An Interview with Ellen Datlow

On the eve of the debut of her latest horror anthology, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, editor Ellen Datlow shares her perspective on genre trends, the quintessence of the short story, and the stupidity of carnivorous zombies.

When you choose subjects for anthologies, do you choose subjects that you are already interested in? (I.e., got a passion for vampires or cat horror?) Or, to phrase it another way, where do your ideas for anthology themes tend to come from?

I choose subjects that I’m interested in. The vampirism anthologies came about because I’d turned down a bunch of horror stories for OMNI when I was fiction editor but still loved the rejected stories. So I started with the idea of reprinting those stories and pitched an anthology based on that idea. That’s how Alien Sex also came about. But mostly, I first pick a subject that interests me.

On that note, what’s so compelling about the horror genre for you?

I’ve no idea. I’ve read horror fiction since I was a child and have always loved it. Horror is a major component of the human condition.

“Missing children,” as you describe them in the introduction, children who are ghosted by pain, appear frequently in the pages of Inferno. Any thoughts on the connection between children and horror? What is it that is particularly horrific about the suffering of a child?

Because children are usually more vulnerable than adults, fear about their safety is one method of creating tension in a reader. There are more stories than I realized with “child” elements in the book: from parent-child relationships to threatened or stolen children—or childhood. But the subject (something I think every reader can relate to) is so fertile, the tones and treatment of each situation so different from each other, that I have no problem with having several such stories in the anthology.

You say that one of your criteria for Inferno was that the stories had to cling to you, constantly reminding you of the fears we live with inherent in the human condition. What story or stories in the anthology haunt you the most and why?

Probably whatever I choose for the next Year’s Best anthology, but I don’t know yet as I’m still reading and rereading for the anthology.

One of the most exciting things I’ve noticed in my reading life is more and more genre creep. I used to have a pretty good idea of where the boundaries lay: fantasy was about magical things; sf was about futuristic, scientific things; and horror was about gross, scary things. But, as Inferno shows, you can’t categorize things so easily anymore. You could think of “Riding Bitch” as a grief-stricken hallucination in magical realism, “13 O’Clock” as a dark domestic drama. Do you think genre creep has been happening more in recent times, or were the genres always porous?

I think the boundaries between the three fantastic fiction genres—sf, fantasy, and horror—have always been porous. Think of “fantasy” as the umbrella and sf/f/h as the spokes comprising that umbrella. (Of course, that leaves out non-supernatural horror, but hey, few theories are perfect.) But some of the best contemporary writers move between realism and the fantastic: Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Chabon, Elizabeth Hand, Jeffrey Ford, Kelly Link, Lucius Shepard, to name but a few. Good stories can be about anything as long as they’re about something. So I don’t understand why it would be surprising that the Jeter story (“Riding Bitch”) is about grief transformed hallucinogenically or that Mike O’Driscoll’s (“13 O’Clock” ) is a dark domestic drama. To me if a story is only after one effect (e.g., shock) it would be fatally boring.

Over your years as editor of horror anthologies, what changes have you detected in subject matter or writing styles? Any comments about the current state of horror?

There’s always been a push-pull between supernatural horror and psychological, and between “quiet” horror and more graphic splatter-type horror. That tension continues today. Zombies have made a (largely unwelcome) resurgence in fiction. I say “unwelcome” because most contemporary zombie stories are about flesh-eating zombies inspired by Romero’s Night/Dawn/Day of the Living Dead movies. After reading a few of the same boring, repetitive, superficial takes on the subject, I want to toss most anthologies full of them across the room (and often do).

With regard to the current state of horror publishing—For horror and other genres, the mass market for “pocket books” has collapsed. Twenty years ago “mass market paperback” meant the book would sell at least 100,000 copies. Today, it might sell 10,000 copies. Part of the problem is that original paperbacks rarely get reviewed in the top magazines/newspapers and part is that they’re priced too high compared to the trade paperback.

But there are many small or independent presses publishing horror: Cemetery Dance and Gauntlet, Permuted, Night Shade in the U.S. and PS, Telos, and Gray Friar in the U.K., Ash-Tree Press in Canada (which specializes in the ghost story).

There’s also interesting horror being published by mainstream publishers that just isn’t labeled “horror.” This to me is a positive development because the slash-and-dice torture franchises have over the years corrupted the word “horror” in the minds of most readers, just as the Star Trek and Star Wars movies have corrupted what is thought of as science fiction.

There’s a quote on your website in which you state that the short story is the “heart of genre literature.” Please elaborate on what you mean by that. Why is the short story form so essential?

It is the form with which writers can experiment in voice, in style, in structure. A writer can try out a theme that may later be expanded into a novel.

In the early eighties, when I began editing sf/f/h, the career trajectory was that young writers started out writing stories and then moved on to novels. You had William Gibson, Howard Waldrop, Bruce Sterling, Bruce McAllister, Lucius Shepard, Michael Swanwick, Jack Dann, Gardner Dozois, Nancy Kress, Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Cadigan, Connie Willis, George R. R. Martin, Ted Chiang, and Kelly Link, and so many other talented writers producing lots of high-quality short fiction. All of them but Chiang, Dozois, Waldrop, and Link turned to novel-length work. Only a few continue to write short stories regularly. So many of the best and the brightest sf/f writers—those with new ideas, stylistic innovation, energy, and passion—move on, which is kind of a shame. The short story is a powerful form with which writers can experiment in voice, in style, in structure, a clearly defined space in which you can sustain that complex juggling act and suspension of disbelief required for a successful piece of supernatural horror.