There’s been a lot of discourse on gore of late in this blog, but not much about sex. Maybe that’s because it’s a ‘touchy’ subject (pun intended)? It certainly appears to be so in the world of book marketing, in my experience, and that’s what I’m taking exception to today.

To my knowledge, there’s really no such thing as ‘horrotica for prudes’ (unless someone out there has rudely invented that subgenre without informing me) – but perhaps we’re going to need such a subgenre in the future. In case you don’t already know, Erotic Horror, or ‘Horrotica’ as some have dubbed it, is a subgenre of Horror that’s – well, basically a sexy hot mess at times, though some do it more artfully than that. But it can still get quite gory in any case (hopefully, justifiably so, as CW stipulated in his recent posts on gore in horror literature), and can still be quite horrible. My own Horrotica novel Canny Danny (written under my Gerhard Dennis pen name) is all of the above, but I think/hope I did it artfully.

Granted, certain works of literary fiction can verge on outright pornography, especially in genres like Erotica, Horrotica, Extreme Horror, Bizarro, etc.; I acknowledge that there’s a fine line there that can be easy to cross. But numerous well-regarded authors, dating back at least to the early nineteenth century, have occasionally straddled that line – though where exactly that line is isn’t well defined. As a certain judge once famously asserted, does one simply know pornography when one sees it, even if one can’t unequivocally define it? Again, I’ll reiterate what CW said about relevance; if the sex (like the gore) is relevant and furthers the story, then I think it’s okay. However, I should also add that I think the ‘shock & awe’ factor should be considered for Horror; after all, why do we read Horror if not to be shocked and awed – not only for the pleasure we derive from the experience, but perhaps also because we might learn something about ourselves or our world (as with the problem of existential angst that CW wrote of). Just as one man’s trash can be another man’s treasure, could one reader’s ‘gratuitous’ sex (or gore) be another reader’s salvation?

Regardless of how artful or artless a work of erotic fiction may be, what has brought me back to my Festivus Pole today and stood me on this teetering soapbox is the pervasive bias against virtually all flavors of Erotica at many book marketing portals. For example, Amazon won’t let me use AMS auction ads to promote Canny Danny, and they also won’t promote it internally. Why? Because it’s billed as Horrotica, it contains explicit scenes, and they think the book cover is salacious. But I happen to think the cover is an admirable work of art, and I refuse to change it (much less the content of the story). Most BookFunnel promotions also specify ‘no erotica’ and ‘no suggestive covers’, and paid book promotion sites and social media sites often have similar advertising restrictions (though in fairness, not all of them). However, I’ve so far been able to skirt this issue with my Horror Sci-Fi Toilet Bot Diaries novella series. Although they do contain prurient scenes, neither Cloacina Maxima (the first entry) nor Cloacina Renata (the second entry, which just dropped) have ostensibly ‘salacious’ covers; I haven’t put them in any ‘erotica’ categories at Amazon; and I’ve cleverly used the word ‘risqué’ in place of the word ‘erotic’ in blurbs and keywords (the gatekeepers’ bots haven’t been smart enough to pick up on that so far, luckily for me).

But it annoys me that I have to sneak around like that when violence of all stripes, on the other hand, is just fine and dandy. If my book was about children killing other children, for example (as in the immensely popular Hunger Games series), none of the gatekeepers would have a problem with that nowadays. And if it was about serial killers, assassins, gangsters, spies, soldiers, vigilantes – or monsters – etc. killing or torturing people, again no problem; and the more guns, the merrier! Book covers featuring two scantily clad people almost kissing still seem to be permissible; but if there’s any hint of bare breasts (female, of course, not male) on a book’s cover or explicit sex within its pages – well Good God, we can’t have that, no sirree! Imagine if those children in The Hunger Games had boffed one another in the woods throughout that series instead of killing each other, with the winner being the one who did the most/best boffing – what an outrage that would have been! That’s sinful, don’t you know, and there are Commandments about that sort of behavior! What’s that? Oh, that one that says ‘thou shalt not kill’? Well, let’s not talk about that one.

But as John Mellencamp sang, ain’t that America? I know we’re a more permissive society than we used to be in many ways – but too many of our citizens are still hypocritical Puritanical reactionaries who think sex is way worse than violence (unless they’re the ones having the sex). And as a culture, we don’t just passively condone said violence, we actively promote it, through books, films, our gun love, and so on. Our National Anthem itself glorifies war, with its ‘rockets’ red glare, bombs bursting in air’ and ‘conquer we must, when our cause it is just’ sentiments (fourth verse; yes, there really are four). But I don’t want to get too political here; so, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, that’s all I have to say about that.

The bottom line? I guess I just wish people (specifically in this case, the book marketing gatekeepers) would stop harassing us artists for what I think is no good reason, and let the audience decide what’s ‘art’ and what’s not. Certain forms of pornography are illegal, and for good reason (like protecting innocent children from involuntary sexual exploitation); but what about legal erotica that straddles that mythical line between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ (such as Lolita, to invoke a famous example)? Like the comedic doctor who says ‘then don’t do that’ when a patient complains about feeling pain when he/she does something, I say if you don’t like the cover and/or content of a book, then don’t buy it and don’t read it. But don’t impose your beliefs on others and try to prevent them from buying it and reading it by actively restricting them from doing so – which I think is akin to censorship and book-banning. It’s hard enough, especially for us indie authors, to market niche books without having to jump through this particular hoop on top of all the others. Yes, but what about the risk of exposing our impressionable youngsters to what we consider pornography if we relax those restrictions, you might ask? Oh, you mean the children who are listening to rap/hip-hop music that’s full of expletives, sexual references, and misogyny, and watching whatever they want on YouTube and TikTok, because their parents are too self-absorbed to pay attention to what they’re doing and supervise them? Are those the kids you’re talking about?  

And that’s all I have to say about that as well. Whether or not you agree with me, I hope you were at least entertained by this post. Happy Halloween, best wishes for more book sales – and like Andy Warhol said, while people are arguing about whether your art is good or bad, make more art.

– Garrett (aka Gerhard for this post)

P.S. Before I go, since I mentioned book covers, I’d like to give a shout-out to Adriana Merchak Designs – so I will! 🙂 A couple of the covers that Adriana and her sister Andrea have made for me are shown below, and I think they did a great job with them. The third image is the cover of a good book to start with if you’re curious and would like to sample some ‘literary’ Horrotica (as opposed to some of the zanier stuff that’s out there – perhaps mine included).

P.P.S. The story of how I got into writing Horrotica might amuse you (or it might not, so I decided to stick it here at the end of the post instead of going off on a tangent in the middle). As Garrett Dennis, I initially wrote relatively ‘clean’ coastal mystery/adventure tales (my Storm Ketchum Adventures series). I enjoyed doing that, but a few years ago I got an itch to try something different. I’ve always had eclectic tastes in reading, and a couple of horror writer acquaintances were coincidentally creating a series of multi-author short story anthologies at the time. One particular call for submissions caught my fancy; for that anthology, they said they wanted horror stories containing ‘adult situations’ and ‘depravity’, which translated as ‘perverted sexy horror’ to me. This appealed to me because it was almost a polar opposite of what I’d previously written. So, I wrote a short story (It is Born, 8000 words) as ‘Gerhard Dennis’ (to avoid scandalizing my Garrett Dennis readers) that I thought fit the bill and submitted it. Long story short, it was rejected, and when I later read that anthology I understood why. I’d given them what I’d thought they’d asked for, but what they’d really wanted was ‘artsy-fartsy’, slightly risqué horror (either that, or maybe they were just chickenshit). In any case, artsy-fartsy is what those watered-down stories turned out to be, and I found them boring. But rather than giving up, I reacted to the perceived slight by expanding that short story into a 140,000-word Horrotica novel, and that’s how Canny Danny was born. So let that be a lesson to y’all – if you piss me off, you might end up with a whole lot more of whatever it was you didn’t like. 🙂