Last week I wrote about blogger Samuel Collingwood Smith and his attack on author Jason Sanford over a horror story written by the latter. My response focused mainly on Smith’s post, but really, the comment section deserves its own reply. If you’re familiar with the moral panics over horror comics in the fifties and horror videos in the eighties, you’ll know exactly what Samuel Collingwood Smith and his readers are trying to stir up.
Sanford’s story (“The Wheels on the Torture Bus Go Round and Round”) struck me as rather tame as far as the horror genre goes, and I got the feeling that Smith’s commentators were either feigning outrage (bear in mind that the attacks on Sanford were spurred by his research into violent right-wing rhetoric at the Baen Books forum) or had simply never read a modern horror story before. My impression was reinforced when I posted the story at a community of horror readers (namely, r/weirdlit) and they generally agreed with my assessment of it:
I think it’s rather tame honestly. It’s not gratuitously violent or anything. A little dark, but you expect that from the title.
Yeah, this was not nearly as bad as the title led me to expect. It’s definitely grim, but not graphic. It’s also quite good in my opinion.
A pretty tame great-great-grandbaby of the Lottery and similar.
It’s slightly unsettling and really slickly executed. I admire the craft that went into it. Almost New Yorkery.
i was surprised by the ending – i thought there would be more of a twist… did i miss something? but no, don’t see the controversy at all.
Now we’ve established what horror enthusiasts make of the story, let’s delve into the twilight zone that is Samuel Collingwood Smith’s comment section…
This month’s main story is “When the Grey Gargoyle Strikes!” After some more scenes of Don Blake/Thor pining over Jane, we get a new villain: French chemist Duval, who turned his hand to stone in a laboratory accident (“Ohh! I have carelessly spilled the potion on my hand!”) Not only is this appendage permanently made of rock, but anything it touches – except, conveniently, Duval’s glove – is similarly turned to stone for half an hour. With this trick up his sleeve, Duval is able to both petrify his victims and transform himself into a stony-skinned supervillain, with the ultimate aim of stealing Thor’s hammer and obtaining immortality – this is, I believe, the first time the comic has established that the weapon gives the user longevity.
