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There is a saying that if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. Which is very embarassing if you're the parent of a small child with a plastic duck bill squeaker. If the child in question were a book, he'd be relegated to the "duck" shelves in short order and nothing his mother could say would get him moved back to homo sapiens.

Which is why half the bookstores I've walked into shelve Urban Fantasies in Horror. This really surprised--and I admit--offended me at first. I don't write horror! 'Deed I don't. (See Kat; see Kat get huffy and parochial.) It's not that I think horror is beneath me, but that I think of it as "that other stuff." Then I stopped to wonder "what is horror all about?" and could I be totally wrong about it?

So I started asking and thinking. Why was I considered a horror writer by some people? Was it the vampires, the ghosts, the death and dismemeberment? Well, in some cases, yes. To some folks, the presence of a vampire is all it takes to slot a book neatly into horror. That's kind of sad for some of the vampires, the St. Germaines and Henry Fitzroys who are basically nice guys. But it's not just vampires that will put a book into the horror department.