>
> Luis Sandoval Jr. wrote:
>
> > I'm looking for a little defining here, what is dark fantasy?
>
Well, I have written books that some people call dark fantasy and some
people call horror, and the difference seems to be that only four or
five names sell if you put them on the horror shelf--Stephen King, Dean
Koontz, John Saul, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice. So, if the judge won't
let you change your name to Stephen King, you change your genre to "Dark
Fantasy" because people will pick up a little bit more variety on the
sf/fantasy shelf.
I have heard less cynical answers to this--in horror, a hero confronts
and overcomes the evil/bad vibe/horrific whatever, for example--but in
practice this is not necessarily true, especially when you stop looking
at the five big names and start looking at classic horror.
I think part of the definitional problem is that horror has changed
dramatically since the eighties. Most of it isn't scary, and I am told
by some horror writers that is not a flaw in the writing, but the
intention of the writer. To those of us who look at old horror--Poe,
Lovecraft, even Shirley Jackson and Raould Dahl--the current asthetic of
horror is rather weak.
Camille
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