![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
Stephen King and I agree on few things, but we agree on that, Which isn't to say that every single one is unneeded or ruins a text, but it's certainly true that avoiding them prevents such miserable quotes as:
I've never loved an adverb, but the worst are unwieldy (sexily is one of my least favorites: it's too twisted on the tongue to sound sexy), or else lazy or redundant. She thought, guiltily? She told herself, fiercely? Tacking on the emotional angle is lazy, it's ugly, it's obvious: it's unnecessary. And here, it was the hallmark (in the second paragraph, no less!) of a miserable story.
On my responses to horror fiction, or the lack thereof
I just finished another volume of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and I put together a few recommended horror texts for another reader; inspired by such, I've been thinking on how and why I respond to horror fiction. N.B.: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror has been my introduction at large to the horror genre; prior to encountering the series, my exposure to horror was limited to the classics (Poe, Lovecraft) and cross-genre texts. So my thoughts are based on limited information and are certainly skewed towards short fiction, which makes up most of the horror which I've read. But all that in mind, what I've noticed:
One of the driving forces of horror literature is tension: foreshadowing, atmosphere, and pacing working together to keep the reader unsettled and on the edge of his seat, often reading faster and faster with each page. When well-written, tension works for me: it changes the pace I read and ratchets up my interest in the text.
The climax of horror literature (generally) comes in one of two forms: explicit or inexplicit. A lot of explicit climaxes are violent or otherwise graphic, and due to my inability to form mental images, that violence has near to zero impact on me. Blood, mutilation, corpses, be they paranormal or mundane, are to me anticlimactic climaxes. However, some writers get past my problem with mental images by going beyond the visual. Detailed, multi-sensual descriptions can conjure up a worthy climax to a story by my reckoning; I imagine that they're effective even for readers which don't have problems with mental images. The most vivid examples of vivid, multi-sensual, successful examples I can think of come from Poppy Z. Brite—where most graphic, violent writing leaves me cold, hers is a rich, bloodied, textured landscape and a thrill to read.
Inexplicit climaxes are often but not always paranormal, and they subscribe to a school of thought that the unknown, the not-perfectly-seen, is more frightening than the obvious. Generally I agree with this point of view, yet stories with these climaxes tend to be ineffective because of the tension that's built up in the rest of the book. As mentioned, tension is often part and parcel of a fast pace, both in the writing and the reading; that pace climbs through the story, reaching a peak at the very end. When reading that swiftly, detailed reading retention decreases. A fractured, oblique, inexplicit climax is all to easy to pass by—and an unseen climax is ineffective.
Slow down the pacing, though, and I can find an explicit climax fulfilling. It's possible to build tension and atmosphere via slow pacing, but few writers do so. As a result, a lot of (mainstream, modern, short-fiction) horror I read leaves little impression on me. But the writers who slow the pace and maintain the horror are some of my favorites, not just of the horror genre but of fiction in general. The example that comes to mind is Caitlín R. Kiernan—who slows her pacing with emotional introspection, scientific detail, and quiet, isolated settings, and capitalizes on that slow pace to develop startling, unsettling glimpses which in another author's work might be missed but in hers are compelling.
My oldschool favorite horror fits into the same category: Edgar Allan Poe tends towards high-tension and vivid descriptions—and he's helped along by pure, terrifying concepts which are frightening independent of the description that surrounds them. H.P. Lovecraft tends towards slower pacing and unsettling themes, and again is helped along by his concepts: Lovecraft epitomizes the fear of the great beyond, which is my personal greatest, truest fear. Not all horror is about an underlying terrifying idea—sometimes it's mundanities, perverted (think: The Shining, Stephen King); sometimes it's a paranormal concept, like vampires or werewolves, which has exhausted its (or has no) innate terror. But there's still something to be said for concept—though not necessary or necessarily good, most of my favorite horror texts are skillful expoundings of terrifying idea.
These are the sort of things I think about while I read.
Stephen King and I agree on few things, but we agree on that, Which isn't to say that every single one is unneeded or ruins a text, but it's certainly true that avoiding them prevents such miserable quotes as:
Something made her turn to look at her daughter. She was propped up against the pillows, looking, Marget thought guiltily, about ten years old. She must keep remembering, she told herself fiercely, that Maddie was nineteen.
—"A Trick of the Dark," Tina Rath
I've never loved an adverb, but the worst are unwieldy (sexily is one of my least favorites: it's too twisted on the tongue to sound sexy), or else lazy or redundant. She thought, guiltily? She told herself, fiercely? Tacking on the emotional angle is lazy, it's ugly, it's obvious: it's unnecessary. And here, it was the hallmark (in the second paragraph, no less!) of a miserable story.
On my responses to horror fiction, or the lack thereof
I just finished another volume of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and I put together a few recommended horror texts for another reader; inspired by such, I've been thinking on how and why I respond to horror fiction. N.B.: The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror has been my introduction at large to the horror genre; prior to encountering the series, my exposure to horror was limited to the classics (Poe, Lovecraft) and cross-genre texts. So my thoughts are based on limited information and are certainly skewed towards short fiction, which makes up most of the horror which I've read. But all that in mind, what I've noticed:
One of the driving forces of horror literature is tension: foreshadowing, atmosphere, and pacing working together to keep the reader unsettled and on the edge of his seat, often reading faster and faster with each page. When well-written, tension works for me: it changes the pace I read and ratchets up my interest in the text.
The climax of horror literature (generally) comes in one of two forms: explicit or inexplicit. A lot of explicit climaxes are violent or otherwise graphic, and due to my inability to form mental images, that violence has near to zero impact on me. Blood, mutilation, corpses, be they paranormal or mundane, are to me anticlimactic climaxes. However, some writers get past my problem with mental images by going beyond the visual. Detailed, multi-sensual descriptions can conjure up a worthy climax to a story by my reckoning; I imagine that they're effective even for readers which don't have problems with mental images. The most vivid examples of vivid, multi-sensual, successful examples I can think of come from Poppy Z. Brite—where most graphic, violent writing leaves me cold, hers is a rich, bloodied, textured landscape and a thrill to read.
Inexplicit climaxes are often but not always paranormal, and they subscribe to a school of thought that the unknown, the not-perfectly-seen, is more frightening than the obvious. Generally I agree with this point of view, yet stories with these climaxes tend to be ineffective because of the tension that's built up in the rest of the book. As mentioned, tension is often part and parcel of a fast pace, both in the writing and the reading; that pace climbs through the story, reaching a peak at the very end. When reading that swiftly, detailed reading retention decreases. A fractured, oblique, inexplicit climax is all to easy to pass by—and an unseen climax is ineffective.
Slow down the pacing, though, and I can find an explicit climax fulfilling. It's possible to build tension and atmosphere via slow pacing, but few writers do so. As a result, a lot of (mainstream, modern, short-fiction) horror I read leaves little impression on me. But the writers who slow the pace and maintain the horror are some of my favorites, not just of the horror genre but of fiction in general. The example that comes to mind is Caitlín R. Kiernan—who slows her pacing with emotional introspection, scientific detail, and quiet, isolated settings, and capitalizes on that slow pace to develop startling, unsettling glimpses which in another author's work might be missed but in hers are compelling.
My oldschool favorite horror fits into the same category: Edgar Allan Poe tends towards high-tension and vivid descriptions—and he's helped along by pure, terrifying concepts which are frightening independent of the description that surrounds them. H.P. Lovecraft tends towards slower pacing and unsettling themes, and again is helped along by his concepts: Lovecraft epitomizes the fear of the great beyond, which is my personal greatest, truest fear. Not all horror is about an underlying terrifying idea—sometimes it's mundanities, perverted (think: The Shining, Stephen King); sometimes it's a paranormal concept, like vampires or werewolves, which has exhausted its (or has no) innate terror. But there's still something to be said for concept—though not necessary or necessarily good, most of my favorite horror texts are skillful expoundings of terrifying idea.
These are the sort of things I think about while I read.
