CalentureThe situation arose, I believe, because many American editors favoured the light diet of 'quiet horror' rather than the meaty stew that Dick cooked up...
I'd be interested to know exactly when this period of quiet horror was. Koontz seems to be saying that Laymon's stuff was too strong for American tastes. But in
The Giant Book of Terror (Jones and Campbell, eds., 1994) Roberta Lannes
Dancing on a Blade of Dreams is prefaced by:
The author should have made her debut in this series with Apostate in Denim in Best New Horror 2. However, at the very last moment, the publisher decided the story was too extreme for the sensibilities of British book retailers and cut it from that volume. Most of Lannes' stories are deeply disturbing but then, after all, isn't that what all the best horror fiction should be?.
So Koontz says the Americans preferred "quiet horror", while Jones and Campbell couldn't publish a nasty American story in a British book?
Meanwhile the first Koontz novel I read had a chapter where a bloke strips off then beats a woman to death with a claw hammer... A novel released as a W H Smiths book club choice, incidentally!
And the Lannes story is too strong for British sensibilities?
I'd be the first to admit that I have difficulty with Laymon's writings. But at his best he's supremely entertaining. I wonder if, instead of being "Stephen King without a conscience", they should have suggested "Shaun Hutson without zit squeezing moments"?
Tremendous post, by the way. I'm thinking that maybe I should follow your advice and try
Resurrection Dreams as soon as I finish Campbell's
The Influence (which by the way is treading a similar plot path to Taylor's
The Moorstone Sickness if I'm not mistaken).
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LynnieLynnI've read 'The Cellar', 'Resurrection Dreams', 'Funland' and 'One Rainy Night' (a job lot from some book club) and while most of the book is entertaining, I find the sexual violence far too gratuitous and just, I don't quite know how to put it, crudely fitted into the stories?
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LCBI'll have to pipe up and admit I'm not a fan of Laymon.
I've read plenty of gruesome material, sampled and even enjoyed the work of the splatterpunks, and the likes of David Schow, the output of the Skipp-Spector duo, and I don't automatically mind stories that have a focus on sex...it's the execution that's important.
Some of Laymon;s short stories worked for me but for the most part, and in re: his novels he was one of those "extreme horror" writers whose material I often found lacking in the execution. The usual symptoms: prose that wants to be ripe and fetid but is rather weak, paper-thin characters that exist only to be ripped apart; laughable, inept attempts at contrived shock, and usually a genuinely unpleasantly nasty focus on sex. This ranges from the one book where I believe a woman decides to, after barely making it home after being raped, to have sex with her boyfriend to "erase" the experience to the book where a girl really gets into her rape because she always had a crush on the attacker and she is, after all, fat and unattractive. And the various situations where women take every opportunity to dress scantily, almost expose their nipples, thighs etc., and all of the female characters who seemed to be defined simply through hair color and bust size. I just felt I was reading the author going through some "issues" y'know?
And all of the previous has but been prelude to this link:
farklebarkle.livejournal.com/111831.html , a summary of Laymon's Blood Games.
Well, I laughed. Warning though, the comments may get a wee bit raunchy with a not-safe-for-work image or two and getting bombed by spammers.
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demonik I'll try and come back to the subject of quiet horror when I'm feeling up to it but, yes to all the above criticisms. Laymon certainly gives the impression that he's enjoying himself rather more than is healthy when the going gets sleazy.
It's also true that many characters exist only to die horribly (the mortality rate among good Samaritans is alarming) but there's nothing unusual about that in horror fiction and, in his defence, I'd argue that the leads are just as likely to be ruthlessly wiped out in the space of a sentence or two. That, and the fact that he rarely feels the need to tie everything up in a "happy" ending is what keeps me persevering with him and I still have a fondness for
The Cellar,
Midnight's Lair and
Funland though I'm not in any great rush to read them again.
Loved that wickedly accurate appraisal of
Blood Games (Laymon's excursion into "Chick-lit"?)!
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Right. Getting back to Cal's post, a Quiet Horror interlude. Can't give you the precise dates but change was already in the air when Chris Morgan penned his ever-so-slightly reactionary introduction to the
Dark Fantasies collection (Legend, 1989) -
No Slime, No Chain-Saws.
"Some authors - I don't have to mention their names - seem to be vying with each other to see who can describe the most disgusting, most nauseating events possible. There is clearly a market for such things, with considerable numbers of readers rejoicing in lavishly gory descriptions of chain-saw massacres or attacks upon humans by giant invertebrates of all kinds. These so-called 'graphic' horror novels sell well, and the occasional one is even well written, though they tend to sicken many other readers - who are put off horror fiction entirely."[/color]
I would have thought the only type of horror fiction this would have put anyone off was the easily avoidable stuff with giant crabs, slugs, devils coach horses and maggots on the covers, but Mr. Morgan's response was to join a "counter-movement ... at the opposite end of the spectrum from graphic horror, there is 'dark fantasy' [whose] impact comes from two sources, atmosphere and realism."
There's much more to it than that (it's an excellent introductory essay) but that gives you the gist and, for a time, horror seemed to be split into two main rival factions. Those who wanted to go further out than ever (the Splatterpunks) and the Quiet Horror/ Dark Fantasy brigade whose standard bearers included Charles L. Grant and his
Shadows anthologies ("shadowpunk" as Karl Wagner mischievously dubbed them), and, if I remember David Schiff's
Whispers. Horror had grown up, passed its 'A' Levels and was now majoring (or whatever one does) at University. No longer cheap art for the masses, it was taking itself
very seriously indeed!
Which is where me and it had a trial separation for ten years and that's why I'm even more entirely clueless on the 'nineties and beyond than I am the rest of the stuff.
Further reading: Karl E. Wagner's wonderful commentaries on the various trends in the
Years Best Horror Stories, especially volumes XV through to XVIII (1987-1990)
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CalentureCan't give you the precise dates but change was already in the air when Chris Morgan penned his ever-so-slightly reactionary introduction to the
Dark Fantasies collection (Legend, 1989) -
No Slime, No Chain-Saws.
...Further reading: Karl E. Wagner's wonderful commentaries on the various trends in the
Years Best Horror Stories, especially volumes XV through to XVIII (1987-1990)
Chris Morgan? There's something weirdly funny about this. In the seventies, Chris Morgan was a publisher's reader (I don't know for which publisher). He was also an SF writer and a member of the BSFA's writer's workshop, Orbiter, which I ran of course. And he was a friend of Rob Holdstock, who started Orbiter and handed it over to me.
Holdstock at that time was about to have his SF novel
Eye Among the Blind published, and had admitted making himself sick with his own graphic descriptions of violence in a novel - which was either a film tie-in, or written under a house name - he never mentioned its title. He was unhappy that he was having to contribute to the flood of hack-written stuff currently entering SF. He said he'd prefer to write Westerns for the cash but didn't know that genre. It would be
very interesting to know the novel that he was writing at the time.
Anyway, at about the same time, I'd passed ...a story around Orbiter... But by the time it completed the round of snail-mail addresses, it had been accepted it for the Fontana horror series. Rob had told me when I first sent him a horror story that Orbiter was intended for SF. I'd said that although I loved SF, while I ran Orbiter it was now open to any fiction.
Not long after this, Rob's stories started appearing in Mary Danby's, Herbert van Thal's and David Sutton's anthologies. He also had a novel,
Necromancer, published by Orbit in 1981. And at about the same time, "Robert Faulcon" and the Nighthunter series was born.
All that any of this boils down to is probably that SF had become an almost "art house" market, and horror was probably seen as the next best thing by some writers. Whether I sparked something in Orbiter, I'll never know.
I'm afraid that I've never seen a copy of
Years Best Horror Stories in a bookshop, second-hand shop or library in end-of-the-world Cornwall. Maybe I should try to track down a copy on the net. But I did find his
Shadows anthology second-hand. So far, that's all that I've seen of "quiet horror". ;D
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The other night I read my first Laymon short story,
Mess Hall. I'm surprised to find that I've read at least 7 of his novels. I had to get through at least
The Stake,
Flesh, and
Beast House - before something struck me as wrong in the 4th,
Body Rides, when I felt I'd begun reading something
wrong...
Then I suppose I read three more just to prove that no decent person should really be reading this stuff.
Laymon definitely was a perve. Some of his books are irritating, failing on all levels, even the lowest. Idiotically, I keep hoping I'll find something as much fun as
The Stake or
Flesh was. Something not written by a pervy schoolkid. So far, I haven't found it. But for people with lousy taste and no sense of political correctness, easily fascinated by dross, I think he's amazing. That's why I keep looking! ;D
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demonikNow you mention it, I've not seen a
Years Best Horror in ages, but I'm sure they were published in some numbers so there's no reason why they should be thin on the ground.
Wagner's intro's certainly contribute to the appeal though, flicking through them just now, God, did he make some odd selections. He notes that he's been granted something like founding father status by both the - apparently - sparring Splatterpunk and Dark Fantasy "movement"s which, he argues, just goes to show how stupid all this labelling is.
Then adds that actually, his stuff is "Acid Gothic".
"Splatterpunk ... was originally coined as an inside joke and seems about as lasting as the fad for Nehru jackets. Nonetheless, all of this has spurred considerable tempest in a teapot between advocates of 'New Horror' and those of (I suppose) 'Old Horror'. ... and from
YBHXV (DAW, 1987)
There seems to be a great deal of hair-splitting and hair-pulling in recent years over definitions and distinctions throughout the various genres and sub-genres of science fiction and fantasy. The term 'horror' seems to offend some readers and writers. The word tends to conjure grotesque and overplayed images and concepts. Outdated and unsubtle. Time for something new, more upscale. ("No dear --- I don't write horror. I write dark fantasy, don't you know."). Or maybe something with a harder edge to it. ("Piss off and die! I'm a New Wave writer!"). .
Anyway. I think it's possible the Robert Holdstock novelisation was
Legend Of The Werewolf (Sphere, 1976) as by 'Robert Black'?
Now, where were we? Oh yeah, Laymon. I just finished the title story/ short novel
Fiends and I'm feeling kind of ... gross. Back once I've had a shower (and, quite possibly, a sand-blasting), wash all the blood, sweat and less salubrious bodily fluids off of me ...