How Horror Short-Circuits Fiction Writing

Part of the difficulty horror writing faces has to do with the defenses that modern readers bring to genre fiction. Like virtually every other genre, horror only came into its own as a discrete mode of fiction with the great literary branching that took place in the era of modern publishing. But we find elements of “horror” strewn throughout world literature — not just the near-ubiquitous tradition of ghostly folk tales but the canon too. How else would we describe Pentheus’s dismemberment at the hands of his own mother(!) at The Bacchae’s conclusion, or the myth of Perseus confronting the hideous Medusa, or Beowulf’s simultaneously erotic and horrific battle with Grendel’s mother deep under the earth, or Macbeth’s encounter with the three witches in some nightmarish version of the Scottish Highlands, and so on and so on. “Splatterpunk,” the bastard offspring subgenre of horror, is notorious for reveling in particularly graphic descriptions of torture and murder, but I doubt there’s much there that’s grislier than Dante’s depiction of the cannibal Count Ugolino gnawing upon the head of his own murderer, Archbishop Ruggieri, for all eternity.