A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Evil by Nick Mamatas : Neil Gaiman’s oeuvre, and the genre of horror/fantasy in general, is typically looked down upon as unsophisticated or childish, and the past decade saw a marked decrease in the Horror genre’s relevance.
“9-11 resembled cheap, lazy fiction, and because it did, it made it strange for writers to decide what is valid artistically.”
Horror was beginning to find new voices and new readers even before the attacks on the WTC, but now, after a initial period of doubt, there appears to be a renewed interest in the genre… “The everyday twisted horribly awry is, of course, the state of the nation post-9-11.” Will Horror become popular again because it evokes fear of the magnitude we all felt on September 11? Time will tell. [thanks BJ]
Just to rewind a bit, I think the period of doubt mentioned above is a very important phenomenon, and I can see it happening all over the place. My very own weblog here, for instance, is a good example. I had posted fairly regularly up until September, focusing mainly on Film and various interesting articles on culture and whatnot, but after 9/11 my posting dropped off sharply and has been irregular ever since. The reason for this, I think, was because I felt that there were more important things in life than my stupid blog. It just seemed so futile. There are certainly other factors, personal and professional, that also contributed to the dropoff, but I also think I needed to re-examine my goals here. My post 9/11 entries were scarce, and they began to lean more towards politics, as I became determined to keep up on current events. But I didn’t want to become a warblogger (I still don’t), and this limited my ability to post because I didn’t want every entry to be about the latest bullet flying over in the Middle East. So I’m hoping that I can live up to the demands of My Shifting Paradigm…