THE SWAMP STOMP / Part Two

or “Up to My Neck at the Shore”

Something pale shimmered in the swells. He squinted. Even on such an overcast day, the bay glittered. The object bobbed between two of the boats. Stooping, he strained to make it out. Some sort of fish, belly up among the pilings? Squid-like, the thing wavered down, now visible, now gone. He crouched at the edge of the rotting dock.

The surface stirred as a swell approached, sloughing sideways like an aquatic serpent. He bent to prod the object with his cane, to bring it closer, but with the perversity of things in water, it twisted the other way, and he shivered, leaning further.

Something watched him from the water.



http://www.amazon.com/The-Shore-Rober...

“This book is so stupid I can’t even understand it.”

Zen-like in its purity, that’s still my all-time favorite “reader” comment for one of my books on Amazon. And what’s to be made of this statement (also from Amazon)?

“I hate all that prose and literary stuff. I just wants me some horror.”

So disheartening. I’ve often wondered what a novel should be if not literary. Musical? Athletic? Also I get sick of reading that “Dunbar obviously doesn’t even know what horror is supposed to be.”

Let me guess. Is it "supposed" to be stupid?

“Who does this Dunbar think he is?”

(Sorry. Can't help you there.)







So many years had passed between books: I had to wonder whether I could pick up the thread. And the initial responses to this sequel to The Pines were not encouraging. If anything my anti-fans had grown more incensed with the passage of time, because by now my work had also been stigmatized as “difficult.” One woman on Amazon railed at length about my books being too complicated to read in front of the television. Clearly, she felt betrayed by this, as though Horror itself had let her down. I began to wonder if a readership for adult horror like The Shore even existed.

Good reviews seemed only to fan the flames of outrage.

“A classic. Dunbar is a master.” ~ Nights & Weekends

Message boards and horror sites now sported warnings that no one should buy my books (because I was ‘perverting’ the genre), while others publicly insisted that all my good reviews were evidence of a conspiracy. For weeks, one gentleman on Shocklines, a popular genre community board, kept calling me “deformed and retarded,” really working himself up into quite a state. I never understood what the poor soul was on about, but the level of discourse spoke volumes.

Again, the genre presses rather heroically stepped in.

“This is the way great horror should be written.” ~ HellNotes

“Fresh and fascinating.” ~ Famous Monsters of Filmland

“This intense and wholly original novel is one of the best to come out of the horror genre in years.” ~ Dark Scribe

Art should provoke, and I choose to believe that such angry responses mean I’m doing something right. What’s the Churchill quote? Words to the effect that having enemies proves you stand for something...

Never mind. I hate being so combative all the time. It's really not my nature. Maybe it’s just that I got off on the wrong foot with people. (I excel at this.) For every critic who raved that my books were "much better than the average horror" novel – not the most tactful of compliments – scores of aficionados of the genre vented their resentment at the very notion. Who does Dunbar think he is?

But is it really so objectionable a concept that Horror should also be literature?







Extraordinary talents have flourished in the darkness, artists of the caliber and diversity of Shirley Jackson and Ray Bradbury and Algernon Blackwood and Robert Aickman. Consider the works of Franz Kafka or Gustav Meyrink. What are they if not literary horror? Yet the L word is still routinely applied in a pejorative sense. One flouts this mandated mediocrity at one’s own peril.

Still… there’s a reason I stay.

Years ago, I began to hear from readers who told me that they had “just about given up” finding dark fiction intended for intelligent adults. These folks kept me going, because their responses to my work could be passionately appreciative. What else does a writer live for?

Perhaps I am combative after all, and – yes – it’s worth the battle. Over the years, I’ve so often been moved by the praise of readers, my feelings only enhanced by the fact that the individuals making such comments tend to be articulate and insightful – exactly the readership I’ve always sought.

Sought? Summoned.

Conjured.

Believed in as an article of faith.

These are the readers I envision when I sit down to write. Whenever one of them declares some novel of mine to be among the finest books they’ve read, it constitutes validation on a profound level… if only because there’s not a vanilla character to be found anywhere in my work.

This gives me hope. Perhaps the genre isn’t as reactionary as it seems. Perhaps culturally we are at last emerging from a dark time, like some noble monster groping toward the light.