Fungus Of The Heart

My review of Jeremy C. Shipp’s new collection Fungus Of The Heart has been posted at http://pagehorrific.blogspot.com/2010/11/fungus-of-heart-by-jeremy-c-shipp.html

Check it out.

The End Of Leisure

Editor Don D’Auria has been let go from Dorchester so this is surely the end of the Leisure horror line. I feel sorry for whoever won the Fresh Blood competition, as it looks like their novel will now be going nowhere.
Ah well, it was fun while it lasted. Here’s hoping Don will either find another house to continue in the same vein or team up with a few like minded people and start his own company, preferably one devoted exclusively to horror fiction. Personally I’d love to see him take this second path and think he’d have an excellent chance at success given his loyal following of both writers and readers.
Whatever he chooses to do, I wish him the best of luck.

As Good As I’d Hoped

I’m talking about Black Static. My copy arrived in the mail yesterday (a real surprise, as I thought it still hadn’t been shipped) and I immediately sat down and read it cover to cover. Very stylish and professional. Great articles and stories, insightful interviews and reviews.
And of course, it was a blast seeing one of my stories in print for the first time:)
Highly recommended.

Hard Times For Leisure.

This has to be the worst news I’ve heard in years. Dorchester Publishing, home of the Leisure Horror imprint, is discontinuing their line of mass market paperbacks and switching to E-book format and print on demand in trade paperback only. The changes are due to a 25% drop in retail sales last year and will be effective as of September. Apparently people just aren’t buying enough physical books anymore to justify the costs involved in getting them from the printers to the retail outlets.
Leisure provides a crucial niche for both writers and readers of horror fiction and is one of the key imprints that has kept the genre alive when so many others left it for dead back in the nineties. So if you hate E-books and you’re a Leisure junky like me, you’ll be dreading the impending withdrawal symptoms already.

Leisure is home to many fantastic writers and for them this news is bad enough. But at least they have a chance of being picked up by another house. For emerging writers however, the news is devastating. Leisure was not only the sole mass market publisher of horror fiction in America but is currently one of the only houses that accepts unsolicited manuscripts from unknown writers. Pioneering editor Don D’Auria has said that approximately half the writers in Leisure’s stable were initially signed on this basis. But will this practice still be viable now?

How will print on demand work for unknowns? Trade paperbacks are not only more expensive than mass market ones but how can there be demand for a book by a new writer that no one’s ever heard of yet if their books aren’t available in stores for anyone to find?
Emerging writers are usually discovered by browsing shoppers who pick up books at random and read the back cover and first few pages to see if they like the style and story enough to purchase them. Without a physical book to flick through, it seems highly unlikely that readers will take the time to track down an unknown writer on the internet, much less read any sample chapters that might be posted online.

Granted, a small dedicated following of horror fans will no doubt go the Leisure page on the Dorchester website and do exactly that but the vast majority will not. Most people are lazy and can’t be bothered doing anything that requires any kind of effort. Actively seeking out new writers on the internet is time consuming work that requires a lot of research. I know, I’ve been doing it for years. But then I’m a writer as well as a reader, so my interest level in horror fiction is much higher than the average consumer. I’m prepared to put in the hours in order to find the new writers worth reading out there, not just to read their work for enjoyment but also to keep abreast of how the genre is evolving.
Sadly, most people are not prepared to put in that sort of time. I know a lot of people who say they like horror but only read King and Koontz because those writers are already familiar and their books are available everywhere. In other words, there’s no effort involved in the purchasing process.

I hope I’m wrong, but it would seem that E-books and print on demand will only make readers even more inclined to stick to writers they already know at the expense of anyone new.
I could be argued that on one side of the business these changes might be for the best, as E-books take off in conjunction with Kindles and other hand held devices. There’s probably a whole generation coming up that doesn’t read anything unless it’s in electronic form. But there must still be a lot of people like me who hate reading fiction off a screen.
The problem with screens of any variety is that I can’t visualise properly and therefore engage my imagination with the writer’s, so the story doesn’t come alive the way it does on paper. And when I can’t ‘see the movie in my head,’ reading is reduced to tracking words with my eyes and the whole experience ends up feeling sterile and one dimensional.
Not to mention that scrolling through text will never replace the pleasure of turning pages.

No doubt other houses will soon follow suit if Dorchester’s new business model proves to be successful, so where does this leave someone like me? Where am I going to get my regular horror fix from now? What will become of all the Leisure writers who depend on people like me to buy their books? People who can’t afford the more expensive trade paperbacks and won’t buy E-books for the aforementioned reasons?
And what the hell am I going to do with the novel I’ve been working on that I intended to send in to Don D’Auria as an unsolicited manuscript?
Is there any point now?

I’m all for E-books as well as real books but not instead of real books. Will we see a future where the next generation of up and coming writers achieve the goal of publication without ever actually making it into print?
I don’t think I could live without real books, and now one of my greatest fears it that one day publishing houses might stop printing them altogether.
I sincerely hope not, but I’m going to keep a cyanide capsule handy just in case.

Subscription

Just became a subscriber to Black Static. Couldn’t find a copy of it anywhere in Sydney. Hopefully it will be every bit as excellent as everyone says it is.
Now if I can just find the money to subscribe to Cemetery Dance as well…

Memories, Dreams, Warped Reflections.

Can someone please explain something to me? What the hell is ‘A great summer read?’

I know it’s a term that applies almost exclusively to novels but beyond that I’m baffled. Advertisers and marketers are not known for the complexity of their slogans, so why don’t I seem to understand such a simple phrase? It’s all the more confusing as I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent person.
So what exactly do they mean by it?
From what I can ascertain, it’s a blanket phrase that’s applied to whatever bloated novel is currently being hyped in the media during the hotter months of the year. But what does it actually mean?
How can a book be a ‘great summer read?’ Does this mean it’s not a great winter read? If so, what happens if such a book is read in winter, or for that matter, autumn or spring? Will it somehow not be as interesting? How can this be? What has the weather in the real world got to do with events that transpire in a fictional one?
And what if someone reads the book whilst on an international flight? What if it’s summer in Sydney when they start chapter one but they’re only halfway through the book when they arrive in Helsinki in the middle of winter?
Does the book cease to be a ‘great read’ all of a sudden and become an ordinary or even boring one?
Surely a great read is a great read, regardless of the circumstances. And if not, why not? By what criteria is such a thing measured?

And then there’s the sister phrase ‘A great summer beach read.’ Wow. That’s even more specific. Does this mean it’s not a great summer garden read, or great summer bedroom read, or great summer read in any other location that isn’t a stretch of sand or stones by the sea?
If I wasn’t so clueless, I’d have to conclude that people are so incredibly stupid they not only need to have such books spoon fed to them in the first place, but actually need to be told under what conditions to read them in order to somehow get the full effect.
And my confusion doesn’t stop there. Increasingly these kinds of terms are being applied to everything, and appear to be seeping into the public consciousness in the form of insidious mental programming. But that can’t be right. It must be me that’s missing something.

Take movies. Whenever a forthcoming blockbuster is advertised, it’s always prefaced with the phrase ‘This Summer,’ uttered by some clown in a voiceover booth using the same condescending tone one uses to address a bunch of kindergarten kids. Is such a preface really necessary?
What is it about summer that I don’t seem to understand? Is it that everyone else automatically associates some idealised nature of the season with a cinematic ‘experience?’ Does the mere mention of summer really lift people’s spirits to such a notable degree that they can be hijacked and manipulated by advertisers? Does it evoke feelings of warmth and comfort? Images of happy consumers licking ice-cream cones as they stroll along in the sunshine, even though movies are viewed in darkened theatres where external conditions are totally irrelevant? Do such infantile associations really make people more inclined to fork out their hard earned money for the latest pile of Hollywood crap?
Please help me. It’s been years now and I still don’t get it.

All this brings to mind an incident that occurred back in 2001 when I was living in the UK. At the time, I was working for a temp agency and there were nine or ten of us that met each morning at the office to travel in a mini-van from North London to the warehouse in Hertfordshire.
Our driver would always stick the radio on and flood the van with excruciating pop pap that I had to endure for the duration of the trip. At the time I was in a band, (we’d come to London in the pursuit of a dream) and one morning I brought along our demo tape and we listened to that on the car stereo instead.

The music was ambient and progressive, it had groove and soul, soaring female vocals, mystical guitars soaked in delay and esoteric keyboards. In other words it was pretty damn good, if I do say so myself.
Yet something strange was happening inside the van. Most of the guys genuinely seemed to like what they heard and told me so, yet at the same time they were becoming visibly uncomfortable. I knew from experience when people were saying they liked our music just to be polite, and it wasn’t the case here (many of the guys later requested copies of the demo.)
And yet their growing discomfit was obvious.
Finally one of them appointed himself spokesman and began asking me a series of bizarre questions. Our conversation went something like this:

-Hey James, sounds good man, but I’ve never really heard anything like it before. What kind of music is this?
-It’s our own original stuff.
-Yeah, but what is it?
-Well, it doesn’t really fall into any particular genre though it has elements of many.
-Oh right, but, I mean, how would you describe it?
-Well, I suppose there’s lots of ways you could describe it. Ambient. Progressive. Ethereal.
-No, I mean who else does it sound like?
-You mean who are my influences?
-No, I mean which other bands play this stuff. What’s it called?
-The style? It’s not called anything. Not yet anyway. Hopefully what we’re doing is something new.
He seemed unable to process this statement and changed tack.
-Um, so, when would you listen to this kind of music?
-What do you mean, we’re listening to it right now, aren’t we?
-Yeah, but, um, when would you normally listen to this kind of music?
At this point I honestly had no idea what he was talking about and the confusion must have shown on my face because he felt the need to elaborate.
-What I mean is, um, would you like, normally listen to this kind of music at home, say, with your girlfriend on a Thursday night at around eight o’clock?
I stared at him, absolutely flummoxed. What the hell was this guy talking about? Was he mad? Had he misunderstood me? Had I misunderstood him? Maybe one of us had hearing problems because this conversation wasn’t making any sense to me at all.
The guy looked equally confused, as if his meaning was entirely obvious. And it was, to everyone but me. Because apparently it’s universally understood that you can only do certain things at certain times. This means that you can’t listen to unfamiliar music at eight o’clock on a Monday morning on your way to work, but you might be able to get away with it at eight o’clock on a Thursday night. Provided you’re at home, and as long as you’re with your girlfriend. Unless of course it’s her voice you’re listening to, because she also happens to be the singer in the band. Apparently that falls into a category that is yet to be defined by the marketing people.
I explained to the guy that I listened to any kind of music whenever I felt like it, regardless of the time of day. But he couldn’t seem to grasp the concept and neither could any of the other guys. After the shift we drove home to the familiar din of commercial radio, a nightmare sound that had somehow become perfectly acceptable to listen to all the time. I writhed in my seat as usual, hating every second of the formulaic garbage and screaming advertisements, while the placid faces around me seemed content to be back in their comfort zone.

I’d always been the odd one out, but was only now starting to realise to what extent. Everyone seemed to speak in cliches and say things that, to my uninitiated ears, sounded impossibly obtuse. Things like ‘This music is only great for the summer time,’ or ‘I can’t read my new book until I go abroad, otherwise it won’t be the same,’ or ‘I really want to see that movie but I’m going to wait till it’s a nice day.’

Once, at a different job, a Kiwi guy I’d befriended was reprimanded by an upper level minion for whistling ‘Silent Night’ in the office. But it wasn’t the whistling she had a problem with, it was the fact that it was still only October. Apparently in London it’s unacceptable to whistle a Christmas Carol until at least the first week of December.
We both started laughing, thinking it was surely a joke. But she was deadly serious.
And there were more things. Strange looks in the lunchroom whenever I refilled the same water bottle or ate a homemade sandwich. Looks from other people who wouldn’t be seen dead eating anything that hadn’t been bought from a trendy franchise.
And there were even stranger looks when I was reading books like Foucault’s Discipline and Punish or Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy on the Tube at 7:30am when everyone else had a copy of the Metro in their hands.
Once, a year or so later at yet another job in Neasden, I was on a morning tea break reading Jung’s Dreams. One of the warehouse managers saw me and asked what I was reading. That particular exchange went something like this:

-Awright James, what you reading there mate?
-Dreams, by Jung.
-Who?
-You know, Carl Jung. It’s about Psychology.
-Fuck me! Psychology, at this time of the morning? You must be mad.

So it would seem that I’m more out of sync with the rest of the world than ever before, because it’s eight years on and I still don’t have a clue what people mean when they say things like ‘a great summer read.’
I have great reads all year round, and what’s more I have them whenever I feel like it. Same way I have and do anything else whenever the mood takes me, not just when a bunch of marketing people tell me I should.
Turns out you can’t get any madder than that. Maybe I should seek professional help.
Anyone know a good psychologist?

Black Static #18

Just a quick update.
My flash fiction story “Showtime” will be appearing in issue #18 of Black Static which is available on August 13th.
I’m sure the thousands of you who read this blog will be falling over yourselves in your rush to buy a copy.

Mediocrity And The Freak-Show Factor

In today’s youth obsessed culture, the writing world is one of the last places left where you’re still considered relatively young in your mid-thirties. Many writers don’t even start writing until they’re thirty, and it can take years of hard work learning their craft before they become good enough to see their work in print. There are always notable exceptions of course, but in general, you need to have been around for three or four decades before you have anything worth saying. Of course, the term ‘young’ often refers to the maturity of a writer’s work, (or lack thereof) but like music and acting before it, increasingly the focus seems to be shifting from the art-form itself to the age and physical appearance of its practitioners.

In order to compete against the vast array of entertainment available in the 21st century, authors are spending more and more time on things like book tours, video blogs and in-store signings, all of which (apart from eating into their writing time) place the spotlight on the author and not his or her work. The pressure to cultivate a higher profile by engaging in this kind of visual exposure is only going to increase, and may eventually lead to the demise of the non-photogenic writer (which let’s face it, is most of us.)
Mathematicians are said to do their best work before age thirty, but writers may not hit their peak until sixty. Yet what hope could an ordinary looking writer over the age of forty have in a world where the emphasis is on appearance and not ability? Style not substance?
Are writers the next big market for plastic surgeons? Will publishing houses eventually demand a author’s photo to be sent in and approved by the marketing department before a manuscript will even be considered?
This may sound far fetched but why should writers remain immune from what’s already happened in other artistic fields?

In the contemporary music world, artists in their mid-thirties are generally seen as being past their use by date. No doubt this has a lot to do with the massive shift in the last few decades from music as an audible medium to a predominately visual one. For the most part, modern music has become little more than a backbeat to an endless parade of firm young bodies bumping and grinding in choreographed synchronicity. Show me a song without a video clip on MTV or YouTube and I’ll show you a song that no one with a waistline under thirty inches has ever heard of.

It wasn’t always this way. The great vocalist Ronnie James Dio, one of the grandfathers of hard rock and heavy metal, died recently aged sixty seven. Dio was already well over thirty when he was singing in Rainbow back in the seventies, and he didn’t even start his eponymously titled band until he was forty years old. Such a thing happening today would be almost inconceivable. Singers are like movie stars, they’re not only expected to be young and beautiful but also to remain that way for as long as possible, even if means becoming more plastic than human from the endless implants and cosmetic surgery required to achieve it.

Which is why someone like Susan Boyle is such an bizarre anomaly.
Everyone knows her story by now. Complete unknown becomes overnight sensation due to an appearance on Britain’s Got Talent, despite looking like a farmer’s wife from the middle ages. Boyle wasn’t just plain, she was downright unattractive and pushing fifty to boot.

Just in case you'd forgotten.

On paper it simply couldn’t work.
And yet it did.

The media machine that created her would have us believe this was due solely to an amazing voice, living proof that in a skin deep world it’s still possible for genuine talent to transcend a complete lack of sex appeal. That was certainly the consensus among the general public.
But I think it was merely the illusion of excellence coupled with the freak show factor, i.e. Boyle become an overnight success story mainly because her age and appearance were seen as a bizarre contrast to her actual ability, the former accentuating the latter.

Until her appearance on Britain’s Got Talent Boyle existed in near total anonymity as just another middle age woman singing in her local church group to a handful of parishioners, and under any other circumstances that is exactly where she would have stayed.
If Britain’s Got Talent had been broadcast on radio instead of television, does anyone believe for a moment that without the novelty of her incongruous appearance she would have received anything other than a wave of yawns from the majority of listeners? That without the prompting from irrelevant cretins like Ant and Dec and the visual cutaways of the judges’ reactions that cue the audience on how to respond, they would have still found her voice so amazing? Or imagine if Simon Cowell had simply rolled his eyes twenty seconds into Boyle’s audition before cutting her off with a few scathing remarks and dismissing her with a contemptuous wave of his hand. If the other judges had simply laughed and jeered.
Would there have been mass outrage and protest as Boyle exited the stage to make way for the next contestant?

But it would seem this question has already been answered. Boyle had previously appeared on Michael Barrymore’s My Kind Of People fourteen years before her appearance on Britain’s Got Talent. But as the video footage reveals, her performance provoked little more than mockery from the compare and titillation from the audience. Based on the complete lack of interest in her afterwards, no doubt anyone watching at home had a similar reaction too. I’m guessing this was because she was in her early thirties at the time and not quite old and dowdy enough to be considered some kind of freakish anomaly yet.

Which brings me to my main point, her actual singing ability. This is by far the most ironic thing about the whole Susan Boyle phenomenon because anyone who knows anything about real singing knows she has a decidedly average voice. The reason she stood out from the pack is not because she was an exceptional talent but merely a competent one. The vast majority of contestants who appear on such televised shows are so utterly devoid of talent that when someone halfway decent comes along they can seem incredible in comparison.

UK editor Stephen Jones has observed a similar phenomena with the short story submissions he receives for his yearly anthologies. Jones has described the process of sifting through the hundreds of submissions he receives each year as a soul-destroying experience due to the fact that the vast majority are absolutely terrible.
But editors have often said that when you’re forced to read crap all day long your judgment can become so impaired that even a mediocre story can initially stand out as being far better than it really is.
With a top notch professional like Jones who always strives for excellence in his anthologies, this loss of perspective would be cause for concern. When it comes to the general public and the industry suits involved in the manufacture of their pop idols however, an inability to distinguish between mediocrity and excellence is not only acceptable but the preferred state of affairs.

Excellence in anything artistic is by definition a limited market as it requires taste and intelligence to appreciate and is often difficult to categorise. Mediocrity is abundant and easy to understand, which makes it easier to package and promote as excellence. The reverse however, would be not only very hard to do but from a marketing perspective, also pointless.
The only exception seems to be the freak show factor which as Susan Boyle proved, can sometimes elevate an average talent above the egregious hacks who have won the genetic lottery.

I remember a friend of mine telling me some years ago about a young actress he knew. She was apparently brilliant, and had spent years undergoing the highest quality training at some of the most prestigious acting institutions in the world. Yet when she started auditioning for parts she was constantly overlooked in favour of lesser talents. Finally she asked a casting director what was going on and was informed that although she was indeed a superb actress, she would never get any work in the industry as she was too plain. It turns out that you can be an ordinary talent with extraordinary looks but not an extraordinary talent with ordinary looks.
There’s a ton of work out there for both the beautiful and the ugly but the ordinary looking actor is doomed to a life of extra work and bit parts because the suits who control the industry know that audiences don’t pay to see ordinary people. They pay to see the beautiful and the ugly, those they can worship or pity. They pay to escape from their ordinary little lives for a while, and that’s not something they can do if they’re constantly seeing themselves reflected on stage and screen.

The young actress was devastated. Why hadn’t anyone explained this to her before she started out? It would have saved a lot of heartache, time and expense. But the cruel reality of the entertainment industry isn’t something that institutions are going to teach when it’s so much more profitable to sell you a fantasy.

If only the young actress had looked more like Susan Boyle, she might have been spared the pain of having dreamed a dream that could never come true.

Campaign For Real Fear

Great news.

My flash fiction story ‘Showtime’ has been selected by Christopher Fowler and Maura McHugh as one of the winners for their Campaign For Real Fear competition.
This is my first professional publication, so as you can imagine I’m extremely pleased.
With a 500 word limit it was quite a challenge to write, especially considering the shortest story I’d written previously had been around 2,500 words and most of my stories end up around the 5,000 word mark.

My winning entry will be published in a forthcoming issue of the UK’s leading horror magazine Black Static, in addition to appearing as a Podcast by Action Audio.

I’ll post further details as they come to light.

The fate of the short story.

It’s a common refrain within the publishing industry that short story collections don’t sell well enough to be sufficiently profitable. And in the hierarchy of marketable genre fiction, short story collections of the horror variety languish at the very bottom of the pile. There are rare exceptions of course, such as Joe Hill’s best-selling Twentieth Century Ghosts, but in general the sales from short story collections in the horror genre are so meagre they barely register.
Most major publishers won’t even touch them, and the majority of collections put out by the small press have print runs limited to a few hundred copies. These titles are released with little or no promotion as small outfits cannot afford to advertise.

But this aside, the main argument for the apparent lack of interest in short stories is that in general, they’re not as satisfying as novels. It would seem that most people aren’t prepared to invest the time and effort into a short because it doesn’t have the same emotional depth, richness and complexity of a novel. This may well be the public’s perception but anyone who knows anything about quality short stories will tell you it’s nonsense.
And given the ever decreasing attention span of the average person in the 21st century, this argument doesn’t seem to make much sense.
If most people have trouble concentrating for extended periods of time due to the countless electronic distractions available in our hyper-frenetic world, then surely they’d be more inclined to read a 5,000 word story in one sitting, rather than slog their way through a 500 page novel over several days or weeks. Right?
Wrong.

But how can this be?

Maybe it’s because the few short story collections that do end up on the shelves in the big bookstores are dull and predictable. When it comes to horror, the best collections are tucked away in the aforementioned speciality presses which 98% of the general public have never heard of. Maybe if they had, they’d be amazed at the range and quality being produced there.

But while the independents do everything they can to attract readers, for the writer, these speciality presses are by invitation only. Which means before an emerging writer can even hope to get published by one of these outlets, he or she must first gain exposure in magazines and competitions which agents and editors regularly scan in search of interesting new voices.
I want to examine the current state of the short horror story at this initial phase, and in particular what I see as a major stumbling block for emerging writers and the last thing you’d expect to find in underground horror: a kind of censorship.

When it comes to short stories, the internet has made it a lot easier for writers to find those avenues still available to practitioners of the form, open submissions for competitions, magazines and anthologies etc. But incredibly, many of these have a myriad of restrictions on style and content.
Just about every independent horror magazine these days claims to be at the cutting edge of the genre, but a closer look at their submission guidelines tells a different story.

The editors usually start out by telling you how much they want original stories that genuinely frighten and disturb. They’ll go on to complain about how they’re sick of seeing stories that simply rehash tired ideas and well worn tropes such as vampires, zombies and serial killers etc.
They’ll tell you that they want to see something new. Something different. Stories that take the reader to the edge and beyond. Stories that grab you by the throat and plunge you into a black abyss of terrifying places you’ve never been before.
Great, I think, whenever I read these spiels. These people sound like they’re on the same page as me. I’m generally tired of all the clichés too. But then I reach the bottom of the page and my heart sinks when I see the list of themes and subject matter they do not accept.

No stories which contain explicit sex or violence. No stories about child abuse or the exploitation of minors. No stories about incest or cruelty to animals. No necrophilia. No excessive profanity.
No language that could in any way be considered racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive to well, just about anyone.
One horror magazine even had a rule expressly forbidding stories which in any way denigrated the military.

What the hell is going on?

How can these people claim to be at the forefront of the genre when they’re banning the kind of subject matter and attitudes that are such fertile ground for the darkest horror stories?
Who are they afraid of offending? It can’t be their readership. They don’t want censorship of any kind. That’s the whole reason horror fans seek out these kinds of underground publications in the first place; so they can read the kind of stories that will never be available alongside all the safe, boring books that dominate the shelves at the local mall.
And it’s highly unlikely that anyone who is not an avid fan of the genre is going to stumble upon these kinds of stories in the first place, much less start lodging formal complaints regarding graphic content. Quality horror fiction is hard to find. You have to know where to look, and even then, you have to really hunt for it.

So who exactly is it that needs to be shielded from this kind of content?
Isn’t underground horror and the short story form in particular supposed to be one of the last remaining places where writers can stretch out and explore the kind of dark terrain and issues that mainstream fiction doesn’t have the balls to?
At the very least, these editors need be more specific about the rules they impose. If they mean ‘we don’t accept stories with gratuitous sex and violence, or those that are merely thinly veiled excuses for writers to vent their own personal hatred of certain minority groups,’ well that’s totally understandable.
But at least be clear about it. (Though I’d have thought it obvious that no one wants to read that kind of crap anyway).

What concerns me though, is that there might be more to it that this. Somehow I get the impression that what these editors really don’t want to see is stories where a writer’s characters vent their own personal hatred.
And if this is indeed the case, then it’s far more disturbing than any horror story, and a sign that the form is in even bigger trouble than I thought.
So could it be true? Have these editors become so tightly bound in the mental straight jacket of political correctness that they’ve actually started to confuse the attitudes of writers with those of their characters? Are they implying that anyone who writes about these subjects must therefore hold such opinions themselves? That if a character in a story is racist, then by extension the writer must be too?

I sincerely hope not.

But of course, accusations against writers regarding things only their characters are guilty of is nothing new. Stephen King has often been accused of being racist and homophonic, simply because some of his characters are. I’ve seen Irvine Welsh referred to as a ‘deeply unpleasant man,’ by people who have no doubt never met him but choose to base their opinions solely on some of the deeply unpleasant characters that Welsh brings to life with such gritty verisimilitude.
But this kind of stupid criticism usually comes from book reviewers who aren’t a fan of what they’ve been given to read and wouldn’t otherwise seek out the same kind of material of their own volition.

The difference here is that the people running these small horror outlets are ostensibly devoted to the genre, as they’re big enough fans to have started their own publications in order to be a part of the genre’s evolution.
So if that’s the case, then the worst part about all these rules is their blatant hypocrisy, because the publications that impose these lists of topics and attitudes they deem unacceptable are the same ones that sing the praises of established writers like Edward Lee, Wrath James White and Jack Ketchum, guys who’ve made their names by writing about the very things that are off limits to those submitting stories.

So while stories like Ed Lee’s The Bighead or Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door might be considered cult classics, the message to emerging writers seems to be don’t even think about writing about similar topics if you want to get published in the short story market.
But why? Why is it acceptable to write about whatever you want once you reach the small press, but not in the magazines that are the launching pad for them?
What’s wrong with writing about characters that are racist rednecks or sexist pigs?
Why is such subject matter as child abuse or the exploitation of minors unacceptable for newcomers but a story that deals with the same issues like The Girl Next Door can be a best seller and even made into movie?

The message that emerging horror writers seem to be getting is stick to less offensive things. Tone it down. Play it safe. How about a vampire or a zombie story, or one about a serial killer? Or a, oh – hang on. That’s right, we’re sick of those kinds of stories.

Yeah right.

It’s bad enough that the market for short horror stories is shrinking every year. The last thing writers need is to be hamstrung before they even submit by the same kind of restrictions imposed by major publishers who are only interested in stories that adhere to a commercial format.

So take off the mental straight jacket and let imaginations soar.