A tour of the genresAmericans, are by nature optimistic. In addition, we hunger to know
the future. Of all genres only SF can give us a look ahead. But do not
expect a major swing toward SF until this decade's employment pic-
ture improves and consumer confidence returns. Until then a major-
ity of readers will escape into the familiar comfort of fantasy.
HORROR: DEAD OR JUST RESTING?
In the eighties, the corpse of horror fiction rose from the grave and
seemed to take over book publishing. Driven by the success of
authors like Stephen King, Anne Rice, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub,
and Clive Barker, it seemed invincible, a supergenre.
Horror had everything going for it, not least of which were liter-
ary roots that stretched back nearly two hundred years to novels like
Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Gregory
Lewis's The Monk (1796). Later work by Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan
Poe, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, and others only added to this
dark literature's pedigree.
The genre seemed healthy, too. A writers' organization, the
Horror Writers of America, was formed and began giving out its
Stoker Awards. Semiprofessional magazines and small press pub-
lishers thrived. Best of all, book sales boomed. It seemed that any
black cover with a skeleton on it would sell like crazy.
In the end, many authors complained that it was the very ten-
dency of publishers to overdo a good thing that slew the monster.
In the early nineties, horror crashed. Sales plunged. Lists were
slashed. Many publishers raced away as if fleeing a graveyard.
Apologists claimed that publishers had simply oversupplied the
stuff, putting inferior product into print just to fill slots. No wonder
readers were disenchanted. It was a cyclical downturn, they said.
Normal. The genre would soon bounce back.
Well, we are still waiting. What happened? Was horror never a
true genre? Was horror in the eighties merely a best-seller-driven
fad? To answer that question, let us dissect the corpse.
Horror in the eighties was really two bodies of work: the serious
and the popular. The popular stuff was paperback horror that sold
primarily to teenagers, who would sometimes buy novels primarily
because the covers were cool-looking, as with Rick Hautala's oth-