Return of the Horror Novel

 I do not read horror novels. For me, horror works best in the short story form. That means Stephen King and Clive Barker as well as H.P. Lovecraft. I find Toni Morrison's Beloved to be a great horror story and it is also more. But this being Halloween, I am passing along Alison Flood's Chapter and curse: is the horror novel entering a golden age? from The Guardian.

Horror fiction, says author Stephen Graham Jones, is booming right now. “It’s blooming, it’s blossoming. I mean, night blooms, of course, with a bloody centre. Probably some flies crawling over those petals.”

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“Horror is in a very exciting place,” says Neil McRobert, who hosts the Talking Scared podcast, which interviews some of horror fiction’s biggest names. He points to authors such as Jones, V Castro – whose Goddess of Filth sees four friends hold a seance, only for one of them to begin chanting in Nahuatl, the language of their Aztec ancestors – and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose Mexican Gothic is a deliciously creepy twist on gothic horror, set in 1950s Mexico (I adored it).

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“Horror can encompass anything from Saw to Shirley Jackson,” says Ward. “There’s this fantastic description of the gothic – that it is not a genre at all, but a virus that attaches itself to genres and infects texts, and also morphs through time and adapts as needed. I think horror perhaps could be seen as the same thing.”

And then there is a list of recommended horror novels

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