These are the notes I took during the March 16 event at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts that was billed as "Peter Straub and John Clute in Conversation," with moderator Gary K. Wolfe of Roosevelt University in Chicago. (A far more accurate and complete transcription is being done by other hands and will be published later, I believe.) Their chief topic was horror, but in a larger sense, they were talking about genre fiction in general, and occasionally about Kelly Link. Straub, an occasional collaborator with Stephen King, is a best-selling and acclaimed novelist whose many books include
Ghost Story and
Koko. Clute, an influential critic, is the co-editor of
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
Wolfe:
Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Random House, 1944) established the horror canon for generations of readers. Clute’s new critical book on horror,
The Darkening Garden, and Straub’s new fiction anthology in progress,
Poe’s Children, attempt – among other things -- to expand that canon.
Clute: Horror could not be covered adequately in
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, which he co-edited, partially because so much horror is non-fantastic and partially because there just wasn’t room in that already-mammoth volume. He decided belatedly that one could “usably” trace science fiction, fantasy and horror as separate genres from the mid-18th century, each defined by its relationship to the scientific history of the Earth.
Straub: He guest-edited
Conjunctions 39 to demonstrate to
Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow and the readers of that journal that they would like writers whom they otherwise would have disdained as lowly genre writers, if said writers only were given an attractive display in a show window, as it were. At the outset, Straub invited Morrow to read John Crowley’s novel
Aegypt and said, “If you don’t like this, there’s no point in our talking.” Morrow did indeed love it, and proceeded to love Kelly Link, too, Link being the next author Straub handed him. For his own part, Straub knew little of science fiction other than his youthful reading of A.E. Van Vogt until he started attending ICFA, which showed him sf had changed, had become teeming and diverse, with room for highly literary, Nabokovian works. Straub decided, however, that all the strengths of the
Conjunctions 39 writers derived from their genre origins. The volume ultimately was titled
The New Wave Fabulists, but Straub wanted to call it
The Underground Stream or
The Mountain Behind the Mountain – the obscuring mountain being the one erected by the New York Times best-seller list, the M.F.A. industry, etc.
Clute: His
Conjunctions 39 essay described some of the included stories, then described Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness in genre terms, terms familiar to readers and critics of the fantastic. Among other things, for example,
Heart of Darkness is a “club story,” with an essential frame of safe, secure witnessing, as the fantastic story is told, after the fact, to a friendly audience. Henry James’
The Turn of the Screw and Arthur Machen’s
The Great God Pan can be similarly read because they are similarly told. In fact, Clute went on to argue, Conrad’s Congo cannot be adequately read naturalistically; it can be adequately read only by people at ease with the fantastic.
Wolfe: We have to get past the trivialization of horror as a mere literature of effect, a literature that simply evokes the emotion of horror. That’s not what Conrad, James and Machen are doing in those classic stories, each of them central to the history of horror. That’s not what Peter Straub is doing in his fiction, either.
Clute: We’re dealing with a genre set in worlds that are false until their stories are told. The truth that is revealed in horror is not necessarily transcendent.
Straub: After
Conjunctions 39, he kept noticing that all sorts of contemporary literary mainstream writers were moving into horror territory, often with actual knowing references to the likes of Peter Straub and Stephen King. Dan Chaon wrote a marvelous 2001 collection of uncanny stories,
Among the Missing. When the Ballantine Reader’s Circle edition came out, one of the reader-guide questions asked Schon whether he considers his work horror. Schon replied, sure, and quoted Straub (without naming him) as calling
The Red Badge of Courage “a ghost story in which the ghost never appears.” From there, Straub saw Kelly Link embraced everywhere as “a major American writer.”
Clute: “What you’re describing … is a kind of tacit dismissal” of the genre problems of the past. Today’s writers seize the opportunity to make use of whatever tropes are useful, whether they are associated with genre or not.
Wolfe: They use genre as a resource, not as a pigeonhole – a toolbox, not a box of confinement.
Clute: We are very close to a revolutionary stage in which stories are simply not identified by genre at all. Horror, more so than sf and fantasy, needs these genre walls to blow down, because traditional modes of horror aren’t “plastic enough.”
Straub: “Horror is disdained most by really dedicated sf writers,” to whom horror stories seem simplistic and childish.
Clute: His own horror canon “tends to be very, very eccentric.” To him, horror stories include a glimpse of the truth to come, then a thickening of tension, then a state of revel in which the world becomes terrifyingly clear. Too many horror stories, however, get stuck in the thickening stage and never do anything more. In any genre, formulaic stories are the ones that get stuck in empty verbiage without thought toward a conclusion.
Straub: His goal in
Poe’s Children is to show that horror, at this level, is literature – if one sets aside all the preconceptions that come with the word “horror.” Straub’s trilogy that began with
Koko, for example, includes no supernatural elements, other than the hallucinations of people in great battlefield extremity; as Paul Fussell has pointed out, at a certain point people subjected to battlefield conditions simply go insane. Yet each review of each of those novels called it a horror novel and Straub a horror writer. This first annoyed him, then gratified him, as clearly horror was a more wide-open field than the old “crustacean” definitions seemed to allow. Nor were these crime novels, exactly, as they were too long with too much description and too little detection and muted climaxes and too much dwelling on pain and loss. Straub decided that horror is simply the genre in which we put front and center the things we traditionally seek to put behind us. “Putting it behind you” was the traditional prescription for battlefield veterans, for mothers whose children had been stillborn; today, “we know better,” and so we acknowledge and treat such scarring, but all that subterranean pain is still “very valuable material” for writers.
Clute: Horror leads toward “an opening of the eyes,” an awareness of our “bondage to a natural world that we have ruined … an awareness of what we did or did not do … it ends in a kind of aftermath.”
Straub: We get not closure, “but a widening out.” Joan Didion writes in her 2005 memoir
The Year of Magical Thinking about how she belatedly discovered grief, but most of us learn it much earlier; we all realize, sooner or later, that the world is awash in grief. This is “a powerful, a beautiful awareness,” one that brings people together and underscores their common humanity.
Wolfe: “Facile bleakness” is easy, as any undergraduate fiction-writing workshop demonstrates. That the world does not care about you should be obvious from high school, if not sooner.
Clute: He disagrees that the world’s indifference is generally known. He believes this is a very difficult lesson to learn. “I want a definition of horror that acknowledges that Harold Pinter is a horror writer,” without any disrespect being done to Pinter.
From the audience, Kevin Maroney of
The New York Review of Science Fiction says that David Drake was vitally involved in horror, as a writer, editor and publisher, in his early writing life, partially because of the military experience that he has mined since in other genres.
From the audience, fiction writer F. Brett Cox, who also teaches at Norwich University in Vermont, says Stephen Crane’s “The Monster” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” both qualify as horror largely because of the chilling effect of their final lines. Might we risk losing, in these evolving grammars of horror, the power of such snap endings? In contrast, H.P. Lovecraft’s stories aren’t scary -- although H.P. Lovecraft himself
was scary.
From the audience, fiction writer John Kessel, who also teaches at North Carolina State University, says that famed science-fiction writer James Tiptree Jr. was a horror writer, in Clute and Straub’s terms, and both Clute and Straub happily agree.
From the audience, Charles Brown, founder and publisher of
Locus magazine, says another science-fiction novel, Philip K. Dick’s
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, is the most terrifying novel he ever read, and he doesn’t find Lovecraft scary, either. But just as any assessment of science fiction must somehow account for A.E. Van Vogt, surely any assessment of horror must account for H.P. Lovecraft.
