So why do I read horror fiction, when so much of it is bad? Why don't I listen to the advice of my friends, who recommend cerebral literary fiction with beautiful sentences, and instead keep reading wheels of cheese like Battle Royale? (What a compelling book! Not sure if it's the translation or the writing that's bad, but I suspect the translation, since so much of the dialogue sounds clipped, stiff, and overly formal, much like the dubbed dialogue in Godzilla movies. Even still, I can't put this thing down! Bring on the middle school carnage!)
Well, because I think horror fiction is truthful about life in a way that most fiction is not. The fact that horrifying, inexplicable, awful stuff happens suddenly and randomly is mostly ignored by literature, or when horrifying, inexplicable awful stuff happens in "realistic" fiction, it seems over-the-top and melodramatic. But, I mean, you can just be at work, or driving down the street, minding your own business, and have a scaffolding fall on you and kill you. Sounds like an over-the-top twist from a John Irving novel, but three people really died this way yesterday.
I mean, yeah, there aren't usually vampires and demons and werewolves and sexy women who turn into cats involved, but horrible things happen, and the reality of that, and how people react to it, is what keeps drawing me back to the horror genre. I'll take a book like Battle Royale over somebody's literary post-9/11 musings about how life is somehow different now any day.
