Amber Sparks

This is just so excellent. I love Peter Straub. And I love that he wants us to stop hating on genre, please.  I feel the same way. A great bit:

Okay: genre genre genre, here we go. Crime novels and horror stories huddle down here in the gutter, right?, while real literature lives in the fragrant uplands and on the radiant peaks where plotting is at most secondary and life proceeds by instinct and intelligence, by fine intuition and a lively moral consciousness, owing nothing to formulae and the requirement to gratify the lazy reader’s expectations of suspenseful suspense and exciting excitement. One is disposable, the other immortal. However… well, just for beginners, let’s admit that literary fiction is a genre, too, shall we?

Yes, I’ll admit that. Gladly. Why is the genre with the ghosts and ghouls and goblins or the one with the private dicks and killer dames less legit than the one with the small-town girl growing up and discovering the world? Perhaps people don’t like looking at unpleasant things. Perhaps dark equals scary and people don’t like scary so we have to make it go away, de-legitimize it. Perhaps, perhaps…but don’t listen to me. Listen to Peter Straub, who is awesome and says this all in a much more fascinating and intelligent way.