21st Century Literature discussion

This is the place to post spoilers and anything that people might not be ready to see if they are still reading.

Is this Horror? Is it literary?

Thanks for this discussion thread! To me, this book is literary but not horror. It is full of horrible things -- murders, rapes, preying preachers, bullying, beatings, etc., etc. But, while concentrated in this novel, these are all things that happen in the world all too frequently. Pollock may have accentuated them in telling this story set in Appalalacia, but he did not write a horror story, he wrote reality. Horror, to me, is something that scares me so I turn on all the lights in the house. The movie Cape Fear -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Fea... -- is an example of what I consider horror. I think I slept with all the lights on in the house for a week after seeing it!

So why is it literary? For me, it is literary because it conveys, with amazing use of language, sense of place and people.

An example of sense of place appears in the Prolologue on pp. 1-2: "Four hundred or so people lived in Knockemstiff in 1957, nearly all of them connected by blood through one godforsaken calamity or another, be it lust or necessity or just plain ignorance. Along with the tar-papered shacks and cinder-block houses, the holler included two general stores and a Church of Christ in Christian Union and a joint known throughout the township as the Bull Pen." When I read that, I know where I was and what live was like for most who lived there. (Of course, in 1957 when I was in the first grade, I had a classmate or two who lived in a tar paper shack.)

As to a sense of people, just read the first paragraph of Chapter 10: "The couple had been roaming the Midwest for several weeks during the summer of 1965, always on the hunt, two nobodies in a black Ford station wagon purchased for one hundred dollars at a used-car loat in Meade, Ohio, called Brother Whitey's. ... The man on the passenger's side was turning to fat and believed in signs and had a habit of picking his decayed teeth with a Buck pocketknife. The woman always drove and wore tight shorts and flimsy blouses that showed off her pale, bony body in a way they both thought enticing. She chain-smoked any kind of menthol cigarettes she could get her hands on while he chewed on cheap black cigars that he called dog dicks." After reading that, it was hard not to see those the two of them -- Carl and Sandy -- in my mind and know they belonged in 1957 in Appalachia.

Yeah. I agree. For me, it's literary. It just happens to be about a bunch of killings. For me, a genre suggests tropes and a certain set of expectations. This is really no more horror than, say, a film like Badlands or a book like American Psycho. It's not about plot or about specifically building horror in the reader. It's about the characters.

But of course this could go round in circles like the lit v genre discussion. I wonder if the best way to solve that is to just call literary a genre, and say that like all genres it has its tropes and expectations and some commonality in what you expect from the prose, and like all genres it can be one of a number that a book crosses.

Terry, you are right that the character development is superb. For me it is how the characters fit so believably in the time and place, i.e., 1957 in Appalacia, the novel is set.

Willard was such a complex character. A traumatized WWII veteran returns to Appalacia. He doesn't seem to particularly religious at first. And he is certainly not churched. His religion is his own, although he does introduce it to his son.

Emma is an interesting character for me. She loses one son to the war and the one that returns is soon gone. Emma is poor, she is religous, and she is churched, although the church is not a recognized main stream one. She opens her home to Helen and Lenore, after their lives have been devastated by terrible events. She loves them and they love her but they, like her sons, die "unpleasant" deaths. Both Helen and Lenore are deeply religious and that seems to lead them to take dangerous paths. Helen betrayed by Roy, who believed he would be able to bring her back to life through prayer, and Lenore by Paster Preston Teagarten, who used his positon of paster to seduce young women. Emma, loving and giving, looses all the young people she raised and loved. Hers is a sad story, even though she was not the target of any of the physical violence.

I loved the book and I'm glad we read it. It was not however, what I think we hoped for. It was, as Terry says, a literary novel where horrible things keep happening.

I don't think we hit that place where literary and horror collide.

Oh well, it was a good book all the same.

I personally am glad it was not what the moderators thought they wanted!

It was, however, I think a very good pick for a month ending with All Hallows Eve, which is the precursor to All Saints Day and All Souls Day, two religious days recognized in Christian churches.

I have not actually read any horror novels, that I recall, so its hard to determine if this book is. I think if you filmed this it could very much enter the horror genre. There are many scenes in this novel that are highly disturbing but alot of blanks are left for your imagination to fill in. If that was suddenly presented visually it might be a different story ?

It's literary to me because of the characterization and the language. I liked the art of the book, but it induces despair for humanity without any offsetting hope, and I don't mind avoiding that kind of thing. To me, it's not horror.

I finished this last week and would definitely characterize it as literary. I was delighted to discover this author and found this to be an unnerving and satisfying read. I was hooked!