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While I certainly understand the position of authors who do not wish to be labelled in any way, shape or form, I personally take pride in calling myself a horror writer, and am happy to be known as such.

Now, I don't think of genre or categorization when I sit down to write a story, but everything I've written since I was able to hold a pencil has touched upon at least some of the myriad themes of horror fiction. For me, it's not about working slavishly with any particular formula, it is writing about reality as I see it...or, in the case of purely supernatural horror, as I speculate at the way reality might be.

If authors wish to have the label Horror stripped from the spines of their books, that is entirely their choice and I respect their decision to do so. I have no desire to see that happen with my own work, however.

Rather than shying away from the word horror, I would rather see publishers and booksellers embracing the diversity and breadth of dark litetature. I wonder how the book-buying public would feel about horror if they saw a large section in the bookstore that contained not only the authors one would expect to find there, but also Shakespeare's Macbeth, the tragedies of Aeschylus, the poems of Baudelaire?

Best,
Richard