As I get older I’m more comfortable with genre. More comfortable deciding what points a reader would feel cheated without. But still, my main impulse in creating a story is to treat myself as my reader, as my audience, and tell myself a story that amazes or delights or thrills or saddens me, that takes me somewhere new.
But still, as Edgar Pangborn put it, I persist in wondering . . .
Do we transcend genre by doing amazing genre work or do we transcend it by stepping outside of it? Is there any merit in transcending genre?
For that matter, at what point does an author become a genre? I do not read Ray Bradbury for moments of genre gratification, I read him for moments of pure Ray Bradbury—the way the words are assembled.
I get told—most recently by a pedicab driver in Austin, Texas—that my writing is Gaimanesque, and I have no idea what that means, or if there’s anything people are waiting for, anything they’d feel cheated if they didn’t get. I hope all the stories are different. I hope the authorial voice changes with the stories. I hope I’m using the right tools from the potting shed at the bottom of the garden in my imagination to build the right tales.
And when I get stuck, sometimes, I’ll think of porn films and I’ll think about musicals: what’s the thing that a lover of whatever it is I’m writing would want to see? And sometimes I’ll do that. And on those days I’m probably writing genre. And on other days I’ll do the opposite.
But I suspect I’m at my most successful and ambitious and foolish and wise as a writer when I have no idea what sort of thing it is that I’m writing. When I don’t know what a lover of things like this would expect, because nobody’s ever loved anything like this before: when for good or for evil, I’m out there on my own.
And at that point, when I only have myself as a first reader, then genre, or lack thereof, becomes immaterial. The only rule that can guide me as a writer is to keep going, and to carry on telling a story that will not leave me, as the first reader, feeling cheated or disappointed at the end.
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This was the keynote speech I gave at the thirty-fifth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held in Orlando, Florida, in 2013.
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Ghosts in the Machines: Some Hallowe’en Thoughts.
We are gathered here at the final end of what Bradbury called the October Country: a state of mind as much as it is a time. All the harvests are in, the frost is on the ground, there’s mist in the crisp night air and it’s time to tell ghost stories.
When I was growing up in England, Hallowe’en was no time for celebration. It was the night when, we were assured, the dead walked, when all the things of night were loosed, and, sensibly, believing this, we children stayed at home, closed our windows, barred our doors, listened to the twigs rake and patter at the window glass, shivered, and were content.
There were days that changed everything: birthdays and New Years and First Days of School, days that showed us that there was an order to all things, and the creatures of the night and the imagination understood this, just as we did. All Hallows’ Eve was their party, the night all their birthdays came at once. They had license—all the boundaries set between the living and the dead were breached—and there were witches, too, I decided, for I had never managed to be scared of ghosts, but witches, I knew, waited in the shadows, and they ate small boys.
I did not believe in witches, not in the daylight. Not really even at midnight. But on Hallowe’en I believed in everything. I even believed that there was a country across the ocean where, on that night, people my age went from door to door in costumes, begging for sweets, threatening tricks.
Hallowe’en was a secret, back then, something private, and I would hug myself inside on Hallowe’en, as a boy, most gloriously afraid.
NOW I WRITE fictions, and sometimes those stories stray into the shadows, and then I find I have to explain myself to my loved ones and my friends.
Why do you write ghost stories? Is there any place for ghost stories in the twenty-first century?
As Alice said, there’s plenty of room. Technology does nothing to dispel the shadows at the edge of things. The ghost-story world still hovers at the limits of vision, making things stranger, darker, more magical, just as it always has . . .
There’s a blog I don’t think anyone else reads. I ran across it searching for something else, and something about it, the tone of voice perhaps, so flat and bleak and hopeless, caught my attention. I bookmarked it.
If the girl who kept it knew that anyone was reading it, anybody cared, perhaps she would not have taken her own life. She even wrote about what she was going to do, the pills, the Nembutal and Seconal and the rest, that she had stolen a few at a time over the months from her stepfather’s bathroom, the plastic bag, the loneliness, and wrote about it in a flat, pragmatic way, explaining that while she knew that suicide attempts were cries for help, this really wasn’t, she just didn’t want to live any longer.
She counted down to the big day, and I kept reading, uncertain what to do, if anything. There was not enough identifying information on the Web page even to tell me which continent she lived on. No e-mail address. No way to leave comments. The last message said simply, “Tonight.”
I wondered whom I should tell, if anyone, and then I shrugged, and, best as I could, I swallowed the feeling that I had let the world down.
And then she started to post again. She says she’s cold and she’s lonely.
I think she knows I’m still reading . . .
I REMEMBER THE first time I found myself in New York for Hallowe’en. The parade went past, and went past and went past, all witches and ghouls and demons and wicked queens and glorious, and I was, for a moment, seven years old once more, and profoundly shocked. If you did this in England, I found myself thinking in the part of my head that makes stories, things would wake, all the things we burn our bonfires on Guy Fawkes to keep away. Perhaps they can do it here, because the things that watch are not English. Perhaps the dead do not walk here, on Hallowe’en.
Then, a few years later, I moved to America and bought a house that looked as if it had been drawn by Charles Addams on a day he was feeling particularly morbid. For Hallowe’en, I learned to carve pumpkins, then I stocked up on candies and waited for the first trick-or-treaters to arrive. Fourteen years later, I’m still waiting. Perhaps my house looks just a little too unsettling; perhaps it’s simply too far out of town.
AND THEN THERE was the one who said, in her cell phone’s voice mail message, sounding amused as she said it, that she was afraid she had been murdered, but to leave a message and she would get back to us.
It wasn’t until we read the news, several days later, that we learned that she had indeed been murdered, apparently randomly and quite horribly.
But then she did get back to each of the people who had left her a message. By phone, at first, leaving cell phone messages that sounded like someone whispering in a gale, muffled wet sounds that never quite resolved into words.
Eventually, of course, she will return our calls in person.
AND STILL THEY ask, why tell ghost stories? Why read them or listen to them? Why take such pleasure in tales that have no purpose but, comfortably, to scare?