The Horror Show

Those who prefer their horror straight up, with no chaser, should definitely check this one out.

rekt tells much the same story as Feeders, but from a dude’s perspective.

The Butcher’s Daughter may best be enjoyed by those unfamiliar with The String of Pearls or the musical Sweeney Todd.

“Pending Licensor Approval” is structured largely as a conversation between a writer and a bartender.

King’s accomplishment here is in combining his three levels of fear – terror, horror, and disgust – in a surprising and highly literary manner.

Chapman’s book is about as far from subtle as it’s possible to get.

Knútsdóttir places the reader in close proximity to Iðunn’s psyche via an unreliable first-person narration.

For those looking for a solid throwback to the great pulp horror novels of the ’80s, this one is a good bet.

Vampires, it would seem, are everywhere in our culture.

Sharp shares with Jon Klassen an affection for macabre conclusions in which the story’s villain gets an exaggerated, though not unwarranted, comeuppance.

Sathue’s novel is the fist release from the Soho Press horror imprint Hell’s Hundred.

At its best, horror has always skirted an anarchic or illicit sensibility.

The one area that literary craft does get elevated a bit beyond a pulp sensibility is in the East London setting.

Russell was an executive editor at Playboy, where he published such canonical writers as Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson.

Leede’s great sleight of hand is in her ability to make us feel something for Maeve.

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.

As a primer for the uninitiated, American Scary has a certain value.

The books in these stories are dangerous not just for the ideas they contain, but the wounds that they inflict.

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.

The subtextual question in each of these stories – Where, exactly, does the true horror reside? – is a provocative and pressing one.

Tremblay’s entire fiction is built on contingency and ambiguity.

The plot, which unfolds at a frantic pace, comes to resemble an M.C. Escher sketch.

The biggest disappointment in this book is its relative lack of creepiness.

Appearing in 1974, Carrie benefited from the groundswell of interest in literary horror that began with Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby.

Horror as a literary genre has seen a renaissance in recent years.

As with any anthology of this kind, not all entries work equally well.

Those who view The Exorcist as a frightening and transgressive story about the supernatural may appreciate it on one level, but essentially miss Blatty’s point.

The three pieces represent a triptych of horror tales that examine the various ways lack of personal connection can eat away at a person.

Body horror is by nature a visceral mode, and many of the writers here take full advantage of the gooier elements in their tales.

Brainwyrms is all about the horrors of transphobia

The more obviously generic elements of the story are less unsettling than the very real horrors of racism and family strife.

Reading Koja’s novel in 1991 was a revelation, as well as a reminder that horror is able to deal with large themes and philosophically weighty subject matter.

Weirdly, horror fiction is one of those places capable of provoking a sense of calm.

DiLouie is clearly a fan of both haunted house stories and found footage movies.

The Marigold is a quintessential urban horror tale; The Handyman Method relocates the terror to the suburbs.

It’s hard to fault the contributors to the volume, or the ambition of the editors.

The novel parcels out its secrets judiciously, saving the final reveal for the very last sentence.

“I’m not a professional person,” says Chris Krawczyk, proprietor of the horror-themed Toronto independent Little Ghosts Bookstore and Café. The… Read more: Toronto horror bookstore Little Ghosts expands its purview with a spring pop-up tour and new publishing imprint

“These stories ask the question What is a monster? and complicate the definition of ‘monster’ along the way.”

The Black Guy Dies First reads like little more than Horror Noire for the attention-deficit crowd.

What is apparent throughout Bad Cree is Johns’s facility for dealing with the rocky and tumultuous terrain of familial memory.

Grainger’s horror Substack, The Veil, is parcelling out the longish story in several instalments.

The goal is to raise $4,800, which will be used to defray production costs and to pay contributors.

By melding elements of Greek mythology, nature, and body horror, Desjardins has created something unique and enticing.

Together, these essays provide a justification and rationale for queer readings of what may in fact turn out to be one of the queerest genres around.

Poole’s extended argument about the dominance of American empire and the ways horror filmmakers (and, to a lesser extent, novelists) have responded to it is potent and challenging.

When Khaw is at their best, their writing has teeth – blackened, razor sharp, and ready to rend flesh.

This gruesome, often darkly funny novel manages to put a new spin on its central metaphor.

As a primer to the ways cinematic horror works on audiences’ psyches and the specific neurological responses these techniques can elicit, Nightmare Fuel is a breezy and fluent read.

The Talosite exists at the confluence of sci-fi and body horror, with the actual horrors of the First World War a constant shadow in the background.

Vampires and werewolves are the genre touchstones that get renovated in these two works of fabulism.

Two novels – one from the 1980s and one from the 2010s – showcase the grindhouse-driven mentality of horror’s golden age.

Ruthnum’s brief work of fin-de-siècle body horror reads like a mash-up of David Cronenberg and Henry James.

Barker’s psychologically tense story examines the price we pay for confronting our darkest fears.

The author of Little Women was also an aficionado of “blood and thunder,” a mode represented in this story about grave robbing and its attendant consequences.

Focusing on a writer investigating a double murder with Satanic overtones, the novel asks uncomfortable questions about how and why we consume such gruesome material.

In its examination of the roots of American horror cinema, this single-volume survey is valuable, though it lacks follow-through in its second half.

Neither of the houses in these two books is haunted in the traditional sense; the evil comes from the people and environs that surround them.

The book uses Grand Guignol techniques to literalize the process of tearing oneself open in the act of artistic creation.

In this suite of sixteen uncanny tales, memory and loss are manifest in the spectres that haunt various characters.

A volume of cultural criticism about Vampira and a new memoir by the creator of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark show how much, and how little, the two have in common.

Horror doesn’t gel with those who’ve propped up CanLit respectability – that is, chiefly cishet, nondisabled white people, Pottle writes.

The pop culture phenomenon resulted in board games and a central character’s appearance alongside Bozo the Clown.

Nia DaCosta’s re-imagining of the 1992 film Candyman proves more effective because it does not traffic in white voyeurism in its examination of Black trauma.

What could possibly go wrong?

“By scaring you in your seat without actually posing a threat, you have the opportunity to practice your emotion regulation skills, particularly with regard to fear.”

The author returns to the slasher film saturated ground he has trod before to provide a loving homage that leans a bit too heavily on insider knowledge of the genre.

“Horror movies really, really distracted me from the most painful time of my life. Alone in the theatre for a couple of hours, being manipulated into screaming, swearing, and tossing my popcorn, I was transported.”

“If you just look at your own nightmares, you know that there are no rules.”

“It’s difficult to assign a specific cultural meaning to the bad clown, because it is such a malleable archetype,” Radford writes.

“A lot of it reminds me of just how much I have come through. And how much the people I know have come through. And what it was like to lose people.”

“The very things that nurture you in the horror genre are also the things that can suppress an understanding of what you’re trying to do.”

Tuttle’s brand of quiet horror is at once a rejoinder to a genre that leans heavily on masculine aggression and a means to achieve effects more unsettling than an explicit presentation could ever be.

Cather’s use of a close third-person narration lends her story an uncanny element of unease and creepiness.

We can thank Wood for taking the horror film seriously, and for giving us a framework to understand many of our current cultural impasses.

Poe’s 1843 tale is not only one of the greatest horror stories ever written; it is also a pristine example of internal integrity in the short form.

The genre “specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation” traffics in transgression and finds pleasure in the disreputable.

The Toronto author’s story provides a metaphorical response to a very real history of trauma and violence.

From 17th century Gothic novels to the modern-day zombie story, the horror novel continues to fascinate readers and evolve in the literary consciousness.

A breezy, plot-driven book and an abstruse, philosophically dense ontological mystery provide different pleasures for readers.

Huysmans shared his protagonist’s disgust with humanity and longed to create a new kind of literature.

The term “splatterpunk” refers to a highly disreputable, extreme subgenre of graphic horror, but its best practitioners do much more with the form.

Not a retread or homage, Bloch’s vampire story displays a momentum and technique typical of the author’s best work.

Herbert’s novel combines elements of a haunted house story, a zombie tale, and a meditation on the nature of evil.

Being able to see King’s horrors is a significant drawback in terms of their emotional and affective impact – with one exception.

McDowell’s mashup of Southern Gothic and a traditional haunted house story provides a slow burn as opposed to the anarchic energy of his earlier novel.

Black creators have made their mark in horror film and literature, though they have had to work to get noticed. There are signs that this is changing.

“You can imagine that character – Max Renn – you can imagine him having a Twitter account after going through and seeing the true colours of society.”

Weird Horror, an offshoot of the publisher’s book imprint, Undertow Publications, is a nostalgic magazine in the EC Comics, Weird Tales vein.

This story of a man and his malevolent doppelgänger recalls Poe and includes a critique of apparent social respectability.

Horror fiction provides a buffer against the ongoing stresses and upheavals of the real world.

There are certain core texts that must appear on any list of the “best” horror novels ever written. Then what?

“I have always been drawn to adrenaline-cranking moments that straddle that delicate space between hysterical fright and laughter.”

The story, which originally appeared in 1957, includes a framing structure that distances the reader from the main action.

“I thought there were things this book could do to me that were dangerous.”

In a brief survey of some core Western texts, Oates asks the key question, why do we want to experience fear in an aesthetic context?

Of all the genre master’s classic novels and stories, none comes close to the sheer paranoid terror of this ruthless chiller.

Upending the radical vision of much 1960s and ’70s American horror cinema, the following decades saw a reactionary retrenchment, argues the academic and critic.

Hill’s Gothic tale is an exuberant mashup of Warren Zevon, Little Red Riding Hood, and “An American Werewolf in London.”

The author of psychological thrillers says his respect for the horror genre may explain why he has had difficulty writing in the genre.