Hey, hey, hey, Laurell K Hamilton has been evicted from her rooms at Romance Bontique. She's scraping a living down in Pornville these days. I hear she sits by the kerbside with a sign that reads "will write orgies for food."

I had a look in the Horror section of Borders the other day, and I hadn't realised how dire things had got. It's down to half a rack of shelves, then it morphs straight into crime. It's tragic really.

It's tragic. Friday I went around Borders, Waterstone's, and Blackwell's (which no longer has a separate horror section, if indeed it ever had) looking for the new Ramsey Campbell novel and it was nowhere to be found. Considering that he's one of the most highly-rated British horror authors of the last twenty years, it's depressing that you can't find *any* of his books in a bookshop these days.

And Brian Lumley gets far, far too much shelf space.

I'm not really a fan of horror, I must admit. It's either risible - in which case I don't see the point - or genuinely disturbing and then I'm unhappy. I'm quite into Victorian ghost stories and Poe though... although they don't really count do they? I read some Baker when I was younger but I thought they were fantasy.

Poe and Victorian ghost stories count as horror in the same way that classic novels about people falling in love count as romance novels: they technically fall within the same genre, and indeed provided its inception, but they are the sort of thing which will always always always remain in print - the genre isn't really alive and kicking if it consists of a bunch of dead guys and one or two average-to-poor hacks.

Did you just deliberately go out there and hammer on all my buttons? I get so unbelievably stressed out when people try to link classic novels with people who happen to fall in love with them directly to the romance genre as it exists today. It makes me want to scream and jump up and down and throw things and break things. I got into a huge bitter argument about it on the internet quite recently which only ended when I remembered my life was too short to waste it. I understand what you mean, though, it was a good analogy.

Yeah, that's what the analogy was driving at: there's a big leap between horror fiction as we know it and classic fiction where people get scared by ghosts and big black birds. I think in both cases, the most solid connection is the marketing: modern authors and their publishers do love to imagine they're the inheritors of a distinguished literary lineage, although (at least in the case of horror) it's more a case of raiding the lineage's crumbling highland castle, making off with the silverwear, and pretending you inherited it whenever anyone asks you about it.

I think the big problem is that when all's said and done "genre" is as much a convenient label cooked up by publishers to help sell books as it is a concoction of fans trying to give a name to a type of fiction they're enthusiastic about. The definition of "romance" or "horror" or "classic literature" or whatever ends up being a choice between the publisher's definition, which can fly in the face of reality, or the fan's definition, which tends to be either impossibly restrictive or universe-encompassingly broad.