The past few months I have picked up the classics. Or what people consider the classics in genre fiction. Novels from HG Wells, Jules Verne, MR James, Ambrose Bierce, and other contemporaries have been on my reading table and I have shifted from author to author. And in this retrospective of genre fiction I have brought some perspective of the new stuff that is currently being released in SF, horror, and other genres.
What the perspective is, however, takes a little explaining and I haven’t completely understood it. I could easily say, ” The new stuff sucks compared to the old stuff and new authors seem to have neglected to realize that books were written prior to 1974 and that reading Bradbury’s or Ellison’s stuff prior to 1974 does not make you well read in the genre.” I have actually said that minus the Bradbury and Ellison part. And I think, overall, it is true, at least in horror. It seems that the newer authors are trying their hardest to emulute King. (Mostly King because they aren’t smart enough to emulate Barker or Straub). So what we end up having is all these King babies (similar to the late 90s Slayer Babies of the thrash metal music genre) who cut their teeth on King’s works growing up and they take on his voice, albeit a pale comparsion, and produce nothing of merit or originality.
Reading older works by Verne, Bierce, James as well as just being introduced to Borges, Nabokov, Calvino, and Turgenev (yes very late in life. I didn’t grow up in a reading household and I look back and see how narrow my reading was, which is another entry in itself) requires the reader (me) to be an active and attentive reader. These authors make you pay attention. You have to ingest every word they write and every sentence completely lest you miss someething. And I’m not talking about missing an entrance of a character or if the monster turned left or right. I’m referring to missing the point. Missing the themes, context, commentary, and everything else that is hidden inside the paragraphs. Most of all, if you don’t pay attention, you end up missing the utter beauty of the prose.
The more recently published works I have scattered here and there are, by and large, not worth paying attention to other than on a superficial level. They are much like summer movie entertainment. You read them fast, get the story in your head, enjoy the hell out of it, and let it go when you close the back cover. It is rare that I have to pay attention to pull more from the book. There are few exceptions. But overall, the average modern horror novel just doesn’t have the depth nor breadth to facilitate an attentive and close reading.
It came more apparent after reading some of the authors above (and a few other critical books) that reading isn’t just about transferring a story to your head. And that the reader has to be an active participant in order to own the story. To get everythign out of the story that she can. In order to do this the story has to have something of substance to garner from it. It is not an every book occurrence that the modern horror novel has much to garner from a deep reading. This doesn’t make the modern horror novel bad. Just different.
Am I missing out on some truly great works of modern SF and horror? I might be. Enlighten me. Is my superficial reading of modern horror fiction allowing me to miss teh good stuff? No, I don’t tink so. Most peopel can figure out in the first few pages whether or not they need to pay attention, or if that particular book is going to be a roller coaster ride to enjoy in a different way than say enjoying Bierce, James, or de Maupassant.
Recently, a discussion about literary criticism showed that horror readers don’t want to be forced to pay attention. And, to be candid, I don’t want to have to pay attention all the time. I like that roller coaster book or what Holden Pike dubbed “dixie cup horror”. But that is not all I want. It would be like trying to survive on grocery shopping at Candico every week.
