Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It's almost a case of horror being in a dimension that's orthogonal to "genre". "Horror" is more of a way of treating the subject matter that can be applied to pretty much any genre. You can have horror fantasy, horror SF, horror crime, horror thriller - even horror cookery  . |
David Farland has a theory:
http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/07/h...ould-harm.html
Quote:
I'm convinced that people read stories primarily for emotional impact. If we wanted information, we'd be reading news magazines. If we wanted beautiful language, we'd go for poetry. If we wanted insight, we might be reading philosophical texts.
But when we read a story, we go to it looking for a number of things. We might hope to be surprised by the twists that take place in a murder mystery. We might read a romance looking to fall in love with a protagonist. We might pick up a science fiction novel hoping to be swept off to a wondrous new world--and so on.
So when a reader picks up a story, he or she begins looking almost instantly to see if these kinds of emotional needs are going to be met.
In fact, have you ever noticed that we don’t really have genres? We tend to buy our books based upon the emotions that they promise to arouse—romance, thrills, horror, wonder (in SF and fantasy), justice in Westerns, and so on.
|
I'd say that horror can be an element in any story but that Horror *genre* stories exist primarily to shock and give the reader an adrenaline rush.
(Just as romance can be a part of any kind of story, even Horror, but that Romance stories are built around the relationship as the core element.)