The strangest line of criticism I've ever received was one I got in Creative Writing class. A good chunk of the class didn't see the point of me writing horror, because vampires, werewolves, zombies and so on "aren't real". Seriously, one guy even asked me "Why do you write about these things? You know they're not real, right?"

Well, yeah! Funny, I thought that when writing fiction you were entitled to write about *fictional things*.