Let's drop the analogy before we all get the munchies and eat our magazines [or, in this case, lick our monitors].

The point is that there is very little serious reviewing these days in horror. There's also next to no real criticism (as in "considered judgment of or discussion about the qualities of something, especially a creative work") or criticism (as in "opinions that point out one or more faults of a work") outside of some academic critique.

Part of the problem is probably historical and possibly integral. Horror, as a genre, doesn't have the same sort of long-established fan base that its sister science fiction has. There's a tradition of debate, discussion, and criticism in SF that has never existed and never will exist for horror. What did exist for horror along these lines never really thrived. This may be because few people really want to read ABOUT horror. Stefan Dziemianowicz, who has done some serious horror criticism, once pointed out to me that readers tend to read horror for pleasure or entertainment while science fiction is all about, well, speculating. It's still entertaining, but in a more thoughtful way. Horror is, as we know because Doug Winter told us, an emotion. We feel it. We don't think about it.

Alan Beatts of Borderlands Books theorizes that the science fiction readers tend to self-identify as "science fiction readers" whereas horror readers do not tend to identify with their reading and are more often casual readers. An sf reader will frequently read only sf; the horror reader reads much more widely. Nor do horror readers seem to feel any particular bond with other people based on what they read. Thus it seems horror readers are no more of a cohesive identifiable group than fiction readers in general, whereas sf readers can be seen as a definite group unified by their interest in all things science fictional, not only by their reading. (I'm abbreviating the theory, but this is my column, not Alan's.)

That concept, too, supports the idea that folks really don't care to cerebrate about horror so much as read it. There's a good possibility that there are just enough people interested to really support serious criticism of modern horror.

There's another semi-historical aspect, too, that applies more to reviewing than criticism. By the time I started hanging out with horror about ten years ago, there seemed to be a lot of people who reviewed horror in its small press who wrote negatively without providing back-up reasoning or example. Some were ignorant or at least did not know how to express themselves well. Some thought that part of their job was to find something wrong with anything they read. Some just liked being snarky because they thought that made them appear to be clever. Some may have taken potshots for personal reasons. I'm not sure exactly why, but it seems like there was, shall we say, a bit of a nasty atmosphere. There was some reason, in other words, for a writer to feel defensive about a "bad review" because sometimes the review or the reviewer was NOT fair.

I think that's mostly disappeared now. Unfortunately one reason it has disappeared is that there are fewer venues that review horror. [Yes, I know, there are online venues. That's another story.] Perhaps just as unfortunate, though, is that the "support the genre" clarion was used to drown the negativity out. I played that tune myself for a while -- until I realized that no one should support anything not worth supporting; that "support the genre" could mean, all too often, "support anything connected with the genre whether it is good or bad or otherwise."

Still, bad reasons or not, that sort of reviewing, for the most part, has disappeared. What is left, however, is more pleasant but not any more acceptable. The trend now seems to be to never meet a book you don't like, to over-praise, and to be blind to even obvious flaws. I suspect some of this may be because so many people who review are trying to advance their "careers" as fiction writers. The technical term here is "suck up" as in, "If I suck up to other writers then I will have a larger pool of people who might suck up to me and my work. If I suck up to established writers they might recognize me and the connection might help me out." The technique has been known to work, so I guess you can't expect people not to try it.

Another aspect, one I think I fell into at first, is the "fanboy" (or "fangirl") mode. This is, at least, sincere. The reviewer genuinely loves horror literature as a whole and is simply too willing to be forgiving. Time and experience usually take care of fanboyism for most folks, but not all. Plus, there are always new fanboys rising. When I started reviewing for the original DarkEcho (a weekly email newsletter for horror writers and others I did for over six years) and elsewhere I had a policy of "positive reviews." I reviewed only what I found worthwhile. After all, there is only so much space and time. Why waste it on the less-than-praiseworthy? So, I ignored the less-than-good and, naturally, because there simply wasn't enough time to read EVERYTHING, some good stuff got ignored as well. This worked out in a practical manner, too. Writers and publishers couldn't be sure if they were ignored due to quality or my inundation in quantity. I think it was a social nicety we were all aware of and appreciated. (There's another few categories, too: good stuff that I read, would have liked to review, but did not have the time to write a review and/or a place to publish it; good stuff that had received enough notice elsewhere that my meager words would not have mattered; good stuff I discovered too late to do anything about; and good stuff I never saw, for example.)

Eventually -- maybe this happens to anyone who is putting forth opinion on a regular basis, I don't know -- this stopped working so well. There were people who decided it was my "duty" to do this or that with DarkEcho. Despite the fact no one paid for a subscription, that I did not get paid, and that, in fact, it cost me money to provide DE, these folks got some misguided notion that I HAD to do what they thought I should do "for the good of the genre."

There were also people who got insulted because I politely ignored them. Why they were ignored really didn't matter. They, too, felt I was somehow cosmically required to do their bidding and weren't, I guess, interested in mutual social niceness.