Let’s play a game.
One of my favourite mind games to play in between Serious Tasks is trying to identify elements of genres I enjoy in media—whether it’s in a song, book, game, or film—that doesn’t overtly claim it belongs to that genre. So, you know, the opposite of what most people on the internet love to do, which is exclude as much as possible from their genre to maintain some sort of treehouse purity where it’s just them, a magazine from 1972, and a sign saying “no gurlz allowd.”
Which is why, when I was prompted to name my favourite horror book for my very first author bio, my brain immediately switched out of Serious Task mode and spat out, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland!” almost as a joke. But, here’s the thing, I stand by that assertion still—not just that it remains my favourite book, but that is is Horror, and maybe even New Weird Horror, specifically. And I think we’ve got a lot to gain by exploring this theory further.
But why? What’s the point of shoehorning random pieces of media into genres they never claimed? Well, there are a couple of reasons to play this game.
One, like any other exercise in literary analysis, it helps keep our mind sharp and open, combats preconceptions, and generally exercises the part of our brain that connects dots into the constellations we navigate our lives by. It stops us from getting complacent in our acceptance that any work of art can only be one thing; or that categorization only belongs to the professionals. If we don’t exercise our mental flexibility, it’s that much easier to fall prey to the social media Thunderdome where two opinions enter, but only one may leave.
Two, it helps us analyze our influences and get to the genuine heart of our likes and desires. All of us are creative in some way, and none of us are creative in a vacuum. Whether you’re a writer, or someone who yells out the plot twist in movies before it happens; a painter, or someone who doodles while they talk on the phone, you exist in the context of a world that influences you, and those influences are broad and vast. Everything we see, everything we engage with both positively and negatively, has an impact on who we are, despite how much many would like to imagine that they read, but their reading material does not read them in return. Well, that’s wishful thinking.
Three, it’s damned fun.
Now I’m not suggesting storming into your local library at night and rearranging their volumes according to your whimsy. The sacred space that is the shelf definitely belongs only to librarians and booksellers, and that’s the place where genre serves one God: the reader. Genre is there to ensure that the reader knows exactly what they’re getting, and gets exactly what they’re looking for.
No, this exercise is meant only for our entertainment and education, for spaces where it won’t affect the book’s sales or reception.
So let’s play.
Is Alice in Wonderland Horror?
We’ll be talking about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, here, but also including the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, as well as several film and cartoon adaptations. So, for the sake of ease, I’ll just call the entire universe Alice in Wonderland.
First, let’s establish the broad terms of what we mean by the genre Horror. There are lots of different definitions, but the good ones all focus on one aspect: the feelings Horror tries to elicit in its audience. Because much like we just know the difference between a dream and a nightmare, we just know Horror by how we feel about it. And, just like a nightmare, it can be as simple as showing up to school naked or as complex as being chased by inter-dimensional beings through time portals on Mars.
Whatever the setting, Horror is the genre that tries to deliberately unsettle, scare, gross out, weird out, or disturb you for entertainment—yours or the author’s, we’re not picky.
I can already feel a lot of people go, “Well, if you define it THAT loosely, sure.” And I get it, I absolutely do, you like neat borders and clear categories and don’t thrive in chaos. But do this experiment with me: try to write any one-paragraph definition of horror that covers Dracula, The Mist, and Coraline.
It’s not nearly as easy as you’d imagine. “It makes you feel the dark feelings” is about as close as anyone can get.
Now, I’m going to expand this definition even further. I’m going to add that if a work of art makes some, but not all people feel those feelings, and it makes them feel those feelings deliberately, as an intended feature of its creation, then it still counts as horror. We have to make this concession, otherwise we’d have to again, cut everything off the list. Even the media that terrified you most felt flat to someone else.
So let me take you on a little detour and tell you about recurring nightmares.
Because I adore nightmares and often ask people about them, I’ve noticed that there’s a subset of recurring nightmares where the specific details of the setting aren’t necessarily the same, but the structure and goal of the nightmare are identical. The sufferer always knows it’s the exact same meal on different wheels, and feels the exact same feelings.
One that myself and many other people have in common is the Get the Hell Out dream. Different people experience different settings, and it can even change within the same dreamer from night to night. For some, it’s their house, or school, or office building; for others it’s surreal nightmarish factories, underground tunnels, or endless forests. The goal of the dream—that is, the goal the dream has against you—is to run you ragged across the setting and frustrate your efforts to leave. Sometimes, people are highly motivated by something chasing them, and sometimes, just by the inexplicable need to get the hell out.
Often, if there are other characters in this dream, they’ll be its tools; rarely actively malicious but often either completely useless, nonsensical, and associated with a deep feeling that there’s something wrong and Other about them. That they can’t be trusted.
It’s no surprise, then, that Alice in Wonderland hit me like a very familiar ton of bricks. I came to it, like most kids my generation, through the cartoon, long before I could read; and that first time she realizes she’s well and truly lost and breaks down was one of the first times I shouted, “Run!” at a screen.
Given my monogamous relationship with horror movies, definitely not the last.
I’ve got a theory—everyone does, and this one is particularly speculative, so take it as such—that there’s a reason why Alice in Wonderland speaks to the fundamental recurring nightmare of traumatized children growing up in abusive homes around the world, and it’s simply this: we know that Lewis Carroll didn’t so much create this world as receive it from the very real-life Alice Lidell. My theory is, this was her nightmare, too.
“Alright, Alex, maybe this is Horror to you, but what about everyone else?” you’d have every right to ask.
Well, take your pick. What kind of nightmares does your subconscious like to terrify you with? What fears and dark curiosities do you harbor deep where nobody can see? A person in power giving you instructions you can’t comprehend and staking your life on the result? Let’s play a game of croquet with the Red Queen. Bonus: she’s murderous and will chase you. That’s top quality horror villainy right there.
Stuck in a maze? We’ve got hedge for days.
Monsters in the woods? Meet the Jabberwocky, jaws that bite and claws that catch.
Helpless to prevent a friend’s demise? Poor Humpty. Bonus: he can’t recognize faces, a condition called Prosopagnosia that I also suffer from, which, I promise, makes the world that much scarier.
Losing your mind? Enter the Mad Hatter, whose very name derives from the hatters who, inhaling the toxic fumes of the mercury nitrate they used to cure felt, suffered neurological symptoms like tremors, hallucinations, and seizures.
Nothingness? A fear that personally doesn’t affect me; I’m a cheerful nihilist through and through. But for most people, Wonderland’s ultimate message that there is no meaning to anything we experience; no explanation, no guiding hand, no goal, only the experience itself—well, most people find that quite terrifying.
One final argument to plead my case—just look at the panoply of horror media that Wonderland inspired. From Alice: Madness Returns to Alice in Borderland and everything in between, artists have always known where the core of this story really lives, and we promise, it’s a dark place.
Well, that was almost too easy.
But is Alice in Wonderland, more specifically, New Weird Horror?
Ah, now we’re moving on to the harder levels of the game. We’ve established Horror, so let’s move on to Weird. I don’t believe in interpretations of genres that say a genre was confined specifically to one group of authors or one year; that’s reductive to the point of being unrealistic. It completely ignores the living thriving community of writers who take inspiration from that group of authors in that year and carry the torch into the future.
So, ignoring that, how is Weird defined? The classic definition says it is a genre of horror that “either eschews or radically reinterprets…traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction.”
No doubt, our specimen easily falls into that category. There’s nary a vampire or werewolf to be seen in Alice in Wonderland, despite having established that most of the human and non-human characters are bloody terrifying.
It further goes on to say “Weird fiction often attempts to inspire awe as well as fear in response to its fictional creations…weird fiction evokes a sense of the numinous.” The numinous—the spiritual, mysterious, and awe-inspiring. From the very first moment of falling down an infinite tunnel into another world, there’s no doubt that Wonderland is there to inspire reverence and awe.
I’ve personally found this awe hidden in the smallest, most quiet moments, like the Mock Turtle singing Turtle Soup in chapter 10. Moments like that also have this meta-effect that I’ve genuinely only very rarely encountered; it remained stuck in my mind as something touching and mystical for reasons beyond my ability to discern, and definitely beyond anything explicitly written in the text. There’s no reason why the Mock Turtle should be a significant moment; no reason why it should ever have been adapted into film! And the fact that it was is why I’m certain it produced this effect in others, not just in me. It crawled off the page and came after us. It becomes almost a virus, an unshakeable feeling that there’s something Other going on.
One of the few other writers who almost constantly produced that effect of making the story bleed into reality happens to be Lovecraft himself.
That’s plenty for the old definition of Weird media, but what about the new one? What about my own definition of New Weird Horror? Well, I defined the Weird aspect as literally as possible: weird concepts, weird genre blends, weird characters, weird endings, weird backgrounds, weird stories that wouldn’t easily fit into any genre. A sense of, “What the heck did I just read?” a feeling of newness and curiosity and awe.
And there it is, clear as a bell: the book that can’t really be called pure Fantasy, or Literary, or Adventure, or even Horror, nor any other genre in its entirety and by itself. It would have to be a blended mix. It would have to live on the border of things. If it hadn’t been quickly and summarily dispatched as a children’s book, librarians would have had a hell of a time with it.
Especially at the time, when it would have been incomparable to almost anything else.
So what about New?
That’s by far the hardest element to pinpoint, if for no other reason than the age of the material itself, but I feel like I could still make a solid argument for it. And for that, we’ll go back to one of my favourite parts of the book, The Walrus and the Carpenter.
Because the New, both in New Weird and New Weird Horror, was always supposed to represent works of literature that kept a finger on the pulse of humanity’s fears at the time; that spoke to those moment’s social and political traumas; that felt almost like the cutting edge of philosophical commentary.
Brighter minds than I have done extensive looks into the political aspects of Alice, touching on things like the monarchy represented by the Red Queen, and such blatant jabs at politicians as the Caucus Race. But if I were an editor who came across Alice as a manuscript in my submissions pile, what would have really grabbed me by the lapels is The Walrus and the Carpenter. This absolutely heartbreaking story-within-the-story—and talk about getting Weird with form, right?—talks about two individuals, the Walrus and the Carpenter, who lure a pack of innocent oysters to their doom.
The Walrus, opulent and gluttonous, even says, “It seems a shame…to play them such a trick,” before eating every one; and the Carpenter, though outwardly somewhat unhappy with that turn of events, is really only unhappy to not have gotten his fill. It’s hard not to make the connection to capitalist greed and religion’s uselessness, if not downright competition for the same exploited resources. Told from the perspective of the villains, this little tale does an excellent job of filling readers with disgust and horror at the plight of the oppressed many, at least if they have two shreds of empathy to rub together.
So was this profoundly representative of people’s fears at the time? Maybe. It’s hard to be certain, but here’s the thing: it’s still strongly representative of our fears right now. One hundred and fifty years later, there are people who could and should still learn from that parable.
For me, that relevance more than qualifies this story with the title New; bringing the final piece of our Wonderland puzzle into place.
Most importantly, this is only the beginning. Not only does this book contain thousands of other examples that could attach it to dozens of other genres, but you’ve got a wealth of your own cultural baggage at your fingertips to play with. Don Quixote as a metaphor for queerness? I dare you. Friends as anti-capitalist satire? Absolutely. The Little Prince as SF? Okay, that one’s not even a stretch. Look for patterns, expand your definitions, treat art as play, and I promise, you’ll only cultivate a better relationship with it.
