Literary Fiction or Horror?

What kind of story is The Angels of L19? It’s published by a press whose mission statement emphasises literary fiction. I also submitted the manuscript to several publishers of speculative fiction, but when I met with an editor at one of these presses, she insisted she wasn’t the right home for my book: that it needed to be published by a ‘literary’ press. So there did seem to be a consensus on that point.

If we’re talking about the shape of my book’s plot, its structure, then it’s a redeemed tragedy (I have a guest essay upcoming on Lithub that will talk about this in relation to Tolkien’s idea of the eucatastrophe). But it can also be described as a horror novel.

There are four specific strands within the horror tradition that seem important here:

1) The Gothic. All horror novels are the children or grandchildren of Gothic novels, but in this case the genealogy is particularly clear. Haunted houses, doubles, labyrinths, supernatural beings, demonic pacts, the decaying corpse as the ultimate challenge to human reason: my book features all these Gothic motifs. But I’d particularly like to emphasise the idea of the Gothic as being about the return of the repressed, and the uncovering of secrets, including but not limited to the awful secret of what happens to our bodies after we die.

2) The Uncanny. There’s a prolific literature on this concept, often drawing on Freud’s seminal essay on the subject, but I’ll go with Mark Fisher’s definition: uncanny fiction is 'set in “our” world – only that world is no longer “ours” any more, it no longer coincides with itself, it has been estranged.’ The clearest example of this in my book is the semi-detached house: that is, a house accompanied by its own mirrored double, its own conjoined twin, to which it is sutured by a common wall that both joins and separates its two halves. A couple of key episodes in my story try to draw out the strangeness of this, with my doubled, mirrored house standing for the complex relations between my two protagonists, Robert and Tracey, who live on either side of its common wall.

3) The Weird. Again I’ll go with Fisher’s definition: ‘The Weird … depends upon the difference between two (or more) worlds - with “world” here having an ontological sense. It is not a question of an empirical difference – the aliens are not from another planet, they are invaders from another reality system.’ I talk about the applicability of the weird to my representation of angels and demons in an essay at Ginger Nuts of Horror.

4) Folk Horror. This is a more recent variation, which is generally about the hidden presence of atavistic forces within our degraded modern landscapes, which then reassert themselves and erupt into our disenchanted present. But while most versions of this focus on pre-Christian paganism, and often on forces associated with nature, I’m more interested in Christianity and medieval Catholicism as atavistic forces underlying modern secular life. This links back to the Gothic: in early Gothic novels, one of the repressed secrets that reasserts itself against Protestant rationality is precisely the medieval, which is associated with the irrational and superstition – the ruined abbeys and monasteries that were the preferred sites of Gothic encounters were ruined because of Henry VIII and the English Reformation. The Gothic is therefore haunted by the ghost of Catholicism – and so is my book.

None of these interests are antithetical to literary fiction, but their presence definitely suggests I’ve written a horror novel. 

To sum up:

Do you like literary fiction? Then you might like my novel.

Do you like speculative fiction, especially horror? Then you might also like my novel.