Horror is Part of (the) Fantasy
Gentle Reader,
I’m not savvy enough to curate and control my online presence, so I sometimes worry that people who know me mostly from the ‘net have an unfairly bleak impression of my personality. I’m not as much of a grouch as my ceaseless complaining suggests, and in truth I’m not nearly as persnickety as I appear.
But I did post the Facebook status update below.
(The slip-shod editing bothered me more than the error. Every writer makes mistakes. Some of us have weird writing quirks that a good editor would spot, and fix. Like the first paragraph of this very email.)
The “grizzly” error popped up in an online review of a book I was reading: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle.
Chuck Tingle is the enigmatic writer best known for his accurately if unusually-titled gay erotica, including the Space Raptor Butt trilogy and Trans Wizard Harriet Porber series. He writes other things, of course, including (most recently) a couple of lauded horror novels.
Rose has had a day.
Diving into the river with her friends (including Martina, a young woman who exerts an oddly magnetic pull) and seeing a creepy woman in a red polo t-shirt that no one else notices, then getting a lift home from Isaiah, an old friend who suddenly announces that he likes her, and then, during dinner with her ultra-religious, ultra-conservative parents, she coughs and coughs and up comes a single, horrible, black fly.
And then a whole lot of flies.
That's only the beginning of the novel, told from the Rose’s point-of-view. She’s twenty, autistic, and lives in a small town dominated by The Kingdom of the Pine church and Camp Damascus, its famed conversion therapy facility. Some fairly odd things are happening around Rose and what’s even stranger is that people either don’t notice, or do notice and are lying to her face.
Coughing up flies isn’t really what sets things off (although that’s one of the early symptoms). What actually moves things to another level is when a character (whom I won’t name because of spoilers) meets with a grisly fate.
No bear involved.
Other things are, though, including the woman with the red polo t-shirt who has no pupils, fingers that are too long, and the ability to walk through walls. What’s more frightening to me are the constant use of scripture as justification, explanation and comfort to paper over what seems obviously to be either madness or some demon incursion. That’s symptomatic of the thinking of the members of the church, whose faith is more convenient than actually virtuous, and who live under the oddest (self-imposed) strictures.
The reason I was reading reviews is that while the book is marketed as horror, about half-way through I thought I saw another shape showing through, maybe the bony ribcage of a fantasy novel. Perhaps Camp Damascus doesn’t fit so neatly into the horror category.
In Danse Macabre, Stephen King says "... fantasy is what it is; the horror genre is only a subset of the larger genre". That connects to my experience: Camp Damascus is a fantasy novel, with a contemporary setting and the occasional intrusion of the supernatural. It has a lot in common with first-person urban fantasy novels, particularly those that lean towards werewolves, vampires and other horror staples.
This is where I started reading online reviews (with nearly disastrous results for my IPad). Mostly I wanted to see if anyone else made the same observation. I didn’t get very far.
In his discussion of the thinness (or futility) of genre divides, King says "it's a trap, this matter of definition", and then says "you can see why I don't want to open this door any wider than I have to".
And I do see (genre categories are mostly there for ease of marketing) so I'll shut the door by saying that Camp Damascus was horrifying and also satisfying. Along the way, the novel has something to say about evangelical Christianity (particularly its relationship with LGBTQIA and otherness), and small-town conservative white America.
A lot of the horror in it isn't particularly fantastic, and the fantastic elements can be seen as stand-ins for something else: control, or deception, or the forces of conformity. There’s gore, and blood, but when you look back at it, that’s all less horrible than what people (normal, mundane people) are doing. The real monsters were the friends we made along the way, as they say (or something like that).
In one sequence, Rose realises that she doesn't have a bedroom door. Except that she remembers having one. And her dad, whose she loves, tells her that she never had one. And she checks, and it absolutely does look like she doesn't have a bedroom door and she never had one. So why does she remember closing it? And why would her dad lie to her? Surely it must all be in her mind.
I’m also very grateful that Tingle isn’t explicit. The awfulness isn’t signposted, isn’t obvious, and there’s enough space that the reader can work it out for themselves before Rose does and if they don’t, well, Rose leads them there in her own implacable (sometimes almost plodding) way. By the final third of the book, Rose has transformed from an ignorant, unwitting victim and is actively engaging with the situation, hauntings and murders and all, doing research, investigating leads, making connections and coming up with plans. She's no longer a victim, and instead is transforming into a still-hesitant and somewhat trepidatious hero.
Perhaps it’s this change that I find unusual, or that I don’t associate with horror. Often the characters are focused on escaping the situation, and when Rose is presented with the option to simply run away, she makes a different choice.
Because I got interested in what makes horror horror, I did some other reading while I was in the middle of Camp Damascus. You can probably guess that I turned to Stephen King’s now-classic exploration of the space, Danse Macabre. It’s not terribly cogent, or lucid, but he does go on at length about horror books and horror movies with the familiarity of a fan and insider (of course he’s both) and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It helps that he doesn’t try too hard to be clever, or academic, and it’s clear that he enjoys horror.
Which got me thinking about horror movies: maybe Camp Damascus resembles a horror movie more than it does a horror novel: more Hellraiser or Nightmare on Elm Street than The Haunting of Hill House. Rose would certainly fit in the former, resisting Pinhead to the last before reshaping the Lament Configuration to send him back to Hell.
I remembered those films because I’ve also been reading Horror for Weenies, Emily C. Hughes book about classic horror movies. Meant for people who are too scared to watch the original films, each film has a lovingly-detailed if somewhat snarky recap, including all the iconic moments and killer lines, interspersed with box-outs identifying familiar horror tropes and ending with recommendations for books to read if watching the films are too much for you.
I wouldn’t call myself a horror fan, but I’ve watched and read my fair share, including (terrifyingly) every single film in this book and then some. It’s entirely possible that the disconnect I feel in Camp Damascus isn’t because it’s reminding me of a fantasy novel but because it reminded me of a horror movie.
So while I finish off Horror for Weenies, I’m adding Feeding the Monster to my list. This is a spiritual successor to Danse Macabre, with Bogutskaya advancing the thesis that modern-day horror is perhaps the most successful current film trend next to superheroes, and then attempts to get to why horror is such an enduring genre. I haven’t read this book yet, only read about it, but I thought I’d put it here: if, like me, you’re into reading about horror, this might be something to add to your TBR.
That’s where I’ll leave you, Gentle Reader. Be kind, and be well.
Devin Jeyathurai
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