OCCUPY DARKNESS The revolution is underway. The mindlessly commercial, the undistinguished and barely literate will no longer be allowed to utterly dominate the genre. Not without a fight anyway.
Because it’s one of the central threads of literature. I often recall how many titles in our field derive from Shakespeare, particularly Macbeth and Hamlet’s soliloquy from act three, scene one. We have our roots in the earliest tales of capricious gods and presences beyond the firelight. That kind of folk memory might explain the survival of the genre, but its vitality surely lies in its ability to let us talk about contemporary experience, to shine a strange but illuminating light on it, to show it afresh and make people (the readers and ourselves) look again.