NOTES FROM THE BORDERLAND
LYNDA E. RUCKER
THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE: HORROR EDITION
It’s a phrase that’s been on my mind lately when it comes to the horror field, inspired by but otherwise not particularly about the book of the same title by the American literary critic Harold Bloom beyond the basic premise that writers – in Bloom’s case, poets – are made anxious by their predecessors. And because I see metaphor everywhere and the horror field is particularly potent for metaphor, I found myself thinking of three separate but related anxieties in terms of horror tropes.
There’s anxiety about our past, the writers that came before us, the closest to the anxiety Bloom was exploring – the fear of ghosts. (Apologies in advance to some of the writers I’m going to mention here who are not actual ghosts but very much alive and still doing vital work in the field – because their towering influence stretches across decades, they are our past as well as our present, as you’ll soon see.) There’s anxiety about the ways in which the genre is changing, with new people and new directions and concerns about diversity and fears about what is happening to a familiar genre that suddenly isn’t the same any more – fear of body snatchers. And there is anxiety about the outside world, how they perceive us – fear of monsters, fear of the Old Ones, fear of alien invaders.
I first scribbled notes for this column on Ramsey Campbell’s seventieth birthday because it occurred to me how fortunate those of us working in the industry right now are to have a figure as monumental as Campbell alongside us – unlike either of the writers who might be considered his American counterparts, Stephen King or Peter Straub, he’s also still accessible. You can go to a convention in the UK or even America and there’s a good chance that Ramsey will be there, and not just there, but available for a chat.
Campbell’s influence on the British horror scene is incalculable. His gritty urban settings, the sense of isolation that plagues his characters, the sinister landscapes that evoke a kind of folk horror that is somehow also uniquely Campbellian, the families wracked by often unexpressed tensions and the occult underpinnings all have found their way into much of the British horror fiction of the last two or three decades.
Of course, none of these elements are original or exclusive to Campbell, but his prolificness, his longevity, and the quality of his work all mean that they are very much associated with him and in turn with the particular strain of British horror fiction that follows at least partly in his footsteps. Even if you’ve never read a word of Campbell, if you read contemporary British horror you are getting his influence second or third hand. And Campbell, of course, had to shake off his own influence, Lovecraft, a writer whose vision he managed to integrate into his own while avoiding pastiche in all but a few early stories. But more on Lovecraft in a moment.
In America, of course, we have King: he towers over all contemporary English-language horror fiction, but he is quintessentially American in the same way that Campbell is quintessentially British. His career is almost equally as long too.
Those of us a generation or more removed from Campbell and King are all their children in many ways, whether we’ve read and enjoyed either writer or not, but every writer has their own personal pantheon of writer-ghosts that we must answer to and make peace with in order to begin producing work that avoids being derivative and is truly our own. Sometimes, this anxiety erupts at outright hostility, sometimes directed toward still-living authors but other times toward the long dead, and here is where the first anxiety segues into the second in the person of H.P. Lovecraft.
There is first a concern that he may have come to exert a disproportional influence on the field, and second a growing awareness of and repulsion toward his personal views. The genre is changing and diversifying, and Lovecraft has become one of the battlegrounds for this second set of anxieties.
A genre previously dominated in the English-speaking world by male, white writers (I feel compelled to add that I really do mean that strictly as a descriptor and not a value judgement) is shifting and few things tell that tale as succinctly as would a scan through the contributors to The Third Alternative and Black Static over the magazines’ existences. While the earliest issues of The Third Alternative in the 1990s carried largely stories by white male British writers, Black Static has for years been quietly publishing one of the more diverse tables of contents one can find in the genre.
Not the diversity itself but the conversations around the subject can feel for some people as though the genre they have always known and loved is changing for the worse, or in the parlance of horror, body snatchers: it’s still wearing the face I love but this isn’t my loved one any longer.
On the internet, where everything is heightened, it all begins to feel downright apocalyptic, as though we must dig in and defend a side lest all be lost. As someone who can see both sides of the debate over the World Fantasy Award, I found the tone of much of the discussion last year on all sides discouraging. Yet I think it’s important to remind ourselves that as uncomfortable as these controversies may be, they are also signs that the genre is vital and alive and that it matters to people. It is the very opposite of moribund: its pitched battles signal a passion for horror that I find ultimately heartening.
And here we come to the third anxiety. If horror is then so vital and alive today, might others begin to notice that as well?
I recently listened to a podcast of a panel on the weird at World Fantasy last year in which some participants expressed concern about the parameters of the subgenre being seized and defined by outsiders. (A tip of the hat here to one of the panellists, Maura McHugh, who also pointed out the metaphorical quality of this particular fear sounding very much like a horror trope.)
The problem – aside from the fact that I don’t actually think “outsiders” are all that interested in us – is that I also don’t think writers ought to be in the business of defining much; if anything, writers ought to be striving to break out of definitions, the great ones at least, and while the panellists speaking up to protect the weird from outside influences that misunderstand it were not in favour of writers doing that defining, I think there is a danger in our becoming too self-conscious both within and outside of the field. We can only ever do so much about how others perceive us, in writing and in life, and expending too much energy on such an endeavour is usually wasted.
I’m reminded of the possibly apocryphal story of James M. Cain, who when asked if he was upset about what Hollywood had done to some of his books, pointed at his shelves and replied that nothing had been done, the books were right there, just as he had written them.
Horror, the weird, whatever you choose to call it, and those of us who make and read and watch it, will always be here regardless of what the rest of the world thinks about it.
And that’s true for what happens within the genre as well.
Sometimes people will proclaim they are turning away from the genre altogether due to weariness with various conflicts, but I wonder where they will go where humans aren’t somewhere just being human. And horror is the genre of anxiety, after all, so in the end perhaps it is little wonder that we are suffused with it in a meta sense as well.