Why you’re buying more horror novels than ever, but just didn’t know it…

How can this be? Didn’t horror/thrillers die just after Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein? Or at the very least, when Stephen King branched out into more ‘thoughtful’ literary tales?

The answer is a resounding no. Books are still scaring you to death, keeping you awake at night and regularly sinking their genre-sharpened teeth into your jugular. The undead stumble and reach anew for you with their bony fingers, and thankfully, demons still lurk deep in your bedroom mirror.

They just wear a new cloak now and it’s called Fantasy. That’s right- all of your old favourites – the Count, Satan, your hunky Angel Gabriel and more, stand proudly astride new electronic fantasy book categories such as Dark Fantasy, Paranormal, Metaphysical, Epic fantasy… the list goes on. Of course we still have books listed under ‘horror’, but that now encompasses sub-genres such as Occult and Ghosts and even Westerns.

What is interesting is that horror has also crept quietly from the shadows and seeped into Crime and Mystery categories partly, I suspect, in response to the highly-successful, darker Scandinavian thrillers from Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankell and the like.

So where did the horror novel go?

You already know- sucked into the whirling vortex of sword and sorcery-driven worlds where horror authors vie to be the new Stephen King in the new literary game of thrones. But it’s weirdly comforting to know that real horror has never left the dark place where it was born and where it feeds and thrives… in the cobwebbed chest at the top of the stairs in the attic of your mind, where your inner child still occasionally reaches for the lock, ready again to be thrilled and terrified and then retreat once more, alone and afraid, to the safety of the bed-covers… and the welcome light of the false dawn.