Fiction: the visionary, the experimental, the difficult, the plain

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

Quote Originally Posted by Hell-Ghost I quote myself when I say that I feel modern stories of horror are lacking in experimentation, that and also vision. Experimentation and vision. This is why I no longer read the likes of David A. Riley and John Llewellyn Probert; their work is too prosaic and routine for my liking, mere entertainment. The likes, however, of Poe, Machen, Blackwood, Hope Hodgson, Ligotti, and Lovecraft whom are visionaries with their own distinct brand of horror, terror, and fear are, indeed, much more to my tastes. For a short while back in July I was interested in Modernism and experimental literature, yet I seem to have largely grown out of that phase now; I simply prefer old-fashioned Romanticism. I could be both a Romanticist and a Modernist, much like Yeats. I am somewhat fascinated - obsessed, I daresay - with the word ''visionary''. It is a word that I always use to describe my favourite weird artists and myself. Often I even go out on what I term my ''visionary walks'' for meditation and inspiration and sometimes to read a book that I bring along. But yes, experimentation and vision is what I find lacking in to-day's imaginative literature. I allow no such defects to contaminate my own work. I agree with much of what you say. I have found myself in recent years somehow tapping into the visionary and experimental in Weird, SF, Horror and Literary authors when real-time reviewing their books, even to the extent of uncovering things they did not intend, as if by some preternatural means they themselves tapped into the visionary by the act of writing something they didn't think they were writing.

"To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible." - Ursula LeGuin

[Nemonymous]

I would add that I have sometimes found 'vision' in apparent prosaic or plain fiction or in what is called above as 'entertainment'. I don't think one can prescribe such things only describe them.