THE CAREER NOVELIST
erwise-worthwhile Night Stone, which had the industry's first holo-
gram on it.
At the same time, an older category of reader with a more dis-
cerning taste for the horrific was seeking out new work, and finding
it in the semiprozines (non-commercial magazines aimed at serious
fans) and in book lines like Dell's Abyss. An even smaller, strong-
stomached audience also began to appreciate a group of writers
that brought to horror a new realism, plus a cutting-edge extremism
and a fascination with violence. This bloody fiction has earned the
nickname "splatterpunk."
Those readers and writers are still around, but they are struggling
with little support from publishers, who burned themselves selling
to a fickle readership. The core audience keeps the faith, but their
numbers are small and their prospects somewhat dim. If a revival
comes, it may well be because a new wave of best-sellers excites
fresh interest from publishers and readers.
Indeed, throughout the twentieth-century the field has primarily
been best-seller-driven. In the period between the world wars, a
boom in oriental and occult terror was led by the British authors Sax
Rohmer (creator of Dr. Fu-Manchu) and Dennis Wheatley. In the
post-war atomic era, Shirley Jackson led a movement toward realis-
tic horror with strong psychological elements, a movement that
included Robert Bloch's seminal novel Psycho and the fiction of
Richard Matheson. William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel The Exorcist
spawned a host of imitations that lingered for a decade.
Examining the sales patterns of horror in the eighties, one finds
that much of the horror that was popular then was also poured from
the molds of a few best-sellers. Stephen King, for example, led a
boom in small-town horror. John Saul and V. C. Andrews started a
category that insiders called "spooky kid novels." The sympathetic
vampires of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Anne Rice were also the
beginning of a long-term trend.
Speaking of that, vampire fiction is the one remnant that contin-
ues to thrive today as a genuine subcategory. Readers cannot seem
to get enough of it. Anne Rice may be the queen, but others can still
break through. Kim Newman's Anno Dracula and Roderick
Anscombe's The Secret Diaries of Laszlo, Count Dracula (a nonsupernat-