Book Review: STORYTELLER UNBOUND: GARY BRAUNBECK and COFFIN COUNTY
STORYTELLER UNBOUND: GARY BRAUNBECK and COFFIN COUNTY
Gary Braunbeck, Coffin County(New York: Leisure Books, 2008). $7.99
Review by Jason Ridler
In 2004, award-winning writer Gary Braunbeck penned an essay known as “Storytelling Unbound†in his essay collection Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror as a Way of Life. The essay was a trenchant argument for writers to read widely and deeply across genres. Braunbeck, most closely associated with the horror and dark fantasy, began to notice a genre myopia amongst both readers and writers of horror fiction, a desire for trope over substance in the outlaw form of fantasy fiction. Braunbeck disagreed with this development. The more he read across genres, the more he saw them as not enemies or competitors but schools of learning where many of the fundamental lessons were the same, even if some of the tools were different.
To get back to this ethos of possibility over limitation in any form of fantasy, Braunbeck suggested writers try “storytelling unbound.†What, exactly, is this approach to fiction?