A View From Corona #2
Jeremy Lassen | February 22nd 2002 at 8:02 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
One of the most interesting “in between” books I have stumbled across while living in San Francisco is A Face at the Window by Dennis McFarland. I ran across this book while haunting the bargain bins at Ninth Avenue Books, on my lunch hour. Ninth Avenue Books is a sister store to one of San Francisco’s largest used book stores, Green Apple Books. Sadly, the Ninth Avenue store recently lost its lease, and there will be no more lunch-time hauntings of their bargain bin.
Back to the matter at hand: McFarland is a “mainstream” writer who has written four “Literary” novels. You know what I mean when I say “Literary.” I mean the novels that go from hardcover to trade paperback, and NEVER have a mass market paperback because the marketing department has decided that this piece of “Literature” doesn’t have mass appeal, and thus can not be profitably sold in a strippable mass market format. This is the reason why you won’t ever sea Oats or Carroll in mass market editions at the drugstore or supermarket.
In any event, McFarland turns in an absolute barn burner of supernatural haunting, guilt and redemption. At the same time, he reveals a lot of insight into the mechanics of genre fiction, specifically mystery vs. horror fiction. The protagonist of the novel is married to a popular mystery novelist, and he accompanies her on a research trip to England. As the narrative unfolds the protagonist is confronted with increasingly supernatural events. At one point, he contrasts these experiences with the formula of his wife’s novels, and in doing so, reveals a keen insight into how and why both mystery and horror fiction work.
The protagonist suggests that mystery fiction is by its very nature conservative fiction… The core conflict of a mystery novel revolves around a disturbance in the natural order of things… a crime of some sort, a murder or a disappearance… something that violates the natural order. The protagonist’s job through the course of a mystery novel is to restore “order” to the universe — to solve the crime, or to put the murderer in jail, etc.
Horror fiction is at odds with this form. The protagonist of horror story is forced to confront a universe that does not conform to his or her expectations. The “natural order” is in flux, or inherently unknowable in a horror story. Through the course of a horror story, the protagonist must come to understand this newly revealed order, or come to accept the inherent unknowableness of the universe.
A Face at the Window was a pretty accomplished piece of supernatural fiction, but by seamlessly introduced this insight into the narrative, McFarland tried to overcame the barrier that keeps most genre fiction from being successful outside of the genre… By explaining the differences between mystery and horror, he gave the non-genre reader a crib sheet so that their expectations would conform to the narrative. Kind of a neat trick. Incidentally, this “explanation” of horror fiction neatly explains why “Psycho” is horror fiction, even though it has no supernatural elements to it. Go ahead. Pick your favorite non-supernatural horror novel, and see if this explanation applies.
While I felt that A Face at the Window was a brilliant novel, McFarland’s attempt to bring the mainstream readership to the supernatural table wasn’t entirely successful. Of his four books, A Face at the Window is often sited by mainstream critics as his weakest. I saw McFarland on his last book tour at another independent San Francisco book store, A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books. I asked him if he had any plans to return to the realm of supernatural fiction. He explained that not only did he receive negative criticism for A Face at the Window, but that he received virulent attacks, and that his career probably couldn’t survive another “Face at the Window”. He went on to explain that he felt the negative response to the book was because in it, he revealed the dark heart of human nature, and that a lot of the mainstream critics simply don’t want to acknowledge that this dark heart exists.
I found this very funny because revealing this dark heart of humanity is exactly what horror fiction does best, and it is exactly what McFarland was trying to explain to his readers with his crib sheet. Perhaps this is the reason why the bookstores shunt all the books with black covers and lurid fonts into their own little ghetto section. They don’t want their timid, easily rattled customers to accidentally stumble across something that might upset their rose-colored view of the universe. And that is the sad truth of it. Most readers today don’t want to read things that challenge the status quo.
I might try and make a leap of sociological speculation, and suggest that this is the reason why Academia looks down its nose at Stephen King, while blue collar readers across the world love his stuff — King gives his readers a look at a world transformed — where the reader’s station and place in the world could be vastly different than in real life. By gawd the world may be overrun by giant insects and dinosaurs, but now I’m finally taking charge of my life, and am in control of my own destiny, Ala King’s novella, “The Mist”.
I MIGHT make this leap but then I remember that conservative, reactionary mystery fiction outsells horror 100 to 1. Which I suppose is a good thing, because it means that the majority of people are inherently content and happy with their lot in lives. Because if people weren’t, we might have a lot more horror readers, but we’d also have a lot more Timothy Mcveigh’s and Uni-bombers.
And while I am trying to digest these contradictions, I’m reminded of the old cliché that mystery sells best when a Democrat is president, and horror sells best when a Republican sits in the White House. I won’t try and make any sense of all this, but I will ask a question. Do you prefer mystery, or horror?
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