A View From Corona #1
Jeremy Lassen | February 18th 2002 at 11:23 pm
“The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of Downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.”
- Fritz Leiber, Our Lady Of Darkness
When you think of San Francisco, what do you think of? Hippies and liberals? Alternate lifestyles? Cable Cars? Alcatraz? Fisherman’s Wharf? Clam chowder soup in sourdough bread bowls? Rice-a-Roni? When I think of San Francisco, I think of Corona Heights. A small, tucked away piece of mud and rock surrounded by an urban sea of cars and buildings. It has one of the best, and least known views of San Francisco. And it is the black, occult heart of The City — At least according to Fritz Leiber’s classic novel of urban horror, Our Lady of Darkness.
So when I want to show someone San Francisco, I don’t take them to the tourist locations. I take them to the dark heart of The City. Corona Heights. I had the pleasure of showing Edward Lee around The City a couple of years back, when he was touring to support his then new collection, Ushers. I took a great picture of Lee standing in front of Corona heights, with Sutro tower hulking over him in the background. Lee was like a kid in a candy store… tickled pink that he was standing in front of that craggy hilltop that he had read about in Leiber’s novel.
Lee’s delight represents the salvation of the horror genre. Edward Lee is a big Fritz Leiber fan. Sure, you may not think so if you are only familiar with his red-neck-splatter-porn sub-genre of stories. You may not see the connection even if you’ve read his carefully crafted suspense and crime titles. But if you talk with him, even briefly, you will see a historian, and student of the genre. One who has felt the long shadow of writers like Fritz Leiber stretch across the face horror. And unfortunately, Lee is the exception.
The problem is, Horror, as a genre, doesn’t have a continuous sense of history and community. There has always been a class division between the horror that is peddled to the masses, and the horror that is read in the hallowed halls of academia. There has never been the kind of cross-pollination that has allowed the SF and fantasy genre’s to flourish and transcend genre and class boundaries. SF and fantasy has always been considered a ghetto genre, with no artificial market separation between E. E. Doc Smith, Phillip K. Dick, and Ursula Le Guin. It’s all been marketed to the same audience for 75 years. The readers and writers of those genres have been allowed to co-exist with one another… to inspire one another… and to push the genre boundaries just a little bit further.
Like all genre labels, Horror has become a marketing concept to enable readers to continue getting the same thing over and over. Aficionados of the weird fiction pulps often don’t read anything published past 1950. Ghost fiction’s most fervent adherents often don’t read anything from the 20th century. People who cut their teeth on the splatter punk movement are often blithely unaware that Stephen King didn’t invent the genre, and that horror short stories were published long before Clive Barker’s Books of Blood… Do I even need to mention Cthulhu Mythos Junkies?
These discreet sub-genres don’t support the kind of diversity necessary to maintain a healthy eco-system, and twice, the publishing industry has laid waste to a seemingly flourishing horror landscape. What a lot of publishers, and horror readers don’t realize is that he interesting stuff lies in the “in-between places.” Just like San Francisco, between all those tourist traps and trendy shopping districts are little spots that can take your breath away. For example: Everyone in America has probably seen the “3 sisters” of San Francisco — 3 restored Victorians painted pastel colors, facing Alamo park, with the San Francisco skyline in the background behind them. This view was featured in the opening credits of a long running TV sit-com. And I have seen people lining up in the park, taking pictures of this view over and over again.
If only those people would walk to the top of Alamo Square and turn 90 degrees, facing northwest. They would see one of those “in-between” places. They would see a 3 story Victorian painted in dark greens and blacks with gold trim, and black rod iron fencing. A Victorian that is over 100 years old… a Victorian that was built to house the Russian Embassy. A house that survived the devastating 1906 quake, and later became the headquarters for Anton Le Vey’s Church of Satan. It looks like it belongs in an Adams Family cartoon. It’s pretty damn cool. And nobody notices… all those people just need to turn their head, and open up their minds. But they want to get another picture of the same old thing.
A lot of horror readers spend their time doing the same thing. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that everyone who picks up a Stephen King book needs to be able to trace the literary ancestors of Ed Lee’s City Infernal all the way back to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. I’m just suggesting that if a few of you would TRY doing something like this, the genre might be a little more interesting for us all. So pick up some horror novels by Joyce Carol Oats, or Jonathan Carroll, Or Ian M. Banks, or Shirley Jackson, or Richard Matheson, or Ray Bradbury, or Manly Wade Wellman. And by god, if you haven’t read Our Lady of Darkness, pick THAT one up and read it. I’ll vouch for it. Ed Lee will too. And so will most of your favorite horror authors…
Upon further reflection… when I think of San Francisco… I think of ALL those things I first mentioned… The Hippies, the liberals, the alternative lifestyles, the cable cars. Fisherman’s Wharf. I think of ALL the things that I can see from Corona Heights. And I think how wonderful The City is because all of these things and many more are allowed to cross-pollinate and mutate into something greater than the sum of its parts.
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