Horror in Sword & Sorcery
And the writerly dread of AI
Hey friend, with NECON 42 starting this Thursday — NECON is a really great, laidback convention for horror writers that I try to attend every year — I wanted to share my notes from last year’s discussion panels. Hoping it will help and inspire you the way I felt inspired.
Today I’ll share notes from two NECON 41 panels, one about horror in sword & sorcery and the other about AI’s effect on publishing, with context and my thoughts in bold. Any omissions of important stuff or misinterpretations are on me, of course!
“Bloody Swords & Dark Magic: Horror Elements in Swords & Sorcery”
Panelists: Gerald Coleman, Craig Shaw Gardner, Paul McNamee, Darrell Schweitzer, Mike Squatrito, Morgan Sylvia, Trisha Wooldridge (Moderator)
Trisha said that horror is an emotion rather than necessarily a genre. [This is a favorite and ongoing topic in the horror writing community… does horror stand on its own as a genre or is it more of an element across genres? Trish was pointing out here that horror as an emotion can be injected into sword and sorcery fantasy to enrich it.]
Morgan mentioned two favorite examples of fantasy blended with horror: Tanith Lee’s demonic fairy tales and C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire trilogy.
Paul defined the sword & sorcery subgenre of fantasy as fantasy rooted in horror. Related to Trish’s point, he mentioned that when a fantasy writer is showing a horrific monster, they have to sell the emotion of horror to the reader in order for the monster to have an impact.
Trish defined sword & sorcery as the “adventure” level of fantasy, often involving melee (fights) and magic. [Some classic examples of sword & sorcery fantasy are Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser series, Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian series, and obviously Dungeons & Dragons!] Whereas epic fantasy takes place on a grander scale, with gods and demigods coming after you. “High” fantasy might involve politics? [My notes seem to be leaving something out here, but epic fantasy and high fantasy are often synonymous terms.]
Paul pointed out that Elric of Melniboné, Michael Moorcock’s sword & sorcery hero (or rather, antihero), is an example of the subgenre mixing horror and fantasy to tragic effect (rather than the more lighthearted examples such as Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser). Elric damns himself to achieve his goals. [Through a pact with Arioch, the Duke of Hell, as well as through the magical sword Stormbringer.]
Morgan brought up a similar though less obvious pact with a weapon, in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series: the young character Arya becomes the master of using a small, thin blade called Needle, but in the process, Needle also masters her, transforming her over time. [From the daughter of nobility to a ruthless killer.]
Morgan also mentioned Gene Wolfe’s fantasy work The Shadow of the Torturer as another example of this transformation: the sword transforms the torturer, Severian. Just as the sword itself was transformed from rocks and minerals into a weapon of murder — and just as the sword can transform its victims, from living people into corpses.
Gerald talked about how calling upon the Duke of Hell for help transforms Elric [my notes are missing more specific information — clearly I need to actually read the Elric saga! But there’s always a cost to pacts with demons].
Gerald also mentioned the book Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff (which was adapted into an HBO series); the book is not sword & sorcery, but horror with fantasy elements (and obviously in response to H.P. Lovecraft). The scene where a cop is closely following the main characters, who are Black in the era of segregation, and hoping to catch them after sundown is horror but ripped straight from history. [See sundown towns for more info on this awful North American legacy… one of the first examples originated in New Hampshire!]
Trish brought up the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance as two examples of sword-and-sorcery Dungeons & Dragons settings, where horror is commonly incorporated as an element. Not just monsters like zombies, vampires, werewolves, etc. who are staples of horror fiction, but also more existential horror: in these worlds, gods can die. You might even have to take their place! [An example from the Forgotten Realms, as highlighted in the game Baldur’s Gate 3: the gods Myrkul, Bane, and Bhaal were all once mortals.]
Morgan commented on the horror of lost civilizations and mass extinctions: sword & sorcery settings in novels and games frequently incorporate cyclical civilizations. The society through which the heroes travel is often built on the ruins of more ancient ones, leading to underground labyrinths and caves for the heroes to explore.
[The horror of losing our own civilization someday, to be buried in progressively deeper layers, comes to my mind as a subtext when thinking about these fantasy settings, though in the text itself it’s not usually played for horror — unless there’s a character who has magically survived from that lost era and is mourning their people.
OK, this also makes me think of the Lovecraft story “The Rats in the Walls,” in which getting to the root of a problem in an old estate involves traveling down through successively older civilizations. Trigger warning, the story contains an offensive racial slur.]
Darrell brought up the Roger Zelazny novel Jack of Shadows, in which the world is half light and half dark. [And respectively, half science and half magic.] He mentioned that in fantasy, you can shape the world as you please, including creating a literal underworld where the dead go, which creates interesting possibilities for horror elements.
Paul recommended readers check out James A. Moore’s The Tides of War for a sword & sorcery story incorporating horror — he described it as having a Howardian hero standing up to the gods. [Jim Moore passed away this past March; he was a NECON regular.]
Bear in mind for this next one that it’s from a year ago, but seems to hold true despite AI’s rapid evolution (or mutation).
“The Coming AI Publishing Apocalypse (Doomsday Preppers Division)”
Panelists: Salvantonio Clemente, Mark Eshbaugh, Patrick Freivald, Nicholas Kaufmann (Moderator), Jamie Levine, Lori Perkins
Patrick mentioned having an author friend who uses AI to edit books and to suggest placement of story beats to keep the reader interested.
Lori said that a client with grammar issues could run their draft through AI and then have it edited from there.
Patrick pointed out that the more formulaic a story is, the easier it will be for AI to replicate. That kind of writing could be endangered by AI, because it can be processed by algorithms and then spit back out in a slightly different form. But he predicted small presses will flourish because some readers want to feel a personal connection with the author.
[It’s interesting to think about what type of publishing encourages “formulaic” writing — my own take is that both the big traditional publishers and self-published authors can end up wanting to produce titles that follow the formula of a previous successful book. But no matter the size of the publishing operations, there will always be authors stubborn about following their own path rather than a formula/tropes. Can be more difficult to make money that way, though.]
Jamie made a correlation between nonfiction ghostwriters and AI assisting writers, that in that sense a writer having help is not a new phenomenon.
Lori focused on the larger world of nonfiction, saying that the type of journalism that will survive into the future will include strongly personal essays and strong voices — while human-written quizzes, rote news pieces, and so forth would die out because AI can more easily complete those tasks.
And she predicted that the division between art and commerce will become more pronounced and apparent.
Mark agreed with this, observing that AI has a hard time with personal and persuasive writing. But then he asked, “Is this the death of style?” [Because AI will fill more writing roles, that is. I think as that happens, human style may indeed become more rarified but will also become more valuable. A year later many of us can already identify the dull AI “style” of writing when someone is trying to sneak it into a post or essay…]
Sal expressed his worries about the demise of human-to-human communication. [I still feel that it’s hard to imagine human in-person interaction going away completely, at least with the generations that have grown up with it as the norm. Perhaps there will someday be a generation only comfortable with machine-mediated communication with others… but I can’t picture it. What do you think?]
Jeff Deck is an author and novel coach. See his bio to get your free quick-start novel writing guide. And get his comprehensive course “Author Activator: Write Your 1st Novel in the Next 90 Days or Less!” at the following link: https://resources.jeffdeck.com/sales-page-1493
