I was going to try to write a fairly scholarly, objective blog post about some of the interesting and highly entertaining fiction and film that comes out of pairing horror with other genres. I could think of plenty of movies - for instance, several horror and comedy titles sprang promptly to mind ("Shaun of the Dead" being a prime example of comedy with horror, and the '99 version of "The House on Haunted Hill" being a prime example of horror with comedy), but I couldn't think of any comedic horror novels off the top of my head.

Horror and SF are the peanut butter cups of fiction - two great genres that go great together - and some of the best and most iconic authors, books, and stories fall firmly into the horror/sf camp! What's more, it's a combo genre that's rife with crossover potential for TV and movies. What's not to love?

The darkness of horror's exploration of the dreadful may at first seem like an odd companion for the brightness of sf's exploration of the possible (at least if you're a Trek fan like myself), but they can be seen as two sides of the same coin: there is hope inherent in scientific discovery but there is also the potential for ever greater disaster and new, as-yet unimagined terrors. Beyond this, though, can be seen a deeper thread binding the two genres: "There is something going on here beyond anxieties about science. It is the theme...of the incursion of the irrational into an apparently calm and ordered venue - an intrusion that in the real world we all fear with good reason" (Clute and Nichols).

Now that I'm thinking about horror this way, of course, the floodgates have opened and I've got more authors in mind than I could possibly talk about, so instead I'm going to focus on a couple of the best that may not be as widely known as, say, Michael Crichton or Dean Koontz. Many of them have made the transition to television and/or film, as well, and if they haven't they should.

First on the list is a sleeper of a book that's not only genre blurring but also one of the few Lovecraft-inspired stories I've actually liked, and although it's not technically sf, there's something about the nerdy protagonist that makes it feel right to include here. (Besides, Lovecraft himself is often regarded as a horror/sf writer, which is a little meta, but still.) "Résumé With Monsters," by William Browning Spencer, combines Cthulhu mythos horror with a wry humor, romance, and generalized late-20^th -Century angst: It's "Office Space" meets "The Nameless City." In the novel, Philip Kenan, a middle-aged typesetter, is trying to regain the trust of the woman he loves while simultaneously becoming more and more convinced that the Great Old Ones have resurfaced in Austin, Texas. What makes the novel such a treasure is the juxtaposition of mounting dread and subtle humor, which elevates the neurotic wage-slave to the level of epic hero. Sadly this novel has yet to be produced for the small or large screen, but I like to think it could still happen.

My favorite relatively unsung superstar of horror/sf by far is Richard Matheson, whose first short story blending these genres, "Born of Man and Woman," appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1950. This disturbing and unforgettable tale is told in broken English by a mutant child and is considered such a classic that it was included in the collection "Science Fiction Hall of Fame: The Greatest Science Fiction Short Stories of All Time," compiled by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Though he had begun as a science fiction writer, by the 1960s Matheson had become widely recognized as a significant and seminal creator in the horror genre. Like Phillip K. Dick, he's also one of those genre biggies whose names the non-science-fiction-reading public doesn't even know but who is responsible for a large number of popular films, including "A Stir of Echoes" and "I Am Legend" (in its various incarnations, from "The Omega Man" to the Will Smith version) as well as 14 episodes of the original "Twilight Zone."

Jerome Bixby was another prolific Golden Age author with a classic horror/sf story featured in The "Science Fiction Hall of Fame" collection. "It's a Good Life" is about a sadistic boy whose mental powers hold his family and entire town in a state of terrified thrall. This story has had such an impact on American culture since its publication in 1953 that even people who don't read at all are probably still familiar with it - not only has it been widely anthologized, but the story was used on the original "Twilight Zone" series, in "Twilight Zone: The Movie," in "The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror II " (with Bart naturally playing the part of the psychically omnipotent boy), and in The Cartoon Network's "Johnny Bravo." More recently, homage was paid to the story in the season 3 finale of "Supernatural," in which the demon Lillith possesses a young girl and uses her to torment her horrified family. Bixby wrote other stuff, of course, but nothing else matches this story for sheer horrificness.

Finally I want to mention an author who's quite well known but is simply one of the all-time greats: Harlan Ellison. Prolific and wide-ranging in subject matter, he is a master of the classic "weird tale" type of horror/sf - you know, the old-fashioned kind that usually has a big twist at the end, the type that was the staple of the old horror comics but is frowned on these days - as exemplified in his classic collection, "Ellison Wonderland." Several of the stories here, along with Ellison's unique twist on post-apocalyptic fiction, "A Boy and His Dog," are largely responsible for my lifelong obsession with writing and strongly influenced my own short stories for a long time. They're clever, often thought-provoking, and, in a word, dark explorations of love, loss, betrayal, and inevitability. Even the movie version of "A Boy and His Dog" holds up relatively well because of the universal nature of the themes, despite having been made in 1975, at a time when it was difficult to portray a telepathic dog with any degree of sophistication.

Obviously this isn't even close to the beginnings of any kind of comprehensive list, but all of these works in some way got me thinking that what we want from horror/sf is a cathartic, safe avenue for expressing our hopes and fears relating to technology, to the future, to our own fragmented and conflicted natures. Science fiction alone is often concerned with the ethical dilemmas science and technology so often create; horror alone is often concerned with the exploration of the darker sides of human nature. These areas of concern are not unrelated. We want to boldly go, but we're just a little worried about what might be out there - and what we might take with us - when we do.

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Other articles in this series:

• Welcome RJ Cavender, Our Horror Genre Specialist
• Horror is Dead! (Again?)

Image: scary cat, a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works image from luchilu's photostream