Let’s Name The Beast: The Horror Novel
Calling a grave-digging shovel a spade.
I can remember as a child my father closing a book and saying: “Try this one son, it’ll scare the tripe out of you”. Decades later I’m still not sure where in my body tripe resides or how it was supposed to exit, but I got his drift. Inevitably he’d have been reading something Like ‘The Pigeons from Hell’ from ‘Weird Tales’ or perhaps an old H.P. Lovecraft chiller. A decade or so later of course the dead hand of Stephen King placed horror in the manicured neighbourhoods of small-town America and the world scared itself silly for the next twenty years. Edgar Allan Poe’s bones must have rattled in appreciation.
But an interesting thing has happened. There seems to be a slight collective embarrassment among authors about overtly marketing their work as ‘horror’. We now see Dark Fantasy, Contemporary Fantasy, Occult and so on. But if we cut to the chase, most are really horror novels, sub-categorised into infinity to soften the scary edge. I wonder why and in fact, I suggest the true horror novel is on the rebound after a decade or so of remission. It has even been alleged that author Dean Koontz a former President of the Horror Writers Association, steadfastly refuses to proclaim himself a horror writer. Curious isn’t it? Is there a perception among authors and or publishers that readers don’t want to be scared witless these days?
Fear is a primal reaction to a perceived threat. We have needed the adrenalin rush of fear to survive as a race.
As they say, ‘you’re never more alive than at the moment your think you’re going to die’. Less melodramatically, I suggest our greatest fears revolve around that which we do not understand. That thinking spawned the great horror novels of the past in which we were confronted with everything from creatures emerging gooey and black from the swamp to spacecraft from distant, unimagined worlds looming above the Manhattan skyline.
In the true horror novel we are taken outside ourselves in classic escapist fashion, and if the characterisation is good enough, and we identify with the hero or heroine in the set piece, we vicariously experience their fear and of course their inevitable triumph over it. What more powerful response could any author shoot for? If through my own writing I can take a reader on a dark adventure in which he or she hangs on every challenge the protagonist faces — and experiences — victory over creepy things, or forces they would never want to face in real life, I’ve succeeded - particularly if it takes that reader a minute or so before they’re comfortable in turning off the bedside light. Job done.
Of course horror novels don’t have to be about monsters or chainsaw massacres. True horror lives in us. It’s the novelists challenge to make it bubble to the surface and be entertaining - worth the price of entry into the freak show or the serial killer’s twisted world. So let’s not be shy. The horror novel is here to stay and sales are creeping up ever so slowly behind us…
