Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  If horror literature is, indeed, experiencing a revival, this is partly because horror writers such as Stephen King, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Tanith Lee, and Dean Koontz, all of whom began writing in the 1970s or 1980s, have acted as role models for a new generation. Their establishment as auteurs, regardless of their (in some cases) dwindling or niche readerships, have made horror writing an appealing venture. Stephen King, in particular, with his tireless championing and promotion of the genre, whether through book tours, encouraging reviews, or talks at universities, has become a spearhead figure for the indefatigable horror writer and has even received recognition from outside horror circles; he was awarded the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and, in 2015, the National Medal of Arts. King has also managed to produce a string of successful novels, novellas, and short stories, including Under the Dome (2009) and A Good Marriage (in Full Dark, No Stars, 2010), that have been or are being swiftly adapted to television or film.

  Although some of these writers, such as Barker, have switched gears and now work in genres such as YA (young adult) fiction—or else, like Caitlín Kiernan, have never considered themselves to be horror writers—they have still managed to produce significant works of literary horror, such as Kiernan’s haunting novel The Red Tree (2009) and Barker’s The Scarlet Gospels (2015), which chronicles the return of the iconic Pinhead (best known from the Hellraiser movies). This exodus or evolution of some writers of genre horror has also helped “clear” horror’s image, so that more literary or mainstream writers, such as Bret Easton Ellis (Lunar Park, 2005), Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted, 2005), Mark Z. Danielewski, who actually began his career with the labyrinthine postmodernist horror novel House of Leaves (2000), and David Mitchell (Slade House, 2015), have successfully turned to horror at occasional points. The perennial return of the Gothic, in novels by the likes of Sarah Waters (The Little Stranger, 2009), Susan Hill (Dolly, 2011), Jeanette Winterson (The Daylight Gate, 2012), Lauren Owen (The Quick, 2014), and Kate Mosse (The Taxidermist’s Daughter, 2014), has also been important in keeping the flame of subtle horror burning bright.

  While the twenty-first century has seen the death or retirement of more than one key figure—such as Richard Matheson, James Herbert, and Poppy Z. Brite, to name a few—these have been swiftly replaced with young blood. A remarkable example of this new generation is Joe Hill, who, despite beginning his career by hiding the fact that he is Stephen King’s son, has quickly built up a significant bibliography that tackles ghosts (Heart-Shaped Box, 2007), devils (Horns, 2010), vampires (NOS4A2, 2013), and world-changing plagues (The Fireman, 2016). Importantly, Hill has also worked in another medium that has seen a rise in horror-themed volumes: comics. His Locke and Key series (2008–2013) deserves particular praise for its innovative magical “keys” premise, which rethinks the haunted house narrative.

  Adam Nevill is another writer on the rise who has consistently produced solid works and is developing an ever-growing readership. His brand of supernatural horror, high on suggestion and cinematic in style, features horrific creatures that range from evil presences such as the Brown Man (The Banquet of the Damned, 2004), to a pagan beast looking for sacrificial prey (The Ritual, 2011), to heretic ghosts awaiting remanifestation (Last Days, 2012), to an ancient fertility rite spirit (No One Gets Out Alive, 2014), to deadly portals (Apartment 16, 2010). The occult cult, a recurring trope in Nevill, is also present in House of Small Shadows (2013).

  A few other noteworthy contemporary horror writers are Sarah Pinborough, Gillian Flynn, John Shirley, Alison Littlewood, Jonathan Maberry, David Moody, Glen Duncan, Conrad Williams, Joseph D’Lacey, Nicole Cushing, Graham Joyce, Joel Lane, Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, Sarah Langan, Brian Keene, Tom Fletcher, and Tim Lebbon.

  Monsters continue to play a significant role in horror fiction, and none have been a more steady focus of attention than the vampire and the zombie. The vampire, despite largely having been co-opted by the romance genre and YA fiction, especially after Stephenie Meyer’s record-breaking Twilight series (2005–2008) established sparkling Edward Cullen as the vampire du jour, has also been at the heart of several notable twenty-first-century horror novels. John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In (2007), a work that aligns its child vampire, Eli, with another social outsider, twelve-year-old incontinent and bullied Oskar, develops pity for the monster, who in turn becomes a savior and, as we find out in Ajvide Lindqvist’s short story “Let the Old Dreams Die” (2009), even a lover.

  But apart from exploring “human” bonds and the modern sympathetic monster, Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel is representative of the gradual change that monsters experienced in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when their monstrosity became linked to the idea of disease and infection, an idea first explored at length in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954). Vampires, for instance, became the result of viral infections and partially shed their religious connections to a Manichean notion of evil (that is, the idea that vampires are simply and purely evil, as absolutely opposed to good). Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) takes this trope to the extreme and merges it with the postapocalyptic narrative, itself particularly popular after Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007 for The Road. Market forces aside, it could be argued that vampires are becoming viral as a result of an increased awareness of pandemics and their spread, following recent international disease crises such as the various outbreaks of AIDS, mad cow disease, avian flu, and Ebola.

  The contemporary fascination with infection has also traveled underground, deep into the graves of the restless undead. If late 1960s cinema saw the birth of the nuclear, meat-eating zombie in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, then the twenty-first century has fathered the viral zombie, the rabid subject that is human but shows all the signs of being a traditional flesh- and/or brain-craving zombie. Apart from the obvious filmic, comic, and television influences—the films Resident Evil (2002) and 28 Days Later (2002), and Robert Kirkman’s comic series The Walking Dead (debuted in 2003) and its corresponding AMC television series (debuted in 2010) have all been seminal—two novels have been key in the establishment of zombie fiction, which was never predominant in the twentieth century, as the postmillennial subgenre par excellence: Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) and Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). The former followed scrupulously the template of the global pandemic and showed that horror could still be well written and politically committed, while the latter kick-started the mash-up parody subgenre, which splices together literary classics with pulp horror fiction. The zombie has, like the vampire, proved very versatile. Novels such as Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2010) have given prominence to the zombie romance, and others, such as M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), have explored the possibilities of fungus-based plagues and of zombies retaining mental powers. Most likely, zombie fiction is popular not just because of the simple laws of supply and demand; the zombie resonates with the hyperconnected masses of the twenty-first century. Its alienation, horde-like qualities, and, ultimately, helplessness constitute a strong metaphor for the feelings of disenchantment brought about by late capitalism and the invigoration of multinational corporations.

  The other main horror subgenre to develop strongly in the twenty-first century is the weird, particularly following the rehabilitation of its flagship writer, H. P. Lovecraft. Three volumes of his stories were published by Penguin Classics between 1999 and 2004. Then, in 2005, a selection of his tales appeared in a prestigious edition by the Library of America, effectively canonizing him as a major American author. The weird, “a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic (‘horror’ plus ‘fantasy’) often featuring non-traditional alien monsters (thus plus ‘science fiction’)” (Miéville 2009, 510), may be seen to be thriving in the work of writers such as Simon Strantzas, Qu
entin S. Crisp, John Langan, Richard Gavin, Paul Tremblay, Livia Llewellyn, Mark Samuels, Matt Cardin, and Laird Barron. The latter’s fictional universe, largely constructed through intricately crafted short stories and in the novel The Croning (2013), has been gathering such attention that an homage anthology of stories by various writers, The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron, was published in 2014. Samuels received a similar treatment in 2016 with a tribute anthology titled Marked to Die: A Tribute to Mark Samuels.

  A Timeline of Horror in the Twenty-First Century

  2001

  Terrorists attack the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a fourth hijacked airliner crashes in Pennsylvania. A coalition of U.S.-led forces invades Afghanistan.

  2003

  Mapping of the human genome is completed. The first issue of The Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard, is published.

  2004

  Exploration rovers land on Mars.

  2005

  H. P. Lovecraft’s Tales are published in a Library of America volume.

  2006

  Max Brooks publishes World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

  2007

  John Ajvide Lindqvist publishes Let the Right One In.

  2007–2008

  The world is rocked by a cascading series of global financial crises.

  2008

  The first season of HBO’s True Blood airs, indicating a growing interest in high-budget horror television.

  2010

  The first season of The Walking Dead premiers on AMC.

  2011

  Thomas Ligotti publishes The Conspiracy against the Human Race.

  2013

  Stephen King publishes the long-awaited sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep.

  2014

  Anne Rice returns to her vampire chronicles with Prince Lestat.

  2015

  Clive Barker kills off his most famous character, Pinhead, in The Scarlet Gospels. Stephen King is awarded a National Medal of the Arts. Mark Z. Danielewski publishes the first book in his ambitious 27-volume The Familiar series.

  Another writer of weird horror who rose to prominence in the early years of the century and who exerted a profound influence on the new crop of writers is Thomas Ligotti. Having established a cult reputation during the 1980s and 1990s with his extremely literary and philosophically pessimistic style of horror fiction, Ligotti was a key progenitor of the weird renaissance at the turn of the millennium, even as he continued to produce work of his own, including The Conspiracy against the Human Race (2010), a nonfiction book of horror-centered philosophical and literary commentary. Ligotti’s significance was then amplified in 2014 when his name suddenly came to mainstream awareness as the first season of HBO’s True Detective drew on the tradition of weird supernatural horror fiction, and in particular the work of Ligotti (along with Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, 1895), as a chief inspiration.

  The weird has also played a major role in the speculative turn in horror philosophy, especially in the work of media scholar Eugene Thacker, author of three books comprising a trilogy on the “horror of philosophy”: In the Dust of This Planet (2011), Starry Speculative Corpse (2015), and Tentacles Longer Than Night (2015). Another significant writer in this vein is philosopher Graham Harman, author of, among others, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012).

  The extent to which the “new weird,” understood as a hybrid of the science fiction new wave of the 1960s and the new horror of the likes of Clive Barker—and practiced by, for example, China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer—is “new” (innovative) or simply a periodic marker (of the modern or contemporary) is still very much up for debate. In any case, the new weird shows how horror has, in some cases, hybridized to the point where its generic allegiance becomes less interesting than a specific writer’s own style and influences.

  All in all, horror fiction in the twenty-first century is in good health, a situation that is surprising considering that written fiction now has to compete with other, similarly immersive horror products, such as comics and video games. Although the rise of the zombie and the interest in an impending apocalypse demonstrate a marked pessimism and skepticism about global capitalism and the neoliberal triumph of free trade—Žižek has astutely referred to the current period as “living in the end times” (in a 2010 book of that very title)—it would be unfair to say that all horror fiction shows signs of a social and political engagement with the zeitgeist. The continuations and further mutations of well-known myths, alongside the nurturing of subgenres such as the weird, as well as the arrival of a new generation of writers who are influenced by the horror “boom” of the 1980s—all of this makes twenty-first-century horror, still in its infancy, a fascinating and multiple-headed beast.

  Xavier Aldana Reyes

  See also: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Apocalyptic Horror; Horror Comics; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Horror Literature in the Internet Age; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction; Part Three, Reference Entries: Ajvide Lindqvist, John; Barker, Clive; Barron, Laird; Campbell, Ramsey; Hill, Joe; House of Leaves; Keene, Brian; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; King, Stephen; Koontz, Dean; Lee, Tanith; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Miéville, China; New Weird; Palahniuk, Chuck; Rice, Anne; Samuels, Mark; Straub, Peter; Vampires; VanderMeer, Jeff; Zombies.

  Further Reading

  Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. “Post-Millennial Horror, 2000–16.” In Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, 189–214. London: British Library.

  Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction. Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Luckhurst, Roger. 2015. Zombies: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion.

  Miéville, China. 2009. “Weird Fiction.” In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, 510–515. London and New York: Routledge.

  Nelson, Victoria. 2013. Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  Sederholm, Carl H., and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, eds. 2016. The Age of Lovecraft. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

  VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. 2008. The New Weird. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications.

  VanderMeer, Jeff. 2008. “The New Weird: ‘It’s Alive?’” In The New Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, ix–xviii. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications.

  Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Times. London: Verso.

  Part Two: Themes, Topics,

  and Genres

  APOCALYPTIC HORROR

  Apocalyptic horror is concerned with the end of the world or the end of humanity. It has been a popular subgenre of horror fiction since the nineteenth century, though its antecedents are much older. The word “apocalypse” comes from Ancient Greek and means “revelation” or “uncovering.” It is the name (in Greek) of the final book of the New Testament, known as the Book of Revelation in English, in which the ultimate destiny of the world is revealed by Jesus Christ to John of Patmos. As a result, “apocalypse” has come to be used as a catch-all term to describe various end-of-world scenarios, with the earlier sense of “revelation” being obscured. Given the cataclysmic and terrifying nature of the apocalypse(s), almost all apocalyptic fiction is, in one way or another, horror fiction.

  Theological conceptualizations of the final events of history, “end times” or “end of days,” are called eschatology. Many religions include eschatological writings within their scriptures, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Jainism. In a number of cases, this eschatology is concerned with the completion of the world’s preordained life cycle or the attainment of some ultimate state of existence, thus renderi
ng any further human endeavor unnecessary. In many eschatological scriptures, this end point is signaled by a period of degeneration, the coming (or return) of a messianic figure, the resurrection of the dead, the collection or redemption of the pious, and the violent destruction of the remains of humanity and (in most cases) the world itself. In some literature, including Christian and Hindu writings, this destruction includes a final battle (at Armageddon and Keekatpur respectively) in which the unrighteous are massacred. This last battle signals the end of history, leading either to the obliteration of the earth or the transition to another phase of existence. The “final battle” motif is also found in other apocalyptic myths, including the Viking myth of Ragnarök, which has led to the theorization of a common Proto-Indo-European source for these myths.

  Eschatological writing treats the degeneration and destruction of the Earth as the means to an end, as the true significance of the event lies in the spiritual transcendence or elevation that comes in the aftermath. However, artistic representations and responses to the apocalypse commonly focus on the events leading to transcendence, rather than on the endpoint itself. In medieval representations of the Book of Revelations, for example, it is common to find detailed (and often lavish) depictions of the beast (Rev. 13:1–10), the dragon (Rev. 12:9, 20:2), “Babylon the Great” (also known as the “Whore of Babylon,” Rev. 17:4–20), and the lake of fire (Rev. 19:20). One of the more famous examples of this type of representation is Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.16.2 (ca. 1250), known as the Trinity Apocalypse, in which the various stages of the destruction of sinners are represented in colorful illuminations alongside biblical text and commentary. Significantly, medieval illuminated manuscripts often incorporate contemporary concerns into visual representations of biblical figures, including depicting “Babylon the Great” in Muslim dress, despite the fact that most Christian interpretation claims the figure is intended to represent Rome.