I Am A Woman Who Writes What Used To Be Called "Penny Dreadfuls"

I write horror.

You have no idea how long it's taken me to type this sentence.

It seems like a no-brainer. My last few writing projects have been about a family of vampires, a fallen angel, a cannibal killer, and the reanimation of a dead person (spoiler alert: it doesn't work out very well). Yet for the longest time I've been hesitant to label myself a horror writer. I always found some way to weasel around it. Oh, I write dark fiction, I'd say. Or literary fiction with a gothic bent. Or (when I was reaching the end of my rope) psychological horror. Yeah. Psychological. It's all deep and shit.

The problem, I have found, is this: horror is simply not viewed as a respectable genre. It's a view that's well-rooted in tradition. Horror writers of the past were generally viewed as workhorses, who got paid by the word to write silly little tales of mayhem for mass consumption. They don't get paid by the word anymore, for the most part, but the rest of this image has proven difficult to shake, especially if one wants to be taken seriously in the literary world. When Stephen King won a National Book Award in 2003, the sound of the country's literary elite having a collective stroke could be heard from coast to coast. A literary award? B-b-but, he makes money! By writing horror, no less! Harold Bloom (that elderly crotchety literary critic who would like you to know that you are little more than a slack-jawed drooling monkey if you've ever enjoyed a popular book) said about King at the time "He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That [the awards committee] could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy."

Ow.

Even one of the board members of the committee who'd helped choose King for the award publicly said that she'd only started appreciating his work after seeing the film version of The Shawshank Redemption, the furthest think from horror King has ever written.

I was eleven when the King book award debacle happened, and only vaguely remember hearing about it, being at the age where I had just started to devour every bit of King-related news I could find. I'd started writing when I was a preteen, and most of my stories at the time were related to vampires or monsters or ghosts or more vampires. As I grew older, I became subconsciously aware of the anti-horror bias in the literary world, of which the King award was only one example. As I began to take myself and my writing more seriously and started researching the business, the writing world's messages about horror were coming through loud and clear.

Real writers don't write horror. 

Horror is for hacks. 

There is nothing of literary importance about horror.

By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I had effectively disregarded my previous love of horror as nothing more than a childish phase. Okay, I thought, I've had my fun. Now it's time to be a Serious Writer. And so I started trying to write more literary pieces.

And guys, they were bad.

No really, they were baaaaaaaaaad.

I was too young and green to understand the importance of not breaking one of the most important rules of writing: write what you love, not what you think other people will love. As my ambitions of being published soon fell by the wayside, I found myself drifting back into writing what I'd originally loved, horror. But even after that I think I still held some subconscious belief that this was a phase that I would grow out of. Or, if I didn't grow out of it, that it must be carefully cloaked with the proper terms to make it sound more respectable. Today I dug up a Facebook comment from just this last June where I pulled out the "dark literary fiction" chestnut.

And to be perfectly honest, I'm tired. I'm tired of trying to dodge labels and make myself sound respectable enough to be taken seriously. Although I may one day grow more cynical as I start to seriously pursue publication, I'm at the stage now where I prefer to let my writing live and die based on its own merit, not based on the associations some people will give a certain genre.

So, fuck it all. I don't write literary fiction, or dark fiction, or dark literary fiction.

I write horror. Deal with it.