Storytellersunplugged

By Jeff Mariotte

Since I’m in the last days of a novel’s first draft (and because it’s germane to the conversation here at SU, I’ll say that I’m in the camp of writers who power through to the finish to get the whole story out, and then go back and worry about the niceties), this month’s essay won’t be entirely original, but will instead point you toward a conversation begun on my blog Friday and expand a bit on that.

Here’s the original post. The whole thing started because I read that there was a new, authorized sequel to Peter Pan coming out, and it struck me that Peter Pan in Scarlet, along with books like The Godfather Returns and Scarlett, are tie-in books every bit as much as novels based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Wars or Robert E. Howard’s Conan.

The difference is that they’re not treated as if they are. Instead, they’re given more “legitimacy,” by publishers, press, and public. They are published in hardcover to great fanfare, they are extensively advertised, they are reviewed and they sell many, many copies, earning their authors big advances and nice royalties.

They are, of course, based on familiar properties, beloved by millions. Then again, so are Buffy and Star Wars. CSI has become every bit the 21st Century cultural touchstone that The Godfather was in its time. As the top-rated TV show for several years running, exported around the world, it’s been watched by more people than ever read the original Godfather novel, and probably more than have seen the movie. It has influenced everything from real criminal trials to the number of people studying for careers in criminal forensics to cinematography styles in other shows and movies. There’s no reason, except base prejudice, that every new CSI novel is not a huge hardcover bestseller.

The problem is that tie-ins live in a literary ghetto. They get no respect from society at large. What concerns me is not that the lack of academic attention—there’ll probably never be graduate courses on epistemological truth as revealed by Data in Star Trek novels of the late 20th Century, and that’s fine. But respect in the greater sense translates into attention, which translates into sales, which translates into money. For someone who makes a living at this game, and would like to be able to put money away against the possibility of a day when he won’t be able to do so, that is an important point indeed.

Thinking about that, I realized that the two ways I make most of my income are by writing tie-in novels and comics and by writing original horror novels and comics. Sometimes I even get to combine horror with tie-ins, as in the many novels I’ve written based on the Angel TV show, in which I got to tell ghost stories, haunted house stories, Cthulhu Mythos stories, and more. The book I’m just wrapping up is largely about Superman, the DC Comics character, but because I love horror and Westerns, he is teamed with the Phantom Stranger and the Demon, and he travels back to the old West to battle alongside Jonah Hex, El Diablo, and more of DC’s Western characters.

And if there’s another literary ghetto with just about as much social acceptance as tie-ins, it’s horror.

There are two basic responses you can have to working in the ghetto. The easiest, I think, is to embrace it. Horror is by its nature about outsiders. It doesn’t play well with others. It focuses on the monsters around us and the monsters within us. If members of polite society enjoy it—or even “get” it—then the writer hasn’t done his or her job, and it’s not horrific enough. Put on the black T-shirt, turn up the death metal, and ignore the rubes passing by outside. This option, I believe, leads to further marginalization, to focus on small presses and internet publication, and ultimately to impoverished writers—poverty being a state to which I am opposed.

I prefer the second option, which is not to accept literary ghettos. There is excellent writing to be found in horror, just as there is in tie-ins. Conversely, there is some truly wretched writing to be found in the mainstream, and in other, more socially approved, genres. It is not the bookstore classification that defines quality, and it should not be the classification that creates a self-fulfilling sales prophecy. A good horror novel or a good CSI novel should have the potential to earn just as much money as a good mainstream novel.

Horror, too, has its exceptions, like the Godfather and Gone With the Wind tie-in books I started this discussion with. There are always the handful of horror writers who sell lots of copies and earn millions—the Stephen Kings, Dean Koontzs, Clive Barkers and Anne Rices (although Kooontz claims not to write horror, and Rice has turned her attention to religion).

But Dean is a horror writer, and there are plenty of other writers putting out one horror novel after another. These books don’t get claimed by the genre, and therefore there are readers who “don’t read horror” who are happily plunking down $30 for each new hardcover. James Lee Burke, John Connolly, Michael Gruber spring immediately to mind; you can surely think of others.

And horror has a distinguished history as long as literature itself. The first stories told around campfires at the dawn of humanity were about spirits working for good or evil, and how their work affected people. Beowulf, often acknowledged as the first work of pure literature, is a horror story. Its modern companion, Grendel, by literary darling John Gardner, is both horror and a tie-in—someone tell the universities!

I believe those of us working in these noble professions should take every effort to point out to the world at large that they do read horror and they do read tie-ins and hell, they even read Westerns, every time Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy puts out a new book, and it wouldn’t hurt them to drop the blinders and delve a little deeper into those genres. Or they should forget genre altogether and read what interests them from one day to the next, one book to another.

If we don’t, no one else is going to.