There’s a literary term from the 1970s that, apparently unlike most things from the 1970s, never came back. It was applied to the work of David Morrell, a novelist of some skill and intelligence whom I consider underrated these days. The term was “carnography.” The meat novel. The intent was to contain “the pornographic nature of the detailed description of extreme violence” into a single term. Morrell was an intellectual in love with popular fiction, an English professor fascinated by fabulist/metafictionist John Barth, and I remain greatly amused that it was that mind that gave John Rambo to the world (not that that Rambo resembles the Rambo of the second film and beyond).
(Note to self: just found a decent PDF of Barth’s essay “The Literature Of Exhaustion“)
I recall an interview Morrell once gave where he described his life’s work as, perhaps, trying to find out what would happen if John Barth wrote The Creature From The Black Lagoon.
In discussing his approach, in another interview:
I don’t write like Hemingway, but what I noticed was that he was an action writer in many ways. He certainly wrote a lot of action books, To Have and Have Not (1937), for example, and I noticed that his approach to writing action was to write it as if it had never been written before, as if he was doing it for the first time. I was wondering if, in a parallel way, I could do the same thing.
This here is also a very good interview with him, that gets a little bit into his process.
I remember his THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE (UK) (US) having a very interesting tool — there are points where the effect of an explosion or other kinetic event happens to the characters before the event is detailed. The shockwave hits before the book catches up with it. It’s a really weird, jolting effect, and the work of someone who really knows what they’re doing with a page.
I remain fascinated by the term “carnography.” A novel slapped with that label should be an irredeemable horror, shouldn’t it? And yet, somehow, I think it should have been a publishing category. It certainly should have survived as a literary term. It’s older than “splatterpunk,” which I suspect supplanted it, and has a different tone to the outsider-lit trashiness of bizarro lit. There’s something oddly haughty about the word. I can imagine someone saying “Please allow me to present my latest work of carnography” and philosophising about their carnographic intent.
And yet. David Morrell has an MA and a PhD, and his book research, pre-internet, involved things like marooning himself above the timberline in the Rocky Mountains for a month and getting special training on how to fight with cars. Which sounds Hemingwayan, sure, but in all his interviews he maintains a warm, urbane character. The creator of John Rambo is not “macho,” he’s simply dedicated to his craft. Trying to curse him with a new word always seemed unfair.