Joe’s answer to “You've said a few times that you don't consider The Fireman to be a horror novel, though a lot of p…” > Likes and Comments
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I love this so much x-D
You did pop to the horror section Joe! Dead bodies and burning flesh not too romantic
I just finished The Fireman a week or so ago. I really liked it. I like books that help me imagine with pictures in my head. Your books do that.
I like the creepiness of it and how it really breaks human beings down to their primal versions of themselves, but man, Harper is awful.
When we talked about Horror in my genre fiction class at university, one of the defining elements of the genre was death; a main character, often the protagonist, dies at the end of the book (Not all books ending in death are horror though). You can dress up that death however you want, but, in the end, it usually has to be gruesome, maybe a bit tragic, to kick the book into Horror. To more clearly define a genre, you would then need to use some of its associated props. Dress the set with rain, mud, burning bodies, infectious disease, anger, and a cult, it's starting to look a lot like Horror. As for "The Fireman," there's a lot of tragic death in the book, gruesome imagery, and of course the name Joe Hill was already associated with horror when the book came out too. It's easy to see why folks want to shelve it next to Stephen King. But what is the most important factor in determining a story's genre? What the author says it is. Truthfully, maybe the editor and publisher get their say too. For the development, and later the marketing, right? They have to go off what the author has written, though, so it all comes back to the brain behind the story. Now, if I had to stick The Fireman in a genre, I would probably throw it on the Speculative Fiction pile; it's not Horror, not Fantasy, not Sci Fi, but a mix of all three; gruesome imagery, death, tragedy, plague, magical powers (they do seem kind of magical), and a dystopian society (in miniature). There's a lot going on. For the shelf, General Fiction. That's usually where the horror ends up, anyway. Just my opinion, though. If Joe Hill says "Sci Fi," well, I guess we better shelve it with our other Sci Fi!
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Chrysten
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Nov 21, 2016 02:05AM
I love this so much x-D
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You did pop to the horror section Joe! Dead bodies and burning flesh not too romantic
I just finished The Fireman a week or so ago. I really liked it. I like books that help me imagine with pictures in my head. Your books do that.
I like the creepiness of it and how it really breaks human beings down to their primal versions of themselves, but man, Harper is awful.
When we talked about Horror in my genre fiction class at university, one of the defining elements of the genre was death; a main character, often the protagonist, dies at the end of the book (Not all books ending in death are horror though). You can dress up that death however you want, but, in the end, it usually has to be gruesome, maybe a bit tragic, to kick the book into Horror. To more clearly define a genre, you would then need to use some of its associated props. Dress the set with rain, mud, burning bodies, infectious disease, anger, and a cult, it's starting to look a lot like Horror. As for "The Fireman," there's a lot of tragic death in the book, gruesome imagery, and of course the name Joe Hill was already associated with horror when the book came out too. It's easy to see why folks want to shelve it next to Stephen King. But what is the most important factor in determining a story's genre? What the author says it is. Truthfully, maybe the editor and publisher get their say too. For the development, and later the marketing, right? They have to go off what the author has written, though, so it all comes back to the brain behind the story. Now, if I had to stick The Fireman in a genre, I would probably throw it on the Speculative Fiction pile; it's not Horror, not Fantasy, not Sci Fi, but a mix of all three; gruesome imagery, death, tragedy, plague, magical powers (they do seem kind of magical), and a dystopian society (in miniature). There's a lot going on. For the shelf, General Fiction. That's usually where the horror ends up, anyway. Just my opinion, though. If Joe Hill says "Sci Fi," well, I guess we better shelve it with our other Sci Fi!
