The Harlequin of Horror, or Why Leisure’s Editors Are Much Too Leisurely In Their Work

By June Pulliam

06/26/2005

Originally, this space was to be for a review of one or two offerings from Leisure that had found their way to the Necropsy book shelf, but I picked up two recent books issued by this imprint, only to put them down after, ninety pages into each, I was just not hooked for one reason or another. This experience, while extremely annoying, is alas, de rigueur when it comes to Leisure’s offerings of late.

One of the jobs I am actually paid to do is to teach writing to various levels of university students, and the advice I give them all is that if you can’t hook your reader with your introduction, you’re screwed. In fact, when I am grading their various offerings, I know I’ve got a stinker on my hands when those first paragraphs are dull and muzzy, and in general fail to either a) tell me what the essay is about, b) capture my attention or c) interest me in any way at all. It seems to me that the above criteria are also helpful for judging the effectiveness of fiction.

The audience for fiction is not obligated to read a particular work, and indeed, if the writer fails to grab the reader’s attention in those crucial couple of chapters (or for less patient souls, in those first few pages), then s/he will merely stop reading and find something else. Obviously, the reader is looking for something when selecting a work of fiction, and readers of genre fiction come to a work with a specific set of expectations about what the story should do for them. Thus, those first few chapters not only need to catch the attention of the reader and give a general idea about the story, but they also must to do something to establish that this is a work of horror fiction. Two of Leisure’s offerings that I picked up recently, James A. Moore’s Rabid Growth and Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, both failed to meet this test. Ninety pages into each book, the plot dawdled, I was not interested in what was going on, and had no idea why anything should be scary or why I should care about any of these characters, so I just made an editorial decision to stop reading. Thus, this review is not of Rabid Growth or The Girl Next Door, since frankly, I didn’t read enough to do an evaluation, bad or otherwise, of either book.

Instead, this most recent negative reading experience led me to a realization: for the past year, I have dreaded pulling a Leisure offering from the Necropsy bookshelf, since this bad reading experience is all too frequent. The novels fail to engage either because they plod along, or worse yet, they just follow an inane formula that populates the pages with monsters we’ve seen before or some seeming quota of sex and violence (as was the case with Edward Lee’s most recent novel, Flesh Gothic). I fear that this phenomenon is a matter of cupidity on the part of the imprint. Leisure has published some notable pieces of horror, but with few exceptions, they are all reprints of works that have been through the editorial process at the expense of another publishing house, so all that the reprint publisher must do is pay royalties to the author, slap on a new cover, and ratchet up the marketing machine to sell the old book anew.

Some of my favorite novels have been reissued by Leisure, including Simon Clark’s Blood Crazy, Elizabeth Massie’s Sineater, Richard Laymon’s The Traveling Vampire Show, Edward Lee’s City Infernal and Al Sarrantonio’s Toybox. And alas, only three titles stand out as being both original and interesting in some way and being first issued by Leisure: Mary Ann Mitchell’s Drawn to the Grave, Jemiah Jefferson’s Voice of the Blood, and Deborah LeBlanc’s Family Inheritance. The remainder of the Leisure first issues, whether written by experienced authors or neophytes, suffer from being overly formulaic in the way that Harlequin romance novels are notoriously so. Perhaps this sort of “consistency” is a good business plan for an imprint of a mass market publisher, but it makes for dull reading.