(Falling in) Love is Horror • Wallowing in Ink Issue 48
in which: new poem, Readercon panels, and a loving gaze at some of the pulsing organs and viscera that (imo) make up the subgenre of horrormance.
Hey, I’m Courtney Floyd, author of Higher Magic and creator of The Way We Haunt Now. Welcome to my monthly newsletter, Wallowing in Ink.
Happy June!
It’s only been about a month since my last newsletter, but somehow I’ve been convinced that I skipped a few months. May was a yawning void, I guess.
On a (probably) totally unrelated subject, I’ve been reading a lot of horror and horrormance lately, and I want to talk about it. So. Welcome to my TED Talk, red-string conspiracy murder board, unpremeditated vivisection of the horrormance subgenre.
But first, news:
I have a new poem out in Small Wonders. It’s called “Familiar,” and it’s about magic and grief and identity. It’s a bittersweet publication for me. Those of you who’ve been around a while can probably connect the dots, but I wrote it in honor of my cat Nellie, who I lost last fall.
My other piece of news is that I’ll be on programming at Readercon next month. Here’s my schedule, please come say hi if you’re there:
Okay, so, horrormance…
I recently read an eARC of Clay McLeod Chapman’s Devil Inside, which opened with a definition of the subgenre. Basically, he explains that horrormance is a story out of which stripping horror and romance is equally impossible. If you don’t have both, you don’t have a story.
That doesn’t have to mean the horror and romance are combined in the same plot, or are equal drivers of that plot (although they are in Devil Inside, which was fascinating to see play out on the page). The horror plot can be the thing that starts the domino fall of romance, or the romance plot can trigger the domino fall of horror. What’s important is that both horror and romance are integral to the overall experience.
