In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Dan Hartland is joined by Shannon Fay and Marisa Mercurio to discuss horror, and especially its cozy variety. From the gothic to the slasher movie, how might texts within an increasingly broad tradition be judged as a success? And what should reviewers do when a given example falls short?
Transcript
Critical Friends Episode 19: On Cozy Horrors
Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I'm Dan Hartland, and in this episode I'll be joined by scholar of the gothic and co-host of the excellent However Improbable podcast, Marisa Mercurio, and the writer and stalwart of the Strange Horizons Reviews Department, Shannon Fay.
In every episode of Critical Friends, we more or less discuss SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it's going. In this episode, we'll be talking about horror, and perhaps specifically its cozy variety. From the gothic to the slasher movie, how might texts within this increasingly broad tradition be judged as a success? And what should reviewers do when a given example falls short?
We talk about Bram Stoker and Agatha Christie, terrifying board games, and the chilling deeds of marketing departments. And we ask where horror finds itself right now … and whether that may be a dead end. (Yeah. Sorry about that.)
Moving on! First, and as always, we started with Marisa and Shannon's latest reviews for Strange Horizons.
[Musical sting]
Dan Hartland: Okay, so thanks both of you for joining me here! Because, as always, I'm look on the lookout—I'm always on the hunt, every month—for two reviews that seem to talk to each other. And we're fortunate that there's always several different categories and candidates for this kind of thing. But your two really stood out to me as ones that are almost sort of weirdly next to each other.
Because you both looked at two books, which are kind of, I don't know—I mean, I'm gonna call 'em cozy horror, but we can kind of get into the weeds of that and whether I'm right about that and what that might be and what these books are. But also they're both books that feature art and craft and how that relates to the horror tropes, but also some of the more fantastical stuff that goes on in both books.
And also they both talk about gender and those kinds of things, too, to varying degrees of success. And that's the other thing that made me think, “OK, we've gotta have this conversation.” Because both of these books, you sort of liked them, but you kind of also were a little bit disappointed by them. So I really want to dig into that too.
One of the things that I think about a lot is how we can responsibly dislike books (and sometimes, you know, irresponsibly if we want to!). But, like, how do we talk about books that don't work for us. So Shannon, let's start with you and The Macabre, because this is almost the quintessential “it was fun, but also kind of disappointing” kind of book. Do you want to talk just a little bit about what The Macabre is, what happens, why maybe it's not kind of double thumbs up.
Shannon Fay: Part of the problem of talking about this book is I feel like it was let down by its marketing—things from the cover, which has a very awesome little piece of art of a screaming woman. Her face is upside down. There is a little train of skulls at her feet, you know, the tagline’s about how a picture is worth a thousand nightmares. All great, evocative stuff. But this book is more of a kind of jet-setting magical adventure with some horrific scenes. But just because something has horrific scenes, doesn't make it horror.
And I do think the gruesome moments are well done and they do help drive home how high the stakes are. But it doesn't invoke kind of fear or a sense of dread, right? So it's fun in that sense. But it's one of those: If you go in expecting one thing, you will be kind of disappointed.
Dan Hartland: We see this a lot in genre, right? The way in which marketing works against the text. A lot of what you talk about in The Macabre in your review is that it's a kind of heist?
Shannon Fay: Those scenes, the fact that it's kind of episodic, is enjoyable, right? It's like, “We found a new magical painting. You need to go and neutralize it.” And so you have like kind of the crew, the plan, how are we gonna get close to this painting, how will we neutralize it? And so it’s an art heist where the art can fight back. And, you know, that is just so fun! There's lots of fantasy books where people get, like, sucked into paintings and have to deal with like, “Oh no, now we're in the world of the painting.” Always kind of a fun trope. So all that is good stuff, right?
Dan Hartland: So where do you think it goes wrong? Because that's such a great … like, if you sold me that book, right? “Art Heist, but the art fights back.” That's great! What a tagline! But that's not entirely how the book is sold or how the book … or where the book winds up.
Shannon Fay: Yeah. Well, there is also a through-line of people dealing with grief. So, you know, the title in that sense is accurate. It does have to do … Right. These paintings are attracted to people who have suffered a loss and are often offering a kind of Faustian bargain of maybe restoring that dead one to the people they are, like, sucking energy from.
So maybe they felt by leaning into kind of that element, it needed to be more in the horror genre.
Dan Hartland: That leads us, I guess, Marisa, to your book, your most recent review for Strange Horizons, which is of Slashed Beauties, which lives in a similar kind of space where the cover and the copy and all of that sort of sets up a set of expectations about what this book is gonna be.
Marisa Mercurio: Yes.
Dan Hartland: Which is kind of a kind of neo-gothic thing, right?
Marisa Mercurio: Yes, it’s absolutely a neo-gothic novel. It is set in 1769. Primarily, there are two different timelines. We switch perspectives back and forth from our narrator in the modern period, who is an antiques dealer named Alice, and she is hunting down these wax Venuses, which are kind of this obscure item, real thing—from the eighteenth century primarily—which were, if you can sort of imagine the very famous painting of Venus emerging out of the shell but lying down, a wax cadaver that anatomists could, and students could, take apart to learn about the human body without having to use cadavers. Because cadavers were really hard to come by legally, and there were a lot of ethical, moral questions, religious questions tied up with using cadavers.
And so Alice, in the present day, is hunting down very specific wax cadavers, these wax Venuses, because there is this rumor that, in the eighteenth century, they would come alive and murder men who went wronged them. And we learn very quickly that this is all true.
And so in the 1769 narrative, which is the one that I think is both more successful and more frustrating—because of the potential that it has and doesn't quite get there—we see how these wax Venuses come to be. And then we very belatedly see them go on their murder spree.
Dan Hartland: And where does, if at all, where does the kind of horror that we are either encouraged to expect—or, you know, deliberately signaled that we should look forward to—how, where does that come in? How does that manifest?
Marisa Mercurio: I do think it's important to think about this novel as a gothic novel primarily, rather than as a horror novel. And while those two genres have a lot of overlap, and horror emerged out of the gothic, the gothic is doing some slightly different things. But that being said, a lot of those elements that we're seeing are—I mean, in the present day we have a coven of witches, so we have the supernatural throughout the novel—but a lot of what is horrific in the past setting, in the 1769 narrative, is honestly the day-to-day lives of these women, who are down on their luck in the eighteenth century. We follow a protagonist and she is essentially a jilted lover who's come to London from the country and who is swept up by this older—I say older woman, she's like, I don't know, not what we consider old, right, but she's older than our protagonist. And she says, “I'm starting a new brothel. Essentially, it's gonna be really high end.” And so she sweeps our protagonist up in that and lavishes her with gifts and perfumes and things, all in preparation to have her be part of this brothel.
So a lot of the horror is really coming from the human interactions, just the state of these women's lives, in that they are treated cruelly by this madam and by the men who are in her circle. And then we are introduced later to I think an inexplicably evil witch who is creating these wax Venuses. And then of course we have the murders at the end of the novel as well.
Dan Hartland: Yeah, and this is something that I think we should sort of dwell on a little bit—you know, the various implications of this word “horror.” And, as you say, your book is a gothic horror with a significant emphasis on the gothic, and as you say that … I mean, I want to say kind of social horror, in a way that exists, certainly in Slashed Beauties.
On the other hand, what we have in The Macabre is—as you say, Shannon—that title, but also like the really striking cover, which is sort of full of red and skulls, and Slashed Beauties as a title suggests the slasher movie as much as anything else. So what is going on here? Like, with how these books are playing with our various expectations of horror?
Because there are so many—and I think actually the resurgence of horror in the last couple of years has been on multiple fronts—there are all kinds of things going on here, which don't have to cohere. But these books are playing in these kinds of sandboxes, and they're setting up all kinds of associations or expectations that, you know, they follow through to one extent or another. So, Shannon: talk to me a bit about how you think The Macabre approaches its horrific elements. Like, is it just a marketing accretion?
Shannon Fay: I mean, it's hard to say. There are certain elements that maybe if the book had invested more, could have really developed this as a horror novel. So maybe an earlier draft, right, was more horrific.
When the main character, Lewis—so his ancestor, Edgar, is the one who created these paintings, and it's that kind of familial connection that allows him to neutralize these paintings—and when he gets sucked into the world of these paintings, oftentimes he is actually sent to the past and speaking to Edgar. It's a little ambiguous about how real these kind of scenes are—whether he's actually in the past, whether he is more of a phantom in the past—but they're very good scenes and we get to see Edgar, his mental state, break down over the course of his life as each of these paintings are at a different point in his lifetime.
And that has a very strong, kind of gothic arch to it. But the book doesn't really spend a lot of time with it, you know? And I was wondering if this is because race is a big part of the narrative, right? Lewis being a Black American man, and Edgar being a white British man but his direct ancestor. And there are novels, like the classic novel Kindred, where the Black American main character is sent into the past and kind of has to reckon with their white ancestors. And so I was wondering if maybe—you know, understandably—Jackson was like, “No, I don't wanna write that book.” Right? Those aren't, that's not what I'm exploring here, which is totally valid. But there's other ways; maybe you could have explored this subplot more.
Dan Hartland: It's so interesting to me that of all of the sort of horror options available to the text, it does have this kind of, as you say, this kind of familial, this ancestral, secret, right? Which is—again, Marisa is the expert here!—but speaks to me of many gothic novels, where, you know, there's this … Yeah, and yet it does not follow through.
And yet it is the thing that is used to sell the book. And I just … yeah. I mean, Marisa: Do you think that your book is aware of where it is sitting in the present kind of profusion of horror? Or do you think it is just the thing that it is and we shouldn't be reading it within this kind of broader context of, you know, “Oh, it's very popular at the moment, so maybe that will sell.”
Marisa Mercurio: Right. It's a very good question. It's also a tricky one. I mean, I think that the novel is absolutely aware of it and engaging directly with its gothic underpinnings. It is an historical piece in a time period in which the gothic novel was at its very beginning—just a couple years before the novel is set, The Castle of Otranto, which is credited as the first gothic novel, was published; and of course then you sort of see this explosion with particularly Ann Radcliffe at the end of the eighteenth century.
So I think it's very aware of the fact that it is playing in the, you know, proverbial gothic sandbox. The cover, as you mentioned, plays towards that sensibility as well. And I think what you had mentioned earlier, too, Dan, about the title is interesting: slashed beauties is … when I was doing some research on wax Venuses—which were a thing that I had been familiar with prior to reading the novel, but had never done a deep dive on—I did come across that term slashed beauty. So it seems that it has been applied to wax Venuses elsewhere. However, I think that of course it brings to mind a slasher, and I think part of that is this feminist—but I think is really more of a pseudo-feminist—novel, which is I think the reason the novel is being written. It is marketed as, “This is a revenge tale against the men who have wronged these women.”
However, I think when you read the novel that really, that really falls apart, for various reasons. But I think, to me, what is problematic about the novel—and in conjunction with its marketing—is that it is trying to present itself as this very didactic feminist message, when in fact both the narrative doesn't fully support that.
And then the central item, the wax Venus, the novel is centered on is a lot more thematically rich and complex than the novel wants it to be unfortunately. So everything kind of gets flattened in a way that is really unsatisfying.
Shannon Fay: I haven't read the book, but I really enjoyed your review.
Marisa Mercurio: Thank you!
Shannon Fay: I enjoyed your um talking about how these anatomical Venuses is actually quite a step forward for science and a positive thing. And I also liked you touching on … kind of, this comes up on a lot of media: the men bad, women good.
Marisa Mercurio: Oh, it's exhausting!
Shannon Fay: And I was thinking, I was like, “Why does this bother me so much?” And I think what came to me is that it perpetuates the idea that women are on the earth to suffer. It also further, you know, enforces a strict gender binary.
Marisa Mercurio: Absolutely.
Shannon Fay: But it slots it into, you know, like sufferers and the people who cause suffering. Which just not a good way to frame the world!
Marisa Mercurio: Yeah. And to be fair to the book I do think there are some complex women, particularly this madam of the brothel who is probably the most complex character in the novel. But the novel is very preoccupied with that pseudo-feminist message of … well. I think actually this is the problem with the novel: It never becomes clear to me! I think it is all kind of muddled in a way that I'm not sure if the novel is trying to proffer this pseudo-feminist message, or if it is trying to do something more complex and subversive. Because it simply doesn't succeed at doing whatever it is it's trying to do.
Shannon Fay: In The Macabre, the characters discuss a lot about colonialism. And, you know, I think it's done well within the characters, they do a good job of kind of literally embodying different sides of the issue. But I don't feel like the book really follows through on it. Unlike, say, a book like Babel, which from the title kind of tells you it's gonna be not just about linguistics, but—uh, spoilers for the Bible—that tower is going to fall.
Marisa Mercurio: I think there are a lot of other current examples of novels that are threading these interests in historical or present day structures and systems that are really interesting, successful; but there is a deftness to it that is required to be successful and that I wish … I think a lot of these novels just aren't proceeding with.
[Musical sting]
Shannon Fay: It is so much easier to talk about books that you just love right? Just open up a spigot and be like, “Oh, and this was good and this was good.”
Marisa Mercurio: Yeah, I find novels that are ones that I'm not enjoying, or I don't think are successful, much harder to write about and to talk about.
Dan Hartland: But I'm so interested in this question of why these books aren't quite hitting the mark, because they're not the only ones.
So let's not pick on these, right? There have been several books Strange Horizons have reviewed in this kind of ballpark that the reviewers have found: “OK, this book has a theme, but there's something about the way in which it is being handled here.” And it's often in the context of the kind of horror trappings it's just not working.
So I'm thinking of Racheal Chie’s review of Christina Hagmann’s Field of Frights, she said that about that book. Subham Rai’s review of The Demon by Victory Witherkeigh, he said that about that book. Ian Simpson on We Like It Cherry, by Jacy Morris, he said it about that book. Is there something going on at the moment?
I talked at the beginning of the episode about kind of quote-unquote cozy horror—which is definitely a thing, and I don't think these books are necessarily the sort of quintessential, cozy horror examples—but is there something happening in horror because of something about how they're handling the material?
Marisa Mercurio: Even though I wouldn't categorize Slashed Beauty really as cozy horror, I think there is perhaps some overlap there, because I think that the gothic is often relayed into cozy horror fiction—because of the aesthetics surrounding it and the aesthetics that we've created surrounding it. So, especially when it comes to like neo-gothic fiction, because I think that is weirdly cozy for people.
When I think of the gothic, these things are certainly present in the gothic, and I am absolutely guilty of wanting to spend time in a crumbling movie castle—Crimson Peak, the Guillermo Del Toro movie, comes to mind, which I don't know if it's a quote-unquote good movie, but is a movie that I enjoy. But to me, the gothic, when we're speaking to coziness, and maybe why this doesn't quite work, is because the gothic is so, I think, truly preoccupied with the nastier aspects of life.
So: the gothic being a genre that is preoccupied with a really harsh resurgence of the past, a reminder that progress is deeply fallible. And then you have things like sexual violence, incest, all kinds of the more horrible parts of life. And of course those things can coexist—you know, I think of, like, Dracula maybe. But I don't know if the goals of the cozy novel really align with the goals of a gothic, like a truly gothic, novel.
Shannon Fay: I worry it just comes down to marketing—that if you have a book that has … that's doing a lot of interesting, weird stuff, maybe it's just easier to position it as kind of unsettling and disturbing and horror and at least that way you can maybe get genre fans to buy in on it. I'm thinking specifically of The Macabre, where I compared it to The Rook in my review—and I don't know if that would still be a good comp, because it's been, you know, several years since even the sequel to that book came out. If you could position it as “if you like that book, if you like that kind of spy-thriller fantasy, you would also enjoy this book,” if instead it's like, “Well, there's creepy paintings” … Let's go with that.
Marisa Mercurio: I absolutely agree that marketing is a huge problem here.
I also recently reviewed a book for Strange Horizons that was a gothic novel—again, that was a modern-day gothic novel that just didn't work for me. And I think a lot of that was because it was marketed as a gothic novel when it didn't really meet those expectations. And I think that for Slashed Beauties, there was a problem of, “This is a gothic novel”—which, true, I would agree with—and then, “This is a feminist novel” … and that is where I really tripped up.
I think there are a lot of opportunity for feminist gothic novels. I think gender is inherently a topic that the gothic is interested in. I don't think you can separate gender from the gothic genre. But there are certainly more successful versions of that.
Shannon Fay: So it's late in the podcast. But I do have a question, because I feel like my definition of gothic is mostly vibes based. And it sounds like maybe you have a stronger definition.
Marisa Mercurio: Um, yeah. I mean, I think the gothic is rooted in a historical moment of the eighteenth century in which you’re sort of post-enlightenment, post-revolution, so you're dealing with the possibility … like, you know, everyone is sort of wanting to progress and think “Oh, we're so enlightened. We're so progressive,” and the gothic sort of comes in and it's like, “Hold up. Here's the past.” You know, there's the old adage, “The past has never really passed,” and that's kind of what the gothic is doing, to me—to sort of say, “Hey, maybe we aren't so civilized,” or that the occult or paganism or the supernatural can still infiltrate science.
I think I mentioned Dracula before and I'll mention it again because I think it's such a perfect case study of all these seemingly contradictory, dichotomous ideas of the past and the present civilization versus, you know, savagery—you might say the east versus west, science versus supernatural. I think the gothic is really preoccupied with those ideas, sort of untangling those complexities, but also making them butt heads and making people deal with that collision.
Shannon Fay: I was wondering if cozy horror, and I know it's been hotly debated, but to me it comes out of maybe the thinking that horror needs to have existential dread, a nihilistic viewpoint—a hopeless genre in the sense of only the bleakest works can be called true horror—and people buying into that. And therefore, if they read something horror and it doesn't have those hallmarks, they're like, “This must be something else. It must be cozy horror.”
So I just think it comes from maybe having too strict a view of a genre and therefore needing to break it down more.
Marisa Mercurio: Yeah, it was a matter of time. I think we had cozy, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. You know, we have closed door romance, we have things that are not going to offend the sensibilities, so that it was a matter of time before it just, you know, made its way to horror—which is kind of …
On one hand you do have this sort of, in terms of like mystery, Agatha Christie-like cozy novels, which still have death and murder and horrible things happening in them—which probably if they were published today would be labeled cozy. But on the other hand, it does seem contradictory to the very nature of horror to label things as cozy.
Dan Hartland: I also feel like I don't want to kind of demonize our colleagues in marketing too much. Because, you know, they've gotta shift these books, and if they don't sell books, then fewer books will get printed—and that's a shame! So I agree that Agatha Christie was not marketed as cozy, but would be marketed as cozy now. That's probably fine? Like, in some cases it doesn't change the text.
Marisa Mercurio: Yeah. I wanna read a cozy novel every once in a while, too—like, absolutely. And I think from our perspective maybe as avid readers, we're coming at this with a much more critical lens about the marketing and the genre trappings, as opposed to your average reader who is maybe going to a bookstore like once a year and picking up stuff, or maybe uses their local library and is just like trying to get these pithy terms to be like, “OK, well I think this sounds like something I'd like so I'll check it out.”
Shannon Fay: Well, let me talk about a book that I think does succeed! So I recently read, uh, Marisha Pessl’s Darkly, and if you've read her book Night Film, this almost feels like a YA retread of that. But I love Night Film and I do like also this kind of YA version of that book!
So in Darkly it's very much like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—you know, how in the world of that novel, everybody is just obsessed with this candy maker and his crazy inventions and his process and what goes on in that factory. Well imagine that. But instead it is a board game maker.
So this woman—Louisiana Veda, I think is the character's name is—she was this eccentric board game creator, and these are very off-the-wall board games. You have to like cut apart the board. You really have to think out of the box. You have to like shine flashlights to create little shadows, and like they're, like, “Her games will drive you mad!” The winners disappear and are never seen again. People pay millions for an original Louisiana Veda! And so our main character, she applies for this brand new internship being run by the estate of this woman, right? And, you know, only her and six other lucky teens will get to go to the abandoned factory where these board games were kind of brainstormed and created! Again, very Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, right? There's all these people trying to get her secrets and the teens are tasked with tracking down a stolen game that could be dangerous for the people playing it.
Like, I don't think this book has any really grand meaning. The characters talk a little bit about how—when they find out about some questionable things Louisiana did in her life—they do talk about how, say, male celebrities and creators get away with a lot worse, right? So there's a little bit about having to deal with your heroes, taking them off a pedestal. But for the most part it is like reading a version of almost a LARP or a RPG, where these characters are in this world where: What's a game, what's real, who can you trust? But I think it does a lot with the nature of fandom and obsession, which is also kind of the same beats as in Night Film, where three super fans—they're super fans of a director, the director's daughter commits suicide, and they want to kind of find out what happened and almost end up literally in the world of the film.
So I enjoyed both those novels a lot, and both of them less about creative passion and more about fandom, but both having to do with obsession and the creative process. So those are books that I think, uh, kind of successfully tackle that.
Marisa Mercurio: I'd also just like to mention The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland, which is a vampire novel that is very preoccupied with art, as is Woman, Eating. So there are books out there that I think are interested in craft and art that are horror- or gothic-leaning that are a little bit more successful, they're out there.
[Musical sting]
Dan Hartland: What about these little books—like, as you said, the boardgame book isnot doing anything really sort of grand or you know, whatever, but it succeeds on its own terms—so in what way is that book better than The Macabre?
Shannon Fay: I think there's just almost a tactile detail to it, right? There is almost, you know, almost on the border of like, “Stop talking about this, please!” You know, you almost have to push the envelope as far as characters starting to describe the rules to this archaic board game, right? That doesn't really have to do anything with the plot, but has everything to do with the world.
Dan Hartland: Yeah, it commits to the bit is what you're … yeah. Marisa—because I'm conscious that you've said that the two most recent reviews you've written for us were both of quote-unquote gothic novels and you dislike both of them and I feel responsible for this!—so are there any recent books that you did like that we should have asked you to review instead?
Marisa Mercurio: Oh, well, first of all, you should not feel responsible! Because I think, you know, maybe we'll have part of this conversation later about what makes a book successful or not, but I always endeavor to feel that I am an appropriate person to be able to speak to the novel.
And so, as someone with the background of the gothic, I feel like I can have a place to stand where I can actually talk about it, as opposed to something that is like hard sci-fi, which is just not in my wheelhouse. But in terms of a novel like Old Soul by Susan Barker, which is a novel that came up this year and which is, I would maybe say, like a literary horror novel—it is about a demon—but photography plays a very integral role in that novel.
So there is this female character who lives for decades beyond what a human should live. And she is making these really strong relationships with people. She comes by people, they strike up a really strong relationship. She takes a photo of 'em, they go wrong, the person goes wrong, and then often end up dead soon after. And the photographs, or the act of photography is absolutely integral to the novel. It is part and parcel of this character, and it is the mechanism through which the horror is happening in the novel.
Whereas in Slashed Beauties, the wax Venuses are so much relegated to the end of the novel. They don't really even show up until past halfway through the novel, and then the murders themselves don't happen until the penultimate chapter. So why is it presented so much as a murder spree? Even bringing to mind something that happens a century later, Jack the Ripper, is not really what the novel is about in any meaningful way, and the present-day narrative doesn't really do enough I think with the antiques aspect—which is also something that I was really interested in—to sort of bring it all together.
Because Slashed Beauties really has a premise that I'm very interested in. You know, it's set in the eighteenth century. It's a neo-gothic novel. It's about wax Venuses, I love medical history. And it also has an antiques dealer as the first protagonist, which—awesome! You know, but the threads just don't converge.
Dan Hartland: There's that thing, isn't there, where sometimes a book can seem so likely to be perfect for us that when it isn't—it's got all these things that, in theory, we should really love, and somehow they don't cohere—we are more disappointed in that book than we would be in a book that was similarly unsuccessful, but didn't ever seem to be something we'd enjoy.
So how do we navigate this? Marisa, you said, “Let's talk about what a successful book looks like.” Can we do that and can we also talk about how we handle books that don't meet that benchmark?
Different reviewers will place benchmarks in different places. So some reviewers will have extremely high standards—not even high standards, they will have a set of criteria, right? And if a book doesn't meet those specific criteria, they will give it a pan. Other reviewers are much more sort of open and, “OK, let's deal blah, blah, blah.” How do you approach it when you come against a book that doesn't meet whatever you think a successful book is? How do you just be honest about that without, you know, kind of just being grumpy?
Marisa Mercurio: I'm personally happy to meet books where they're at.
Like, I want to enjoy everything that I read. You know, I'll read schlock and love it and I'll read, you know, high art—whatever that might be, so the most literary of the literary. And to me it's all about meeting authors and the novels where they are. And I think that I have two major criteria from novels, which are maybe not exactly craft-related—you know, on a purely syntax level—but that is certainly part of it. Because I think a book can fall apart just on a syntax level if it doesn’t—even if it has a great premise—but my two major criteria are: one, I wanna be entertained, and two, I wanna have something to think about after I read the novel.
And I think what often happens, I find particularly in a lot of current horror publications where the novels are not being deft enough with what they are trying to write about, is that the novels are prioritizing a didactic message over entertainment. In which case I probably in many cases agree with the message that it's trying to promote. But I just feel like I am being, um. Taught a message, I'm being preached a moral of a narrative, which I just simply don't want because I want to figure that out for myself.
And then, relatedly, I want to think about the novel afterwards. So if the novel is simply saying, “Men bad, end of story,” I have nothing to think about after the novel's over and it leaves my mind.
Shannon Fay: I think what you said earlier, Marisa—about there's certain things where you're like, “No, I am the reviewer for this book”—and Dan, you were saying how is it tough when you have a book that on paper you're like, “Oh, this is made for me,” and then it disappoints you? Well, in a sense, like, yeah, I think a review from that point of view is valuable. Because there'd be other people who would say, “Hey, this sounds like it aligns with my interests.” And then they might still be like, “Well, I'm still intrigued by the premise, but now I can kind of adjust my expectations knowing that someone else who has a similar kind of affection for these things was kind of disappointed.”
It is tough—like, for me, something that is tough—going in without preconceived notions. Like, usually with the review I'll have maybe read the barest summary. Maybe I'm familiar with the author's previous works and usually I'm excited. And usually I'm already like, ”Ooh, I am excited by this premise.” And it can be dangerous to be like, “Ooh, where are they going to go with this?”—and then either they go somewhere totally different and you're like, “Wow, I was so pleasantly surprised” or you're like, “But what a great premise and how come they didn't deliver on this?” Right?
Marisa Mercurio: Right. I think other contributing factors to me are: who is the author and what work have they been putting out lately? So I think of someone who, like with this novel, I believe is their debut novel, I'm likely to treat it more as such—to say, “Does this project have potential?”
I remember several years ago, I reviewed Kay Chronister’s collection of horror short stories, and then she had The Bog Wife out this year. And I remember saying in those short stories, which I mostly liked, I said, you know, there's a couple that aren't as strong, but I think this is a really, really strong collection of a new voice. And then I loved The Bog Wife, which came out this year.
Shannon Fay: That potential was delivered on.
Marisa Mercurio: Yes! And then conversely, an author who I think is very prolific and has a lot of good work, like Stephen Graham Jones—just to point to a really successful horror novelist who is doing a lot of work with just like super entertaining stuff, but also novels that are about ideas and deep concepts—I loved The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, so this maybe isn't a good example, but I would be more willing to say like, “Ah, this one, you know, compared to his other works didn't hit as well.”
And then similarly, I think I'm really interested—probably just coming from a publishing background myself—in what presses are publishing. So if a book is being published by like Penguin Random House versus an indie publisher, I am a lot more likely to be like, “Oh, this indie publisher, maybe the novel isn't a ten out of ten, but it shows some potential and what they're acquiring in is really interesting to me.” So I wanna see more of that. I wanna see it succeed. I'm really excited about that kind of work.
Dan Hartland: Yes, there are ways to contextualize our sort of disappointment. There are ways to admit to kind of negative feelings about a text whilst not enabling or not letting those feelings overwhelm a sort of a broader consideration of the book.
Marisa Mercurio: Yeah. I mean, when it comes down to it, a book is what's written on the page, and it's what the reader engages with. So ultimately, you know, if you think a book succeeds or not, some of those factors are gonna be stripped away. They can be things that you take into consideration, but at the end of the day, a book is, you know, plot, character, syntax. That kind of thing.
Dan Hartland: Yeah. I think it was Will McMahon who on this show said—was it on this show or was it in one of his reviews?—who said, “Yeah, these are just words. It's just words on a page!” Right? That's all there is. And I do think that you're right, Marisa, when you say that some books just fall apart on the syntax level alone. Reviewers can struggle to know what to do with those kinds of books, as well. And sometimes it's easier to talk about a book's ideas than it is to talk about the fabric of them.
Shannon Fay: With The Macabre, I've been thinking about one of the reasons why it left me kind of cold. I was thinking how if it was a case of you could put points into stats for this book, this would be a very even build. And I'm like, “Oh, if only, maybe if it had just like excelled in one thing, you know, I could have either championed it or known why my disappointment with it, what it's grounds for.”
Marisa Mercurio: Yeah, for sure. I really get that. I think similarly with Slashed Beauties, you know, the content of my review really is more about the thematic content and the messaging rather than the words on the page, because— although I did feel that the words on the page were also not successful and were, you know, the work of a not fully matured author—it's harder to sort of be like, “And I didn't like this sentence, and here's the sentence and here's the sentence.” It just feels so much more mean to say, “These sentences aren't working and they're hitting a lot of like, my pet peeves, like ‘This happened somehow!’” And I'm like, “Well, how?!” as opposed to sort of taking a larger idea?
Shannon Fay: No, I just wanted to talk about the things that did tick me off in The Macabre’s characters!
Marisa Mercurio: [laughter]
They're supposed to be like spies. Like, you know, they work for different national entities. They have their own agendas. But they'll be things like, they'll say things practically like, “All right, I'll team up with you, but if I even think that you're gonna steal the painting for yourself, our partnership is over and I'll kill you.” Right?
And it's like, no, play your cards a little closer to your chest! This is, you know … it almost feels like we're at a point with genre fiction in particular where self-awareness is seen as a book being intelligent. You know, like if we acknowledge the reader's expectations—like having people outright say, “I will betray you if these things happen” because the reader's thinking they will betray them. But instead it just becomes so juvenile, right?
Dan Hartland: I'm really struck by, Shannon, something you said, which is that it's kind of a very even distribution of stats on this novel. Like, there's no spiky bits and you're both talking about kind of flatness. So flatness in terms of prose and style, flatness in terms of character: This links to the didactic quality that Marisa was talking about where a lot of novels right now just want to tell you.
All of that speaks to me of safeness, and maybe that is a feature as well as a bug in so-called cozy or, you know, escapist—that's a very loaded term—literature, where the book is deliberately being flat. It's deliberately distributing its stats all in the middle, just to sort of stay as smooth as possible, reduce the friction. Does that sound like a reasonable … ?
Shannon Fay: Yeah, actually, and it does maybe solve the question you posed at the very beginning of this podcast.
Dan Hartland: I can't say I planned it!
Shannon Fay: Some of the most vivid scenes, the most memorable scenes, are kind of … they interact with the painting. With Lewis, because he is inexperienced in the ways of magic, kind of things go wrong and people die horribly. And those are some of the most vivid, well-written scenes in the book. So maybe either an editor or a publisher or, you know, the marketing team read in and said, “This is the book’s strengths, you know, these are the scenes that make people feel something. We're gonna lean into that.” And maybe that's why it got hit with that genre.
Marisa Mercurio: That’s really interesting to think about, too, because what you're saying about flatness to me is contradictory to what horror is, right? Horror is a series of, like, stasis, stasis, stasis, spike, right? Big moments followed by like a sort of climax followed by a coming down and maybe multiple of those throughout a novel.
But that affective response is what we're looking for when we read or watch horror. And if it's not being delivered, then that becomes a generic problem for the novel.
[Musical outro]
Marisa Mercurio: I want to like stuff!
Shannon Fay: Yeah. It turns … it becomes a personal disappointment. Right? You know?
Dan Hartland: You're more disappointed in yourself than in the book at some point.
Marisa Mercurio: Yeah, exactly! [laughter]
[Musical outro]
Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. Listen to more of their music at grandvalise.bandcamp.com.
After our last episode, some queries were raised in various corners about how it is that so many speculative fiction criticism podcasts seem to be releasing in the same calendar slot each month. From A Meal of Thorns to Hugo! Girl, By the Bywater: It's a real pleasure to be in such august company. And even better to meet in our secret hideout deep below the surface of the earth every month where we plan our—
[Long censor’s tone]
Not sure what happened there. Anyway. See you next time.