Quelle Horreur! by Kat Richardson:

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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.

It's monsters of any kind that will get you shelved next to Lovecraft, King, and Koontz. From kit-built reanimation specialties to Elder Gods who wake from the oceanic depths, if you've got a monster you've got horror. But stop and consider: the best horror is not about monsters. The Cthuluan tentacle beast is not just the numinous thing of ancient evil; it's the Id. It's us. It is the deepest atavistic drives of humans rising from our own slumbering ocean of mind. That's what horror is: holding up the mirror to ourselves, to society, to Humanity, to our own hubris and cruelty. It comes dressed as Freddy Krueger and It. It comes as a chill touch on the back of the neck and breeze in a closed room. It comes as that uncanny Thing in the mirror.

The best of horror fiction turns the eye inward, to examine the worst in ourselves, to chide us with the thought that we're our own worst nightmare. And often we cannot save ourselves. So perhaps all good writing is horror since it strives to hold up that mirror--perhaps not with such bleak hopelessness, but with the same intent that we should recognize the Thing in the mirror. It is us.

But Urban Fantasy is not quite so bleak. So long as it keeps Pandora's box beside the mirror of the Human soul--the box that was empty of all... save Hope. To me that is the thing that keeps Urban Fantasy from being outright horror: it has a kernel hope, even when things are bleak and the demons are winning, even when the evil within rises like black tides. When Dante Valentine can love her demon half, when Harry Dresden can overcome the blackness in his past, there is hope for the rest of us that our own blackness will not eat us alive.

And perhaps small children with duck bills aren't really ducks at all.

Kat Richardson

Poltergeist

Harper Blaine

Greywalker

detective

supernatural

murder

Penguin Books

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