Poe's Children

Hey Kiddies! It's time again for one of Badseedgirl's famous open letters

Dear Mr. Straub:

Really this letter is for all horror writers, new and established. If you're ashamed of writing in the horror genre, well by all means just don't write in it. If you plan to make your money by writing horror fiction, please don't disparage this genre in your forward to a horror anthology.

I am a college educated person who likes horror fiction. I like all the aspects of the genre, some more than others, but have enjoyed everything from "The Weird," to "Splatterpunk." All these books have merit and are appropriate for different times in my life.

I know, Mr. Straub, that you were just trying to show the world that Horror has many shades, but to do it by stepping on the backs of other writers who you deem as lesser is no way to do it. You are just proving the point of people who disparage the genre, that it is somehow less than other genres.

The stories in this anthology are just one subgenre of horror, Slipstream Horror, Goodread defines it as:

Slipstream is a kind of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction/fantasy or mainstream literary fiction.

The term slipstream was coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye #5, July 1989. He wrote: "...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility." Slipstream fiction has consequently been referred to as "the fiction of strangeness," which is as clear a definition as any others in wide use. Science fiction authors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, argue that cognitive dissonance is at the heart of slipstream, and that it is not so much a genre as a literary effect, like horror or comedy.

Slipstream falls between speculative fiction and mainstream fiction. While some slipstream novels employ elements of science fiction or fantasy, not all do. The common unifying factor of these pieces of literature is some degree of the surreal, the not-entirely-real, or the markedly anti-real.

So in conclusion Mr. Straub, please think about the words you write, as you know words have power, for both benefit and harm. Your heart was in the right place in trying to show the world all the glories (or is it gory's) of horror. But you went about it in a way that tries to hurt other aspects of the genre, and that is just not good.

Sincerely,

Badseedgirl

PS. Like most anthologies, I enjoyed these stories to varying degrees. I finally read Joe Hill's "20th Century Ghost" the title story of his award winning collection that is still sitting on my TBR list. It made me want to finally get to this collection, so that is good.

The stories get a 3.5 of 5 stars, but I'm only giving the anthology itself 2 stars.