particularly scared or frightened me, mostly because I’ve always been drawn to wanting to know about the cultural and social rituals that help us to lessen its hold on the living, and about the process itself. As far as horror is concerned, part of the key to it all is contained in the preceding paragraph: ‘safe environment’. Even back then I realised it was all fiction, that it most definitely wasn’t real and that my parents were there should I ever need them, or I could just put the light on and the bogeyman would dissipate. It was all a vicarious thrill, living out scary scenarios from the safety of my warm, light-filled bedroom, sometimes being deliciously scared out of my wits. The images lingered long in my mind, but I knew that those images, however powerful, were just the result of words on a page. As an adult, that vicariousness still applies; I watch and read horror for the very same reasons. My imagination has been tainted to a certain extent by my experiences and the life I’ve lived thus far, and I’ve come to realise that, in many ways, I see the reading of dark genre literature as a form of exorcism – a way of facing my deepest fears without actually putting myself in danger. It is, at bottom, why all we horror-heads like the genre, even if we can’t articulate it that way or put another gloss on it. Beyond that, however, is another deeper realisation, one that often works on a subconscious level: that truth is very often much stranger and more twisted and dangerous than any fictional creation a writer can come up with. We must also be aware that many classic and modern horror tropes were inspired by real life examples, the prime one being the notorious Ed Gein, whose ghoulish exploits have spawned many a film, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs and many another in between. As if to emphasise that, there was the recent report about a Russian historian who kept twenty-nine bodies at his house in Nizhny Novgorod. He’d dug them up from a local cemetery and dressed the corpses in clothes. Remember, this scenario wasn’t dreamed up by some author or screenwriter; a member of society, albeit a broken one, who was engaged in a ‘respectable’ academic profession, surrounded himself with dead bodies for some unknown reason. This happened in real life. As some wise wit once said, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Of course, there are always going to be those individuals who derive evil inspiration from violence in films, but this has always been the case throughout history. Accounts abound of religious zealots and fanatics committing genocide, killing and destroying others just because their particular sacred text or their god told them to do so. However,
the thing we have to remember here is that it’s the individual who thought it okay to do these things who is to blame. He or she must possess a predilection for such acts in the first place – the book or film is, in itself, incapable of physically ‘making’ someone go out there and act against type. It takes a warped mind to go from fantasy to reality. Nonetheless, it’s far too easy for the ignoramuses of the world to use these kinds of occurrences as scapegoats. In fact, it’s considerably easier and more comfortable for them than actually trying to look for the root causes, which are inevitably social and environmental, for if they did acknowledge those root causes, it would be tantamount to acknowledging a systemic failure, and there are too many vested interests to allow that acknowledgement to happen. The truth is (although you’ll just have to take my word for this) that the people I’ve met through the horror scene are amongst the nicest, sanest and most welcoming people I’ve met. Like I mentioned earlier, many of them see involvement in horror culture and its accoutrements as constituting an act of exorcism, whether it be writing it, reading it, filming it or watching it. For me, it then becomes the means by which I cope with the world as it is and avoid the disappointment of knowing it’s not how I want it to be. But, the important thing to remember is that, whether the naysayers like it or not, I am the man I am because of those reading and viewing preferences and NOT in spite of them. SOLARIS RISING Edited By Ian Whates www.solarisbooks.com Writer Ian Whates turns editor for this reincarnation of the Solaris Book of Science Fiction. Bringing together a slew of brilliant SF authors, including Peter F. Hamilton (with a rare original short story), Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, Ken Macleod, Pt? Cardigan, Ian Watson, and many more. There are nineteen fairly short-short stories in the book, but despite their diminutive size they all pack a punch. This anthology isn’t going to take on the Mammoth Book of New SF for size or scope, it simply can’t. Instead it goes for quality rather than quantity and does an astoundingly good job. Whates’s experience and knowledge of the genre are clear, and without the restrictions of theme he has allowed the writers contained in this book the freedom to go where their minds take them, which is everywhere. A brave and outstanding collection, Whates has done Solaris proud and produced a collection that rivals the Mammoth books for quality.