Recently, New York’s response to questions about genre and marketing is that it’s all about positioning, but asked to define positioning with any degree of clarity, our “bosses” in the industry are confounded.
The latest issue of SF Crow’s Nest contains an interview with Eric Flint (Rivers of War; Del Rey Books). Like so many of us, he responded a trifle irritably to the topics. He said: “…objectively speaking, the distinctions are absurd. If you were to take it seriously, you’d have to start shelving in the science fiction and fantasy section such works as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. (Of course it’s a fantasy! No whale that ever lived acts like Moby Dick.) The same with most of the works by Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, and Rabelais–and Tom Clancy, for that matter.”
I like that a lot because I think he’s saying a rose is a rose, even if you call it a horse, and a horse is a horse, unless it’s Mr. Ed.
Have I lost my senses? I don’t think so, besides it provides a perfect segue into my question of the day: Why do we find the need to call what we are writing here blogs when we could call them essays and allow our mothers and grandmothers to understand what it is we do in the dead of night. I mean, “I’m blogging, Grandma,” just doesn’t hack it, but “I’m writing an essay,” is fine. Impressive even.
Essays are such wonderful creatures that my love of them has heretofore kept me from entering the world of blogging whose inhabitants are so often people with nothing to say. I was afraid that would happen to me. I first learned to read sitting under a card-table that was covered with the morning newspaper. I read upside down and imagined that I was writing the words. Years later, I found a small (4″ x 4″), old, green, hardcover book of essays called Alpha of the Plough. I have it still and read it often.
So, I want to use this blog to write about something. Like today I set out to define horror and to say why I must look so horrible (sorry) in my photograph to those who knew me when. Trust me. The two subjects merge together. It goes like this: To me, horror isn’t about monsters or chainsaws. It’s about what frightens me.
What frightens me is the real world; what frightens me is Man’s inhumanity to Man; what frightens me is growing old in America.
What scares me spitless is what I’ve been doing since late 2003.
Since around 1980, when Myasthenia Gravis kicked in, bugs have looked for me. When they hit, within minutes I can go from feeling relatively well to ERs and ICUs. This time, I spent 8 months on a ventilator, unable to hear, talk, or move. I had pneumonia four times. I shared a room with an old lady whose husband claimed to be a physician, part owner of the hospital. Daily, he checked my vitals–and told me I was being used as a guinea pig for a major experiment: doing lobotomies on high IQ people. He said it was such a pity, since I was so pleasant to have around. He’d tried to stop them, he said, but alas….
Understand, I had hospital-induced amnesia and was on morphine, living a vivid second life inside my head. In that other life, I was transported by helicopter to a cow farm in Hawaii where I was injected with a smelly serum. In my other life, I could hear people in the passageways, talking about the lobotomy program. Scheming. Planning. Laughing.
And–I had diarrhea for weeks at a time and lay in my own feces for half a day and more. Old men came into my room and felt me up. I wore heavy boots and couldn’t move my feet or much of anything else.
Was it real? Was it fiction? When a sadistic night nurse disconnected my bell and, pinned a note to my pillow saying, “Don’t help this bitch”. Was it horror?
How about the next life inside my head, the one where I was working for a branch of the CIA? I was in Afghanistan, a prisoner, being tortured. I fell out of bed trying to escape and injured myself badly.
Is that horrific?
I’ve been home for almost a year, sorting out present-time reality from unreality, coming off cortisone and other drugs, relearning motor skills–not all, yet, but hey, I’m typing, aren’t I? When I came home–Bob tells me it was July, but I remember nothing before late August 2004 and almost nothing until well into 2005–I could not feed myself. I had tremors from having been given wrong medication. I taught myself to write by practicing the letters of the alphabet, one letter a day, over and over and over…. I couldn’t sit up unaided; I essentially couldn’t walk. One step on my own took months to accomplish. I used a walker and hated it, a cane that helps, and a wheelchair, which I still sometimes use.
If…when…I can bring myself to write about it, be it framed as fact, fiction, or both, where will my book be shelved?
–Janet Berliner
16 Comments, Comment or Ping
Joseph
Test after fixing comments issue…
Jun 26th, 2005
David Niall WIlson
That was a very cool essay, making some pretty valid points. People are easily led into categorizing things…and marketing is behind most of it. By definition, it’s all romantic fiction, but society changed the usage of romance, and we now have fantasy, sf, horror, etc….to what end? The only *noticeable* end is that editors and publishers now turn down perfectly viable books because they don’t fit narrowly definied categories that don’t really exist. The proof of this is at the top of the game, where people make so much money that the walls are pushed aside for them, you see the finest cross-genre work available. The Dark Tower series encompassed them all.
To me, it’s all fantasy of one sort or another…
As to where your other lives would be shelved…well, under J of course…DUH!
DNW
Jun 26th, 2005
Peadar Ó Guilín
Oh, but it’s not just publishers or marketeers who reject books that fall outside of certain boundaries. Readers do it regularly. Not every reader, of course, but vast hordes of them all the same. There was a time in my life I didn’t even look at anything unless I could find it in the Science Fiction section. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have enjoyed other stuff, but rather, I knew the type of reading I liked best and where I could come by it most easily. These days, I have different criteria that aren’t so straight forward to classify. However, I think that for most people, the marketers are just giving them what they want whether it’s healthy or not,
Peadar
Jun 27th, 2005
DNW
But Peader (heh). If it’s only MARKETED that way, but really isn’t that way (which is the case with, say, Dean Koontz, you can fool those readers. When was the last time Dean Koontz wrote a strictly horror novel? I’d say, really, he’s more of a SCI-FI writer, and definitely thrillers…but horror? Still, he’s considered a premiere horror writer…which probably irks him …
More evidence, I suppose, that it’s all smoke and marketing mirrors…
DNW
Jun 27th, 2005
Peadar Ó Guilín
Yes, it is all smoke and marketing mirrors. My point was that many consumers like it that way. They want to be able to wander into the supermarket knowing that when they pick up something labelled pasta they’ll find pasta inside and not some fancy foreign dish whose taste they may or may not grow to love. Without the labels, everything in the supermarket becomes a potential waste of money: a mystery box.
IMHO, the fault of the marketeers lies not in pigeon-holing authors or books, but in putting them in the wrong pigeon-hole. It results in many fine writers getting stuffed into shelves far from where their true readership may lie.
Peadar — yes, I’m a bit incoherent today!
Jun 27th, 2005
Mark Rainey
Couldn’t respond to this yesterday; some blogger bug I guess. Anyway, Janet, some very powerful points here. It definitely makes one think about what “horror” really means to an individual.
Jun 27th, 2005
Joseph
Wonderful essay, Janet. (And my prayers and well wishes to you and your family for what you’ve been going through.)
Horror to me is watching the delivery room nurse rush by with my daughter’s blue form in her arms, because my daughter was born with a hole in one lung.
Horror to me is sitting with my wife in the recovery room, my daughter down the hall in the nursery, and hearing a helicopter overhead. Even worse, somehow knowing that helicopter was for her. That sound can still stir me from a deep sleep, my heart racing…
Horror to me was a two a.m. ride through a town I didn’t know well (having just moved there) with my head out the window of my truck so I could track the damn helicopter because no one had told me how to get to the friggen bigger hospital they were taking her too.
And I’m sure I was a horror to the sleepy desk attendee who didn’t respond quickly enough to tell me where they had taken her once I arrived - I don’t think he’d seen anyone go for his throat that quickly before.
Horror is all around us. It’s inherent in our human condition, I think, and it’s why our genre is such a fertile ground for breaking preconceived notions of genre and compartmentalization. We just need to be holding those examples up far more than we do, showing the world that horror is not just some idiot serial killer with a big knife and lots of spilled blood…
Jun 27th, 2005
Janet Berliner
Thank you, Joseph, for the prayers and well wishes and for your story. Yes, that’s exactly my point. The world is in chaos; it’s up to us to present it, in all of its ugliness and chaos and its beauty. How is your daughter now?
Janet
Jun 27th, 2005
Joseph
Oops. Sorry about that - she’s doing wonderfully and just turned six!
Jun 27th, 2005
Janet Berliner
Most happy to hear that. Janet
Jun 27th, 2005
alaneye
Real horror is, indeed, all around us, but I feel the skill is in taking those personal slices of terror and splicing them into fiction. I don’t necessarily want to read about ‘real’ horror in the books I buy unless they are stirred into a larger, I guess, ‘fantasty’ story.
Last night we watched ‘21 Grams’. A fine, realistic movie, but because I had spent the last two months fighting both ill health and the hospital to get my 85 year old mother well, the scenes in the hospital, including simple things like oxygen and the clip they put on your finger were almost too much for me to bear.
Alan
Jun 28th, 2005
Anonymous
A couple of years back, just before I went in for lung surgery, I made the mistake of reading a Charles Grant - memory tells me it was The Orchard but that was a double handful of oxycontins ago - with a sequence set in a hospital. That ended up scaring me far more than did the notion of a complete stranger fiddling around with a sharp knife and my innards.
Or maybe allowing myself to be freaked out by the story - and a wonderful story it was - was a perfect way to avoid thinking about the fact that I was indeed going to get myself turned into a filet o’Rich. Concentrate on the hypothetical, the fictional, the expeirience of the real world wrapped up in words and distance and you don’t worry quite so much about the incontrovertibly real.
The first thing the surgeon said to me when I woke up was “We had to make a bigger hole than we planned so I could get my hands on your liver.” That, I suspect, is going to make it into a story some day. It pretty much has to.
-Richard
Jun 29th, 2005
Anonymous
If your experiences don’t qualify as horror, then I can’t imagine what does!
Jun 30th, 2005
Janet Berliner
Wait a minute, Richard. You went in for lung surgery and he diddled with your liver? Or was he joking? That would be rare.
Thanks all for your comments.
Janet
Jul 1st, 2005
Elizabeth Massie
Oh my God, Janet. What a horrific and powerful essay. Your major fears are indeed mine (man’s inhumanity to man, one reason I’m an active member of Amnesty International), growing old in America (and it’s happening as we speak)…but you’ve lived through one of my personal nightmares and I have not. That of being completely powerless, and at the whim and mercy (or no mercy) of others. Trying to figure out what is real and what is not, and unable to. You are so correct in using this experience to question the definitions of genre. This is something that all horror authors/editors/publishers should read and ponder. My thoughts and prayers are with you as you move into each new day.
Elizabeth
Jul 9th, 2005
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