The Horror section depresses me.

Once upon a time, long long ago, it contained books that could actually be described as horror. Now 'horror' seems to mean 'fantasy with a vaguely dark gritty feel and added erotica'. Is anyone really ever scared by those stories anymore? Anyone over say...... twelve? Why do people persist with this idea that adding an overcast day or two and a generous splash of human blood makes horror?

I'm not complaining about book shops really- More a lazy attitude to the concept of horror and a naive childish notion of what exactly we should be terrified of.

See the old horror stories, the good ones, were never really about the surface story. Like the top notch fantasy today, your Pratchett, Gaiman and so forth, it was mostly metaphor. You could talk about vampires when really you were saying something about sexuality. About monsters coming back from the dead when you were talking about outsiders......

What scares us now, really? And more to the point what should?

Horror, to me, seems like a chance for the author the explore the definition of evil. To look at despair, and examine how terror changes people, twists them back to animals.

This is important, because if we don't consider the ethical questions it throws up we risk..........well-

Horror is a chance to take a good long stare that wavering grey line between right and wrong. Demoting it to a collection of modern fantasy that barely raises a shiver robs us of one more way of discussing philosophy and examining how we think.

What are people afraid of anyway? I know a lot of people who would name some sort of animal there, which I think is probably more repulsed than afraid. Some people would say death, which I'd agree with, but I think if we're honest most people fear their own more then other people's and writing about it is bound to be more then a little removed from reality. Confined spaces, open spaces, public speaking, crime. Terrorism, I know people who've told me I should be afraid of that-

I think what I'm afraid of is states of mind.

That comes, I think, from the understanding that people are capable of anything, and that extends to me. And that this anything doesn't just encompass the motivational speaker's 'get up and go', achievement, progression, break-throughs, good......... It also contains the opposite.

Some how, horror seems to have lost sight of that idea. This makes me wonder whether writers have become cowards, willing to toy with bland fleeting fears instead of plunging into the truly terrible. To sketch us a gore plastered room, because it's easier than trying to paint what's in our own hearts.

We don't need ghosts to scare us. We don't need madmen either (because it's so much easier to just make the antagonist mad, to try and seperate them from us, to persuade ourselves that we are not and never could be like them). Madness, physical mostrosities and gore are starting to seem more and more like lazy writing.

I despise lazy writing.

(And yes Michelle I am over caffinated)