the banality of sadism

A week or so back, the wife and I made one last trip to the local comics and used book store's basement "all for a dollar" room before its closure. As it was the last hurrah for the beloved place where we've bought hundreds of cheap vintage paperbacks over the years, we went a little crazy scooping up anything remotely of interest, be it genre classics, trashy potboilers, or even honest-to-snobbery literature.

I used the opportunity to buy a lot of books I ought to have read or owned but never gotten around to acquiring, as well as large number of works that fell within the "guilty pleasures" and "modest curiosity" categories (like Graham Masterton's Famine, a Mork and Mindy photonovel, and the novelization of Moon Zero Two). I also nabbed a copy of Splatter Punks, a 1990 anthology of "extreme horror" released by St. Martin's Press in 1990.

It was something I'd seen on the shelf during many a previous visit, but even the markdown from a fiver to a buck hadn't been enough to convince me to get off the fence...especially since the stories by the two authors I liked, Clive Barker and Joe R. Landsale, had been anthologized in other books I already owned. Considering this was my last chance to pick it up as an impulse purchase, though, I figured I might as well blow the four quarters and just buy the damn thing.

It turned out to be exactly what I expected -- not quite good, but not quite terrible either. I'm less than keen on the tendency to coin new subgenre by adding the "-punk" suffix. When "cyberpunk" was coined in the early 1980's it made an excellent descriptor for William Gibson's blend of street-level aesthetics and science-fiction. The problem was that once the designated subgenre was coined, a slew of imitators -- some good, most downright dire -- rushed in to create works that fit the form from creative inception. (I've toyed doing a series of posts titled "Bad Cyberpunk," but shelved the idea when I realized that I'd have to reread most of the works in the process.)

From that one seed a thousand subgenres (and microgenres) were born -- steampunk, cybergothic, Edwardian-punk, biopunk, postcyberpunk, ribofunk, and so forth -- in a process of marketing most fractal. Splatterpunk was one of the early adopters, coined in the mid-1980's in reference to the works of Clive Barker (and it always comes back to Barker) and other writers of "visceral," as opposed to "suggestive," horror fiction.

So what, you may be asking, does that really mean? According to "Outlaws", a manifesto written by Paul M. Sammon, editor of Splatter Punks:

Well...first remove the limits society and so-called good taste place on fiction. All the limits. Add a healthy dose of shock as well as the influence of schlock movies, late-night TV, and the screaming guitar licks of the world's greatest heavy-metal band.

Finally, stir in a strong awareness of of pop culture. Season with a no bullshit attitude. Serve up some of the best writing in the field today.

Oh, dear. He's not kidding about the lack of restraint, at least as it pertains to the hard sell hyperbole. The thing is, and Sammon even mentions this in his essay, that graphically violent horror fiction is hardly a new phenomenon, even by 1990 standards. Richard Matheson's Hell House, the works of Stephen King and James Herbert, and scores of potboliers penned in the 1970's made ample use of over-the-top sex and gore to spice things up. Clive Barker's Books of Blood weren't revolutionary for their luridness, but for the author's unique approach to the genre, which presents a mix of mythic and mundane akin to the South American "magical realist" school of fiction.

In the absence of a similar sense of creative vision, most of the stories in Splatter Punks resort to the twin banalities of popcult namedropping and casual brutality to propel the thinnest of narrative gruel. The marriage of high concepts and cheap thrills is a perfectly workable one, but it's not revolutionary, nor is it necessarily worthy of a distinct genre tag...apart from the marketability such a thing brings with it. The fact that many of the anthology's featured authors either flat out reject the splatterpunk label or treat it with noticible ambivalence is telling.

There's also a distinct defensive tone to the Sammon's advocacy, directed at the traditionalists then in nominal charge of the "scene" as well as toward the critics' concern about the misogynist subtext present in many of the works. Even a story like John Skipp's "Film at Eleven," presented as an rebuttal to those concerns, comes off as as rather disingenuous, a spin on The Burning Bed that manages to undermine its own message for the sake of some predictable shock value.

Joe R. Lansdale's "The Night They Missed the Horror Show" does a far better job at balancing social awareness and graphic violence -- imagine To Kill a Mockingbird directed by George Romero -- but Lansdale is one of the author's who refused to self-identify with the splatterpunk label. Douglas E. Winters's "Less Than Zombie" purports to send up the morally apathetic protagonists of Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, but the end results read less like pointed satire than a straight excerpt from the hundred or so pages cut from the final draft of Ellis's novel.

Overheated boasts about relevance and transgressive power aside, it takes more than a meticulously detailed description of stabbing or scatalogically-vivid purple prose to legitimately break genre boundaries in a manner that doesn't reek adolescent posturing.

Rubicon - Watch Without Pain (from What Starts, Ends, 1992) - Acceptable, if not especially inspired, gothic rock with ties to the far superior Fields of the Nephilim.

My Bloody Valentine - Only Shallow (from Loveless, 1991) - Yet deep enough to submerge the Himalayas....