Christopher Fowler -- The View from the Balcony
Christopher Fowler’s column appears in each issue of
The Edge. This is the 4th instalment, from the out of print #7 (old series, published 1997).I'M NOT NORMALLY prepared to knock bad horror literature, but today I'm making an exception in order to illustrate a point. I've just read the worst horror anthology I've ever purchased.
Actually, two of the stories were almost passable (one was by Thomas Ligotti), but the majority were so breathtakingly, dazzlingly awful that I had to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming. The book is a fat mainstream US import, and what's particularly distressing is that the stories are meant to represent 'Cutting Edge Horror For The Next Millennium'. Many of the tales feature detailed pornographic sexual violence to the female body, and visceral shock-tactic descriptions of characters consuming faeces and mutilating genitalia.
The tales share other common characteristics. They are badly written, indifferently plotted and identically constructed. Convoluted, ugly sentences mix technobabble with lurid mismatched metaphors. Language is mangled beyond comprehension. Ideas peter away into random thoughts. A number of these authors are Bram Stoker Award winners. They are described on the jacket as modern masters redefining the boundaries of fear. Here are some sentences from our new modern masters that redefine the boundaries of grammar:
'On the avenue the man sauntered casually, common frame blending nicely as eyes were kept busy.'
'The man shrieked with fury and spattered a volley of sibilants.'
'Despite the premature aging of youthful features, her body contained enough pure sex to pique his cravings.'
Many stories use awkward business-report jargon to describe simple things:
'The blues and whites were also the reason for his acquiring pedestrian status.'
'At the low end of the growth curve, she was a very small three years old.'
Some authors simply choose the wrong word; describing a typewriter, one tells us 'the type would bunch together in a skeletal fist', meaning the keys would bunch together, as opposed to the letters on the page.
Tales are littered with spelling errors, ludicrous typesetting, misunderstood literary quotes and obscure long words. 'Hyomandibular', 'interoperculum' and 'supra-occipital' all appear (in the same sentence!) in a story called 'Tears Seven Times Salt' but which should have been titled 'I Now Own A Medical Dictionary'.
Lest you think I'm being nit-picky, these examples were taken from one casual flip through a book which should be far beneath our notice were it not for the fact that it is the work of thirty different authors, virtually none of whom seems to have successfully mastered the craft of telling a story. Consequently the tales are really hard to read. Just as special effects are burying intelligent writing in film scripts, so gut reaction bad taste seems to be ousting thought-provoking plots and memorable characters on the printed page.
This book is certainly not alone on the shelf of stinkers. There are dozens of equally crapulous horror anthologies around; perhaps they reflect the confusion of the times. The horror genre acts as a literary binliner for all sorts of half-formed rubbish.
By way of contrast, UK editors Stephen Jones, David Sutton and Nicholas Royle rigorously examine contributions to their anthologies, rejecting submissions and requesting rewrites (my own stories included). You may not like all of the tales in their collections, but at least you know even before you open the book that they'll be properly written. These editors actively encourage literary exploration, but recognise that new seams in horror can only be mined after craft is fully mastered.
The broadcaster and horror essayist Mark Kermode told me he felt that the number of outlets for any kind of in-depth analysis of genre books or films was shrinking to the point of collapse. Editors and producers were going for the sound-bite, the easy hook, deciding for their audiences, relentlessly dumbing down whether we want it or not. Mr Kermode makes the heinous mistake of being a consummate craftsman with a rigorously intelligent viewpoint. His BFI volume on The Exorcist is essential reading. But the most demanding TV shows the networks can offer us are the fluffy Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Clive Barker's boring A to Z of Horror.
The Shape of Terror
Maybe I want something I can't have, but I know from talking to readers that you hope for more from magazine horror than set reports and endless video reviews of horror movies made in the seventies. Inept films like Inseminoid are every bit as bad as current video-premiere fare - they've just been lent a kind of tacky charm by the passing years. And how many times can the Hammer story be retold? There's more than enough material around to satisfy entry-level horror fans - but what about us advanced pupils? Well, magazines have advertisers, and advertisers decide that the target audience for horror is primarily an adolescent one, so it's unsurprising that most of the letters published in certain of them are teenagers' top-ten lists.
Maybe the problem begins with horror fiction writers. They complain that publishers no longer know how to categorise them. They're exploring new territory far from old-style horror, and the publishers' fear is that the public won't be drawn to something new. It's a valid fear, and while there's nothing wrong with traditional horror, a lot of good new work gets overlooked because it can't easily be found.
I finally gave up my horror column in Time Out because of the sheer drain of reading poorly written supernatural novels. Why do Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist work so well, both as films and books? They're intelligent, beautifully crafted stories from two top-notch US authors, but also, they come from a time when the genre was much more clearly defined. Thomas Tryon gave up acting in films like I Married A Monster From Outer Space in order to write. Of his first four excellent novels, two were made into horror films; the wonderfully unsettling - and sadly unobtainable - The Other, and a toned-down TV version of Harvest Home. Another, Crowned Heads, consisted of four novellas about four thinly disguised real movie scandals, one of which was filmed as Billy Wilder's Fedora. Tryon was that rarity; a writer whose work naturally adapted itself to film. In the nineties, unless you're Stephen King you don't stand a chance of finding someone with the vision to see your book as a film.
Giving Flight to Fantasy
So, why don't modern horror novels make good films?
Well, for a start, there's the supernatural problem. Many books rely on the appearance of demonic forces, something we've all seen in a million bad videos. What haunts on the page is often hokey on the screen. Then there's suspension of disbelief. In many a British horror novel, weird deaths occur in small villages - but now we live in a world of mobile phones, fax modems, satellite cameras and DNA testing, so how can there be such mysteries?
When a film comes along that addresses genuine dilemmas of the future, like Columbia Tristar's genetics nightmare Gattaca, the results are haunting and memorable. The film is about the horror of oppression, the death of free will, the exclusion of everything imperfect. Its dystopia is carefully thought through, but its slow pacing, subtle tension and lack of exploding spaceships will leave the Star Trek audience scratching their heads. (Trekkies didn't even wonder why the Borg turned out to have a leader, and worse still, they didn't get the best joke; that they are the Borg.)
For better or worse, The Devil's Advocate is the closest I've seen to a filmed horror novel in a long time. It presents a cogent argument about good and evil in the form of an exciting drama with popular appeal, although I'm getting tired of computer-generated effects being used where none are needed. The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby couldn't be improved by the use of them, and it's a sure bet that computer graphics will date films just as much as stop-frame animation has. A Hollywood film has always been and will always be a fairground ride - bigger, faster, noisier than ever, something visceral to enjoy and forget. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's down to Europe to provide stories with a brain-stem. A great film starts with a smart script, and that will often come from a well-written book. The infrastructure is already in place; all it needs now is for you budding writers to get cracking and produce good stories. It means that, in addition to learning your craft and your art, you'll have to be strong enough to convince sceptical publishers and film-makers that the general public will be interested in what you have to say.
Why should you bother? Because, since the night the first fire was lit, people have gathered to hear tales of wonder. The literary heritage of this century can be found on the country's secondhand bookstalls; it is rich, diverse and utterly unique. Whoever chooses to pick up the reins can pilot the imagination of the world to undreamt-of places.