Odd that my phone goes off right now with a post from Robert in the rescuing Horror thread. I'm standing in a Borders hoping to buy The Shore, but there seem to be no copies here! How can we rescue the genre if we can't find the books!?! Dang it all!

What an outrage! You should consider rioting. Maybe take hostages. At least loot something. (Always works for me.)

I did consider that...but decided against it as I would never be able to buy the book if I was in the pokie. I would have to guess most jails would frown on inmates reading Horror novels, no matter how literate the book might be.
So I opted to buy Maberry's Bad Moon Rising. But I did find another store does have The Shore and will place it on hold and get it on Friday, hopefully. I do need it for the vacation next week.
Yes, I was so desperate to find the book though that I even checked the "Lesbian Literature" section! I had no idea there was such a genre.

Robert wrote: "Any John Connolly fans amongst us?"


I, sir, am a John Connolly fan. I've read The Book of Lost Things, Nocturnes, and the first two Charlie Parker books. Loved them all. I've heard good things about his new book The Lovers, but I'm a stickler for reading series books in chronological order, so it may be a few years before I get to it.

Oh, the joys of not having read all of John Connolly's works yet! I envy you.

I'm reading THE LOVERS as slowly as I can ... in order to savor it.

Never fails to amaze me that his excellent novels -- with their ghosts and demons and serial killers -- don't get classified as horror. But I can tell you from experience that a horror publisher would have wanted them "dumbed down."

I was pretty surprised to see The Lovers being sold at Target. It seems to be a major release. I wonder if it's on the bestseller list? Does that mean the general public has finally caught on to him or has he changed his writing style to suit the masses a little more? He's always been published by a major company (forget which one), but he's never been a household name...like Michael Connonlly.

How sad that we all just assume that quality would prevent popularity. It's exactly the kind of thing I talk about in this interview.

http://www.horrorbound.com/news.php

Well...popularity and 'Target popularity' are two different things. Target stocks mostly summer chick-lit type stuff..which is why I was surprised to see that book there.

Hi folks,

I've been a bit shy to post here, but time to bite the bullet.

First, congrats again to Lisa on winning the Stoker for best first novel. I haven't yet read The Gentling Box, but must rectify that soon.

On the topic of classic horror tales: I highly recommend Young Goodman Brown. First read it in college, and it's a story that's never left me. I find the atmosphere in this tale gripping. I think Hawthorne effectively portrayed Young Goodman's paranoia. You can feel it coming through the pages. And I enjoy stories that, like this one, leave something up to the reader's imagination. Did Goodman Brown see the townsfolk cavorting with Satan, or is he simply a neurotic man lost in what he perceived seeing? (Religious furor?)

Louise

Oy! That could be the mantra for most of my friends. (Problem these days is spotting a vanity press. They hide it well.) Veneration of the amateur is a blight on the genre, but if you rail against it you will be blasted as an elitist. Trust me. Personally, I don't much mind ...

Robert wrote: "Oy! That could be the mantra for most of my friends. (Problem these days is spotting a vanity press. They hide it well.) Veneration of the amateur is a blight on the genre, but if you rail against ..."

You've been blasted as an elitist because you've railed against self published books?

I can understand being labeled as an elitist because someone denergrated novels that they may consider "unitelligent" or "unprofessional". After all, those are subjective terms (though I've been told they are 'certainly not' by an author/editor whom I love and respect). ; )

T

Oh, you know -- not self-publishing per se, more the whole "rule of dumb" thing. A powerful wave of excellent, literary writers are taking the genre to new heights -- at least artistically -- but so many aspects of the way the genre gets run seem designed to nurture mediocrity. Can't you just picture Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf winning the "Gross Out Contest" at some con? Or Henry James and Isak Dinesen schmoozing with some editor around the pool? The folks who flourish in such situations tend not to be artists of the first flank. It's no accident that works of genius have been pretty much driven underground.

Ah well -- if it were easy, I'd probably get bored.

T. wrote: You've been blasted as an elitist because you've railed against self published books?

I've seen it (er, not at Robert, but at "the industry" in general.)By and large I've found there's a certain kind of writer attracted to self publishing. Of course I've also read wonderful, fun self published books and horrible pro published ones (because proper spelling and grammar doesn't always make a book good).

It's a shame that self publishing has gotten such a bad rep, since it could be a wonderful tool for writers to help themselves build and maintain audiences, keep from being ripped off by rights grabs and keep their backlist available for sale.

Actually almost all the self published books I've read have been firmly in the "not horrible, but not ready for public consumption either" category. Whereas the truly horrible, WTF books I've read have been about a 2 to 1 split between micro presses and the big boys.

I finally picked up copies of Fevre Dream and Sunglasses After Dark. I haven't been able to start either yet but I'm hoping to fix that soon. I'm in the middle of reading too many books for an American Literature CLEP exam and they tend to not include too much horror :)

Self-Promotion bit follows:
As a side note, I just wanted to mention a new group, if anyone is interested in joining. We're hoping to generate lots of discussion involving any and all forms of darker fiction.

http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/2192...