Horror fiction

Horror fiction is, broadly, fiction intended to scare, unsettle or horrify the reader. Although a good deal of it is about the supernatural, any fiction with a morbid, gruesome, surreal, suspenseful or frightening theme may be termed "horror"; conversely, many stories of the supernatural are not horror. Horror fiction often overlaps with science fiction and fantasy, all of which form the umbrella category speculative fiction.

Table of contents

1 Early horror fiction
2 Contemporary horror fiction
3 See also
4 External links

Early horror fiction

Probably the first works of horror fiction were the gothic novels, typified by Bram Stoker's Dracula and Henry James's Turn of the Screw. Another early work of horror fiction is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein. Frankenstein has also been considered science fiction or a philosophical novel by some literary historians. Early horror works used mood and subtlety to deliver an eerie and otherworldly flavor, but usually eschewed extensive explicit violence.

Other early exponents of the horror form number such luminaries as H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, who were considered to be masters of the art. Lovecraft and Sheridan le Fanu called some of their writing weird fiction or weird stories.

Contemporary horror fiction

Modern practitioners of the genre have resorted to progressively greater extremes of violence in order to achieve some sort of effect. This has given horror fiction a stigma as base entertainment devoid of literary merit.

Nevertheless, contemporary writers such as Clive Barker in The Books of Blood and Stephen King in his more considered work, such as Misery, are capable of bringing off the horror effect without the grand guignol which characterises much of the current mainstream of this genre.

The rise of the Internet has allowed horror authors and fans to create new subsets of the genre. Numerous web based fanzines have provided a market for both amateur and professional writers which is (for better or for worse) unfettered by the tastes and judgments of the professional publishing houses.