Primary voting day; puts me in mind of other votes and their supporting demographics.
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King, his sequel to The Shining, won this year’s Stoker Award. It is about the little boy Danny’s subsequent life in which he becomes a palliative care nurse on the terminal ward who eases his patients into death using his psychic ability. His shine is the light they go to.
Many complain it is fragmented and confusing. I take that to mean it is too difficult for them to follow due to a lack of hand-holding in the narrative’s connective tissue.
They are sub-literate. Reading is in steep decline.
Many said King’s Joyland, a much less ambitious, much shallower, and much more clichéd book, should have won. This reflects their declining abilities. More YA novels, less challenging to read if often intense and creative in content, are cropping up on award lists and winning main honors too.
Another old geezer complaint I have is that award juries and committees are ever less aware of their given genre’s history. What’s new and exciting to them is old hat to those of us who take the reading and its history seriously. In horror you get experts in, say, vampires who have never read Dracula by Bram Stoker, whose name graces their award, and who may well find actual reading of it difficult.
I’ve seen complaints that Dickens, Poe, Stoker, and even Lovecraft prove “too dense, unreadable,” and “as impenetrable as Shakespeare”. Those making such complaints are serious on many levels and increasingly common in genre discussions and organizations.
In science fiction, already few know Harlan Ellison’s work, even as they yap about his antics.
This spate of superficial readers have been weaned on the thin gruel of best-sellers written to 4th-to-6th grade reading levels for maximum LCD reader reach. That is calculated as about the complexity, subtlety, and sophistication the general book-buying public can comfortably handle.
And here am I primed to write better stuff than my potential readership habitually buys and reads. Lucky me.
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