Criticism: a Conversation with Zach Gillan

I have summoned Zach Gillan, horror reviewer and editor with Ancillary Review of Books, to defend his criticism from critics. 

IG: How do writers and readers benefit from criticism? Do they still benefit if they disagree with you?

ZG: I’m a reader, first and foremost, and criticism, for me, is primarily a way to hone that practice and force myself to reflect coherently and systematically on what I’m reading. Writing criticism helps me to work toward clarity about what I’m finding and enjoying (or not!) in certain pieces and usually helps me bring out sub- or intertextual aspects in a legible way. As someone who doesn’t write fiction, it feels, oftentimes, like a flailing attempt to understand how and why fiction does what it does, in general, and in particular how the weird/horrific elements that speak to me are brought to bear in a text. It’s a tradition that doesn’t get as much critical attention as it deserves, and so a lot of the time I’m just channeling Toni Morrison’s dictum that if there’s something you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. My academic background is in history, so I fear sometimes that I’m just slowly and somewhat-publicly piecing together an undergrad lit degree. 

I do think that taking in and reflecting on other people’s criticism and reflections is important, and I’d love to think that other people get some value out of the critical writing that I produce out of that thinking process. I have doubts about whether that’s realistic, so maybe it is, all in all, a selfish exercise for my own edification. Either way, in general I think it’s good for a field of writing, particularly one as niche as weird fiction (or weird horror, or just horror, or whatever you want to call it) to have people taking it seriously as an art form that’s worthy of deep consideration. I think that pertains to disagreements just as much as agreements - weird fiction opens up a lot of interpretative space for its readers, and figuring out different ways to fill that space is part of the fun.

As for writers benefiting from criticism, and interpreting “writers” as artists writing fiction rather than critics writing criticism, I’m a little hesitant to speak for you all, not being one myself. I have to think it’s gratifying to have your work receive close attention/interpretation, and I have had a person or two tell me I’ve really gotten what they’re trying to do, or that they’ve been pondering some analysis of mine while working on new work. That’s incredibly gratifying for me, although saying it’s a benefit for writers feels a little too self-aggrandizing. So let’s turn the tables: do you like reading criticism, in general and/or regarding your own work?

IG: There hasn’t been much criticism written about any of my stories, as far as I know. But on those few occasions there have been, whether it was positive or negative, it did help me understand what I was doing. Carl Jung said something along the lines of “Trying to interpret your own dream is like trying to see the back of your own head.” And stories are dreams. Sometimes it’s helpful when someone else can see them more objectively, though I imagine there’s a saturation point. In some cases, artists have been so crushed by criticism, it caused them to produce less. For example, one of my favorite movies is Fire Walk With Me, and it amazes me that it received such negative reviews when it was released. I think that had an impact on future Lynch projects. 

Another question: I never fully understand Twitter conflicts because I am very boring, but about a month or so ago (ten years in internet time), you found yourself in the midst of an online argument about cozy horror. What was that about? 

ZG: An area where it’s better to be boring and disengaged, in all honesty. The argument, which was so all over the place that it’s hard to even summarize, was about whether horror can be cozy, or if that’s a contradiction in terms. My chief contribution was in saying that if a narrative has a happy ending, it isn’t a work of horror. A lot of people were displeased with that assertion.

The problem with the discussion, as with most on twitter, was that very few people defined the terms they were using or laid out their arguments with much clarity, and so you had people insisting that horror was cozy because they personally found satisfaction in watching gory films, other people insisting that no, horror was cozy because domestic ghost stories have a long and productive history, other people insisting that no, saying anything isn’t horror is gatekeeping (which seems to me to be an utterly meaningless term at this point). It’s argument-as-non-sequitur, really.

For my part, “cozy horror” pertains to a certain strain of recent work that takes some tropes or imagery from mainstream horror and uses it to reassure and comfort the reader. Horror, in my eyes, rests on a bedrock insistence on unsettlement, and so “cozy” and “horror” are anathema. Maybe that emphasis on the work itself, and what the author intended, textually, make me a bit of a formalist, but I do think it’s, by necessity, a totally different conversation from the one about people finding comfort or enjoyment in discomforting works. Either way I don’t think it has anything to do with whether or not someone should enjoy those new “cozy horror” stories (although I don’t), or whether or not a writer should write them; it’s critically discussing the boundaries of what the genre does or is, not providing any sort of value judgment about someone’s enjoyment of a particular work. 

I was surprised by how many people were annoyed at this kind of critical genre theorizing - is it something that you think is fruitful, or a distraction from the work itself? You and I have discussed a bit before about our sideways journeys into and around genre work, so I’ll follow that up here and ask: what do you think it is that makes something horror? Do you make a distinction between horror and weird fiction, or care where critics place your work between the two? “Hitchcock,” for example, seems more horrifically-minded to me than many of your glass stories, which strike me more as weird, but do you distinguish between them that way? 

IG: I'm not the right person to ask about which direction the genre should take. I think most people prefer some subgenres to others and don't want to see their least favorite subgenres winning all the awards and selling all the copies. This makes people feel like they've been shut out. That's one problem with arts competitions, I think...they can create a false sense of scarcity and pit artists against each other over work that can't be easily compared. 

Criticism is important to me. It helps me notice new details about stories and think about big picture issues. I enjoy reading analysis of my favorite and least favorite work (including creepy fan theories!). As long as it feels like a game, a weaving of perspectives among other perspectives, then it's fun. 

Many writers in the horror space have been horror fans since childhood, but this isn't true for me. I still have a lot of gaps in my knowledge of horror. So I don't think of myself as a horror writer. I've come to love a lot of horror, though, and I really appreciate that horror writers have made me feel like I belong in the community. I occasionally write stories that are darker and more subversive, but most of what I write is more absurd and dreamlike. I'm taking inspiration from the Kafka branch of the family tree more than the Poe branch (though I also love reading Poe). I think that still leaves most of my work in the weird subgenre. But I don’t think it’s important to me how people classify it. 

There are many other branches on the tree to fall under, too, and some writers probably don't fall under any of them. But I'm fine with whoever wants to join the party. As long as they're tolerant, then I'm tolerant. 

Are you generally open to counterarguments? Were there any in this case that you found persuasive? 

ZG: Absolutely - if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s doubting myself, and someone disagreeing with me is just proof that I was right to do so. With the discussion about happy endings in horror, a lot of people threw big mainstream movies at me (typically in a kind of “what about Jaws, you IDIOT” kind of way) that I’m perfectly content to think of as thrillers or action movies and not horror-qua-horror, but Max Cairnduff gave the very interesting counter-example of Jacob’s Ladder, which raises the question of how much a last-minute twist can re-write the generic character of an entire film. Other people pushed back productively about protagonists changing in ways that the reader might find horrific but provided catharsis or transcendence for the characters. I definitely love counterarguments like that, it’s all more fodder for the practice of reading well.

Horror-qua-horror is kind of a silly phrase, but I haven’t come up with anything better yet. There’s an occasional tendency among some music critics to distinguish between “death metal” and a more specific “metal of death,” which is even sillier, but getting at the same kind of generic distillation that I’m grasping for here with a differentiation between horror-as-set-piece and a more all-encompassing horror-as-narrative. It might be a Deleuzian “major horror” vs “minor horror” thing, but I’m not versed enough in Deleuze yet to make that a meaningful argument (there’s that flailing-toward-a-fake-lit-degree thing again - I need to go back to Michael Cisco’s Weird Fiction with that distinction in mind). I think of myself, really, as more of a weird fiction guy than a horror guy, having also not been a horror fan since childhood, and maybe I need to lean into that in order to make this distinction that I want to and which these counterarguments are pushing me toward.

I did find it fascinating that so much of the discussion defaulted to film, which is not my thing, and very little was about short stories, which is very much my thing, so even in that regard the counterarguments seemed fruitful to me in thinking about why people automatically assume horror=film, in a way that I’m not sure they would for fantasy or science fiction.

IG: Deleuze? I’ll Wikipedia this person later. In the meantime, is there a way for us all to discuss differences of opinion without making it personal and/or taking it personally? Any ideas?

Good faith and community go a long way. Plenty of people I know and like disagreed with me on the cozy/happy endings discussion, and I hadn’t really reflected until now on the fact that it tended to be people I already knew who wanted to discuss things fruitfully, as opposed to strangers who glommed on to rant in a kind of meaningless way. It does seem that we’re maybe at a tipping point where the huge, anything-goes-from-anyone field of Twitter et al is moving back to a more segmented, hopefully community-oriented internet. We’ll see.

Critically discussing art is fun, and should be fun and meaningful, and disagreement and critical judgment is just as important a facet of that as agreement. I’ve said many times before that being able to dissect why you dislike things is just as important as being able to enthuse about things you do like, and taking those critiques in stride from other people is part of being an adult able to talk about art in a mature way, I would think. 

IG: What are some pieces of criticism you’ve written that you can point us to? And can you tell us about Ancillary Review of Books?

ZG: My brain, unfortunately, defaults to a withering auto-critique and dismissal of everything I’ve written once it’s out of my hands, but some books that I think deserve more attention, and my reviews of which I’m not completely humiliated about, are Kay Chronister’s Desert Creatures (https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2022/12/23/the-whole-land-shall-be-a-desolation-yet-will-i-not-make-a-full-end-kay-chronisters-liminal-desert-creatures/) and Jonathan Raab’s The Secret Goatman Spookshow and Other Psychological Warfare Operations (https://www.seizethepress.com/2023/01/19/gillan-secret-goatman-spookshow-review-6/). Stories of the Eye, an anthology edited by Joe Koch and Sam Richard (https://ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2023/04/20/the-church-of-fakes-reproduces-fakes-review-of-stories-of-the-eye/), gave me an opportunity to both write about some excellent stories and sketch out some ideas about genre, which I enjoy a lot (as is probably obvious by now), while Sue Rainsford’s Redder Days (http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/redder-days-by-sue-rainsford/) was an interesting exercise in figuring out how to write about a difficult work I respected a lot without enjoying all that much. 

Ancillary Review of Books was founded in 2020 as a home for online criticism of genre literature with an eye toward utopian impulses and radical possibilities. I joined the editorial collective in late 2021, and Casella Brookins is the current publisher. We publish short reviews of recent releases and longer essays about a variety of topics,  and it tends to be academically-minded but written for a general audience as much as possible (I would say, if I hated myself, that we try to avoid gatekeeping). We send out a monthly call for review pitches, and are always looking for new writers to join us! 

Thanks for the criticism, Zach!