Applause for a new fright club
In his elegant introduction to "Poe's Children: The New Horror - An Anthology" (Doubleday, $24.95), Peter Straub argues that the stories included represent "the most interesting development in our literature during the last two decades." He should know. The author of 17 novels, including "The Hellfire Club" and "Mr. X," Straub has twice written in collaboration with Stephen King and is the recipient of eight Bram Stoker Awards and the title Grand Master from the Horror Writers Association, among many other honors.
He spoke from his home in New York City.
Q. The first story here, "The Bees," would be at home in any literary collection. Was that your point?
A. My first point was to include something by Dan Chaon, a wonderful writer who straddles the borderline between serious contemporary literature and horror. This was a good strong story to begin with, and it had all the qualities I was looking for.
Q. What are those qualities?
A. I wouldn't have been as conscious of this a little while ago, but I've recently tuned into what is the real unifying factor, I think. Dan's story is, of course, very well written, but it is also full of emotion, in particular a dreadful sense of loss. Loss, pain, sorrow: These are the things that I was looking for and that help define for me what good contemporary horror tends to be about.
Q. Is horror, then, essentially alienating?
A. I would say it's not so much that we experience horror, it's that we inhabit it. It's reflected all around us. I am speaking, for example, of the sort of perceptions people tend to have after the loss of someone very close. In that position, you tend to understand a great deal more about the world than you did before. Specifically, you come to understand the universality of grief.
Q. Should it make the reader uneasy rather than terrified?
A. Uneasy is better than terrified, I think. There are stories that achieve a real scary frisson at the end, that make you go around turning on all the lights. But that effect really only works once. When you know what's coming, all the juice goes out of it. But the story that undermines your confidence in the stability of the world and of everything you think you own, that will stay with you.
Q. So is suggestion more effective than spelling things out?
A. Probably. It's more numinous, more pervasive. For example, if you awaken, worried by some dire matter, that worry colors everything you see. The sun looks black; cinders fall from the sky. It pollutes your world. That is a useful angle for fiction, I think, because things move out in ripples from a fact that actually might be banal.
Q. Are there perennial triggers for that anxiety in horror fiction?
A. Decade by decade, the triggers change, I think. For a while it was teenagers, atom bombs. One thing that really seems to have made an impression in America was Abu Ghraib. The fact that we were capable of behaving in a completely inhuman manner that was utterly degrading to everyone concerned. Right after that came an explosion of torture movies and fiction. It threw another note on the keyboard, but only because it was profoundly unsettling. You've got little Lynndie England, who looks like the girl down the block - except that she's taunting a man on a leash.
Q. Have horror movies coarsened horror fiction?
A. The effect is not very positive, in my opinion. I think of all those movies of the '80s and '90s with numbers in their titles. Some were effective, but most just threw pots of blood around, exactly what the audience of 15-year-old boys wanted. This produced a mini-school of disaffected, grumpy young writers whose stories, in many cases, were based on the early work of Clive Barker. Barker's work was very striking, but the work of the splatter-punks was often imitative and secondhand.
Q. Do you remember what first terrified you as a child?
A. The first book that spoke to me in this way was "Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural." It's a Modern Library giant, and it was really thick. It had [H. P.] Lovecraft, M. R. James. . . . When I bought that book - [laughs] I hope I bought it - anyway, when I acquired that book I wasn't prepared for some of the language, and that made it all the more appealing. I had to struggle to get into it; there was something being said that I wasn't quite getting, a sense of the mysterious. That had a huge impact on me. But my first actual memory is pretty fearful. I must have been about 2 years old. I heard my father say the word "fired" into the telephone. He had not been fired; he was talking to a friend who had been. Instantly, I had a mental vision of a man on a grate with flames leaping up at him. I thought "Boy, being fired must be really terrible." The phrase really caught my imagination.
Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached at ama1668@hotmail.com. 