A Flaw in Contemporary Horror?

[Druidic]

OK, this whole genre thing has become a bit of a red herring.
It's no crime to write good genre fiction. Genres are no more straitjackets than a sixteen bar blues. It depends on the musician. And its no crime to write outside of genres (whatever the hell that means). There is genre fiction and everything outside of it which is probably a genre in itself. Conventions shouldn't stop a talented writer. In The Pledge you have a novel that confounds readers expectations and still provides closure (Durrenmatt. had his cake and ate it too). Enjoy the fiction you love. OK?
My original complaints stand. Let me be clear: the worst abuses of mainstream and mainstream thrillers--tedious repetitive descriptions of simple acts to pad out novels or short stories, or a delusional belief that one's verbosity is creating great characters (Dean Koontz once bragged how realistic his portrayals of women were. Dear God)--kill any attempt to provide a genuinely satisfying story.. Tedious repetition is not artistic repetition.

And, yes, please keep your O'Neill out of my Brecht. Please.

[Druidic]

btw, Don't assume I'm down on all contemporary works of Weirdness; No, just the bloated pointless ones which unfortunately seem to be the majority. I've recently read Campbell's The Grin of the Dark at the urging of Mark Ssamuels and I must say it's a fine novel, certainly the best novel I've yet read by the man. Thanks, Mark! Midnight Sun would also have been magnificent...but as a novella, I believe. Was it James who said the novella was the perfect form for fiction? I t certainly seems to be for weird tales.

[Justin Isis]

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

And its no crime to write outside of genres (whatever the hell that means). There is genre fiction and everything outside of it which is probably a genre in itself.

This seems like the most interesting thing that's been said in here so far, is it possible to think outside of genres once we've been made aware of genres and there exist multiple repositories of information about them? (TV Tropes, various submission guidelines, etc). I think most people who are reading and writing now are always aware of genres to a greater or lesser extent...would be interested to hear people's thoughts on whether anything can be outside of genres now that we've spent about 200 years categorizing everything that can be written.

You could make a comparison to myths...if something has lasted that long I don't really trust it...the most interesting time to be doing anything is when it seems like everything has been done.

Quote Originally Posted by mark_samuels

I recall reading a review (in an issue of Faunus I imagine) by the hideously prosaic critic and arch-materialist H.L. Mencken. He reviewed Arthur Machen's novella “A Fragment of Life”. As I'm sure you all know, Machen, in the first three-quarters of the novella, attempts a mimetic “kitchen-sink” style narrative chronicling the dull suburban lives of his protagonist Edward Darnell and his wife. The final quarter is set up to deliberate subvert the first three quarters in order to demonstrate that their real life had nothing to do with the economy, the latest fashions in furniture, in spurious contemporary politics and gnosticism, and so on and so forth. Mencken, being a idiot, and misunderstanding it 100%, babbles on in his nutty review how Machen went totally off the rails in the last quarter of “A Fragment of Life” and could have turned out a masterpiece of social realism. Mark S.

I think Mencken was wrong at the time, but right now. Sort of like in Pierre Menard, the meaning of something changes depending on when it comes out, even if the content is ostensibly the same. 

If I had more money I'd commission you to focus more on "social realism" or else "whatever"...I've also considered remixing some of your stories by removing the supernatural or weird elements (so "Vrolyk" would be nothing but scenes of people with social problems hanging out in cafes late at night). Think you should try doing "A Fragment of Life" but without the final part...or put it first or something...start with that part, then gradually build up to "tedious and verbose descriptions of mundane activities."

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

And, yes, please keep your O'Neill out of my Brecht. Please.

VINTAGE 80S REESES PEANUT BUTTER CUPS COMMERCIAL W WALKERS - YouTube

[Druidic]

Justin, you picked up on exactly what I was thinking. I can't conceive of anything written that's completely out of genre. It's like the question young children ask: "Well, if God Created everything, who created God?" Your mind goes blank, time for a distraction and change the subject.
Messiah is one of the best SF novels I've ever read but nobody thinks of Vidal as a genre writer. Yet all his books--and Nabokov's as well, the ones I've read,--can be fitted neatly into genres. Vidal wrote SF, political and historical works, fantasy, satire and even light pornography. Some of Vlad's works can easily be viewed as macabre or crime or psychological studies. The thing is these writers did not lean heavily on the conventions of genres. And, just as importantly, they never plowed the same field too long.
The Pledge is an example of a novel that appeared to work against genre (subtitle in almost all good translations: Requiem for the Detective Story) but in the end, Durrenmatt cunningly provided a resolution that satisfied fans of the detective story.
Harlan Ellison, a writer I genuinely like, used to earn the ire of some critics by claiming he was not an SF writer. They thought that was disingenuous because the majority of his stories used SF tropes. He didn't move on to other genres (like Vidal) and he paid a price. I understood what Ellison was saying: he wanted respect for his work and why not? But his identification as a SF writer was written in stone in many minds and who could blame them?
Can you think of something that could avoid all labels and still be coherent? I'm trying to. But I suspect that even "non-genre" writers produce genre works.

Great commercial btw. Thanks, Justin. I understand the licorice whips and peanut butter didn't work out as well.

[gveranon]

I think Ellison is basically a fabulist who often used sf tropes. Fortunately the sf genre was capacious enough to publish many of his stories and give him some measure of fame and recognition. (A point I tried to make in a previous post: genres are variegated things with fuzzy boundaries and interesting hinterlands.) But Ellison was sometimes hindered creatively by the limitations of the genre and its readership, and he didn't reach his full potential readership because of being stuck with a genre label that didn't quite fit. He was right in his complaints, but they probably didn't do him any good.

I recently read Vidal's Messiah (thanks for the recommendation). It is very good. In fact it is so good that it made me look at Vidal in a different light.

[xylokopos]

Justin, I think you can conceive non-genre specific work, provided you narrow down your definition of a genre. But go broad enough, and everything is classifiable. You have these unusual writers that Gveranon mentioned, but even for them you can say, this fellow was part of the whole OULIPO thing, or that fellow was a surrealist or a post-modernist [and this type of classification covers a multitude of sins]. There are also other appellations which, strictly speaking, do not designate a genre but firmly establish a work's position within a literary tradition or the history of fiction [if such a thing could be seriously said]: novel of ideas, roman à clef, etc. I think Umberto Eco has written interestingly on the subject. You can have works of fiction that are the equivalent of an incomprehensible performance piece, but in that case the writer is usually trying to make some point by abandoning the exoskeleton and all the insides of narrative fiction and since he is trying to make a point his purpose would be better served through the writing of an essay- or perhaps the staging of that incomprehensible performance piece.

Funnily enough, once upon a time, when a writer thought of himself as an iconoclast, as a true original, he tried his damnedest to position his work within a respected and time-honored genre. It sort of makes sense: the more outlandish and provocative the material, the greater the need for a respectable vehicle to carry it through the ages. And so we have the Marquis De Sade, genre writer par excellence: The Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man is cast as a pseudo-platonic dialogue, Justine as a medieval morality play [ with the rewards of virtue now transfigured to follies], the Philosophy in the Bedroom and all the rest as part works of 'natural philosophy' part polemic, the kind favored by Rousseau or Diderot and so on. The man even wrote a political manifesto when the form was in its infancy. And pornography is a genre that predates him, no?

[Justin Isis]

Quote Originally Posted by xylokopos

Justin, I think you can conceive non-genre specific work, provided you narrow down your definition of a genre. But go broad enough, and everything is classifiable. You have these unusual writers that Gveranon mentioned, but even for them you can say, this fellow was part of the whole OULIPO thing, or that fellow was a surrealist or a post-modernist [and this type of classification covers a multitude of sins].

I'm not sure this was always the case, or at least I think the specificity has increased over time. Premodern works tended to mix fantastic elements, realism, comedy, drama etc. more freely (four classic works of China, Roman novels, etc.) although the ancients were also talking about genres and formal constraints, so the idea isn't new. But I think the current situation has been created largely by the publishing industries of the previous two centuries.

Surrealism, OULIPO, etc, we can classify them now but they were once (fairly recently) new ideas that hadn't really been done.

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

Justin, you picked up on exactly what I was thinking.  I can't conceive of anything written that's completely out of genre.  It's like the question young children ask: "Well, if God Created everything, who created God?"  Your mind goes blank, time for a distraction and change the subject.

Generally I look at genres the way Scientology looks at engrams: i.e. unconscious patterns that tend to direct how you act unless you pay very close attention. In this sense Vladimir Propp, Joseph Campbell, etc. provide the valuable service of letting you know what to avoid (this is the opposite strategy employed by for example Neil Gaiman, who tries to "update" "time-tested" generic material).

For example, Markitty thinks that "social-mimetic realism" is boring presumably because of the over abundance of writers who aren't actually paying close attention to real life so much as they are pushing it through the cheese grater of 19th century novels/Booker Prize or whatever...and presumably subverting this was what Machen was doing with "A Fragment of Life," in which the generic model is followed by something unexpected (the couple's real life having nothing to do with its outward content).

Think the most interest/emotion tends to be generated when familiar elements are absent, or the expected progressions don't occur...so "Brecht plays" can only be done once, and then they have to be cut with O'Neill or whatever.

It's sort of like Gurdjieff, it's not that the world is boring, it just requires you to wipe away all the genre eye crust making you see it as "the world" instead of the world as soon as you start writing...so if you started trying to write about real life but fell into "mimetic social realist mode" with free indirect style, flat and round characters etc., then you'd be letting the genre patterns determine what happens instead of thinking about what kind of response would really be appropriate to what's happening around you. 

Note that I think "letting the genre patterns determine what happens instead of thinking about what kind of response would really be appropriate to what's happening around you" is probably the best way to win readership and prizes...

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Justin Isis

I think Mencken was wrong at the time, but right now. Sort of like in Pierre Menard, the meaning of something changes depending on when it comes out, even if the content is ostensibly the same.

Excellent idea.
BTW, smugly I think my preternatural real-time reviewing is a brand new genre of re-fictionalised fiction based on the truth and value of what is being reviewed.

[Evans]

Ahh a lot of Nabakov fans on this forum I see.

Quote Originally Posted by Justin Isis

...I've also considered remixing some of your stories by removing the supernatural or weird elements (so "Vrolyk" would be nothing but scenes of people with social problems hanging out in cafes late at night).

I suggest that a number of 'Weird tales' be rewrttien as 'Anti-Weird tales', that is the supernatural element is implicitly present but the characters manage to plot dodge/have nothing to do with it in the end - for instance The Shadow Over Innsmouth ending with the protagonist having an unpleasant night in the hotel and going off on the morning bus service thinking what a dead-end place that town is or The Great God Pan finishing with the two central characters going off to a club and talking about horse-racing and not bothering to find out any more about the identity and nature of Helen.

Quote Originally Posted by Justin Isis

Think you should try doing "A Fragment of Life" but without the final part...or put it first or something...start with that part, then gradually build up to "tedious and verbose descriptions of mundane activities."

Well the first approach might just end up with something like Kafu's 'The Peony Garden'. The second sounds worthwhile though.

[Robin Davies]

Quote Originally Posted by Justin Isis

If I had more money I'd commission you to focus more on "social realism" or else "whatever"...I've also considered remixing some of your stories by removing the supernatural or weird elements (so "Vrolyk" would be nothing but scenes of people with social problems hanging out in cafes late at night). Think you should try doing "A Fragment of Life" but without the final part...or put it first or something...start with that part, then gradually build up to "tedious and verbose descriptions of mundane activities."

From an M. John Harrison interview:
"The way I started out, I asked myself a question: How would you write a horror story and take all the horror out of it? How would you write a ghost story and remove almost everything? — a couple of sentences, a pair of sentences that would do the trick... "The Ice Monkey" was my first attempt at that. I wrote it as a normal horror story in which it's quite evident what had happened. And then I spent two or three weeks just removing sentence after sentence that directed the reader towards the normal ending, until finally you're left only two sentences in four thousand words which give you the clue as to what might or might not have happened. [...] Yeah, scraped it out. To see what would happen. I wanted to see where it would fall over. [...] After you've been doing it for twenty years, you put fewer of them in. When I started I had to throw out whereas now I know what not to put in."