There’s a war on.
This war has been raging for generations. Each side has its warriors, its partisans, its propagandists. Most of the time the fighting is minimal, confined to minor skirmishes in the pages of small magazines or in the backwaters of social media. But from time to time an article will be published in a popular magazine or someone famous will say something scathing, and the fires will burn hot again for a while.
I’m talking, of course, about the war over the values of Genre versus Literary Fiction, the most boring and stupid of all wars.
We hit the ground stumbling over its intrinsic silliness: Can genre not be literary? Isn’t “literary fiction” itself a kind of genre? What does “literary” mean when I say it? What does it mean when you say it? Once we get past these problems of definitions, we must weather the exchange of the same dull arguments: endless variations of “genre fiction lacks psychological depth and polished prose” and “literary fiction is only about old white college professors having affairs.”
It’s all such a headache. And yet the subject – the argument – fascinates a lot of people, enough that in over half the interviews I’ve done, I’m asked about genre and where I think I place in it. I dread the question and try to evade it as much as I can. I usually say something like, “I don’t like to think about genre. Genres make fences, and I don’t like to write feeling like I’m fenced in.”
Technically, that’s all true. It’s what I believe. But it hides a truth I never admit to: for all my disdain for the topic, I have for years been obsessed with the question of genre, to the degree I’m filled with so much self-doubt and self-recrimination that my production has been considerably slowed. I’ve been an eager soldier on both sides of the war. I’m an unreliable ally; I’m too sympathetic to the other side – whichever side that happens to be on a given day.
I sold what I consider to be the first short story of my actual career in 2003, over twenty years ago. That’s a decent stretch of time. And for nearly all of it, the war at large has been playing out in my own head, with me fighting on both sides. I wrote the stories that make up my first book, North American Lake Monsters, in a state of high self-consciousness. I had a dirty little secret: I wanted to be a “literary” writer (by which I mean, I was slightly embarrassed of genre). I lived and worked in that mode for nearly ten years. I had my vampires and my werewolves, but I kept them peripheral, treating them like a little lamp in the corner of the room. Have you ever seen Bruegel the Elder’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, in which Icarus plunges unnoticed into the seas as the business of life continues apace all around? It was kind of like that. The fantasy element was there, but it wasn’t usually the point. I love those stories and what I was able to do in them. I’m proud of that book, and it’s continued to sell well.
But then, exhausted of that mode, I found myself pulled back to the more overtly fantastical. And not just that; to fantasy’s most extreme form: pulp! My next book, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell, had mad scientists, Satanic cults, gangsters, ghoul cities, even pirate ships. I couldn’t help myself. I’d repressed the urges so long they came spilling out in a starry tide. During the writing of those stories, I oscillated between having a wonderful time – I grew up on Stephen King, EC horror comics, Hammer horror and Universal horror, Steven Spielberg, so I felt like a kid again – and a serious dread of disaster, a fear that by indulging my love for these pulpy elements I was sacrificing my chance at literary credibility.
There’s a scene in Wounds, in a novella called “The Butcher’s Table,” in which a giant squid is possessed by an angel and rises out of the water to hover over a pirate ship, preparing to rend it to pieces. As I wrote it, I thought, “This is it. I will never be taken seriously again.”
But my God, it was so much fun to write.
Two very different books from the same haunted heart. My Jekyll and my Hyde.
When I was not actively engaged in the writing, I was filled with doubt and worry. But when I was at my desk and doing the work, when I was inside the story, living it and feeling it, I felt exalted. I loved the adventure, the unusual names, the over-the-top scenarios. I felt like I was entering the covers of all those EC comics and there was no place I’d rather be. By surrendering to my love of pulp, I had tapped into something truly alive inside myself that I hadn’t accessed before.
My most recent book, the novella Crypt of the Moon Spider, goes all-in on the pulp: forests on the moon, creepy brain surgeries, weird cultists, and a giant moon spider. But the pulp is balanced by a realistic portrayal of the protagonist’s emotional and psychological experience of what’s happening to her. And that’s when I finally had my epiphany.
There is no war. Or more specifically, there was, but it only ever existed in my head. I was that soldier lost in the jungle, raging against an imagined enemy while the rest of the world conducted its mundane business. I wasted so much of my own time worrying about what I was writing, and what kind of writer I was becoming, when I should have just listened to my own answer to that perennial interview question: genres are fences. Or, worse: they’re well-worn ruts that over time have become roads. We follow the roads because they provide the fastest route to a destination. Everyone else is doing it. We’re self-conscious. The publishers want the safe bet. Whatever the reason is, we do it because it’s easy. Soon those roads become freeways, and we forget that there are other possibilities. We forget – I forgot – that we can do anything.
Literally anything.
It’s a little embarrassing to write all this down, because it’s all so obvious. Many of you might have read this far only to think, You think you’re the first one to realize this, you idiot?
No, I don’t. I’ve known it all along. But despite knowing it, I still had to learn it.
So give the horses free rein, smash the lanterns, and careen from the road into the dark wood. What you seek is there.
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