Of Influences, Magical Realism, and the Uncanny

Dean was recently relating how surprised he was at the number of science-fiction stories that have been submitted for his spec fic antho.

At the onset, so was I. After all, given our Eastern culture and mindset-- despite our Western upbringing-- I would have thought our spec fic literature would veer more towards the fantastical. And in spite of local literature's fascination (almost obsession) with social commentary, one of the strongest aspects of our literature is still magical realism.

But then again, I later thought I wasn't really all that surprised. After all, nobody can really tell what influences will go into our writing and how it will affect us.

Personally, I read a lot of genre fantasy (read: epic and sword-and-sorcery) so these used to translate a bit into writing. However, my first forays into short stories tended to veer into horror and contemporary fantasy-- and sometimes in-between, the hallmarks of the interstitial and slipstream literature.

In this, I attribute to my earlier readings of Stephen King, the master of what Matt Cheney says is:

his knack for portraying the psyche of a certain part of contemporary American culture (which he does, I think, far better than a number of contemporary novelists who have been lauded for doing exactly that), his ability when he is writing at his best to create tremendous narrative momentum, his ability to evoke rural American settings that feel half like home-grown myths and half like reality, etc.

Or, as Elizabeth Hand says: "The secret of King's success is not that he writes so well about monsters and ghosts, but that he writes so persuasively about us."

It was a friend, while talking about horror writer Shirley Jackson, who told me that the feeling of the "odd and macabre" in everyday life-- that aspect of "strangeness" in normalcy that we cannot explain-- is the uncanny.

Serendipitously enough-- see, I'm seeing the patterns here!-- it was also the same friend who related to me the reason for the strong thread of magical realism in our literature given our folklore of magic and monsters. For those who've lived all their lives in the cities (like me), these things are just stories. But for those who come from the provinces, they're as real as you or me. As a friend once told me before, Well, it's one thing to see these things from afar. It's another to be directly affected by them.

And that, I think, is what informs-- and influences-- my writings.