Day 2 of my spotlight on Lethe Press includes their biggest name author, Philip Fracassi. Last year I reviewed his collection Beneath a Pale Sky which was put out by Lethe Press. It went on to be nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. I also have his upcoming novel Gothic in my queue for my January column and he also has a title coming from Nightfire in 2023 as well.
His is a name you should already know, but if not, today, I am fixing that for you.
Why I Love Horror by Philip Fracassi
I recently reconnected with an old high school buddy of mine, a good dude who currently holds the position of head librarian at a prestigious New York City university. It was a lot of fun to chat about old times and he wasn’t surprised in the least to hear that I was still writing.
What did surprise him was when I told him I was writing horror, a genre he wasn’t overly familiar with despite the obvious breadth and volume of his reading. But given that he was thrilled for my (admittedly moderate) success, and the fact we were long-time pals, he picked up a copy of my most recent story collection, Beneath a Pale Sky.
A few days ago, he emailed me. He’d finished the collection and was impressed with the writing. He went on to tell me how much he enjoyed the stories, especially given that he typically doesn’t read a lot of genre fiction.
What I found interesting, especially given that it was coming from someone who spent their days buying and cataloguing books, was how bemused he was that I’d referred to my work as “horror.” To paraphrase his note, he said that if he’d read the book without context of our conversations, he likely would not have classified it as such.
Even more interesting, he seemed to struggle with how he would classify it. He wrote that “horror” seemed much too narrow a categorization. He wondered whether a broader category, one that somehow encapsulated psychological thrillers, paranormal dramas or, as he put it, “the fantastical,” would be more appropriate.
The last thing he mentioned in his note (other than the promise of more drinks the next time I was in the city) was that if my story collection was considered “horror”, then the scope of what horror had become, or those books classified as such, was much larger than he’d ever realized.
And that he’d be eager to read more.
The note from my friend is worth mentioning because it ties, quite precisely, into why I love horror. Both as a reader and a writer.
You can do anything.
The supernatural offers a sandbox that is now so vast that, as a reader, you almost never know what to expect when you pick up a horror book. Will this story shock me? Will this story make me cry? Will it terrify me? Will it trigger me? Will it be a psychological character study? Perhaps a gritty, realistic take on home invasion or serial killers? Or will it feature previously unimagined monsters? Or fantastical lands never dreamed of?
What will it be?
The possibilities within the genre are seemingly endless.
The classification of “horror” allows a story to break all the rules—unapologetically and without worry of scribbling outside the lines. In horror, there are no lines. And this is what makes horror great, what makes it rise above general or literary fiction, even genres like science fiction and fantasy. Those books all have rules. Even fantasy books have a tried-and-true structure that you rarely see tested. Science fiction can be speculative, to a point, but most readers will attest that writers must keep things grounded in reality, keep the imagination in check with real-life scientific possibility.
Horror, on the other hand, has no such restrictions. And what happens to these other genres when you begin slipstreaming them with horror elements? The chains are lifted. The boundaries erased. Anything can (and often does) happen.
As a writer, this is precisely why I love the genre so much. For those who have read my work, like my old friend the librarian, it’s somewhat tricky to classify in a traditional way. The same can be said for so many other writers in the field. I think that many readers would have a hard time categorizing work by Paul Tremblay, John Langan, Catriona Ward, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Blake Crouch, Jason Pargin (aka David Wong), Elizabeth Hand... I could go on and on. Even greats like Peter Straub, Joyce Carol Oates, and Shirley Jackson are slippery to define, book-to-book, story-to-story. If you read Lisey’s Story or Weaveworld, with no prior knowledge of the authors (a stretch, I realize), would you have immediately pegged them as Horror? I’m not so sure.
And Speculative Fiction, which I feel is a more fair, all-encompassing category, or definition (for those who seek such things—like bookstores and librarians), is probably too broad to be of much use. Too much science fiction and fantasy and yeah, even literary fiction, would trip into such a blanket category.
So we’re left with the old, tried-and-true, often maligned, almost always misunderstood, label of Horror. And that’s okay for those of us who are fans, and who understand the breadth of what the genre can mean, the possibilities—as readers and writers—that it opens up for our entertainment, or even enlightenment.
My hope is that more readers, like my old buddy, will come to find the genre and discover all the wonderful fiction, all the amazing stories, it holds for the casual reader who may be wary of the “horror” label. We’ve all heard the comments, right? Too gory. Too scary. I’m not a fan of serial killers. I prefer mysteries. I prefer literature. I’m not into ghosts and zombies and monsters.
But what society is slowly learning—as much through the recent deluge of movies and television shows now available to the general public as books themselves—is that “horror” can mean all those things mentioned above, and so much more.
And that’s why I love horror. The possibilities are endless.
And we’re just getting started.
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