Kill the Animals

I recently saw a grotesque missive from a major horror fiction influencer. It was a diatribe decrying animal death in fiction. It was even described, if you can believe it, as a petition.

I was shocked the first time I saw this attitude. Nearly twenty years ago I was reading Amazon reviews for Preston and Child's White Fire, which is one of my favorites in the Pendergast series. A review was enraged because a home intruder killed a guard dog.

I honestly thought it was a joke. All the graphic human bloodshed in that book and this person was incensed by the death of a dog?

I don't have to tell you how impressionable people have become in the social media age. Pavlovian behavior abounds. Six Seven, anyone?

Now it's rampant. I see people squealing in outrage and panic when an animal dies in fiction. I've gotten to the point where I cheer when I see it.

Do I love animals less than them? Perhaps, but I spend hundreds of dollars a month feeding our feral cat colony. We've trapped, neutered and released a lot of cats at our own expense. We build shelters for them. Inside we have four rescue cats from our neighborhood and we dote on them. Our lives resolve around cats and I love them all.

In book I recently read, a street sweeper with a mind of its own sucked up a cat. I laughed, because it's a funny image. If I saw it in real life, I'd be traumatized.

I love Friday the 13th, but if I saw someone beheaded or getting their throat cut, I would probably faint.

It's called fiction. We, horror fans like me, deal with the heartbreak of life through fiction.

The outraged Instagrammers went so far as to call out and shame writer Nick Cutter for the content of his writing.

Yeah, eat brains, rape babies, and drown people in vomit all in the name of extreme fiction, but for God's sake leave Bowser alone.

You know what it reminds me of? Silent Night, Deadly Night. The Mommies came out in 1984 and protested in outrage that their precious Santy Claus was a killer. The studios caved in and pulled the movie from distribution.

It was despicable then and it's despicable now.

I do get it. To a point. I am not very comfortable with graphic rape scenes. I would never in a million years try to tell writers they shouldn't use it in their fiction. I've seen gifted writers vividly portray rape in order to convey the horror of the act. Skipp and Spector's The Cleanup comes to mind. I respect it, but it's hard for me to take.

I am also sick unto death of pointless extreme horror. I find it boring, but again, I wouldn't dream of trying to pressure people out of writing it.

The very notion that horror fiction should be safe, sterile, predictable, is offensive in itself. We should be triggered, challenged, shaken up out of our stupors.

I haven't looked back to see how the petition is going. I have no stomach for it. I only hope that no writers censor themselves to placate today's breed of Mommy.

Written by Mark Sieber