Oh, you nutty kooks with your silly genre writing. The New York Times Book Review thinks you’re just so adorable!
First it was science fiction, with Dave Itzkoff’s supposedly* regular column, which puzzled over why “contemporary science fiction [has] to be so geeky”.
Now the Times turns its attention to horror:
BECAUSE most right-thinking — i.e., literate, educated, professional-type — people consider horror fiction repulsive, juvenile or plain stupid, it’s probably a good idea for me to acknowledge from the start that the genre’s respectability deficit is fully deserved and even fundamental to its nature. The emotion horror stories strive to evoke — fear — is one that civilized folks are inclined to think of as low, primitive, animal. And it is, just like hunger, thirst and sexual desire. These are impulses that in most religious and many intellectual traditions derive value only from being controlled in the pursuit of piety or reason or whatever higher ideal of human behavior you happen to aspire to. Horror is, it’s fair to say, pretty determinedly nonaspirational, which is perhaps why it appeals so strongly to teenagers, slackers and fatalists, and hardly at all to normal, functioning adults, who are busy keeping the more pressing everyday anxieties — disease, financial ruin, loss of love — at bay and who may fail to see the benefit of adding vampires and zombies and poltergeists to the list.
See? They love horror because it’s so dumb, so low, primitive, and animal. Isn’t it just the craziest?
* It hasn’t been back since that first one in March. The angry backlash from science fiction publishers and fans might have been too much for the Times.
I think many readers were troubled less by what Itzkoff had to say about David Marusek’s novel Counting Heads, the book he was ostensibly reviewing in his column, than by the complete lack of understanding of the genre reflected in his online reading list. Whatever the merits or faults of the books on the list, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t out-dated and overly narrow.