A week ago today, Kit Reed, Mike Allen, Adam Golaski, Barry Malzberg, Kathryn Cramer, and Peter Straub (who can all be seen in that order in the clips below) took part in the Readercon panel, “Down There in the Gutter: The Fiction of the Unpleasant,” and I was in the front row recording it with my Flip MinoHD.

Here’s how the panel was described in the program book:

In a recent online essay, Peter Straub argues that the only difference between the best horror and “literary” fiction is that the former acknowledges that life is dominated by unpleasantness, by “crappy, low-rent feeling states.” But in making this argument he mentions neither fear nor disgust (the staples of genre horror) but shame, loss, envy, panic, greed, insecurity, and loneliness. There’s no question that we are oddly hardwired to enjoy fear when we intellectually recognize that there is no actual threat. There is, however, much less of a case to be made for the vicarious enjoyment of the other emotional states that Straub lists, so it is harder to see them functioning in a story the same way fear does in genre horror. Is Straub here in fact defining a new literary subgenre entirely, one that just happens to include (but is hardly limited to) the best of horror? If so, can we trace the history of this secret genre and its influence on and interaction with more conventional literary fiction?

Here are the three best chunks from that 55-minute hour.

To give you some idea as to how slow my DSL is out here in the back of beyond, it took six hours and 57 minutes to upload the 2.022 gigabytes that make up this 30 minutes and 30 seconds of video. But I’m sure you’ll agree that to listen to a bunch of big brains like these, it was worth it!