Just Because It’s Got A Vampire Doesn't Make it Horror

Cards on the table, I am not a fan of Twilight.

I understand that people are and I understand why they are but I can't get there with them and I have no desire to try. Different strokes, I can accept that in others we all have our guilty pleasures. But what makes hackles rise on my neck is when someone refers to it as horror.

I understand the confusion, I do. Vampires are considered with a knee jerk to be predatory creatures of the night that ooze sensuality and goth power. But when you remove the literal thirst for blood and make it subservient to a pining heart you have a romance novel. The Anita Blake books and the L.A. Banks genre books are part of a burgeoning wave of treating undeath like a super power as opposed to a curse. I'm fine with that happening but we really have to stop the pretense that its horror. Are there tense moments in these books? Sure. But meeting an angry man in an alley carrying a knife is tense but doesn't qualify as horror.

And while which heroine can shag the most diverse catalog of monsters is an interesting game, it lacks the existential peril of real horror. In Dracula, Mina is struggling against the darkness as they pursue the Count back into Transylvania. It has drama, it has tension, it has an element of sexual peril because even as she is falling under Dracula's sway she is also a danger to her escort.

Twilight does not develop these compelling qualities because that is neither its point nor its intention. It's a romantic fantasy for what I can only assume is a deeply repressed woman who conflates sparkling teenagers as sexually dangerous. I know its snarky but its also painfully shallow. But this sort of literature has existed for a long time and it has its niche. No arguments there, no one's getting rich off of it because everyone hates it. Lots of people are buying.

So if Twilight is indeed your cup of tea, I wish you all the pleasure that reading can give in utter sincerity. But do me the courteously of not pretending that its horror. And just like frisky pirates in Harlequin Romances are nothing like what real pirates were like, hairless werewolves and sparkly, product using, pretty boys aren't real horror.

The link for William Tooker’s Amazon Author Page:  http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_tc_2_0?rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AWilli...