And here's my contrib. to the Table's Second Turn, Second Month: fantasy/horror crossovers was the topic, remember?
When I think of horror, SF and Fantasy together as genres, I tend to see a big bog between two slippery hillsides. You can’t get straight from one hill to the other - SF and fantasy usually don’t mix: their license to suspend disbelief comes from mutually opposed sources, science and magic. But both genres can slide down into the bog, representing the horror genre, as fast as you can say “demon” – or “alien.”
The big difference between hills and bog is that the hill genres have the bog as an option – or in more common terms, they can offer the reader wonder as well as horror. The bog doesn’t do wonder. Even if treasure is buried there, the emphasis is on the dead men’s bones accompanying it. Comedy there may be, and entertainingly black, too, but wonder, no.
This doesn’t mean that the bog is any worse than either hill
genre, or that such traffic should be prevented by border guards. Indeed, where
would the hill genres be without the darkness option? Someone like Nietzsche
once remarked, either of Homer or Greek mythology, that, in paraphrase, the
greater the light, the blacker the shadows it casts – you’ll excuse the
vagueness, I haven’t turned up the quote for years, and it’s too long to resort
to Google, even if I cd. remember it right. Nevertheless, the idea rings true
to me. The greater the wonder a fantasy text can evoke, the greater the horror
it MAY evoke. And a fantasy text with unrelenting light and wonder wd. be
somewhat like a medieval Christian heaven: great if you’re immortal, but if
you’re still under the sun, eventually conducive to eyestrain and headaches
rather than alleluias.
This assumes that the writer of such a roller-coaster story
is “in control” – well, intentionally sliding up and down the hill, because who
of us is ever “in control” of a story as we write? But unintentional slides can
produce awkwardness, bathos, and at worst, audience hilarity when you wanted
shudders. I recall a local Hamlet where
the ghost walked a “battlement” above and behind the stage. Fine, except that
ghost shd. be uncanny, inhuman, silent, unconnected to earth. As this one
walked, the audience cd. see his feet shuttling below his robe. They cracked
up, and the performance never recovered.
Evoking the spookiness of wonder’s dark side is not easy,
either. It helps to recall the dictum of
Old Gothic best-seller Mrs. Radcliffe: “terror and horror are so far opposite
that the first . . . awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other
contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them . . .” And for Radcliffe,
terror’s power lies in “obscurity and uncertainty.” That is, let the reader
imagine horrors and outdo your efforts, rather than present the monster full
frontal and fail to raise a shiver.
I recall a classic
example in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary – the
first time the male lead enters the monster’s swamp, he and his guide hear a
strange noise “like loons laughing.” That’s all. But it chilled my neck much
more than the eventual revelation of the Winnebago, yellow eyes, clawing hands
and all.
Successful chills, though, can slide a fantasy story into
the bog faster than you expect. “Slick," my first
published short story, was intended as a wry SF/fantasy form of water erotica.
(Much later, I realized it’s actually a modern Bunyip tale.) In one scene, the
narrator has a close encounter with the unknown in broad daylight. By a
waterhole, in a breathless, sultry midday, with a horse that starts cracking
its nostrils as if in panic, and yet there’s nothing to see. I only intended to
foreshadow the actual encounter, which is not horrific, but the accepting editor
(blessings remain on his name) commented that he expected a monster, either
there or at the final revelation. Hmmmn. I had slid further into the bog than was
meant.
 |
| Peake's sketch of Flay |
Examples of bog-tripping abound in fantasy, but for me the
Grandaddy of bog-skaters remains Mervyn Peake, in his truly epic cycle, Gormenghast. Peake’s
language reeks of the bog in its old Gothic form, though his characters‘ names – Steerpike the villain
kitchen boy, Abiatha Swelter the chef, Doctor Prunesquallor, Titus Groan
himself – shout the vitality of Dickens’ or Poe’s caricatures.
It’s this vitality and the language
it sparks that consistently whips Peake up from the bog and across the hills of
fantasy, into moments of wonder the fiercer for the surrounding dark. Here’s a
piece that’s stuck in my mind for 40 years, from the x-pages struggle of Swelter the chef and his mortal foe Flay,
fought with cleaver and sword in “The Hall of Spiders” among the heights of
Castle Gormenghast. As Flay watches Swelter’s death-throes in a temporary lake
of rain-water on the roofs:
[he] turned his
eyes and found them staring into a face – a face that smiled in silver light
from the depths of the Hall beyond. Its eyes were circular and its mouth was
opening, and as the lunar silence came down as though for ever in a vast white
sheet, the long-drawn screech of a death-owl tore it, as though it had been
calico, from end to end. (Titus Groan,
*Blood at Midnight* chapter)
It’s literally horrific, though the terror
is in not knowing what or who the face is; yet simultaneously, the depiction of
moonlight is Other and beautiful enough to invoke wonder as well.
*********************
Sylvia Kelso lives in North
Queensland, Australia ,
and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian
settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for
best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards,
and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short
story, “At Sunset” is in Luna
Station Quarterly for September 2012.
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