Steffen Hantke
While horror cinema has been a lively field of academic inquiry for decades, attracting young scholars who are in equal measure driven by their love for the genre and equipped with a keen sense of its historical scope and theoretical intricacies, horror literature has largely failed to match this attraction. This may have something to do with horror fiction failing to attract a wide popular audience. After all, many academics begin as fans before turning the object of their adoration into a professional pursuit. Of course, horror fiction is still written and read. But when was the last time a horror novel created a buzz like Ari Aster’s film Midsommar (2019) or broke revenue records like Andy Muschietti’s It (2017)? A novel or short story might briefly garner popular attention and gain a readership outside of a committed fan community, but often even this happens because it is about to make the leap from the printed page to the screen. There are certainly horror writers who make it to the top of bestseller lists—or maybe there is just Stephen King. And King’s bestseller status is something that proves unattainable to horror writers at large.
Broader interest in the genre also experiences a brief burst whenever there is a reshuffling of horror fiction’s already existing canon due to issues seen as urgent in contemporary political debate—for better (as, for instance, in the case of Shirley Jackson’s rise in popularity following Ruth Franklin’s excellent biography),[i] or for worse (as in the precipitous rise of H. P. Lovecraft to the status of American literary original, followed by the vertiginous plunge of H. P. Lovecraft as a politically untenable representative of the field as a whole).[ii] But except for these blips on the radar—the serendipitous bestsellers, young authors on their way to literary stardom, or scandals and controversies—it is a stretch to call horror fiction a hot commodity.
Academia is in step with the genre’s limited exposure in the marketplace. For example, out of roughly a dozen monographs in the Horror Studies series published by the University of Wales Press, only two so far have been concerned with fiction, with a third one, Agnieszka Kotwasinska’s Houses of Horrors, published in 2023, making up for the discrepancy.[iii] Another example: for years, the official CFP of the Horror Area of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association’s annual conference has featured an explicit invitation to contributors to step beyond the preoccupation with horror film and branch out into other iterations of the genre, the cue being perhaps the subject area’s official listing as “Horror (Literary & Cinematic” (italics added). Little incentive is necessary to generate academic work on horror film—horror fiction, by contrast, seems to require that additional push.[iv]
Considering that the critical action in academic horror studies seems to be perpetually elsewhere, it is always worth noting when something is, in fact, happening with horror fiction, if not in what is written and read right now, but in the wide field of the genre’s production throughout the twentieth century. With horror’s current investment in nostalgia, it is hardly surprising that efforts are under way to rediscover or redeem past writers and their work. This is all the more apt for a period in the history of horror fiction—between the late 1960s and the early to mid-1990s—when horror fiction was produced at such high rates and commanded such impressive popular attention that one might be tempted to call it horror fiction’s “Golden Age.” As horror cinema is indulging its fans’ nostalgia with 1980s horror films pastiches, it is hardly surprising, then, that someone might think that horror fiction may hold the same appeal if given half a chance.
Hence, the recent critical engagement with this period—the first of its kind since the boom ended—certainly deserves closer attention. If the dictum holds true that academic rigor often starts in loving affection, then any effort that situates itself in the grey area between both emotional and methodological modes might pave the way from dedicated fans to academics and unite both groups around their shared interest in writing the genre’s history.[v] The effort I am talking about has three essential and interconnected components: a website run by Will Erricksson called “Too Much Horror Fiction,” Grady Hendrix’s lavishly illustrated book Paperbacks from Hell, and the re-publication in trade paperback format of select titles from the boom years of horror fiction by publisher Valancourt Books curated in consultation with Errickson and Hendrix and named after Henrix’s “Paperbacks from Hell.”
Before delving into these three interrelated efforts to catalogue, evaluate, and bring back into public consciousness the horror fiction of this boom period, it might be necessary to map out briefly the overall size and shape of the literary phenomenon itself. The boom in horror fiction that started in the late 1960s and ended in the mid-1990s was triggered by three novels that demonstrated to the publishing industry the genre’s viability for an audience far beyond that of fans alone: Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), Tom Tryon’s The Other (1971), and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971). It gained still more momentum thanks to a single author whose name would, simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically, become synonymous with horror and quickly solidify into a brand name in its own right: Stephen King. In the wake of King’s phenomenal cultural impact following Carrie (1974), Salem’s Lot (1975), and The Shining (1977), a group of writers would entrench horror on the bestseller lists: Peter Straub, Dean Koontz, and Anne Rice. Just below the crest of this rising tide, a vast number of midlist writers would find a comfortable niche, published primarily in the format of mass-market paperback originals. Some of them were to enjoy solid and resilient long-term careers (F. Paul Wilson, John Saul). Others would be granted brief moments of brilliance (T.E.D. Klein, Joan Samson). And finally, as the rising tide of literary horror would raise all boats, there were those at the bottom of the wave, quickly cashing in on the boom while it lasted, writing shoddily, derivatively, repetitively, routinely, and forgettably.
Blame for the eventual collapse of the tidal wave of literary horror would fall primarily upon these latter writers and their books: it was the sub-literary detritus—waved through indiscriminately by publishers and editors in order to cash in as long as the going was good—that was to erode confidence in the genre, turn off even committed readers, and eventually lead to horror fiction’s commercial collapse. While the pantheon of brand-name authors at the top would weather the changing market conditions, the oversaturation of the market with sub-literary exploitation fare would lead to an implosion that would take down the midlist writers together with the bottom-feeders. Publishers got out of the horror business, imprints folded, and novels that would have been marketed as horror only a few years before would suddenly be shelved in the bookstore’s mystery or romance section. Some writers would fall silent, others would switch genres, and literary horror fiction would take inventory and chart a course away from the moment of implosion and toward new generic iterations and tactics of cultural relevance. Horror fiction has survived the end of the boom, and it still produces texts and authors enjoying great popularity and worthy of critical attention – but it has never returned to the cultural spotlight in quite the same way.
The peculiar challenge for the effort to create a canon of 1980s horror fiction in the aftermath of this collapse is to separate those aspects that make it the best of times for the genre from the aspects that make it the worst of times. Was it the best of times because of horror’s unprecedented popularity? Because more people were reading horror fiction that ever before? Because publishers were willing, in exchange for likely profits, to take a chance on unknown, unconventional, or risky writers? Or was it the worst of times because the opening of the floodgate would not only let in the eccentric genius but also the untalented hack? Because the demands of this larger audience would dumb down the genre? Or because, given the sheer quantity of material published – somewhat paradoxically – more horror fiction than ever before would go altogether unread? Who would have even had the time to read a single year’s horror fiction production while the genre was riding high? And how could canonization claim to impose meaningful order if so much published material would never rise above the threshold of consideration?
Predictably enough, the canonization that has already occurred has been focused on the brand name authors—King, Rice, Straub, and a few others in sharply descending order. About them, there have been biographies, monographs, and critical essays. Stephen King in particular has received his due as the single central figure initiating the boom, aided by the fact that his productivity and commercial success has continued unabated to the present day. More “literary” writers swept up in the boom have mapped out more complex relationships with the genre (Joyce Carol Oates comes to mind), or have been re-contextualized by publishers to sever them retroactively from the genre (the re-publication of Jack Cady’s entire catalogue by Underland Press as, specifically, a writer of the Pacific Northwest would be an example). The sustained focus on the brand name writers has brought with it a narrowing down of the critical reception of the period as a whole, which is not to say that King did not inspire a thousand imitators. Yet thinking of 1980s horror fiction as essentially defined by a few writers and their work is clearly problematic. At its worst, the market might have been driven by this logic at the time. At its best, however, there was always more to horror fiction during the 1980s than King, Straub, Rice, and Koontz. While sales figures might have been impressive, the genre’s diversity and idiosyncratic creativity would quickly become casualties of the lazy canonization that starts from the top down.
The task that remains undone, therefore, is twofold: to assess horror fiction as horror fiction (i.e. to see it as it was published, and not get side tracked by publishers attempting a genre re-branding of novels and stories in subsequent years), and to perform that task with the vast body of work marketed as midlist fiction or below (with midlist fiction being the problem child of canonization, lacking even the enthusiastic “camp” or “so bad it’s good” readership attracted by sub-literary trash and exploitation). For anyone willing to take on this task, time is of the essence. The current moment is characterized by the precariousness of the medium in which this fiction was originally published. Many of the mass-market paperbacks went quickly out of print, and little would get re-printed as the trade paperback format began to make inroads into genre fiction during the 1990s (shifting from its traditional domain in the literary mainstream). Bookstores all over the US and other English-speaking countries would gradually eliminate the “Horror” section, and merge its titles into adjacent categories (thrillers, mystery and crime, paranormal romance, etc.), leaving the fiction of the horror boom to second-hand bookstores where the mass-market paperbacks published during the 1970s, ‘80s, and 90s are now rapidly disintegrating.[vi]
The precariousness of the medium also shapes current efforts at creating a canon. As the books, as disposable physical objects, are in the process of vanishing, they are increasingly being valued as collector’s items. A growing number of websites and YouTube channels featuring collectors showcasing their most recent “hauls” testifies to this cultural re-discovery and the cultural and, to a certain extent, generational nostalgia it transports. As collectors, these horror fiction fans are, by and large, driven by an agenda of taste that pays little attention to fiction as fiction. What matters more to many of them is the cleverness of the cover page design, or the rarity of an edition, or the condition of a copy. Every period, one might say, gets the canonical model it deserves—the collector’s preoccupation with the text as a physical object is the appropriate one for the period in which this physical object is about to vanish, the period in which it framed by nostalgia. While this could be a source of dismay for those still trying to separate “good writing” from sub-literary trash during the 1980s horror fiction boom, a broad collector’s sensibility might, surprisingly enough, be a roundabout path to an unprejudiced assessment and appreciation of the most deserving casualties of the genre’s collapse at the end of the boom—the midlist writers. And this is where Will Errickson, Grady Hendrix, and Valancourt Books come in.
Will Errickson’s Too Much Horror Fiction
Visitors to Errickson’s website, launched in February of 2010, are greeted by this message: “Too Much Horror Fiction collects and reviews vintage horror literature—mostly from the 1960s to the early 1990s—and celebrates its resplendent paperback cover art. Welcome!”[vii] The lion’s share of the site consists of postings in which Errickson discusses individual novels, authors, and illustrators. The occasion is often personal: it will be a novel he himself has just read, sometimes at someone’s recommendation; or the author or illustrator has passed away, has had a birthday, or has otherwise attracted Errickson’s attention. Occasionally, he groups together sets or sequences of books along some shared thematic commonality. Given the explicitly personal agenda of his commentary, it is fair to call this fan discourse, recognizing that, as with much fan discourse these days, the quality of the critical discussion tends to be high. Texts are anchored in their historical contexts, evaluated as to prose style, character development, and the plausibility (or lack thereof) of details and outlines of plots. Though Errickson is not above passing value judgements, the tone of the conversation is relaxed and tends to be generous; there are few, if any, instances of snarkiness or gratuitous cruelty even in the critical dismissal of an author or a text. While these comparative value judgments already imply a hierarchical ranking, Errickson only makes a more explicit attempt at imposing order on the vast field of material in a number of pages where the site lists “best of” collections in the categories of “novels,” “collections,” “anthologies,” and “non-fiction.” Though an asterisk marks “personal favourites,” the lists are not ranked from best to worst but simply listed alphabetically. The site is not explicitly dedicated to canon formation, but Errickson’s labour is cumulative. In its current state, the site is already a valuable source of information. Over time, it promises to become a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge on its subject matter, easy to search and navigate with via a personal and thematic index column running alongside the text on every page.
“Too Much Horror Fiction” may be just one of many sites dedicated to horror fiction, but it stands out in its direct connection to Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell, published by Quirk Books in Philadelphia in 2017. Subtitled “the twisted History of ‘70s and ‘80s Horror Fiction,” Paperbacks from Hell is a coffee table book—lavishly illustrated and packaged in a retro-inflected style reminiscent of its subject matter—with an abundance of explanatory and critical commentary accompanying the reproductions of mass market paperback cover illustrations. As on the pages of Errickson’s website, the level of critical sophistication is high. Not only does Hendrix speak as someone who, as he says of himself, has read hundreds of these books—no mean feat in itself. But he also does the basic work of critical assessment, linking them thematically to the historical context, shedding light on mechanisms of production, marketing, and distribution, and bringing some order to the glut of material by grouping texts in thematic clusters (e.g. “Creepy Kids” or “When Animals Attack”) and showing lines of influence across various cycles. The book really only gives in to the canonical urge in the Afterword, entitled “Recommended Reading,” which is written by none other than Will Errickson.
Valancourt’s re-issuing of 70s and 80s horror fiction
It is in the collaboration between Hendrix and Errickson with Valancourt that this canonical urge manifests itself concretely through the editorial selection of a limited number of books re-published under the “Paperbacks from Hell” imprint. Each volume is accompanied by a foreword by Errickson, who is drawing on his website postings as outlines for the forewords. Though the books are priced like trade paperbacks, they reproduce the dimensions of the mass market originals and retain their original cover art, with the name of the artist prominently featured in the packaging. At the time of writing, a total of nineteen titles have been published, with three writers represented with two titles each.[viii] Midlist writers dominate the field.
In their relationships to and interactions with each other, these three forays into surveying 1980s horror fiction – imposing some kind of order onto it and mining it for texts to be re-introduced to an audience that is not primarily composed of collectors but of readers – are reminiscent of the practices and market strategies used by distributors of horror cinema (and related genres) like Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow, or Severin Films: they bring the love of the fan for the genre into play and add a careful curating of the material, which brings with it the critical models of academic writing but strips them of the weight of those academic conventions that are geared exclusively toward academic professionalization. As with the flourishing of 1970s and ‘80s low-budget horror cinema, the embarrassment of riches that is 1980s horror fiction provides a rich field for this type of exploration.
One outstanding feature of what Errickson, Hendrix, and Valancourt are doing is that their approach—calibrated carefully between nostalgia and curative rigor, and expanding the textual boundaries to include the physical aspects of the books as material objects—foregoes earlier canonical attempts and their legitimizing strategies. These earlier models were still struggling with the disreputable nature of the horror genre and were, consequently, trying to elevate it by analogies with “literary” fiction. Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (1981), for example, features, as one of its two indices (one listed as “The Films,” the other as “The Books”) a reading list that places literary and genre fiction side by side. Similarly, Stephen Jones and Kim Newman’s Horror: 100 Best Books (1988) includes entries that seem deliberately chosen to make the point that some of the finest entries in the Western canon have always been, in their dark heart of hearts, horror fiction (e.g. an entry on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus written by Clive Barker and one on Macbeth written by John Blackburn).[ix]
As the literary canon in general has lost some of its cultural power, horror fiction’s hope that legitimization might be helped by recourse to that canon has given way to a different way of framing its production for a wider audience. This one is tied to an understanding that the packaging of a piece of fiction is just as much a part of the text as what is on the printed page, while being infused by a profound nostalgia for material culture on the verge of disappearance. “When we teased the series on social media,” James Jenkins of Valancourt explains in an interview, “the response was huge, and as far as the cover art goes it was unanimous: people want the original covers!” (“Conjured from Obscurity”).[x] Valancourt, in other words, serves an audience which just as much appreciates their publications as cultural objects as it reads them for their literary value.
As this project gives readers a taste of the collector’s pleasures, it also, though, turns collectors back into readers. Though Errickson and Hendrix will still point out deficiencies and weaknesses of individual texts they discuss, they do show an honest appreciation of aesthetic models that depart from the aesthetics of the brand name writers of horror (e.g. Stephen King’s kitchen-sink realism or Peter Straub’s literary allusiveness). [xi] Especially for readers who are critically aware of the exclusionary function of all canonization by literary merit alone—i.e. the subjectivity or ideological loadedness by which “good” and “bad” writing are often distinguished from each other—the good-natured egalitarianism behind this approach might be a particularly apt and efficient way of recovering the midlist writers and giving them credit where credit is due. This is not to say that, ultimately, we will all discover that 1980s horror fiction was an unrecognized and underappreciated trove of literary treasures; whenever the prospect of quick profits seduces agents, editors, and publishers into “letting things slide,” the results are never likely to be unanimously brilliant. But for the work that was produced during the boom that, drifting along with the mainstream of popular culture at its most popular, never found the readers it deserved, Errickson’s, Hendrix’s, and Valancourt’s canonical labour is good news indeed.
Notes
[i] See Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, Liveright, 2016.
[ii] For further information, see “Horror of Horrors: Is H.P. Lovecraft’s Legacy Tainted?” NPR, October 4, 2014.
[iii] One of these titles is dedicated to the work of Stephen King, the other to Weird Fiction. For the full catalogue of the University of Wales’s series, see “Horror Studies.” The full title of Kotwasinska’s monograph— Houses of Horrors: Familial Intimacies in Contemporary American Horror —highlights fiction as its primary focus.
[iv] For the full text of the most recent iteration of this Call for Papers, see CFP: Horror (Literary & Cinematic), SWPACA, Albuquerque, Feb. 21-24, 2024.
[v] Kotwasinska’s monograph lists Hendrix’s book among its sources in the bibliography.
[vi] This destruction has been a long time coming since even during the 1980s, the practice of publishers recalling unsuccessful titles and pulping them was already common.
[vii] For full access to the website, see “Too Much Horror Fiction.”
[viii] These writers are Thomas Tessier, Elisabeth Engstrom, and Lisa Tuttle.
[ix] Exempt from this attempt at elevating horror fiction were publications like Ellen Datlow’s and Terri Windling’s Best of the Year: Horror, which would chronicle the range of publications in, more or less, real-time of their appearance, without necessarily entertaining a wider historical perspective.
[x] For the full interview, see “Conjured from Obscurity: An Interview with Valancourt Books,” Unquiet Things, October 23, 2018.
[xi] The most striking illustration of this is Hendrix’s presentation “FIT: Love Your Library: Paperbacks from Hell,” YouTube.
