I didn’t want to talk any more about this.

My principal reason for writing In Praise of Discomfort was because The Mary Sue deceptively used links to my words in the service of a bizarre and gender-essentialist read of the horror genre. This is something that I, as a horror critic and reader, wasn’t about to sit back and allow.

And now…

It’s happening again.

Specifically a book reviewer and writer of no particular talent but rather great popularity on the fan circuit, Cora Buhlert, has scrawled her latest volley in an ongoing dispute between two loosely defined cliques of genre writers, readers and critics.

In the process she brings me and my friend Raquel S. Benedict up at length in order to attempt to pillory us for the crime of disagreeing that the people pushing the marketing category of “cozy horror” will be good for horror in general. And even Buhlert cannot deny that “cozy horror” is effectively just marketing buzzwords, saying, “In fact, I should maybe try to rebrand the Hallowind Cove series (which started out as an attempt to write horror and became a sort of horror parody set in a quirky small town) as cozy horror, since nothing else has worked to help those stories find their market. “

With apologies to Buhlert I’ve read a small amount of one of her Hallowind Cove books and being mis-marketed is not, in fact, why she fails to sell:

He’d once asked Ian, Landlord of The Croaking Foghorn and the closest thing Paul had to a friend here in Hallowind Cove, about the raven.

“Oh that’s just Hugo,” Ian had said, “Never mind him. He likes to pretend he’s a harbinger of doom, but he’s really quite harmless.”

“Wa-atch out,” Hugo croaked again, “Wa-atch out”

Cora Buhlert – The Revenant of Wrecker’s Cove – Hallowind Cove Book 1

With sub-Gaimanesque prose stylings like this and a cover containing clipart so obvious that you can still see the edge of the .jpg overlay in one place, her work lacks both the quality and the commitment to professional standards necessary to be worthy of much attention. I doubt marketing this piffle as “cozy horror” is likely to improve her sales much.

However it’s not Buhlert at her most honest here that warrants a response. I’d have been happy to keep quiet on my opinions of her stories much like I am on the work of countless other amateur story-writers had she not also said the following:

“As for why Benedict, McNeil and Sullivan object to the existence of cozy horror, there are several arguments, most of them familiar from previous debates. McNeil’s main point is that he believes that horror should make people uncomfortable and that cozy horror is therefore an oxymoron. He also dismisses several of the examples given in The Mary Sue article, particularly the 2014 animated series Over the Garden Wall, as “children’s media”. Now Over the Garden Wall may well be aimed at children – I haven’t seen it. Besides, as I’ve pointed out above, horror is a genre that appeals to the young. However, there is a certain sneering undertone in the way McNeil dismisses “children’s media” that you often find with a certain type critic, who tend to conflate “I don’t like this” or “I’m not the target audience for this” with “This is YA”, whereby YA is inevitably viewed as a bad thing.”

And again we’re seeing the same, sad, attempt to smear critics playing out in Buhlert’s blog that we did in the original Mary Sue article. And Buhlert fundamentally misunderstands my concern about adult consumption of children’s media.

See I actually think children’s media is quite important. Even moreso I expect it to be good. This was actually a focus on a significant sub-series of my blog, “kids stuff” and I would dearly appreciate if the next person to accuse me of “sneering” at children’s media would start by reading these articles and noting some of the things I have to say about children’s media.

For instance, I concluded my review of The Mitchells vs the Machines, by saying, “It’s to be expected that a movie financed by Sony and Netflix and created by a team that brought you a hyper-stylized comic book and a 101 minute toy commercial would fail to create something critical of capitalism, that they’d be unable to recognize that the subject of critique in PAL’s nihilism and Mark’s disregard for relationship was somehow connected to a psychology that triangulates social relations against a patriarch or that both were tied inextricably to capital. It’s a challenge because I do want to see media going the direction The Mitchells vs the Machines goes. It’s just that it doesn’t go anywhere near as far as art must.” This echoes my conclusion regarding the Netflix limited series Wednesday, ” Jenna Ortega is a talented new actress and I’m glad to see her getting a larger role after playing a second-fiddle in recent outings like Scream (2022) and X. But it really drives home that you can’t expect a coherent critique of normativity from Tim Burton. And we can all, perhaps, admit at last that it was good he passed on the 1991 film and cleared the path for Barry Sonnenfeld to direct in his stead. Because, building largely on the aesthetic legacy of Sonnenfeld’s movie and on the hastily redacted fan-series of Melissa Hunter, Burton managed to make… a mess.”

Talking about the classic children’s novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, I said “Ged is the wellspring of power that rises out of the primordial origin of all things. He is the doer, the agent of action in the story. The gebbeth is the un-doer, the reactive, the end of things. Ged, to come into an understanding of himself, must see his end as clearly as his beginning. He must be as aware of the ways in which he un-does as the ways he does. Unexamined, Ged’s shadow-self seeks revenge against Jasper and it is let loose, it rampages. It kills. It hounds Ged from crisis to crisis. But when faced, when Ged points to his own darkness and calls it with his name, it comes; it becomes; it comes into being. But by coming into being it is done away with because it becomes nothing but the awareness Ged has of his own potential toward death. There is no other here. There isn’t a wanderer and his shadow – there is a river, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.”

In short what I expect of children’s media is, for the most part, what I expect of adult media: that it can stand up to critical scrutiny, that it is well-crafted and that it communicate a clear and consistent theme. But it’s also true that I’m rather critical of adults fans of children’s programming.

This is because there’s one other element of children’s media that absolutely must be true: children’s media must be legible to children.

Now I know from experience that creating legibility for a child requires a process of a certain simplification. I joked about that in the Earthsea essay, qualifying its inclusion in children’s literature by saying, “However, despite these hallmarks of children’s fictions, this is a book with a density of theme and topic that could prove challenging for an undergraduate university student to fully disentangle. While I have positive things to say about some of the very inventive structural and pedagogical things done in modern children’s lit, for instance, Elizabetta Dami‘s use of modified type to emphasize key words is a very interesting artistic choice, and one with an obvious pedagogical benefit, I don’t think there’s a single voice in children’s literature in the 21st century who would tackle the very abstract topics like the ones that are at the center of Le Guin’s book.”

And this absence of abstraction is a key problem. Adults should be accustomed to paying attention to abstract and dense topics. That’s part of being an adult. As Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians says, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” As a person grows and develops out of childhood they need to be able to observe phenomena through a lens that simply isn’t available to children because it is dependent on the experience of growing into adulthood. For one’s taste to remained mired in children’s media isn’t a problem because children’s media is bad but rather because children’s media is good for children. I would expect adults to find it limiting in precisely the same way they would find the shoes they wore when they were six limiting: because they have outgrown it.

So, no, YA is not, “inevitably a bad thing.” It’s a perfectly good thing for twelve to fourteen year-olds. But if you are a fourty year-old and you’re still shopping for books principally in the YA aisle you have some growing up to get on with.

I am happy to see that Buhlert reacts with discomfort to the use of gentrification in this discussion as a metaphor. “Though personally I find the metaphor hugely problematic, because gentrification does untold harm in the real world by displacing and destroying whole neighbourhoods,” she says. And, yes, it’s very true that gentrification really is that bad. But perhaps she should note that I’m the same person who simultaneously said leftists should be uncomfortable with folk horror because of the way the subgenre deploys reactionary volkishness on one hand and then recommended leftists should watch folk horror so as to interrogate their discomfort on the other. I recommended In the Earth as a good one. Basically I don’t write to make people comfortable and if Buhlert is made uncomfortable by the idea that the genre fiction scene shares characteristics with real-world gentrification then she has a wonderful opportunity to interrogate that discomfort.

Moreau Vazh has laid out with clarity and precision exactly what I mean when I talk about gentrification within this metaphorical context, saying of the SFF publishing mainstream, “When the sub-reddit has been quiet for months and the last specialist bookfluencer has stopped coming up with themed dances to celebrate book releases, they bust out the joint and light a match. The old shit is dead and oppressive… It is tiring having to talk about it… It sucks all the air out of the room when we should be talking about the new shit.”

Effectively, when Buhlert says she thinks it’s “problematic” to use the gentrification metaphor to describe what SFF does as it, to paraphrase Vazh, hops from sinking ship to sinking ship, what she’s really saying is that she doesn’t like what I’m implying about her and her friends – that they are gentrifiers.

But this is the old liberal / leftist mismatch on language at play. Liberals, poisoned by the individual and atomized subject-concept of their decrepit ideology, see any reference to a systemic problem, such as gentrification, and assume it must be made up of a category of individuals who are essentially gentrifiers. Whereas a leftist such as myself denies that a subject is individual at all to begin with.

I don’t think Buhlert is a gentrifier. The truth is that, when she hasn’t deigned to impose herself upon me, I don’t think about Buhlert at all. But I don’t assign any personal blame to Buhlert. It’s not morally wrong to be an untalented short story writer. But it is, at the very best, gauche and a little pathetic to make veiled accusations regarding the politics of one’s critics because they happen not to be on board with the marketing category you’ve decided will be a silver bullet for the fortunes of your amateur story-writing efforts.

I sincerely hope this will be the last thing I ever have to say about “cozy” Horror.