(A response to Douglas E. Winter's essay "The Pathos of Genre") by Adam Golaski

2.  Our Language isn’t Infinite
Why write horror fiction, if it’s limited by the parameters of genre? Authors should consider this question. My answer is that the parameters of the horror genre are generative. To put it simply, I like thinking in the terms of horror fiction. In addition, as I continue to learn what the parameters of the genre are, I can play with them.
I haven’t reached the end of what I can do with the horror genre. I’ve barely scratched the surface. The horror genre may not hold infinite possibilities, but it holds so many that I won’t be able to come to the end. The good authors, and especially the great authors, can take a set of limitations and make literature that isn’t limited at all. The boundaries of genre are murky. One person’s horror fiction is another person’s realistic fiction, science fiction, etc. These murky boundaries are what great horror writers and editors play with, sounding the depths for language, for images, for ideas.
All of this is to say that horror is a genre, and that it is shouldn’t be worrisome. Genre isn’t “the bastard child of anticipation.” Genre is an instrument. A guideline. All instruments can be used in new ways, and all guidelines can be crossed. Knowing how an instrument was intended to be used or where a guideline has been set is the first step toward experimentation.

3. Who Ruined Horror?
Much of Winter’s “The Pathos of Genre” essay is concerned with who is to blame for horror fiction becoming a genre and, in turn, for horror fiction’s demise. Winter places the blame first and foremost in the laps of the publishing industry. In spite of the absurdity of the notion that horror was made a genre by a bunch of publishers in the 1980s and in doing so those same publishers killed horror, he points to a real problem.
The publishing industry is concerned with marketing niches. Publishers try to identify and appeal to niches. People who read horror fiction form a niche. Marketers attempt to attract such people in a variety of ways: with red and black book jackets, with drawings of vampires, corpses, skulls, etc., and—insidiously—with stories written by people who unthinkingly adopt the genre’s tropes. People who read horror should know when they’re being handed rubbish dressed up to look like what they like to read.
Winter almost seems to understand the difference. He writes:
What we are witnessing, then, is not the “death of horror” but the death of a short-lived marketing construct that, although it wore the name of “horror,” represented but a sideshow in the history of literature. …Probably the most welcome result [of the “death of horror”] is the departure of the bottom-feeders and lemmings, who will move along to writing the flavor of the new decade and allow the conscientious writers of the horrific to flourish.

Unfortunately, in the same paragraph Winter writes:
Great horror fiction is being published today; sometimes it wears other names, other faces, marking the fragmentation and meltdown of a sudden and ill-conceived thing that many publishers and writers foolishly believed could be called a genre.

Winter confuses genre with marketing niche; he too often uses the terms interchangeably. The horror genre existed long before the 1980s and still exists; the boom and bust of horror sales is a separate issue. Certainly, when there is money to be made writing horror, the hacks come out in droves. During a bust, those who write in the horror genre continue to do so because it is what they do.
The next category of blame in “The Pathos of Genre” is the subgenre. A subgenre is a facet of a literary genre that draws on the strengths of the whole genre, but focuses on a single aspect. The ghost story is a venerable subgenre of horror fiction. We identify the ghost story subgenre by looking for ghosts.
The subgenres Winter names are vampire fiction, splatterpunk, erotic horror and new gothic. Central to vampire fiction is the vampire and the accompanying lore. Splatterpunk is one of a number of names for a kind of horror fiction that focuses vividly on violence and gore. Erotic horror is interested in the intersections of sex and fear. Winter defines new gothic as: “…invoking, of all things, horror’s literary tradition in order to set itself apart from generic perdition.” Winter’s not referring to a branch of horror fiction that adopts the language, style and presentation of the nineteenth-century gothic, which would make sense. Winter writes:
The “new gothic” is a variant of the “old school” perspective of academia, whose proponents, like literary Luddites, eschew the modern (and especially the popular) and hold that horror’s glory days lurk in the “weird fiction” of its past. Acolytes of weird fiction rely on the company of M.R. James and the Bensons for legitimacy, but tend to obsess about that dour and dear gentleman from Providence, H.P. Lovecraft.

Of the four subgenres Winter describes, “new gothic” sounds like something he made up on the fly, in part because his definition doesn’t make much sense. Who these skulking literary Luddites are who really like Lovecraft but pretend to like James is a mystery to me. There are many, many horror stories that take part in the so-called Lovecraft Mythos (a phrase used by August Derleth and others after Lovecraft’s death), as there are many stories that more subtly reference Lovecraft’s particular view of the world. M.R. James developed a horror story template, which is certainly used today. E.F. Benson? Why not Sheridan Le Fanu, or that other James or Edgar Allan Poe? An aspect of genre is history; we learn what the horror genre is from its history. We make that history by canonizing authors and stories that epitomize the best aspects of the genre. To reference that history is only right. I would not call such references a subgenre. (I’d sooner call Lovecraft Mythos fiction a subgenre; those who write Lovecraft pastiches are rarely shy about doing so.)
Splatterpunk is notorious. Poor Paul M. Sammon edited two anthologies in the early nineties, Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror and Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge. Some people must have liked these books, but I’m under the impression that a number of horror fiction editors, and even some of the authors whose work appeared in the Splatterpunks anthologies, loathed them. Sammon presented, in his introduction to the first book, a manifesto of sorts, but the Splatterpunks anthologies appear to be books marketed to a niche, no more, no less; books meant to appeal to fans of gore. Even if we take Sammon at face value, the term splatterpunk is a relic with very little meaning, unlike its obvious older brother cyberpunk. To call splatterpunk a subgenre is a stretch.
The term “erotic horror” is often used to categorize after-the-fact, that is, to identify extant horror stories that deal with the fear that surrounds sex. Nonetheless, Ellen Datlow, one of the genre’s most respected editors, edited Little Deaths, an anthology of new erotic horror, for which she won a World Fantasy Award in 1995; several other erotic horror anthologies followed.
The vampire subgenre has expanded into a vampire culture, which has little to do with literature. Unfortunately, too, there are readers who only read vampire stories—one would hope these readers would be drawn into horror as a whole, but their taste isn’t really for horror fiction. That said, dismissing the vampire subgenre out of hand would be ludicrous, considering contributions such as Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla,” F. Paul Wilson’s “Midnight Mass,” Terry Lamsley’s “The Break” and Robert Aickman’s “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal.” Or the elephant in the room, Stoker’s Dracula.
Finally, Winter places blame on writers, though not very compellingly:
And it is the writers of horror fiction who must accept the blame, because it is ours. Believe me, it is ours. We have failed to provide publishers with fiction of quality—and more specifically, an originality—that could sustain reader interest, and thus sales.
We have failed in our essential mission of educating publishers, and thus readers, about our art. About horror.
We have allowed ourselves to become typecast as writers of a kind of fiction, by agreeing that horror is a marketing category—and a genre.

In this quote, he does, at least, indicate that a marketing category is different from a genre, though he hasn’t admitted that horror—the literature he thinks writers should educate the people about—is a genre. How can we educate readers about a non-category, about something that isn’t there, a body of work so spectral it can’t be categorized?
Bad writers rarely know they’re bad, or, if they do, they can’t admit it. Even good writers don’t always know—or aren’t able to admit—when they have written derivative, uninspired work. So I can’t blame writers for all the bad horror fiction that gets published. I can blame the filtration system that’s meant to keep bad writing out of circulation: editors, publishers and readers.
Readers, in the end, must bear the brunt of the blame for the success of bad horror. The few of us who still do read must learn to really read, not merely to consume stories. So many readers ask not to be challenged. They have no wish to do the work that good literature requires. They may pat themselves on the back for turning off the television and reading, but, frankly, they might as well turn their televisions back on. So long as most readers consume rather than discern, publishers will provide them with their slop, and editors will be pressured into channeling more slop up to the publishers. Why bother to publish a good book if readers won’t read it?
The horror genre includes both bad and good fiction. Those readers with the patience to identify good horror can serve the genre by directing others to that good work.