Hunger, anxiety, and pain are among the human drives horror addresses, according to Anna Bogutskaya in Feeding the Monster
At its best, horror has always skirted an anarchic or illicit sensibility.
Welcome to the rat race: Fifty years on, James Herbert’s first novel retains its pulpy ability to shock and offend
The one area that literary craft does get elevated a bit beyond a pulp sensibility is in the East London setting.
Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan bridges the gap between pulp horror and the paperback explosion of the ’70s
Russell was an executive editor at Playboy, where he published such canonical writers as Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson.
In Maeve Fly, CJ Leede rewrites American Psycho with an L.A. setting and a female narrator
Leede's great sleight of hand is in her ability to make us feel something for Maeve.
Latin American shivers: Mariana Enriquez’s latest collection locates the uncanny in the lives of women and marginalized Argentinians
The twelve stories in A Sunny Place for Shady People, ably translated by veteran collaborator Megan McDowell, hold their social subtexts more or less on their metaphorical sleeve.
Horror 101: Jeremy Dauber’s American Scary offers a cursory overview of more than 300 years worth of scares
As a primer for the uninitiated, American Scary has a certain value.
Literary nightmares: Nineteen writers contribute to an anthology about the spooky side of literature
The books in these stories are dangerous not just for the ideas they contain, but the wounds that they inflict.
The horror! The horror! Why do so many people who write about the genre seem not to understand – or even much like – it?
It would be salutary if writers addressing the genre would cease treating it as though it has been relevant for only the past ten or twenty years.
Three new novels apply a postmodern lens to horror cinema and its practitioners
The subtextual question in each of these stories – Where, exactly, does the true horror reside? – is a provocative and pressing one.
Brief encounters: “Growing Things” by Paul Tremblay
Tremblay's entire fiction is built on contingency and ambiguity.