DEERSKIN
WARNING. SPOILER FOLLOWS.
It started with a tweet in response to mine about my blog post two nights ago. I post links both on Facebook and Twitter, and for ‘Good Horror’ I tweeted: Yes. Books even wimpy I will read. http://t.co/vdYjO14
Someone—and while I usually try to be punctilious about acknowledging, I’m not going to put her (or his) Twitter name here, because I don’t want her to feel jumped on—responded: Author of DEERSKIN wimpy about horror? I think not!
And I went, huh? I retweeted, which means that everyone who ‘follows’ me would see this comment, and added: How interesting. I have never considered DEERSKIN horror. Rough read, yes. Not horror.
And people started replying. The first responses seemed to agree that DEERSKIN while it may not be pure or mainstream horror was still far enough over the line to be sometimes or semi-classified as horror. I was . . . well, I was appalled. But I put my cool professional hat on* because I do know that readers have a very very very veryveryveryvery** different view of a story than the writer does, and serially tweeted [Twitter abbreviations reinstated as English, and I’m sorry if this is still confusing]:
* * *
Interesting, all you arguing for DEERSKIN as horror. I may have to say something in blog about this. I know why I think it isn’t . . .
But not in 140 characters, and I’m also not sure where I draw the lines, although this partly because the whole ‘genre’ thing gets up my nose, as if—
—as soon as something has a label then it’s one thing rather than another [ie cannot be another, cannot be more than one thing]—and I hate seeing SUNSHINE in ‘horror’ because people like me [ie wimpy] won’t find it. [Because it’s labelled ‘horror’]
* * *
In the middle of me being cool and professional (and distressed, which I’ll get to in a minute), Malinda Lo tweeted, and I fell on her gladly and retweeted. Bless you, Malinda Lo!
Oh good. :) RT @malindalo Who thinks DEERSKIN is horror?! It is not horror
And then I went on, feeling a little more cheerful:
* * *
[There is an] important distinction to me between horror and fairy tale [several tweeters having mentioned that a lot of fairy tales could pass for horror, like most of Grimm] although yes there is bleed between [genres] and some stories are hard to define as one or the other.
Perhaps most crucial to me is the difference between ‘horror’ & ‘horrible’. I don’t myself feel horrible things in DEERSKIN are ‘horror’. They are—
—horrible things that happen in a context of fantasy/fairy tale. Which is one way of working with horrible, but doesn’t make result ‘horror’.
My two cents. I agree that the author isn’t always right, but I’m glad some of you agree with me.
* * *
Now a lot of you have since said something very like what I’m saying now, so forgive me for not doing a better job of cutting and pasting and pulling it all together in a grand and lofty overview.*** But the reason I find the suggestion that DEERSKIN might count as horror distressing is because what is horrible about it is real. It’s not that horror can’t be horror if it’s too close to ordinary reality—and I’m thinking less about serial murderers than about, for example, WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE, which wouldn’t be anything if the narrator’s voice weren’t so, well, real, in a horrible sort of way†. But I find most horror to be a way of distancing what is horrible. It may be distancing it because you can’t cope with it any other way: the input I-the-writer had on SUNSHINE was mostly my fury and despair about the mess us humans seem to be making of our world and our planet, and without any Others to blame.
But the horror of DEERSKIN is the rape. The rest of it is straightforward fantasy. There are no zombies or vampires, and the toro is just a great big animal. And rape is real. I hate the idea—and let me reiterate I’m not saying DEERSKIN’s readers do this††, only that this is my reaction to the suggestion that DEERSKIN might be classified as horror—that anyone reading it could, as it were, get out of it by putting it in their minds with the zombies and the vampires. Rape is real.
The line between fairy tales and horror for me—and for a number of you who have posted or commented or tweeted to this effect—is that fairy tales tend to be about working through your traumas, your horrors, your fears, your great big insurmountable obstacles. Horror tends to plonk them down and say yup, there they are. Trauma, horror, fear and insurmountable obstacles. Have fun. People die in fairy tales and the happy endings may be a little crinkly around the edges but generally some kind of something worth having is won through to. In horror . . . at best you learn coping mechanisms, you build your enclaves. The zombies and the vampires don’t go away. I believe that Lissar is going to be okay. She’s won. She’ll always have the scars—but she’s won.
. . . So it turns out I had more to say about this than I realised, and it’s late and I need to go to bed. ††† I may come back to this. I wanted to quote more of what all of you have said—especially when I asked you to comment about this—and I haven’t even touched on whether SUNSHINE is horror or not. But, all of you, thanks for being interested.
* * *
* Yes, I do have one. Believe it or not. It’s maybe a little . . . dusty.
** I’ve wasted several minutes trying to think of a better adjective than lots of ‘very’s. None of them do it. ‘Profound’ doesn’t even scratch it. Writer and reader are different species.
*** Back in my school days I could never organise all those frelling little facts and quotes—forty years ago you wrote them down on individual file cards, and gods help you if you dropped the box—into a smooth advancing narrative with a conclusion. Brrrrr.
† I know that unreliable narrators who turn out to be nuts are a commonplace in horror. But CASTLE is the first one I read and I can’t believe—I who rarely read horror—it isn’t still one of the best. It’s just that good.
†† Although . . . I’ve told you before that I still get hate mail for DEERSKIN. Rape is an ‘unsuitable’ subject and I have betrayed my audience, etc. This is some of where the violence of my loathing for genre labels comes from—genre as a form of cheap safety^—and for the kneejerk labelling of, in this case, me, as someone who, since she wrote BEAUTY, will always and only ever write books like BEAUTY for the rest of my working career. Uh. No. And I’ve told you I get a fair amount of . . . if not quite hate mail then abusive mail . . . about SUNSHINE. They don’t like my morals and they don’t like my language.^^ Blah blah blah blah blah.
^ Someone on Facebook said this very well, I think:
Genres are fuzzy sets, tools for organizing thoughts. Think of Venn diagrams. A particular work can be nearer the center of one than another. It’s entirely possibly that these are in the center of the fantasy circle (or sphere) and at the edge of the horror one.
But I’m not identifying her either because she went on to say something I want to disagree with fairly forcefully, I don’t know where the lines of power might be felt to run and I don’t want her to feel publicly jumped on:
But an author gets exactly one vote in the debate over the classification of a work, and doesn’t get to tell readers how to classify the work.
I’m having another big huh? reaction here. I’ve said many times—including at the end of my burst of tweeting about DEERSKIN and horror yesterday—that the writer isn’t always right. But this seems to me a very odd take on the question of the balance between writer and reader. I don’t think voting or democracy is a useful model because writer and reader are, in my metaphor du jour, different species. A writer’s view of her story is unique. The writer is the only person who saw the story before it was written down, you know? She’s also the only one+ who knows the stuff she didn’t write down, the stuff she chose not to include—give or take the spin-offs that some writers are good at (and I wish I were, but I’m not). This may have given her so eccentric a view of her story that what she says about it to its readers doesn’t relate much or usefully to their experience, even if it’s a terrific story on its own terms; and no she doesn’t get to order them to have this or that reaction. And some authors (sigh) are simply big pains in the butt and should be ignored. But I don’t agree that discounting a writer’s unique knowledge of what she’s written as one ‘vote’ among a crowd of readers is a valuable or even valid way to look at it.
+ Or possibly including a small circle of friends, family, editors and agent.
^ I’ve just been having a Twitter conversation with a new SUNSHINE reader about the latter. All the euphemisms out there for genitalia give me a blood pressure headache and I’m not going to use them. Make a note. If I write another dark urban fantasy, or whatever they’re calling them by the time I write it, it’s going to have sex and bad language in it.
††† Fiona is coming tomorrow. Yaaaaaay.
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.