>
> 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.
>
Hey - Was this story also anthologized in a collection of science
fiction and essays on science fiction meant to be used at the college
level as a teaching text? If so, I read it and enjoyed it and must have
missed some of the carnage and gore thought to be so shocking. (I liked
the story by the way).
I personally could take or leave Poppy Brite (for reasons other than
her graphic depictions of sex and or violence) but found her work no more
shocking or incidentally misogynist than say that of Clive Barker - who
takes the sex=death correlation to an all new high. I think that you are
quite right is positing that these things have drawn more criticism
because they were written by women.
>
> It's this baby-boy-powered culture that sucks.
>
> Suzy
>
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