Introduction viiAwards have recently been presented to such works
as The Prestigeby Christopher Priest, Declareby Tim
Powers, and Moonlight and Vinesby Charles De Lint
suggests that hardcore fantasy readers are begin-
ning to look for material that does not fit into famil-
iar patterns.
Supernatural horror is as old as the first story-
teller squatting by a campfire. Although much
more popular in Europe than in the United States,
it has not developed into a significant separate
genre on either side of the Atlantic. The oldest and
most familiar form of supernatural horror is the
ghost story, and, in fact, during the first part of the
20th century, all supernatural horror was referred to
as “ghost stories” even if there were no ghosts
involved at all. The form was quite popular in
England for many years and quite acceptable even
for writers such as Edith Wharton, Henry James,
Robert W. Chambers, and others whose major
emphasis lay in more “serious” fiction. Horror fic-
tion did not begin to diversify greatly until the
advent of the pulp magazines, during which period
a variety of labels were invented to describe subsets
of the field, such as weird fiction and occult fiction.
Writers such as M. R. James, Oliver Onions,
and H. R. Wakefield concentrated on evoking a
sense of terror, while others such as Dennis
Wheatley began using the occult adventure con-
text to tell fast-paced thrillers. The American
writer H. P. Lovecraft created his own subgenre,
borrowing the concept of an alien race from science
fiction and using it in place of the traditional
demons and other monsters of his predecessors.
Lovecraft proved to be particularly influential, and
writers continue even now to add to his Cthulhu
Mythos, which assumes that Earth was once ruled
by a race of superhuman creatures who wish to
return and reclaim it for their own. Lovecraft
proved to be heavily influential on writers such as
Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, and Clark
Ashton Smith. There was also a subset of weird fic-
tion that borrowed from the mystery genre, the pro-
tagonists of which were generally called psychic
detectives. Algernon Blackwood, Seabury Quinn,
and William Hope Hodgson all wrote in this vein,
and more recently Charles L. Grant and Jim
Butcher have employed the same device, though in
a more sophisticated manner.
The collapse of the pulp magazines eliminated
most of the market for horror and occult fiction
until the publication of two important best-selling
horror novels, Rosemary’s Babyby Ira Levin in 1967
and The Exorcistby William Peter Blatty in 1971.
The enormous popularity of the novels, both of
which became major motion pictures, convinced
publishers that the reading public was ready for
more of the same. The timing was perfect for
Stephen King, whose Carrie(1974), ’Salem’s Lot
(1975), and The Shining(1977) immediately made
him the leading name in horror fiction and opened
the doorway for dozens of lesser writers to break
into print. The horror boom lasted well into the
1980s but collapsed before the end of that decade,
possibly because the taste of the readers changed,
or perhaps because of the flood of lesser titles that
appeared every month, which diluted the quality of
the field significantly. It should also be noted here
that many nonfantastic thrillers, including excel-
lent novels such as The Silence of the Lambsby
Thomas Harris, Ghoulby Michael Slade, and Magic
by William Goldman, were sometimes marketed as
horror, and similar titles continue to appear under
that label today. These are outside the scope of this
book, however, and have been ignored except in
two or three cases such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The
Pit and the Pendulum,” whose title is so closely
associated with the horror field that its absence
would be noted.
The horror boom did not last long enough for
many significant new trends to develop. A subset of
writers who specialized in particularly graphic
images and story lines came to be known as “splat-
terpunks,” most notably the writing team of John
Skipp and Craig Spector, but the label has now
largely disappeared. Vampire fiction survived the
downturn, in large part because the image of the
evil, repulsive vampire had been transformed by
Anne Rice and others. The vampire was now a
romantic figure and was as likely to be good as evil.
Vampire detective novels, vampire romances, and
vampire historicals continue to flourish, and, in
fact, many of these books are not “horror” novels at
all.
There has been a recent resurgence in super-
natural horror fiction. Stephen King has remained
the field’s dominant writer, but Peter Straub,