. The answers we produce are almost always fictions, or rote repetitions, because our likes are malleable. But your friendly columnist does have a permanent answer for favorite horror story, an outing by a writer who earns several places on his life list of favorite stories, period: “The Renegade,” by Shirley Jackson.
fooey to “genre purity.” Horror without a point of view is just an autopsy, horror without effective prose just an exercise in poring through the thesaurus for synonyms for “viscera.” I sure as hell don’t know the precise dividing line beyond which a work of fiction stops being just a story and starts being literature, but by God, I know when I am deep in that country, and appreciate finding myself there.
I write horror novels. I’m a gay man. Many of my characters are also gay men. As such, I have the privilege of being known as an author of “Gay Horror,” though I don’t have a clue what that means. I’ve been asked. My answer is never particularly good, because the suggestion is that the horror I’m writing is just for LGBTQ readers, or that the horrors I’m describing are derived from the gay experience. Neither of which is true. The easiest way to cut through this nonsense is to invoke the name of Clive Barker. He writes horror novels. He’s a gay man. Sometimes he writes about bad things happening to gay men.
Be sure to read the Editorial for all our nightmarish updates, as well as a run-down of this month’s chilling content.
I got my MFA in Popular Fiction from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program, so my MFA experience was a little different than some people’s. Still, even in a program with a Popular Fiction focus, that tension existed. I also experience it every now and again in other various communities I’m part of. It boils down to a misunderstanding, I think; genre is more than Clarke and Tolkien (both of whom I love, but realize they’re not everyone’s cup of tea), but people don’t realize the breadth of genre.
Terence Taylor brings Nightmare the first installment of his new review column: “Read This!” This month, he reviews Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula, an unusual Icelandic translation of Bram Stoker’s classic, and Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean.
I think (I hope) that the story is about increments. It’s about exhaustion. Here again the story leaps from this fear and shame and disillusionment I felt and still feel. It’s not a very hopeful story. It offers no alternatives or solutions. But it does explore this idea of resistance and acceptance. Diego has every reason to resist. The setting of the story is actively toxic for him, erasing his bisexuality, erasing his past, erasing so much about him. He has no job, and the system is designed to ensure that in order to live he has to lie constantly, which only feeds into his own doubts and insecurities, his own erasure.
Growing up Mexican-American and a fan of speculative fiction meant bouncing back and forth between two worlds, but I was used to that crisscrossing of borders, one of the defining and unifying elements of the Latino experience. In our South Texas home, scant miles from Mexico, I could listen to my grandmother Marie Garza recount the tale of the mano pachona—a disembodied demon claw that hunts children down—and then turn to my father’s yellowed copies of pulp magazines to read Lovecraft or to my own collection of Swamp Thing, Weird Mystery Tales, and other dark comics.
Be sure to check out the Editorial for all our news and announcements, as well as a run-down of this month’s content.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
