I'm reluctant to attribute this to deliberate malice, though I quite agree with the blogger that it's a big mistake, and one very easy to avoid. SFX certainly don't exclude women entirely - they've reviewed my work before (and I'm not just trying to give them the benefit of the doubt because they reviewed it positively), and of the reviewers that I've met, one was female (a nice lady I encountered at a BSFA panel I'd been invited to speak at), and the other is my husband, who's occasionally written reviews for them, is male, but doesn't have anything against women - in fact, a fair proportion of the authors he reviewed were female. I do agree with the blogger, though, that this really is an oversight, and one that would be artistically as well as politically good to avoid. Horror has a long history as a male genre, but that's precisely why keeping one's eyes open for female examples of it is important, because in genres with lots of boys, female exemplars can bring a new and fresh perspective - not that women have ever been absent from it, as Mary Shelley can testify. It's a great shame to miss the opportunity, and any horror compendium that mentions me and leaves out Shirley Jackson really needs to re-evaluate its priorities.

Because yep, they mentioned me. I was the only female novelist who made it in.

Which is, of course, interesting to me for personal as well as feminist reasons. SFX interviewed thirty-four artists (all male) and asked them to name their favourite obscure or under-appreciated work, and one of them mentioned Bareback, my first novel.

This is notable in itself, as it's not the first time lately that I've shown up on a list of under-appreciated authors. This is the kind of compliment that tends to give you mixed feelings, having a certain air of 'I think you're great, isn't it a shame no one else does?' for which the complimenter cannot be blamed at all, but on the other hand, the fact that it's happening in lots of different places is rather promising. I seem to have gone from 'moderately successful new author' to 'creator of under-appreciated gems'; from there, perhaps the giddy heights of 'really successful' might be the next step. Recommendations are certainly a fine thing, and recommendations as someone who ought to be more famous than she is do carry a certain cachet. Remember, my friends, if you buy lots of copies of my book now, you might just be buying boasting rights of 'I always liked her even before she got so big'!

But to return to the point. That all the rest of them mentioned male works is something I'd blame more on the selection of people interviewed than on the interviewees themselves. The majority of my most beloved authors are female, and I'd expect most men to have male favourites likewise, not out of prejudice but simply because a book that speaks out of our own gender's experience may resonate with us more; a more balanced group might have produced more balanced suggestions. But somehow I managed to slip under the wire, meaning that Bareback has now, finally, got the set, having been classified as literary, science fiction/fantasy, crime, and now horror as well. (Romance, war and Western are probably out, but I'm not giving up hope.)

Given that I tend to shrug off genre, this broad spread pleases me no end. But I'm rather pleased and interested to note my inclusion as a horror author.

The first reason for this is that, I hope, it shows someone responding more to the spirit of the book than the superficial content. Bareback isn't exactly a traditional horror plot - nothing's hiding under the bed - but I would certainly classify it as social horror. It's a book primarily interested in the interactions between the structures of society and the psyche of the individual, in how your position in the world changes you, and particularly in how your exposure to horrors makes you more capable of horrors yourself. The heroine, if you can call her that, is exposed to werewolves, but more important is that she's exposed to a world where, at least as she experiences it, you can be sued for self-defence, you spend childhood nights unprotected from the abuses of your supposed friends, and you can be defined as a monster for trying to live the role that your society has imposed on you against your will. Lycanthropy is as much a metaphor as a trope in the book: for the heroine, the majority can turn a wolfish face towards you, and it's being a majority that makes it wolfish as much as any nocturnal shenanigans. As a result, it's a first-person narrative from a flawed narrator who is herself capable of turning a blind eye to torture, and sometimes even taking a kind of bitter satisfaction in the concept: the physical reality tends to distress her, but she's highly susceptible to the notion of the boot being on the other foot for a change. All of this takes place within a plot that involves few spooks hiding in the mirror or gateways to Hell opening up, but what you see in the mirror isn't comfortable and Hell is diffused throughout nonetheless.

So I'm happy to put on the horror hat. The other reason for this is that, while I don't really consume things by genre, as genres go, I rather like horror. As is the case in any niche genre, there's a lot of rubbish out there, but still, if you blindfolded me as said, 'Okay, pick a story: we've got one science fiction, one fantasy and one horror [to pick the categories I'm usually classed as]', I'd pick up horror every time. If literary were in there too I'd probably pick that up instead, but I don't see literary as a genre in quite the same way: if one ignores the assumption, made by genre snobs on both sides of the literary/genre divide, that something must be sci-fi or whatever instead of literary if it's got sci-fi elements - one of the silliest assumptions in the world - it's more a classification by quality than by content, and quality is a lovely thing to behold. But if, as I said, I had to pick a genre piece, horror is generally my choice.

Why is this? I think the simplest way of putting it is this: horror is a genre that, whatever its faults, always tries to invoke passion.

You can, of course, invoke passion in any genre. But in horror it's pretty much an essential: if you don't frighten the audience, you aren't working. And fear, while a simple emotion, is also a primordial one. In attempting to touch it, artists can produce images and phrases that have a kind of transcendent newness to them. And newness - not just novelty, but real, different, drawn-straight-up-from-the-well newness is a thing to love in any work of art.

Horror doesn't always do this, of course. For a genre that lives to surprise us, it's also frustratingly fond of recycling tired old tropes, especially in the movies; I'm thoroughly disgusted with Hollywood's current round of let's-remake-anything-and-everything-from-the-seventies, and not in the good, horrified-disgust way. (Do we really need another Texas Chainsaw Massacre? They did it right the first time. Do we really need another Last House on the Left, for goodness sake? Why remake a gurning mutant of a film whose main interest was in going so nastily, lollopingly far that it pretty much exists to question whether a film like itself should exist in the first place, never mind the second?) Reheated horror is boring, and that's something horror should never be. But on the other hand, at least reiteration is understood to be a problem in horror, not just at the conceptual level but at the visceral: if it's too familiar to scare the audience, it ain't working. Horror tends to go in cycles, and while that brings with it a limping brood of shoddy imitations, it also allows for the sweeping entrance of a totally new and profoundly frightening blast of cold air from outside.

As with all genres, freshness rather than imitation is where we get the really fine work. The two horror writers I love best are M.R. James and Shirley Jackson. There are, of course, many differences between the two. James's ghastly creations ('stained-glass monstrosities', in the perfect encapsulation of author Poppy Z. Brite*) creep half-invited into a world of oak-panelled cosiness where Jackson prefers to tilt the domestic at a mild, dizzying angle from the start and send us all staggering downhill. Perhaps more crucially, James was primarily an academic who wrote ghost stories to amuse his students while Jackson was more seriously dedicated to the art of fiction: James wears his genius lightly where Jackson plunges into hers with passion. But there's genius in both of them, and it comes from the same place: beginning in the world - the real world, the tactile where we all live, not the conventional world of a thousand shaken-together old tales - and looking at this world of ours with newly affrighted eyes.