I strongly disagree with the notion that a hardboiled/horror
marriage is impossible. In my life I've stumbled across all
sorts of hardboiled marriages: hb westerns, hb SF tales, hb
poetry
(Bukowski), hb memoirs (Burrough's JUNKY), etc. Since
"hardboiled" is a perspective, a way of looking at the world,
it can be applied, I think, to any literary genre. Why not
hardboiled horror?
One obvious indication that such a marriage might be
successful is the large number of people who like both
genres. This suggests, to me at least, that people are
responding to something similar in both. Another is the many,
many writers who've tried to blend the two genres
already.
I quite agree with you, though, that recent attempts to blend
the two have been unsuccessful. That doesn't mean that it's
not worth trying, especially if you're interested in horror
(a genre that, in my opinion, has managed to back itself into
an aesthetic dead-end). It may mean redefining the nature of
"horror" in horror fiction, but, well, the genre could use
the jumpstart.
By the way, I'm quite taken with my own notion
(suggested by the Lovecraft/Woolrich comparision) that
Woolrich is better approached as a fantasist. The next time I
try a Woolrich book (I have STRANGLER'S SERENADE somewhere)
I'm going to read it in that light.
doug
--- Bob Toomey <
btoomey@javanet.com> wrote:
> Hardboiled horror is practically an
oxymoron.
> Hardboiled is objective,
> horror is subjective. The primary goal of
the
> horror story is to evoke
> fear, and it does this by operating along
an
> emotional spectrum that is
> scrupulously avoided by hardboiled writers.
To
> suggest that someone
> like Lovecraft has any relationship to
hardboiled
> literature is
> preposterous. The idea, as someone mentioned
here,
> that Matheson's I AM
> LEGEND is somehow hardboiled makes me wonder if
he
> even read the book,
> which is full of purple prose and emotional
excesses
> that are the
> precise opposite of the hardboiled
attitude.
>
> Which is not to say that there are no stories
that
> succeed as both
> horror and hardboiled. But they are few and
far
> between, and in nearly
> all cases, the degree to which they succeed as
one
> is exactly the degree
> to which they fail as the other. In this
instance,
> opposites don't
> attract, they annihilate each other, like matter
and
> antimatter.
>
> BobT
===== Doug Bassett
dj_bassett@yahoo.com
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