At 7:26 AM 7/18/97, Erik Tsao wrote:
>Given the reactions I've read to Poppy Z. Brite's work I get the sense that
>people on this list don't like her as a writer. Contemporary horror
>fiction has been traditionally a male-dominated genre.
I gotta say, I feel a bit squirmy about Brite, mainly because I remember
my own surprise whena little werewolf story of mine in an anth-
ology of horror by women drew very specific and pointed fire from review-
ers who kept warning readers about how very gory and awful this story
was. In fact, there is a paragraph or two (about gobbling a boy who has
been tormenting my heroine at school) and that's all; it I got the message
very clearly that pages and pages of gratuitous gore and flying liver from
King, Barker, McCammon et al, you name him, are all in a day's work (well,
boys are made from snips and snails etc., right, so what do you expect?) ,
but a few sentences of carnage from a female author are shocking beyond
words because women are sugar and spice and everything nice.
Which was in part, I think, what the anthology editor, Lisa Tuttle, meant
to explore/expose/explode, of course; and I can hardly complain that the
few words I did use, which I chose most carefully for maximum effect, had
that effect beyond my wildest dreams.
But it bothered me that my very slight outbreak of carnography raised such
a reaction, and because of that experience I don't like to see a woman writer
criticized for "just doing what the boys do" as if she had no *right* to do
it (and make a mint doing it) if she wants to.
Of course on this list we are talking
about something else: doing what the boys do in order to get the exact same
woman-disdaining effect that powers so much of the boys' horror, as if sanc-
tioning that nasty misogyny (which maybe she intends to do -- a sort of "I'm
not a feminist AND I write whatever pernicious crap I damned please" atti-
tude -- and maybe not). And as a general criticism, I dislike sloppy writ-
ing and overwritten shock-schlock on principle. So I stand by my remark
that this is R.L. Stine for "adults", which applies equally plenty of other
writers, and I don't like her work. But I want to distinguish that opinion
very clearly from not accepting carnography from women authors under any
circumstances. Like every other tool, it all depends on the uses you put
it to. I don't like her uses.
But as I said, the point is *also* for a woman to be "allowed" to make as
much of a jerk of herself as a man and pull down the same rewards that he
does.
It's this baby-boy-powered culture that sucks.
Suzy
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