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When I
moved into my new apartment a few years back, I had enough bookshelf
space in one room for all my crime fiction and enough bookshelf
space in another for all my fantasy and science fiction. Which might
seem like a reasonable, stress-free arrangement until, like me, you
come face
to face with the question of where to shelve the horror novels.
Do they
belong in the living room alongside Sayers and Chandler and Woolrich?
Or in the study next to Asimov and Tolkien and Lovecraft?
Well, Sayers and Asimov aren't very horrific; but Woolrich and
Lovecraft obviously are, and in each case the territory separating
the ends of the
spectrum is blurry and grey indeed. Eventually, channeling Solomon,
I decided to split the baby: I shelved horror novels with
supernatural
elements (think DRACULA) with fantasy and ones that were entirely
non-fantastic (think SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) with crime fiction. But
while
that solution resolved the practical problem, it didn't prevent me
from spending the next several weeks mulling over the more abstract
question.
Where does horror fiction belong? If you stopped someone on the
street and asked him to free-associate on the subject, the first
things he'd be
likely to rattle off are words like "werewolf" and "vampire" and
"ghost" -- associations that might suggest that horror fiction is
inherently or at
least primarily fantastic. But if you give more thought to the
matter, you realize that the essence of horror fiction has to do not
with one
particular plot element or another but rather with the emotional
impact it has on a reader. Werewolves, vampires, and ghosts scare
people, it's
true; but as anyone who pays attention to the newspapers can tell
you, so do plenty of things in the real world. And while the most
dramatic
examples of real-world horrors -- tsunamis, terrorist attacks, Ebola
-- are perhaps only slightly more likely to victimize the average
person than
vampires and werewolves are, the more common sort of horror is still
plenty terrifying. And many of those ordinary, everyday horrors fall
in
the category of crime.
It seems to me that in some ways stories about vampires and
werewolves are a safe sort of horror fiction. Oh, they might be
seriously scary while
you read them, but unless you're eight years old, you don't come
away checking under your bed for monsters. Telling stories about
fantastical
creatures is a way to insert some distance between the reader's
world and the fictional world -- it's a way of saying, "Never fear,
not only is this
story made up, it couldn't *possibly* be true."
On the other hand, horror fiction written about evil people doing
terrible things to one another -- those stories give you no easy way
out. People
really do abduct each other and behead them in front of video
cameras.
Pleasant dreams.
How does this intersect with crime fiction in general and the noir
subgenre in particular? Well, I think that crime fiction also has a
split
between its "safe" stories and those that terrify because they hit a
little too close to home. The classical detective story, with its
tidy
poisonings in vicarages and neat little puzzles about train
timetables, bears roughly as much relationship to the real world as
a story about
ghosts does. It's a fairytale -- potentially a very entertaining
one, in some cases even one of enormous literary quality, but
thoroughly and
safely unrealistic.
Realism
began to be injected into crime fiction with the hardboiled
movement, and it reaches its apotheosis in noir stories.
Such stories may be exaggerated -- in fact, they typically are --
but their core is a determined attempt to paint unflinchingly a
violent,
dangerous, uncaring world in which bad things happen to good people
and good things to bad ones. Some readers don't want to read stories
that
remind them that this is the case. Some look to crime stories for
escapist delights, not reminders that we all live just a step away
from
tragedy. But readers of noir fiction want to face this sad truth;
they take a certain satisfaction in confronting it and carrying on
in the face
of it. Call it endurance, call it defiance, call it what you will --
the noir hero and the noir reader alike share a need to face that
which scares
us rather than hiding from it.
Which brings us back to horror fiction. Whether it's about ghosts or
serial killers, horror fiction exists to allow us to confront what
terrifies us. And in its most realistic form, it's about terrifying
things that our world really contains. Such as crime; such as
disaster;
such as good intentions that end in death and despair; such as all
the situations that fill noir crime stories. Looked at that way,
noir crime
fiction is really just a sub-category -- a particularly powerful
one, but still a sub-category -- of horror fiction.
Time to rearrange the bookshelves.
Copyright(c) 2006 by Charles Ardai
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Charles Ardai is the Edgar- and Shamus-nominated author of LITTLE GIRL LOST
(under the pseudonym "Richard Aleas") as well as the co-founder and editor of
Hard Case Crime, which has been responsible for publishing crime novels by
Stephen King, Ed McBain, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Madison Smartt Bell,
and Pete Hamill, and many others. Mr. Ardai was also the founder of Juno, one
of the nation's largest Internet services.
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