November 6, 2007: Mystery Writer
A weekend at the World Fantasy Convention (along with the chance to meet up with some great friends during and afterwards) provided me with an opportunity once again to reflect on what I'm doing and hope to be doing in my work.
You don't need to be a frequent reader of the blog or a fervent seeker of my work in magazines to see its seemingly divided nature. I've sold the majority of my stories to two very different magazines, Weird Tales and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. I'm obviously drawn both to the inexplicable and also to the often failed or flawed attempts to explicate it.
So does that make me a mystery writer or a horror one or something else entirely?
Does it even matter? Probably not, though the categories can be useful for managing the expectations of fans. I'd never want to be ordinary or predictable, God forbid, but it might be nice for someone to have at least a broad sense of what they're getting when they sit down to read a Will Ludwigsen story.
After finishing Thomas Tryon's wonderful novel Harvest Home a week ago, I think I know what I'm trying to do.
That novel is a supreme example of what I'm working towards when writing a weird tale: a story of natural or psychological aberration that offers insight into reality, perception, and human experience. Or, in cruder terms, "Here's a bunch of weird shit that implies an interesting theory of the universe or humanity."
By that standard, Helter Skelter is as much a weird tale as This Sweet Sickness or We Have Always Lived in the Castle. They all make the familiar unfamiliar and confront fundamental assumptions.
In short, I'm a mystery writer--but of cosmic mysteries. My tools are awe, perception, voice, humor, and weirdness: whatever it takes to execute a philosophical experiment, test it, illustrate it, and strain it to its limits.
This is the bridging concept between all my interests. I want to know secrets and spin theories.
I've always been reluctant to name myself a horror writer, though the dark secrets explored by the genre have the greatest potential to interest me. I think that has to do with the failure of most horror to explore its own philosophical implications in subtle and nuanced ways.
"Horror" as most of its fans enjoy it is more violence porn than anything emotional or insightful. Ever searching for new titillation, those fans are never satisfied because there's no idea or world view at the center. The fans then either burn out as they mature, or, worse, never mature and cling to the symbols and iconography of death in a desperate nihilistic embrace. All those skull tattoos and hatchet movies don't so much mock a universe of meaning as signal a surrender for finding or asserting it.
Which explains, alas, why I so rarely find good things to read or watch under the banner of "horror." Like many science fiction fans, those of horror are also "playing with the box" in which it comes: fixating on the trappings instead of the substance. Many SF fans dote on the spaceships, and many horror ones dote on the gore.
In both cases, it is easy for a writer to pull the levers of the genre machine to output something that comfortably resembles what such an audience wants. To be fair, this is also what romance and mystery and mainstream writers do. It is just more galling when the genres of imagination do it.
So what I've been trying (previously unconsciously) to deliver are the stories that I wish I could still find by long-dead writers like Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith--mysteries of imagination and strangeness, both human and cosmic.
Sometimes I'm funny and sometimes I'm not, but the idea behind even the more gruesome or serious of my tales is that weirdness means something...even the absence of meaning, something we detect by the hole it leaves.
