A View From Corona #8

July 2nd 2002 at 12:10 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

Whenever I think about how “bad” the state of horror fiction is, all I have to do to cheer myself up is consider how much worse cinematic horror is. Have you BEEN to the theater lately? Have you seen how bad most of the horror movies are that Hollywood is jamming down our throats? The state of horror fiction looks positively rosy compared to its cinematic cousin.

With notable exceptions, the last two years have been a travesty. We are reaping the inevitable Hollywood rehash of the horror blockbusters of years past. Everyone is trying to crank out a Sixth Sense or Blair Witch clone (or god help us, another Scream), and little-to-no original horror films are finding a place in the multiplexes. Two of the best horror movies of the year last year - Session 9 and Ginger Snaps - received theatrical releases that can only be described as abortions. I haven’t seen such hatchet-jobs masquerading as theatrical distribution since October films butchered the releases of Michele Soavi’s classic Cemetery Man six or seven years ago.

I live in San Francisco, which is one of the few remaining cities in the United States that has a thriving independent/art house/repertory theater scene. San Francisco is the perfect market for quality, intelligent horror movies… and yet… both Session 9 and Ginger Snaps played for a SINGLE day in a single theater in San Francisco. This wasn’t because local theaters aren’t willing to run indie horror films. It’s because the distributor of these films had so little faith in the movies (after they apparently didn’t generate the right kind of enthusiasm from their teeny-bopper test audiences) that they dumped them onto the market… booking just enough screenings to meet their contractual obligations.

If I was one of the creators of these films, I would be livid. As a fan of horror, the fact that major movie distributors in this country have no faith in intelligent cinematic horror pisses me off. Unfortunately, Hollywood is blind to see the truth that there is a market for intelligent, well done horror movies. Blinded by their own bullshit. For example: I was talking with an author (who will remain nameless), and he was describing a meeting with a studio executive last year just after The Others (the exception that proves the rule…) hit big at the box office. This author was pitching one of his ideas: “I’ve got this idea for a supernatural horror story…” But the exec interrupts him, saying “No… horror’s out right now. We can’t do horror…. we need suspense… you know like The Others.”

To his credit, the author didn’t scream at this mindless Hollywood idiot that The Others was supernatural horror, and that the Scream imitations that Hollywood has been churning out and calling horror are actually just gory crime/suspense movies. Instead, he said “oh… suspense huh? Suspense? like The Others? Okay. I’ve got a couple of stories like that…” and then proceeded to pitch the same “horror” story that he had originally intended to pitch.

The problem goes beyond semantics, and what the difference between “horror” and “suspense” is. The problem is that Hollywood is a bloated, lazy, backward looking beast that only manages to make money and successfully reach an audience because they are essentially the only game in town. When everything is shit, the competent seems to be a work of genius. And the truly successful and cutting edge material doesn’t get done at all, or if it does get done, it is never given a chance to find its audience.

Hollywood’s backwards looking myopia can most clearly be seen in their reaction to the unsuspected success, The Sixth Sense. Hollywood gave us What Lies Beneath. Featuring extremely safe Hollywood icon Harrison Ford. Directed by extremely safe Hollywood hack, Robert Zemeckis (who’s spent the last couple of years producing competent but essentially soulless remakes of classic William Castle horror films… can’t wait for his latest remake, Ghost Ship to hit the multiplexes - yawn), with a script that of course, can be easily summed up (and dismissed) as a classic Hollywood “High Concept” - Fatal Attraction meets The Sixth Sense.

Another example of the pitiful state of mainstream horror cinema is Guillermo Del Toro. Last year saw the release of two Del Toro films. But the only reason the better of the two films was released at all (to a small, art house theatrical run) was because his backward looking, rather pedestrian (but competent) installment in the Blade franchise was released. His other film, The Devil’s Backbone was superior in every way. But it couldn’t even get distributed in this country until it could “piggy back” on some lame Hollywood sequel.

Unfortunately, things don’t seem to be getting any better. Once again, the best horror film of the year this year disappeared after a one week run in the theaters. Frailty, directed by long time character actor Bill Paxton, was a truly creepy, thrilling and insightful horror movie that deserves to be seen by every self respecting horror fan. It got crushed between giant multi-million dollar blockbuster openings, and most horror fans probably never got a chance to hear about it, much less see it during the week that it played. The sad truth is the latest installment in the tired Halloween franchise (expected this summer) will probably be seen by more people.

I have hopes that M. Shyamalan Night’s latest lastest opus, Signs will live up to the hype, and prove to be this summer’s The Others - an intelligent horror movie that actually gets promoted and finds an audience. The latest previews managed to be genuinely creepy.

And don’t even get me started on the fact that a brilliant film like Japan’s The Ring STILL hasn’t been released in the US, because Disney is sitting on the rights, waiting until they get around to a Hollywood remake of it. Shit, even US copy-cat versions of The Ring are hitting the theaters this summer, ala fear dot com, and there is STILL no US home video release of The Ring.

Anyway, I’ll stop bitching about Hollywood, and I probably won’t spend many more column inches writing about movies because when it comes down to it, EVERYBODY talks about movies… There’s an army of film critics out there, on the web and in the real world who yammer on endlessly about the minutia of Hollywood, movies, and horror flicks both crappy and brilliant, while utterly brilliant horror fiction comes and goes with nary a comment. So after this, it’s back to the stuff that deserves more attention…

Like the new Bentley Little collection (titled… what else, The Collection) that snuck into stores as a mass market paperback from Signet last month. Now THERE’s the exception that proves the rule. When was the last time YOU saw an original mass market paperback horror collection published by a major New York publisher? Like I said. Things aren’t all bad. But they’d be a hell of a lot better if you all went out and rented (or preferably bought) a copy of Session 9, Ginger Snaps, and Frailty. If distributors actually do well with intelligent horror films, we might see more of them. Consider the $20 cost of a DVD as a sacrifice to the horror gods to ensure a plentiful horror harvest in the years to come (Sorry, just watched the re-released Wicker Man on DVD…).

A View From Corona #7

May 16th 2002 at 11:36 am

“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

“Just because someone can read does not mean that he necessarily can read SF…” – David G. Hartwell

SF (including its sibling genres fantasy and horror) has a rich and varied history which infects, permeates, and informs most contemporary forms of the genre. This is at once a Good Thing ™ as well as a Bad Thing ™. It is a Good Thing because it means the even the most “low brow”, reader friendly space opera/fantasy/horror epic will by its very nature have a depth and complexity to it… simply because the author will be (usually intimately) familiar with the tropes and traditions of the genre, and there will be (at the very least, subconsciously in the authors mind) a dialog with what has gone before. Contemporary genre fiction is littered with winking allusions to previous genre works, both landmark and obscure. And a good percentage of the readers of genre fiction expect and like these allusions. They allow a reader to observe and participate in an ongoing dialog between multiple generations of writers who have all read the same things. This is one of the big pleasures of reading genre fiction of any stripe, be it SF/fantasy/horror, or Mystery/Crime, or Western or Romance.

This history and interconnectedness is a Bad Thing because it is one of the barriers that prevents those other people… Those straightt people… from reading and enjoying what you and I know is the best thing since sliced bread. You know the kind of person. Those people who’s only exposure to SF is from $tar Wars and $tar Trek. Those people who stand in front of a SF specialty store and say (In a dismissive tone) “I think they specialize in mystery or something…” You know. Those poor, soulless automatons who would think that something as pitiful as TV’s Dark Angel is cutting edge cyberpunk, if they had the slightest clue what cyberpunk was.

What this means is that, with many notable exceptions, the best and most exciting genre writing is going to be mostly inaccessible to the vast majority of readers out there. This is a controversial statement, because there are two opposing aesthetic schools of thought. One says that great art is universal, and will have universal appeal. The other says that to fully appreciate great art, there is a price of admission. You have to be familiar with the history and context in which the art is being produced, in order to understand and appreciate it. As Hartwell says above… The ability to read doesn’t give you the ability to truly appreciate SF.
For example. I think there is universal agreement in the SF/fantasy community that George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series is a very solid, compelling piece of fantasy literature. Even people who don’t as a rule like traditional western European medieval fantasy fiction have admitted that this particular series is very well done. But could I give these books to Joe/Jane Blow off the street, who has never read fantasy before, and expect them to appreciate its finer points? Or even like it? You might initially think that Martin’s straight forward and compelling style, as well as keen sense of suspense and pacing would suck any body in, weather they read SF or not.

I would argue, however, that even something as accessible as Martin’s books are pretty inaccessible to the non-genre reader. Juggling 30 different viewpoint characters is common in fantasy fiction, but how many mainstream novels have “casts of thousands”, with viewpoint characters that switch with each chapter? How many mainstream novels continue a single narrative arc across six books, each the size of a phone book? How many people recognize or care about, or are willing to put up with the allusions and references to historical fiction in general, and the war of the roses in particular. How many people are willing to go along with the fetishization of medieval Western Europe? Readers of SF are trained to accept these types of thing, but it can be pretty intimidating and/or off-putting to non genre readers. So even the most accessible genre fiction has barriers to entry, because like any good piece of fiction, the author has an “idealized reader” in mind, and that idealized reader usually has read a lot of SF and fantasy.

Let me give you an example of this effect, in a completely different medium – Movies. Movies are universal, right? Sound and moving pictures… what could be more natural? The type of “barriers to entry” that I described above don’t exist in the movies, right? Wrong. They do. Movies are probably one of the most complex narrative vehicles in existence, because they combine pictures, and dialog, and music… all together. It just seems natural because they are so ubiquitous, and ingrained into late-20th/21st century culture. We’ve all seen them, and we’ve all seen a LOT of them. But the grammar of films is VERY complex.

When movies first came out, they were filmed like plays – everything was a mid-shot, with every character in the scene on screen at the same time. There were no close-ups. One of the biggest innovations in early cinema was the close-up, and more specifically, the “reaction shot”. You know what I mean. There is a long tracking shot of a train, hurtling towards a car that has stalled on the tracks. Jump cut to a horrified onlooker… an extreme close-up of the onlookers face, so we can see the nuances of the actors expression. It’s obvious that the actor is reacting to the train rushing towards the car right? Well its only obvious because the film grammar of the “Reaction shot” and the close-up has become ubiquitous through repeated viewing. We know that there was not a long period of time passing between the train rushing towards the car, and the bystander looking at the train… We know the person is looking at the train… because it’s a “reaction shot”. What if there had been a long, slow fade to black as the train approached the car, followed by a long slow fade from black to the same close-up of the same actors face? A viewer could rightly assume that some period of time had passed… that the car had already been struck by the train, and the face was perhaps someone standing at the train crossing remembering the horrors of the accident, or perhaps the person isn’t even on the street corner: they could be at a funeral. One makes these assumptions about the story because they have been trained to recognize the visual grammar that a filmmaker uses.

Let me give you another example. Prior to the advent of MTV, and music videos, quick cuts and “fast & choppy” editing simply did not exist in movies. There was an assumption that the human mind could only assimilate so much visual data at a time, and that you needed at least 12-48 frames (1/2 - 2 seconds) to understand what you had seen. One of the real revolutions of MTV was that, because of the need for filmmakers to tell a story in a very short period of time, they began pushing against the edges of what was considered acceptable editing. Cuts became quicker and quicker. Camera movements became faster and faster. And viewers not only became used to that style of editing, but they began associating it with specific types of narratives. This is one reason why older reviewers, who didn’t grow up watching this type of visual narrative, often complain about the “MTV style editing” of movies. Younger reviewers rarely if ever comment on it because it is simply part of the visual grammar that they grew up with. Younger reviewers may say that the movie Blade is fast paced, but they probably won’t say that the movie is un-watchable or incomprehensible because of the editing. However, If you were to go back in time, and show Blade as a double feature with Dracula, in 1931, chances are that the audiences would find Blade incomprehensible – not because of plot or storyline, or the late 20th century setting, but because it simply wouldn’t make any visual sense to them – The visual grammar of movies has changed and evolved a great deal in the last 70 years. Have you tried reading Chaucer in the original Middle English, lately?

Because of the phenomenon described above, I would suggest that “Great Art” is not universal. Aesthetically pleasing generalities might be universal, but Art is always a dialog between the creator and viewer. And this dialog is always informed by a set of common reference points.

I have rambled on in this column about barriers of entry and genre traditions, because I recently read one of the most exciting, and at the same time, the most inaccessible books I have ever read. Tim Powers is a brilliant writer, and his most recent novel, the World Fantasy Award winning novel Declare, is a masterpiece. After reading it, I wanted to run out and tell everyone about it. Except the audience outside of the genre that can read and enjoy Declare seems to be very limited. Hell, even the audience inside the genre seems to be pretty small. One has to recognize and understand the grammar of contemporary urban fantasy or magic-realism (a very specialized sub-subset of SF). And in the same way that George Martin fetishizes medieval Western European history, Powers fetishizes WWII and Cold War history… specifically, he fuses the sub-genre of the “cold war spy thriller” with the traditions of SF, for remarkable effect.

It helps tremendously if the reader understands the political and social details of WW2, and the Cold War… Part of the magic and joy of this book is recognizing the detailed and accurate historical events, and seeing them all put together in such a way that they add up to a completely fantastical world. The Fantastic is believable and compelling not only because of the carefully constructed, internally consistent details, but because it is built on a foundation of historically accurate details… details which are probably not known or recognized by the vast majority of the reading public (much less the “un-read public”). I can’t begin to tell you why or where I learned the historic and social background that was so important to the understanding and enjoyment of Declare, and Powers probably couldn’t tell you where or why he first learned those things. But we both share an interest and fascination with that information, and this shared experience created the special frission that characterizes “great art”.

So while it may not be popular to say so… You gotta pay your dues if your gonna really enjoy the good stuff. This might smack of elitism, and be reminiscent of that horrible place called “Academia”, where they discuss “Literature.” But it’s true. Even the most simplistic and mundane piece of contemporary space opera is operating in an incredibly complex and rich historical context. If you don’t recognize that context, you will only be seeing half the picture.

So in the spirit of paying your dues… In the spirit of expanding the scope of possible reference points that you can share with any given author of SF, I am going to recommend that after you run out and read Declare, you run out and read a couple of the many critical, genre spanning anthologies that have been edited by non other than the person who’s words began this column: David Hartwell. The quote came from an essay entitled “The Golden Age of SF Is Twelve”, which was reprinted in Visions of Wonder. This anthology offers itself as a textbook for teaching SF to people who don’t read SF. While this may be its primary goal, this anthology offers many gems and insights to the regular reader of SF. Another great SF anthology by Hartwell, which puts SF into a historical context is The Science Fiction Century. The Dark Descent, and Foundations of Fear are two critical anthologies that cover the horror genre, and Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder give a nice overview of fantasy fiction. These titles represent only a fraction of the anthologies that Hartwell has edited. You may not always agree with his statements or conclusions, or even his selections of stories, but Hartwell’s ability to present and contextuallize the incredible range of fiction that falls under the SF/Fantasy/Horror rubric is phenomenal. Hartwell’s various anthologies are a cornerstone of my personal library, and they should not be missed by people who consider themselves students of the genre.

A View From Corona #6

May 1st 2002 at 11:25 am

“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

A World Horror Con 2002 Special Report: World Horror came and went… and I miss it already. The Hotel was shitty (something was wrong with the AC and climate control… After spending two hours in the hotel, I was dehydrated, and my lips were chapped. The dealers room alternated from each day from being a sauna to being a freezer, etc.), there wasn’t any good food for miles, and I didn’t see any part of Chicago. But I loved the convention. World Horror 2002 was the best! I flew in to O’Hare on the red-eye, and expected to get some sleep before things got rolling, but that never happened. From the moment I arrived at the hotel, the adrenaline was pumping, and it didn’t stop until I got off the plane Sunday night in San Francisco. Rather than bore you with a blow-by-blow account of what happened I will simply list some of the things that stuck out in my mind:

* Scott Wyatt brought a limited edition print of Ken Kelly’s artwork for Night Shade’s forthcoming Kane omnibus, God’s in Darkness, and he allowed us to display it at our dealers table. Seeing a high quality print of this artwork simply blew me away. I can’t until June, when the book comes out.

* Philip from Fedogan & Bremer gave me an ARC of the new Donald Wandrei collection The Eerie Mr. Murphy… It is a beautiful looking book that shouldn’t be missed.

* I got my first look at Excitable Boys, the anthology I published under the fREAk pRESs imprint, which was edited by Kelly Laymon. The printer had drop-shipped a couple of cases directly to the convention so I would have it in time for the show. Gak’s artwork looks great, and I got to reacquaint myself with the gross-out stories Thursday morning over breakfast. Not the smartest idea in the world. Most of the contributors to Excitable Boys were at the convention, and I shanghaied a bunch of them Sunday morning to sign a LOT of copies – thanks to all the contributors and Kelly Laymon for taking time out of their morning to sign an obscene number of books. If anybody wants signed copies, please try ordering from Borderlands, Realms of Fantasy, Dream Haven, or Stars Our Destination.

* Tom Roche, a fellow San Franciscan and writer/editor/renaissance man turned up on Friday (He came in on the red-eye as well) and I ended up rooming with him. He got much more sleep then Jason or I, but apparently, with a new girlfriend back in San Francisco, he needed the sleep. The lucky dog.

* Night Shade Books hosted its first official convention party Friday afternoon. The convention staff generously provided a driver, and I snuck away from the dealers room long enough to buy booze and food, most of which was consumed by rabid party-goers by the time we were told to vacate the con suite. Good job! Some-time Night Shade cover artist, and all around kick ass guy, John Picacio (Who received an IHG award for best artist the next night), and Tom Roche both went above and beyond the call of duty, hauling ice before the party got started, ensuring that everybody’s drinks were cold. Thanks you guys!

* At the end of the Night Shade party, early Friday night, David Hartwell wandered in, and Jason and I began picking his brain. For those of you who don’t know, Mr. Hartwell is an editor extraordinaire who has been working in the field longer than most of the WHC attendees have been alive. He edited the Bible of modern horror, Dark Descent – If you haven’t read this book yet, run out and do so now! He was also one of the men behind the famous small press line, Gregg Press, which published a lot of classic SF and horror in hardcover editions. If you’re a book collector, you know about Gregg Press. During the short amount of time we spent with him, he generously, and unpretentiously shared his wisdom and experience. Definitely one of the high points of the convention. Thanks David!

* One of the funniest moments took place at the Tor party. It seems that many of the pro editors there (David Hartwell, Melissa Singer, Ellen Datlow and others) are big M. John Harrison fans, and are very excited about Night Shade’s forthcoming collection of his fiction. Of course they all made it clear that they couldn’t touch M. John Harrison, because he won’t generate the kind of sales that Tor needs to justify doing a book. Two years ago, I would have resented the fact that a brilliant writer like M. John Harrison can’t get a book published in New York, but now… I realize that these weird economies of scale create a niche that allows Night Shade to do a lot of cool and interesting projects. I still think it’s enormously unfair that Mike isn’t being published in America by a New York house – I just don’t resent it anymore. New York does some things well, and independent publishers like Night Shade do other things well.

* One of the scariest moments came when I realized that, at the same Tor party mentioned above, every one of the Tor editors seemed to know who Tim Lebbon was, and was eager to exchange a few words with him. I told Tim that he wasn’t allowed to talk to any editors in the room, but I don’t think he listened to me. I’m glad to see Tim getting the respect he deserves, and when (not if) a New York publisher comes along and offers him far more money than Night Shade can, I will only be happy for him.
* The Gothic.Net crew was out in full force, and they put on an excellent party. For those of you who don’t know, Gothic.net is one of the best online horror magazines around. They publish an ENORMOUS amount of quality short horror fiction, and they pay pro rates. Gothic Net is in the middle of a very intense subscription drive, and they definitely deserve your support. I ended up talking a long time with Seth, the gothic net fiction editor, and at some point during the conversation, Seth and I both waxed poetic about how cool Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness is. Bird’s of a feather…

* Also at the Gothic Net party, I met one of the coolest Goth/horror action figures I have ever seen. She was decked out in Sand Man-ish goth pixie gear, and was bouncing around the party like something from the fairy lands. It seems that she is living the dream – she related the story of how she got her first job out of college at Tor, and what a wonderful place Tor was to work at, and how cool it is to work with all those big name writers and editors at the world’s biggest genre publishing companies, etc etc. I was a little bit jealous. If I had gone to college in New York instead of San Diego, that might have been me (well, me if I was 150 pounds lighter, and a lot cuter than I currently am… but you know what I mean.). But, If I had gotten my start in the New York end of the business, I wouldn’t be an owner of Night Shade books, so all’s well that ends well.

* It seems that the hotel bar was a hit or miss kind of place to be. Friday and Saturday night at the bar featured an Elvis impersonator, and a Beatles cover band, respectively. I don’t know how many people were chased out of the bar because of this, but I heard a lot of grumbling. The Chili’s restaurant down the road did pretty well because of the bars uninhabitableness.

* Saturday Night, I was regaled by Paula “Dark Echo” Guran’s first hand account of how Stealth Press managed to successfully throw away $6 million in 2 years. (I could rant about Stealth Press for an entire column, but will refrain from doing so… No use kicking a company when they are not only down, but have spent the last 2 years throwing themselves down wells).

* The Dealers room rocked! Thanks to the Con organizers for creating a great mix of vendors that drew a lot of people willing to buy stuff. Other than the bad climate control system, the dealers room had only one downside: Somehow, a merchant of pirated and bootleg video’s and CD’s got a table and was playing a bootleg of the “Buffy the Musical” soundtrack the whole convention. This wasn’t nearly as bad as the fact that this bootleg scam artist was selling copies of things that either have, or are going to have legitimate releases – things like VHS bootlegs of The Lord of the Rings, etc. I’ve bought my fair share of bootlegs of things that simply don’t have and are not going to get legitimate releases, but this scam artist was going above and beyond the normal range of import bootleg stuff. I hope the organizers of WHC 2003 keep people like this out of the dealers’ room.

* I was on a small press panel, where I basically tried to scare everybody away from doing something as crazy as starting their own small press – because frankly I don’t need the competition – stay away, all of you! It was very interesting to hear how American Fantasy Press and Design Image Group got started, and I ended up talking extensively after the panel with Forrest Aguirre from The Ministry of Whimsy Press. He’s a very smart guy, and Whimsy’s stuff is definitely worth checking out.

* I talked until 7:00 in the morning with Pam Keesey, who I hadn’t really spoken to in a couple of years. In addition to being one of the best editors of horror (erotic and otherwise) around (Daughters of Darkness, Women Who Run with the Werewolves, etc.) She’s got a really cool website called The Monster Zine which is definitely worth checking out.

* Brian Keene, and many of the regulars at the annual gross out contest got (from Brian’s own lips) “….their asses handed to them.” Congrats to all the new up and comers who managed to bury those old farts.

* At some point during the convention, I almost killed Wayne Allen Sallee. It’s a funny story. I had been working in the dealers room all day, and a camera crew from a local TV station was making the rounds, asking to interview the various WHC freaks for a local news segment. While said camera crew was interviewing me, I noticed Wayne Allen Sallee. Wayne is a kick ass writer, and long time resident of Chicago. So when they were done interviewing me, I told them “There’s famous Chicago horror writer Wayne Allen Sallee… You HAVE to interview him… he does a great stupid human trick.” Wayne has this amazing ability to turn himself into a giant human penis, and he had done it several times at World horror in Denver a couple years back. He does something, and his face turns purple, the veins in his head pop out, and he looks like a giant Penis! Its amazing! So they interview him, and ask him about the stupid human trick during the interview. He looks over at me and says “You mean the ‘vein’ thing” and I nod encouragingly. So he does it, the camera crew freaks out. It looks spectacular. I’m impressed. I figure all is well. Then a couple minutes alter, Wayne comes up to me and says “You know, I’m not supposed to do that any more. A year ago, while doing that, a vein burst in my face… and I could die if the wrong vein bursts.” I’m immediately horrified, and apologize profusely for putting him on the spot, but Wayne says not to worry about it. I’m just glad I didn’t end up killing one of my favorite writers.

* Saturday night, I ended up in the bathroom at the Borderlands “speak easy”, with a posy of young, hungry writers, including Mike Oliveri, Mikey Huyck, and others. The Bathroom, you ask? Yeah, the Bathroom. We were staying close to the beer, which was in the bathtub. I ended up letting it slip that Night Shade was talking with Tom Piccirilli about publishing a novel of his – and received an email about it from Pic Monday afternoon… damn news travels fast. At some point I realized that Mikey and I had our World Horror Con cherries popped the same year, in ‘98 in Phoenix. I must be getting old and jaded, because I spent part of the conversation comparing the quality of the various hotels that World Horror has been held at over the last 5 years. I don’t mind being stuck out in the airport suburbs at all, but damn it, the bar better not be overrun by Beatles cover bands! That’s almost as bad as it closing it at midnight (Atlanta, ‘99). During this conversation, we all managed to agree that World Horror was combination of alternate reality, and extended family… every year the same group of people get together, and continue the conversations they had started the previous year. You end up trying to pack a year’s worth of conversations and carousing into one weekend. And the next year, you pick up exactly where you left off. It’s sort of like Farmer’s Dayworld, I suppose… You only get to live one weekend a year… the rest of the time you are a zombie, just punching the clock at the day job until the next convention.

* Saturday night seemed to be the night where the Con Organizers of years past try to convince drunken con goers that they would LOVE to host a World Horror Convention, and that they should show up at the business meeting Sunday morning to make a pitch. I heard that both London and San Francisco are in the running for 2004. We’ll see. I have nothing but respect for the people who put on these conventions. They are even crazier than people who try to publish books.

* Convention regular Denise (who, mysteriously, only shows up at conventions when Bill Shaffer is in attendance) showed me her cloak Saturday night. No. That is not a euphemism. It was a cloak… a very cool cloak, high quality wool, hand sewn, double stitched, satin lining etc. It was so cool in fact, that I bought a cloak of my own for the upcoming Night Shade wedding celebration. If you’re looking for a cool cloak, check out Texas Body Hangings. They do good work. Besides pimping fine cloaks, Denise managed to scare Peter Straub with real life horror stories from her day job – these stories involved massive birth defects and environmental pollution in former soviet republics. Industrial pollutants suck.

* I spent Sunday afternoon in the bar with Tim Lebbon and various sundry folk such as Feo Amante, Jack Haringa and others… Tim and crew were on a quest to get a Chicago style pizza delivered from a real Chicago pizza restaurant, and were still waiting for it to be delivered when I had to leave for the airport. I was in such a hurry to get going that I think I ended up forgetting to pay for my burger and drinks. Thanks to whoever picked up the tab! I’ll get you next year.

* At the airport, I think I literally ran into Willie Brown, the Mayor of San Francisco. I was trying to hustle my two rolling trunks (full of books) to the ticket counter, and I accidentally slammed them into a very stylishly dressed African American gentleman in a fedora who was a dead ringer for “Da Maya”. Sorry ’bout that, Willie.

* The Plane ride home was made bearable by the presence of Christopher Treagus, Bay Area resident and all around cool guy. We talked at length about bookstores (he works at one, as do I), the small press publishing scene, and its relationship to New York publishing. Our conversations lasted the entire flight, and kept the “convention-high” going until I stumbled off the plane. I arrived home exhausted, having slept for a total of 6 hours during the previous 5 days. After finally getting home to my own bed, I slept for 16 hours (after calling in sick to the day job). I can’t wait for next year!

A View From Corona #5

March 18th 2002 at 4:08 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

Springtime is here, and I am getting psyched for World Horror Con 2002. World horror has become one of my favorite events each year. One of the reasons it is such a fun convention is because it is small and intimate–usually between 400 and 800 people make the annual pilgrimage. This definitely makes for a fun convention–it’s made up of hardcore horror fiction fans, writers, artists, editors and publishers, most of whom you know. Even if you don’t know anyone, people are usually more than willing to exchange a civil word with you (usually over a glass of some sort of alcoholic beverage) because chances are you are just as knowledgeable and passionate about the genre as they are. World horror Con doesn’t attract casual fans. It attracts people who have devoted a large part of their life to horror fiction.

But, this suggests that only about 500 people really care enough about Horror fiction to make the WHC part of their schedule. Sure, say there are maybe another 1000 or so people that would go if they could, but the simple fact is, World horror draws significantly fewer people than similar conventions devoted to fantasy, and SF. There just aren’t that many people out there who self identity as readers of horror fiction.

And this is a big problem. As bad as the short fiction markets are in other genres, they are far worse in the horror genre. SF & fantasy have Analog, Asimovs, Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy as viable professional magazine markets. There are also many original SF and fantasy anthologies each year from major New York Houses. There are more markets for SF and fantasy because more people read those genres. Horror markets? Horror’s got Cemetery Dance magazine, and a handful of small press publishers that publish anthologies. That’s about it.

Back in the day, Horror supported several professional magazines with national distribution and a boatload of other semi-pro paying markets. There was Twilight Zone, Night Cry, Horror Show, Whispers, DeathRealm, Midnight Graffiti, Fear… the list could go on and on. And the number of anthologies? Shadows and Whispers were just two of the many multi-volume series anthologies that didn’t have a “theme” and a big name to sell them. They sold because they were good, and there was a market for good horror.

Why did these venues for horror fiction disappear? The obvious answer is people stopped buying them. For whatever reason, the number of people who are willing to go out and spend their own money on “horror fiction” has seriously dropped off in the last 15 years. Be it magazines, or anthologies or novels, people just aren’t buying it any more. Sure, they buy the name brands like King, Koontz and Rice, but when it comes to taking a chance, or actively seeking out something new… They just aren’t doing it.
Realistically, there are only 3000 - 5000 people who self identify as fans of horror fiction. That means that even if half of them are willing and able to buy a given anthology of unknown writers, the economy of scale that makes publishing short fiction worthwhile just isn’t there.

Lets say that a small press publisher puts out anthology. If it is a huge success, it may sell 1500 copies. Let’s say it is a limited edition, retailing for $40. After discounts to retailers and distributors, paying postage, etc., the publisher takes in $20 a book.
You may say damn, that’s a lot of money! $30K! But wait. It cost $15K just to PRINT the damn thing, and another $1K for artwork, design, and production. So now, there is $14K left that has to be split between the authors, editor, and publisher… If you have 100K words, at 4 cents a word, that’s $4K that pays for the stories. Add $1K for the editorial fee. That leaves the publisher with a $9K “profit.” But wait. 10% of the cover price of each book gets paid to the authors and editor as royalties. There goes another $6K. Leaving $3K profit for a $21K investment. IF you actually manage to sell 1500 copies – which will probably take 2-3 years to do. It doesn’t take a financial genius to figure out that a $3K return on a 3 year $21K investment isn’t all that good of an investment.

These numbers assume you actually sell out of 1500 copies of your $40 anthology, which is very hard to do. So, an anthology that pays 4 cents a word MIGHT be slightly profitable, if everything works out as planned.

Now double the payment rate to 8 cents a word. Unless you can guarantee 3000 copies sold at $40, a publisher will LOSE MONEY on the project. And I don’t know of any recent $40 anthologies that sold 3000 copies. How about $20 anthologies that sold 6000 copies? Without Stephen King or Clive Barker as a contributor?

But that’s anthologies, you say. What about the magazines? The same economics of scale apply to magazines. If a magazine has less than 10,000 in circulation, they can not command advertising rates that allow magazines to pay top dollar for short fiction. The glory days of pulp publishing, when writers could make a living writing short stories existed when fiction magazines’ circulations were orders of magnitude higher than they are now.

The simple fact is, unless short fiction has a potential audience greater than 10,000 people, it’s not economical to publish it, and it really isn’t economical to write it, either. Fortunately, some writers still do toil away in the salt mines, writing short fiction as a way to get name recognition and experience, or simply because they love doing it. And some publishers go out on a limb and publish it. Even if it’s a bad investment… Even if the there are only 5000 people out there who might remotely give a damn… The editors and publishers who publish short horror fiction do it because they care about the genre. And it’s these writers, and editors and publishers who show up for World Horror Con each year.

What’s the solution to this death spiral of short horror fiction? I don’t know. Keep trying to find the best stuff you can – and keep trying turn more and more people on to quality horror fiction. If you care about the genre, and you want the young, fresh-faced, kick-ass writers to stay in the genre… if you want them to develop and grow as writers, so that they can create the masterpieces that make this genre worth reading, then you need to expand the genre past the same 5000 people that currently read it. Every birthday present and Christmas present you buy should be a book of horror fiction. Someone might come back to you and ask “Hey, I liked that. Where can I get more like this?” If shit like Leprechaun 4 can find an audience and be profitable, we, the fans of the horror fiction community should be able to find 10,000 people willing to spend their own money on horror fiction.

I happen to believe it’s possible. That’s why Night Shade Books sells trade hardcover and paperback editions of its books. Because we think we can and should reach a wider audience. The only way to do that is to take a big risk, and print larger print runs with lower cover prices. When the next horror boom hits, and I can sell 10,000 copies of an un-themed anthology at $25 a copy, I’ll pay authors 15 cents a word for their best stuff (and I know… that’s STILL not enough money, but it’s a start). Until then, we the fans of the horror genre need to keep bringing more people into it.

Complaining about the sorry state of the genre won’t make it any better. Complaining that NY publishers don’t publish and promote horror any more won’t get them to publish and promote it. Bitching that Stephen King is washed up and needs an editor, and that there are better writers out there… that won’t get his millions of fans to go out and buy an a book by an unknown horror writer.
But… telling someone who like Stephen King’s It that he or she might enjoy Summer of Night by Dan Simmons just might get someone reading beyond the best seller list. And if he or she does that, he/she just might take a chance on an unknown anthology with a bunch of contributors he/she never heard of, or buy that novel with a black cover written by someone totally unknown to to him or her… That would create horror fan number 5,001. Repeat process 4,999 times.

A View From Corona #4

March 12th 2002 at 10:22 am

“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

This month’s issue of Locus Magazine features an interview with China Miéville. I mention this because any fan of “genre fiction” - that is, horror, fantasy and SF - should run out and read it. China makes some profound observations about fantasy, and the tradition of Tolkien’s bucolic style of fantasy. The editors of Locus put the following quote from the interview on the cover.

“The idea of consolatory fantasy makes me want to puke. It’s not that you can’t have comfort, or even a happy ending of sorts, but to me the idea that the purpose of a book should be to console intrinsically means the purpose is therefore not to challenge or to subvert or to question; it is absolutely status quo oriented - completely, rigidly, aesthetically - and I hate that idea. I think the best fantasy is about the rejection of consolation… using the fantastic aesthetic to do the opposite of Consolation.”

China Miéville is firmly committed to doing what Dennis McFarland describes in A Face at the Window (See a view from Corona #2) – attacking the status quo. While horror fiction may achieve this by confronting a PROTAGONIST of the narrative with a world that does not conform to his expectations, the kind of fiction China describes attacks the status quo by presenting the READER with a narrative that does not conform to his or her expectations.

This connection - between horror and this type on non-consolatory fantasy - is reflected in the British Fantasy Society’s annual awards. Far more so than the World Fantasy Awards, the British Fantasy Awards selections seem to emphasize that the horror genre is a subset of a larger tradition - the fantasy tradition. This is easily demonstrated by the fact that Tim Lebbon, one of the darkest, creepiest horror writers to come out of England in a long time, has won a British Fantasy Award two years in a row. China himself says at the beginning of the Locus interview “I never agreed with the idea that there’s this rigid distinction between fantasy and Science Fiction and horror. To me, they are part of the same tradition, which I generally call ‘Weird Fiction’…”

This aesthetic choice on Miéville’s part – to write non-consolatory fantasy, and to not acknowledge rigid distinctions between the genres – may explain why fans of horror fiction, who don’t normally read or care for “fantasy” (in the tradition of Tolkein) love China Miéville’s novel of fantasy, Perdido Street Station. At its core, it does what horror novels do best. It challenges the status quo… It says that the emperor has no clothes… It screams from the tops of its literary lungs, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!”

And this is kind of funny, because the last time a bunch of British fantasists screamed “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!” we ended up with the British New Wave of SF. The New Wave movement in SF explicitly addressed and attacked Golden Age SF’s themes of consolation. But it did so across SF and Fantasy boundaries. Two of the New Wave’s biggest standard bearers, Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison are probably best know for their fantasy work. It should come as no surprise that Miéville sites M. John Harrison as one of his biggest influences.

Back in the day, the New Wave writers were winning the war on one front, but were losing it on another. While New Wave writers were reaching out to SF’s existing readers and saying “No… there’s something more… SF can be more!”, Tolkien’s books were influencing an entirely new generation of readers who never read any Golden Age SF. These readers were enchanted by Tolkien’s visions of elves and hobbits… they were enchanted the same way that Campbell’s pulp readers were enchanted by visions of techno utopianism.

And so while SF publishers acknowledged this change, and began redefining what SF was and could be, the Fantasy side of their house increasingly fell under the long, dark shadow of Tolkienism. Scores and scores of never-ending epic fantasy quests became the DEFINITION of what fantasy was, and what it could be. And a generation of readers grew up never knowing that fantasy could be something MORE…

The thematic battle that the New Wave writers fought is still being fought today by writers like Miéville, but they aren’t addressing the excesses of golden age SF. Rather, they are addressing the excesses of the “Tolkeinesqe fantasy industry” which, though it has been financially rewarding for many publishers, has been artistically hollow for some time.

So, if you are a horror reader who wants to try something new… Give China Miéville a try. If you are a fantasy fan who hasn’t really read beyond the Tolkien tradition, but you want to try something new, give Miéville a try. And especially if you love the New Wave aesthetic and the authors associated with the movement, give Miéville a try. In any case, you won’t be disappointed. In person and in print, Miéville is an incredibly articulate and passionate student, historian and fan of the genre. The best compliment that I can give him is that the quality of his writing reflects this enthusiasm and passion.

In addition to China Miéville, if you want to see some contemporary British authors who are challenging the status quo, take a look through some of the recent years British Fantasy Society and British Science Fiction Association award winners and nominees. Some of my favorites include Tim Lebbon, Mary Gentle, Graham Joyce, Chaz Brenchley, Michael Marshall Smith, Rhys Hughes, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton, Ken MacLeod, Conrad Williams and Eric Brown. In addition to looking at the award winners and nominees, keep an eye on the UK’s small press scene. Interzone is an invaluable magazine that should not be missed, and I can recommended without reservation anything published by Razor Blade Press and PS Publishing. Keep digging for those new and up and coming authors, and if you run across somebody who seems to be doing something really special, drop me a line.

Post Script:

While writing this column, I was working at Borderlands Books and during the course of that Sunday afternoon, I sold 5 copies of various Tolkien books to people who had just seen the movie. I’ll do what I can to get them to read Miéville when they come back in…

A View From Corona #3

March 6th 2002 at 9:09 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

Now that I’ve spent the last two columns telling you what you should be reading, I figure I should spend a little time letting you know who I am, and why you might consider listening to me. Obviously, I’m one of the owners of Night Shade Books. But how, you might ask, did this thirty year old kid manage to become an owner of a publishing giant like Night Shade Books?

For those of you who might have missed it, that was sarcasm. While Night Shade can be considered semi-successful in terms of small press publishers, that doesn’t really mean squat in the worlds of high finance and New York publishing. Being a semi-successful independent publisher means you haven’t had to file for personal bankruptcy to cover the debt that you’ve incurred producing books, and you aren’t more than two years behind schedule. Night Shade has managed to avoid these two things so far, and there aren’t any particularly dangerous reefs ahead so I’m cautiously optimistic about the future. But I digress. I’m not supposed to be talking about the murky, fog shrouded financial dangers of being and independent publisher. I’m supposed to be telling you how I ended up at the helm of this particular ship, and why I’m qualified to be captain! (I’ve been reading a lot of William Hope Hodgson lately, so please excuse the excessive nautical metaphors.)

I was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1972. Okay. That’s too far back. Fast forward about seven years. While I’d been reading stuff like The Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators for years, I picked up my dad’s paperback of Carrie by Stephen King when I was seven. I’ve been hooked ever since. Other important and influential books I stumbled across in my pre-adolescence include Marvin Kaye’s Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural (which I got from the Science Fiction Book Club. How does a 6th Grader end up owing the SF Book club $249 anyway? My parents were PISSED!). Another influence were those oversized, illustrated Alfred Hitchcock’s horror anthologies. Damn those were good. I remember reading my first Robert Bloch stories in those anthologies! My first Lovecraft stories! I could go on and on about how influential those things were. But I won’t.

Instead, I’ll fast forward to Junior High. I read a review in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction about the new, corrected texts of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction from Arkham House. I’d been reading Lovecraft for a long time by then, and had racked up well over $100 in overdue book fines from checking out Lovecraft from the library. If there was a new and improved set available, I’d end up saving money in the long run by buying my own copies! Thus my relationship with the small press began (as did my ability to justify ANY book purchase). I searched every bookstore I could find (which at the time was limited to a couple of B. Dalton’s and some used paperback shops), none of which had, or could get copies of those rare and elusive Arkham House books for me. But a clerk at the B. Dalton’s kindly looked up Arkham House’s address for me, and suggested I contact them directly. I immediately sent off a letter asking how I could get The Books. I received a catalog in the mail, and damned if there weren’t a bunch of other books I desperately wanted, but couldn’t afford. You see I had recently read a battered copy of Mirrorshades, the classic Cyberpunk anthology edited by Bruce Sterling, and was just discovering a host of new SF writers. And by some happy bit of synchronicity, Jim Turner was in the process of turning Arkham House into a relevant and exciting SF publisher. Happiness is a teenage Lovecraft junkie with his first set of Arkham House hardcovers!

My next big encounter with the small press was when Sterling’s collection Global Head came out from Mark Ziesing. That was one damn good collection. I ran across it in, of all places, a Bookstar in San Diego, the summer before I started college. Mark had placed a copy of his catalog in the book, and it had somehow managed to stay tucked between those pages until I picked the book up off the shelf. I was blown away by the amount of quality SF and horror that he had published. I had been reading things like The Horror Show, Death Realm, Midnight Graffiti and Fear for some time, so I was aware that it was the independent publishers who were doing “the good stuff.” But finding a publisher who published real live hard cover books that could be found in a chain bookstore was an eye opener. I was used to searching through dusty bins at seedy comic book shops to get my fix. If they were selling books like this in Bookstar, maybe there was hope for humanity after all.

While attending college at UC Irvine, (don’t ever let anybody tell you that Orange County is a beautiful place to live. It’s not. Especially if you’re a broke college student with no car.) I stumbled across Stan Tal’s Bizarre Bizarre Annual magazine, his Bizarre Sex and Other Crimes of Passion magazine, and the first issue of a magazine called Gauntlet. This was the Good Stuff that got me through my days of Orange County exile. But by this time, most of the horror ‘zines were lamenting those long lost days of the 80’s horror boom, and how the genre was now dead. Which was sort of true, but I was still as happy as a pig in shit, finding a bunch of new writers like Brite, Piccirilli, Holder, Taylor and Koja. The list could go on and on. As a side note: To any young adult who is just getting into a relationship with a person who doesn’t have a passion for reading, DO NOT bring books along with you when you are invited over for a night of passionate love making. Your partner just MIGHT take it as an insult. And books with titles like Bizarre Sex and Other Crimes of Passion might make him or her a little nervous. I may not have learned much at UC Irvine, but I learned this.

After two and a half years, my Orange County exile ended, and I returned to San Diego, where I found a beautiful thing, the genre specialty bookstore. I was glancing through San Diego’s free weekly newspaper (the San Diego Reader), looking for something to do. While normal people might look at the concert or club listings, or be reading movie reviews, I was searching through the “author signings and events” section. The only author I recognized was Dennis Etchison, who was signing his then new novel, Shadow Man. While I had never read Shadow Man, I had read a LOT of his short fiction. So I decided to check out this bookstore. Mysterious Galaxy. It was located in an innocuous strip mall. I would have never stumbled across it except for the that listing in the San Diego Reader. And it changed my life.

Mysterious Galaxy seemingly had EVERY small press book I had been reading about for years. They seemed to carry EVERY SF, fantasy, horror and mystery book in print. Discovering Mysterious Galaxy after years of haunting general interest bookstores was like, well, it was like having sex for the first time after years of masturbating. It was THAT GOOD. And even though they seemingly had every genre book imaginable, It wasn’t the books that made it my Shangri-La. The staff was the best part of the Mysterious Galaxy. Friendly, engaging, and knowledgeable. One didn’t go to Mysterious Galaxy just to get books. One went to take part in a community of genre fans, where you could pick the brains of Patrick, the SF guru, who seems to know about EVERY new and up-and-coming SF writer worth reading. (Just a word of advice. If Patrick tells you to spend $35 on a British hardcover because its good, and because it is going to be worth a LOT of money, don’t doubt him. Don’t wait for the US paperback. Just spend the money. I still wish I had bought that copy of Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction.)

Mystery Galaxy was a great place to spend the afternoon. And after spending a LOT of afternoons there, they hired me. Which was a good thing, because it was Mysterious Galaxy that gave me the collecting jones. Before Mysterious Galaxy, I might be happy with paperback editions of some of my favorite books. Before Mysterious Galaxy, I didn’t mind if my hardcover was a book club edition. But after Mysterious Galaxy, I needed hardcover first editions. I needed limited editions. I needed British Editions. I NEEDED them like a junkie needs heroin. And like a lot of junkies, I ended up dealing to support my habit.

After moving to San Diego, I met Liza Erpelo. Not only did Liza not run screaming when I showed her a copy of Bizarre Sex and Other Crimes of Passion, but she actually enjoyed the copy of Hot Blood that I gave her for Valentines day, and would even sit through the occasional zombie movie with me. Now that’s Love! Eventually, Liza would become my wife, but before that, she and I laid the seeds of my future publishing career. Liza and I co-edited a ’zine called fREAk jOURNAl. She was a razor sharp editor who could spot a typo or misspelling from 100 yards. I was the layout king, production guy, and an editor that was brave enough to wade through the slush pile. Together, we produced five issues of a pretty cool little ’zine. After looking at a few contracts from distributors, I decided that the best way to loose money was to publish a magazine and try and get national distribution. But books… I was aware of publishers like Cemetery Dance and Subterranean, and it seemed like it might be possible to publish books without losing your shirt. So I decided to publish an anthology. An anthology of Southern California Horror.

I picked that theme for the anthology because while working at Mysterious Galaxy, I had met a LOT of Southern California authors. Several of them were generous enough to contribute a story my project. I put a market listing in Dark Echo, and was inundated with submissions. In the middle of editing this anthology of Southern California fiction, I moved to Northern California. I had graduated from SDSU with a degree in English, and my soon to be wife Liza (who also got a BA in English from SDSU) had gotten into grad school in San Francisco. So we packed everything we owned into a pickup and U-haul trailer and headed north. Where I promptly got a job working in a bookstore.

I still had a day job that paid our bills, but I NEEDED to work in a bookstore. Paul, the owner of Know Knew Books in Palo Alto was kind enough to hire me as part time evening staff, and I worked there for about a year. Paul is a big SF and fantasy fan, and though his store is a general interest used bookstore, it has one of the best SF, fantasy and horror sections in the Bay Area. While working at Know Knew Books, I met one of the nicest, craziest people I know: Alan Beatts. This guy wanted to open up a bookstore in San Francisco … a SF, fantasy and horror specialty bookstore that carried new and used books. That was almost as crazy as trying to publish and anthology of Southern California horror fiction. We got along great! And before too long, I started working for him at his San Francisco store, Borderlands Books.

And it is at Borderlands Books where this epic gets kind of crazy. At Borderlands, I met this guy, Jason Williams. He had just published a book of non-fiction on The Necronomicon, and was planning on publishing a collection of John Shirley’s fiction. The first night we met, at a John Shirley reading, we spent the whole night talking about horror and SF. We compared notes about publishing, we exchanged life histories, and learned something really funny.

Jason and I had met, or almost met, several times before actually meeting at Borderlands. While living in San Diego, Jason used to frequent The White Mountain Game Shop for his role playing needs. What he didn’t know was that Mysterious Galaxy was RIGHT NEXT DOOR to the game shop! (during this time-frame, Jason would drive form San Diego to Berkley just so he could buy some Arkham house books from Dark Carnival, a Bay Area specialty store. If he had known about Mysterious Galaxy, he would have saved himself a few seven hour drives!) A couple years later, while working at Know Knew Books, I spent about an hour talking with this long haired, crazy eyed guy who was attending a William Gibson reading at the Printers Ink, the bookstore next to Know Knew. That crazy eyed guy was Jason, who used to come into Know Knew Books on a regular basis, as it was just up the street from his Mountain View apartment.

Jason and I kept in touch for about a year, attending the same conventions, and reading the same things, and blasting each others taste in movies. And somewhere along the line, we decided that we couldn’t fight fate, and that we were meant to work together. After I FINALLY published After Shocks just in time for the World Horror Convention in Atlanta in 2000 (thanks to all the contributors of After Shocks for your patience), Jason and I reformed Night Shade Books (along with a mutual friend, Ben Cossel), and Night Shade became the primary distributor of my personal imprint, fREAk pRESs. Which reminds me. Extra special thanks go out to Kelly Laymon and the contributors of her anthology, Excitable Boys for their patience. Excitable Boys should be available at World Horror in Chicago, only one year late! Pre-orders of this fREAk pRESs title can be made through the Night Shade web site. And in a way, I suppose this brings us to the present. I work a day job at UC San Francisco babysitting computers. I work a part time job at Borderlands Books. And I spend all my remaining free time working on Night Shade.

So now you know a little bit about me. I hope this little voyage hasn’t been too long or boring. I also hope it reveals a little bit about me and where I am coming from with this column. I’ve been working six days a week for the last seven years so that I can keep my ear to the genre ground working in bookstores and talking with other people about the thing that I love second best … SF and horror fiction. The thing that I love BEST is my wife. Thank you Liza, for putting up with me and my crazy obsession for the last eight years.

A View From Corona #2

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?

A View From Corona #1

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.