THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 30, 1994 TAG: 9410260395
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Long : 117 lines
``A good horror has its place in art.''
- THOMAS HARDY
When I was 9, I liked to be scared. Especially at the Saturday afternoon horror double-feature at a rococo hole-in-the-wall called the Vogue Theater. Mike and Jeff lived in my neighborhood and affected distaste for girls the rest of the week, but once the mothers had driven off and we were past the box office, the contest for my affections began.
Mike sat on my left, Jeff on the right (he was a year older); each held one of my hands while giant grasshoppers or leech-women or triffids loomed between the worn red velvet curtains. There was friendly rivalry, but no real animosity. It was an innocent age, and I felt myself to be the center of a small but satisfying universe.
During the week I traded comics with the shrewdness of a street vendor, participated in back-yard fort battles that sometimes drew blood, scuffled and argued on the softball field chalked on our street, and beat the stuffing out of a neighborhood bully more than once. But on Saturday, I enjoyed the fantastical changes that turned the natural order upside down, on screen and off.
It was just a short step from scary movies to scary fiction in my teens. I craved the barely glimpsed terrors of an old manor in a Poe story, the unseen but horribly perceived presence of ghosts in the Shirley Jackson novel. Not the bloody but ultimately dull doings of mad slashers, or the laughably repetitive special effects of movies like ``Friday the 13th.'' These stories didn't bludgeon; rather they lulled me into a sense of safe but pleasurable anticipation, made my taut nerves stretch until they sang, then allowed me to escape unharmed, having savored high emotions and impossible fears without visible marks.
I knew only a fool would really want to set foot in the Castle of Otranto, or Dracula's lair, or even the expensive haunted brownstones favored by Ira Levin and William Peter Blatty.
As a teenager I learned to conceal these books, however - not from shame, but from the tiresomeness of hearing, ``What's a nice girl like you doing reading that?''
When I reached my 20s, I tired too of the passive role women played in plots mostly conceived by men: warm bodies who said little but screamed a lot, and existed to be rescued (or not) by predominantly male protagonists. So by the time I embarked on writing gothic fiction myself, to create the female heroes - not heroines - I had really wanted to read about, I was prepared for my choice of genre to be questioned.
But I wasn't prepared to be reviled and abused, and that was what happened, perhaps most memorably at a crowded booksellers conference in Atlanta. I was talking to the owner of Pineapple Press - a regional publisher of Floridiana - about my first novel, which is also set in that state. Oh, horror, he said. I never read it. I wouldn't even have it in my office. It's not literature. I find that sort of junk despicable and morally reprehensible, he concluded, smirking.
I was acutely conscious of how many people stood around me, and of the righteous contempt in his voice. I briefly doubted the wisdom of my choice.
But later I realized he'd said, I never read it. How could that be? Or did he consider the work of Edgar Allan Poe morally reprehensible? Was Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, one of the purest examples of gothic fiction ever written, actually despicable junk? Perhaps Mary Shelley, Le Fanu, Ambrose Bierce, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Fritz Leiber were simply a bunch of genre hacks preceding the current ones, like Joyce Carol Oates (The Grotesque) and Alison Lurie (Women and Ghosts)?
True, some genre work is slipshod - as is much of the other work published these days. But there is no reason why mysteries, gothics, science fiction, whatever, cannot be endowed with the same craftsmanship as literature.
The Pineapple Press owner questioned my literary taste, which is not exclusive to horror, and he wasn't the first. Some just get a sort of pinched look about the eyes, and say nothing - out loud. A few, who still keep an open-enough mind to wonder past their own expectations, ask: But why do you read that stuff? Ick! How can you write it? And my favorite: Do you like to be scared?
Is fear pleasurable? Do we, as Aristotle claimed, get it out of our system by indulging in it safely, through the arts? I think this is part of the explanation. But it's more complicated than that, and goes further back.
As children, we experienced fear and mystery on a daily basis, inhabiting a world built to a larger scale than we could ever cope with, bemused by those strange, sometimes threatening ogres called adults. At the mercy of everything and everyone, even the darkness in the closet or under the bed. Dauntingly aware of our helplessness, and the patronizing refusal of the big people to help or even believe us. It's no coincidence that children identify with Jack the Giant-killer.
But the most vivid and well-crafted chills are delivered by authors who keep the horror itself out of sight, wisely understanding they could never create anything to outdo the reader's personalized idea of ultimate terror. They isolate their hero, either physically or psychologically, much like a child in an oversized world; and make his warnings or cries for help fall on deaf ears (like Levin's Rosemary), the literary equivalent of those disbelieving adults.
How much more satisfying to get a handle on this fear finally, later, when we can read about it or view it, experience the same intense emotions for a much more limited period of time - and emerge unscathed. When I was 9, I liked being scared. More than 30 years later, I still do. I'm just more particular about content and technique.
Basic horror plots and gothic tales will endure, because readers demand the opportunity to think about the unthinkable, to participate in a controlled ritual that allows them to face down their greatest fears and survive. The authors of fear will survive, for much the same reason. Now, if we could only get a little respect. . . ILLUSTRATION: KELCEY NEWMAN/Staff, TEXT FROM ``BLACK RIVER'' BY ELISABETH
GRAVES
Photo
Lenore Hart often masquerades as Elisabeth Graves, the author of
``Black River'' and the forthcoming sequel, ``Ibo Key.'' Deep in the
eerie marshes of the Eastern Shore, she is at work on her third
novel.
by CNB