As I noted the last time I wrote here, one of the things that kept me busy while in hospital was listening to audiobooks.
A significant number of these, rather than the usual science fiction, were closer to horror. In fact, there seems to be a distinct upsurge in good horror writing at the moment: I listened to books by Grady Hendrix (We Sold our Souls), Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman (better known for Bird Box, now on Netflix), Dead Moon by Peter Clines, and Carter and Lovecraft By Jonathan L Howard, amongst others.
And if you want more objective proof that horror is enjoying something of an uptick, you might be interested to know that Tor books are launching a new horror Imprint.
Looking back over the past couple of years, I can see the influence of horror in my own writing: Ghost Frequencies is, unsurprisingly, a ghost story, My next book, Devil's Road, is all about monsters. And it's not exactly hard to see the influence of zombie movies in at least parts of my Extinction Game series.
This doesn't surprise me. When I was young, I was reading Pan paperback horror anthologies about the same time I was discovering Robert Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke. Not to mention I was entirely obsessed at the time by Halloween--the event, not the film.
Not to mention several movies that are as influential as they are canonical in science-fiction can also easily be classified as horror: Alien and The Thing.
These kinds of stories are much more about unnerving you than they are about grossing you out--a cinematic and storytelling trend that's never had any attraction for me. It's less about the scares than it is the mystery, which is one of the reasons Scooby Doo was so popular and even, if we're prepared to admit it, influential: the gang spent each episode uncovering the mystery of what was going on, and it was the thrill of detection as much as the supposed scares that kept young kids like me locked to the screen.
A significant number of these, rather than the usual science fiction, were closer to horror. In fact, there seems to be a distinct upsurge in good horror writing at the moment: I listened to books by Grady Hendrix (We Sold our Souls), Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman (better known for Bird Box, now on Netflix), Dead Moon by Peter Clines, and Carter and Lovecraft By Jonathan L Howard, amongst others.
And if you want more objective proof that horror is enjoying something of an uptick, you might be interested to know that Tor books are launching a new horror Imprint.
Looking back over the past couple of years, I can see the influence of horror in my own writing: Ghost Frequencies is, unsurprisingly, a ghost story, My next book, Devil's Road, is all about monsters. And it's not exactly hard to see the influence of zombie movies in at least parts of my Extinction Game series.
This doesn't surprise me. When I was young, I was reading Pan paperback horror anthologies about the same time I was discovering Robert Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke. Not to mention I was entirely obsessed at the time by Halloween--the event, not the film.
Not to mention several movies that are as influential as they are canonical in science-fiction can also easily be classified as horror: Alien and The Thing.
These kinds of stories are much more about unnerving you than they are about grossing you out--a cinematic and storytelling trend that's never had any attraction for me. It's less about the scares than it is the mystery, which is one of the reasons Scooby Doo was so popular and even, if we're prepared to admit it, influential: the gang spent each episode uncovering the mystery of what was going on, and it was the thrill of detection as much as the supposed scares that kept young kids like me locked to the screen.
No comments:
Post a Comment