Occult fantasy

[jeregenest]

heron61 has been musing about occult fantasy and rpgs over on his livejournal. I think I disagree with his breakdown, mainly because the categories are so wide and overlapping. I'm not sure, for example, that I would place Rohan's Spiral Series in the same category as Charles de Lint, nor would I place McKinley's Sunshine in a different category from Anita Blake (well except for good versus bad). I think he also misses out on the whole occult crypto-thriller phenomena, or at least does it injustice by lumping it with Wheatley.

I think a problem is people confuse setting with genre all too often. Its one of the reasons I have come to dislike the term urban fantasy.

Someday I'll do the expansion of this line of reasoning I've been wanting to do. I'd like to, for example, follow Williams to Powers, stopping off at Katherine Neville and a few other points in between. The occult detective is another area that one could have fun exploring Carnack is to Anita is to Dresden, that sort of thing.

Comments

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

The problem with defining stuff as horror is that horror isn't much of a genre its more of a style. Kim Newman is a good example, he writes fantasy but people label it horror ebcause it involves vampires and stuff.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I disagree. Supernatural works involve vampires, magic, and suchlike. Sunshine is (to me at least) obviously not horror, despite the vampires.

From my PoV, horror is most definitely a distinct genre. It is a genre that focuses on morality, (internal or external) battles between good & evil, & moral choices. One of the reasons for my categorization is that not everything that uses vampires or similar creatures is horror.

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

I am shocked, shocked that you would write such a sentence. Go to your room. Horror is both (or either) a matter of intent -- works intended to be horrifying to the audience, usually because they horrified the artist at some stage -- and (or) a matter of content -- full of "horror genre tropes" like vampires and whatnot. This is Crit. 101, people.

However, I will also allow that the paltry linguistic kit of criticism is partially to blame, in that there's still, 2500 years post Aristotle, no pair of terms of art that distinguishes the two meanings above, although in academic studies, AFAICT, "genre" is usually taken in the latter sense.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

I've never been happy with saying anything that uses the tropes of horror, no matt how it uses them, is horror. Seems to cheapen that which actually generates horror.