Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Aside from comedy, horror is the genre whose impact hinges most on its brevity, and indeed comedy and horror are rather closely linked, almost like twin siblings who have strikingly different personalities. Both traditionally rely on a setup followed by a punchline, preferably in quick succession. If you watch some third-rate horror movie you’ll likely be subjected to the “jump scare,” which itself plays out like a joke: there’s the setup (the growing sense of tension, either through a building musical score or the conspicuous lack of music, the person about to be jump-scared either knowing implicitly that something lurks around the corner or being totally ignorant of that lurking thing), followed by the punchline (the jump scare itself, typically accompanied by a scare chord from the music section). So, horror is tension plus time. The tension can only be sustained for so long, much like how the setup for a joke can only be sustained for so long before the audience gets impatient or bored, hence why historically horror has worked best and most often at short lengths. Surveying the history of horror literature in the Anglosphere as we recognize it, from the late 18th century to now, there’s no shortage of authors who wrote horror prolifically at short lengths. In the history of American literature especially the art of the modern short story can be traced back to Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving, who both often wrote either horror or fantasy of a weird if not outright horrific sort. Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “The Adventure of the German Student” by themselves may have inspired quite a few authors to try their hand at what we now call weird fiction, but then Irving wasn’t primarily a horror writer. Instead it was Poe who made his name as a master of horror in the short form, in the process also giving rise to the detective story, and even a fair amount of science fiction.

Poe’s most famous and arguably best story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” came as a revelation when it was published in 1839—not so much for its innovation but in how it reshaped what had been for a couple decades seen as a literary school that had run its course: the capital-G Gothic narrative. I say “narrative,” but the Gothic story was, prior to Poe, typically of novella or novel length, the latter being more lucrative. The reality is that what was true in 1820 is more or less still true in 2025, which is that novels sell. With a few very notable exceptions (I’m looking at you, Ted Chiang), the rule is that if you wanna “make it” as a writer then you have to write novels. You can write short fiction on the side if you want, as like a hobby, but you must write at least a few novels. Preferably a series, if you can. And yet, despite the demands of capital, horror at novel length only existed sporadically in the time before Poe, and indeed for more than a century after his death. The horror novelist, i.e., someone who specializes at least somewhat in writing horror novels, simply did not exist yet. Consider what H. P. Lovecraft, in his seminal essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” thought of as the first true supernatural horror novel, that being Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. Lewis, the learned son of a diplomat, was only 19 when he wrote The Monk, a messy and rambling but also striking and entertainingly grotesque novel, published in 1795 or 1796 depending on the source. The Monk sparked controversy in the UK at the time, but it also sold well, to the point where it garnered the very young Lewis a reputation which he was not terribly keen on, being called “Monk” Lewis. While Lewis would continue writing, mostly for the stage, he never wrote a proper follow-up to The Monk; maybe he would have, had he not died young, at only 42.

There goes our first would-be horror novelist.

There was, of course, a close contemporary of Lewis’s who bordered on being a horror novelist, and may have been one had what she written been more in line with the genre. Ann Radcliffe is a name fans of Jane Austen would find as ringing a bell, if only because Austen satirizes her work rather playfully in the novel Northanger Abbey. Radcliffe was famous at the tail end of the 18th century for her Gothic novels, although actually she only wrote six of them before retiring from novel-writing at a relatively young age, and only one of them, The Mysteries of Udolpho, holds serious water in pop culture. Radcliffe’s novels are not horror as we understand the term, but more true to the title of that aforementioned novel, they’re meant to be taken as mysterious. The Gothic elements, from the castles to the Spanish Inquisition, certainly make these works rub shoulders with proper horror, but scaring her readers was not Radcliffe’s aim; rather she wanted to convey a sense of wonder and mystery, although many, including Lovecraft, fault her for providing at times convoluted rational explanations for what appear to be supernatural doings. In part due to Austen’s skewering of her work (albeit that it seemed to be affectionate) and partly from a rare case of pop culture osmosis having a negative effect on an artist’s reputation, Radcliffe’s work has only gotten reevaluated in the past couple decades, some 200+ years after publication. A couple decades after Radcliffe’s retirement, indeed around the time of Austen’s death, there were at least two one-off efforts from very different authors that would do what Radcliffe did not: Mary Shelley with Frankenstein and Charles Maturin with Melmoth the Wanderer. Lovecraft considered both but especially the latter to be the last and ultimately best out of the original Gothic tradition.

Mary Shelley needs no introduction, although it must be said that the stars seemed to align such that she would become one of the most important authors in all English literature, despite said importance hinging more or less on a single work. Shelley was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, who were both famous in their time as proto-feminist and anti-authoritarian figures. Shelley herself married the now-famous Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who sadly died very young in a shipwreck, just a few years after the publication of Frankenstein. The story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein is almost as famous as the novel itself, to the point where it’s recreated as the framing narrative in Bride of Frankenstein (weird choice, I know). The story goes that in 1816 Mary, Percy, Lord Byron, and John Polidori made a bet to see who could write the best horror story, although only Mary and Polidori actually managed to finish their contributions, the latter having written the pioneering vampire story “The Vampyre.” Frankenstein was published in 1818, with Mary Shelley revising it considerably in 1831; a good way to start an argument with fans of the book is to ask which version one should read first. Brian Aldiss later claimed, in Billion Year Spree among other places, that Frankenstein was the Big Bang moment for science fiction, the first proper SF story that set the standard for all to follow—a claim that certainly has firm ground for itself. But while Shelley wrote another major SF novel, The Last Man, Frankenstein remained her most substantial horror story, never mind the work she remains by far the most known for.

Charles Maturin was a very different case from Mary Shelley. An Irish Protestant clergyman of French heritage, Maturin mostly wrote in obscurity, and indeed Melmoth the Wanderer, widely considered his magnum opus, is the only thing of his you’ll likely to find in bookstores. Published in 1820, and inspired somewhat by what Maturin called “the Radcliffe romance,” Melmoth the Wanderer goes far beyond what Radcliffe or even Shelley had done, being at once a harrowing and genuinely eerie Gothic narrative and also bordering on an encyclopedic novel, being dense with allusions and references. One needs an edition that comes with notes when tackling this one. But while it is perhaps overstuffed with frame tales and almost cartoonish in its anti-Catholic sentiments (there’s a looooong sequence involving the Inquisition), there is, as Lovecraft says, “an understanding of the profoundest sources of actual cosmic fear.” Perhaps for the first time since The Monk, which is a religiously serious novel despite its grotesquery, there’s a tangible sense of fire-and-brimstone wrath in horror writing, made possible with Maturin’s novel. Maturin may have written a follow-up to Melmoth the Wanderer, had he not died only four years after its publication; as such it remains yet another one-off effort in the genre’s history, which at this point seems plagued by inconsistency. In the whole first half of the 19th century there was not a single writer, at least in the Anglosphere, who took up the mantle of writing horror consistently at novel length, and indeed there wouldn’t be one for a long while yet. Maturin’s own grand-nephew, the much more famous Oscar Wilde, himself wrote a rightly beloved horror novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; but alas it would be his only novel, and anyway Wilde was not exactly a horror writer.

Looking back on the genre’s history, one would think horror literature stayed more or less dormant through the Victorian era and into the early 20th century, but this is far from true, for at short length the genre stayed very much alive and well through the years. There was a half-century period, from about 1890 to 1940, where the horror short story was arguably at the height of both its average quality and how much was being written, between those who specialized in horror and those who did not. The list, even if we’re just counting “literary” authors who wrote a fair number of short horror stories, is daunting: Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, John Collier, O. Henry, and so on. But then you also had those who did specialize in horror, at which point the list becomes near-endless. Yet none of these people wrote horror novels with any regularity—except maybe one. The closest we have to the first proper horror novelist is the semi-obscure William Hope Hodgson, whose books did not sell much when he was alive and whose untimely death on the battlefields of World War I meant he did not live to interact with the authors he would influence. Hodgson wrote four novels, but I’m especially considering the first three, which were written and published in quick succession, and which Hodgson considered what “may be termed a trilogy; for, though very different in scope, each of the three books deals with certain conceptions that have an elemental kinship.” These are The Boats of the “Glen Carrig,” The House on the Borderland, and The Ghost Pirates. I’ve read all three, and indeed despite very different settings (The House on the Borderland especially feels like an outlier), they do seem in conversation with each other; they’re also early examples of weird horror crossed with a romanticism that has not aged nearly as well. The Ghost Pirates, being easily the least romantic of the three, I would say is also the best from start to finish. Hodgson was a true innovator, but he also wrote for a living and it shows, not to mention his early death robbed us of more work.

It could be because the genre’s finest contributors tended to either stick to short stories and novellas or die tragically young, or both, but even during the height of Weird Tales, in the latter half of the 1920s through the ’30s, horror novels were still hard to come by. The editor of Weird Tales during this period, Farnsworth Wright, wasn’t keen on long serials, and as such you would only get maybe one full novel serialized in that magazine per year, sometimes not even that. Even when a novel runs in Weird Tales it is unlikely to find publication in book form anytime soon; there just wasn’t a market for new horror books in the ’30s. It’s perhaps telling that Lovecraft’s own three longest stories, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness, and The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, had long journeys to publication, with only At the Mountains of Madness seeing print in Lovecraft’s lifetime, and only some five years after he had written it. His contemporaries didn’t do any better for the most part. Seabury Quinn, who in the ’30s was one of Weird Tales‘s most popular contributors, had his novel The Devil’s Bride serialized in 1932, yet it would not appear in book form until 1976. Robert Bloch’s first novel, The Scarf, languished in obscurity for decades and only got brought back into print literally this year. Bloch of course gained mainstream recognition for Psycho, the Alfred Hitchcock movie more so than the book itself; but while it is horror, Psycho is totally bereft of supernatural elements, making it an outlier in Bloch’s oeuvre. Frank Belknap Long wrote almost no horror at novel length. Robert E. Howard only managed to complete one novel, The Hour of the Dragon, which is a Conan story and not horror. When Wright stepped down as editor, shortly before his death, Weird Tales gave even less room to serials, with its new editor, Dorothy McIlwraith, focusing more strictly on short stories.

By the time the US entered World War II, the magazine market for both horror and fantasy was at a bit of a crossroads, and there was still no substantial book market for either; this trend continued into the post-war years, albeit there were a few spots of hope. In the ’50s Richard Matheson blessed us with semi-regular excursions into horror at novel length, including I Am Legend, A Stir of Echoes, and The Shrinking Man (primarily SF but definitely containing prominent horror elements), never mind his almost obligatory haunted-house novel Hell House in 1971. As with Bloch, however, Matheson wrote more prolifically elsewhere, be it short stories or writing film and TV scripts. Shirley Jackson, one of the most famous and controversial short story writers of her time, also found reasonable success with novels, and probably would have enjoyed the deluge of horror in the ’70s if not for her death in 1965. Indeed it wasn’t until the ’70s that the horror novel, having by this point become divorced from the magazine market while at the same time taking advantage of loosening censorship in multiple mediums, had begun truly to blossom in the sense that multiple authors were making a killing on the profession at the same time. Alongside Hell House in 1971 we also got William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, which you may have heard of. The Exorcist was not only a bestseller but spawned an even more popular movie that took home two Oscars, including one for Blatty’s screenplay. Horror, especially in the film world, was becoming nigh-ubiquitous, but for literature it would take one more push to make a powerhouse industry out of it.

In 1974, a sort of miracle happened. A young and often drunk writer from Maine in his twenties, named Stephen King, finally got his novel Carrie published, at Doubleday and under the shrewd editorship of one Bill Thompson. King had been writing horror stories since the tail end of the ’60s, and even got some published in respectable mainstream outlets prior to Carrie; but it was that first novel, which mind you is really a mix of horror and science fiction, which made him a star. However, it would’ve been one thing if King had written just Carrie before going back to short fiction; instead he did what previously mentioned authors did or could not do and came back soon with yet another bestseller in the form of ‘Salem’s Lot. Being one of the all-time classic vampire novels and arguably King’s first truly great novel, ‘Salem’s Lot was far more ambitious than Carrie, yet also showed a growing maturity in King’s writing and a fine-tuning when it came to building tension. By the time The Shining was published, not quite two years after ‘Salem’s Lot, it became apparent that King was a force to be reckoned with, for both his productivity and his commitment to writing horror that was accessible to the mainstream reader. I’ve given King a lot of shit, as I continue to do (I recently tried reading his overview of 20th century horror, Danse Macabre, and couldn’t get through it because I thought it was quite bad), but it would also be foolish to not give credit where credit’s due. It could be that King was on a creative streak in the ’70s, when he was young and hungry, or it could be that Thompson had edited his first four novels and provided a restraint latter-day King lacked, or it could be some combination; but regardless, King had emerged as almost an industry unto himself, a fact which shook the reading world.

By the end of the ’70s the horror novelist, as distinct from a novelist who sometimes writes horror, had come into existence, seemingly arbitrarily. Anne Rice made her novel debut with Interview with the Vampire in 1976, a very gay horror novel that also became a bestseller and which spawned a film adaptation, a TV adaptation, and a long-running book series. Peter Straub, who had made his debut in 1973 with the non-horror novel Marriages, languished in obscurity for a bit before making it big with Ghost Story in 1979, an atmospheric if also bloated horror novel about shape-shifting monsters. You may have heard of Straub if you’re a King fan because of their acclaimed collaborative novel The Talisman. (They also much later wrote a sequel, Black House, although we don’t talk about that one as much.) The ’80s saw such a growth in horror novels being published every year that the Horror Writers Association (HWA) was founded in 1985, and in 1987 would start giving out the Bram Stoker Award for several categories, it being the horror equivalent of the Hugo. The first year’s shortlist for Best Novel was so packed the the winner ended up being a tie between King’s Misery and Robert McCammon’s Swan Song. Indeed at this point you had Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, Dean Koontz, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Tim Powers, and others who made a living off of writing novels which at least had prominent horror elements. The dam had burst open. These were not coming from small publishers either, like Arham House, but big names like Doubleday, Viking Press, and Pocket Books. When it comes to horror the big and small publishers have come to work parallel with each other, each covering ground the other will not, with the latter especially being good for short fiction and “the classics.” Regardless, it seems that nobody has dared look back.

It took close to two centuries, and indeed a few decades longer than it took with science fiction and fantasy, but long-form horror literature became its own industry, beholden to both critics and capital, for better or for worse. When David G. Hartwell assembled the landmark reprint anthology The Dark Descent in 1987, he envisioned it as a look back on the history of horror at it pertained to short fiction, since it had become apparent by the mid-’80s that the horror novel had overtaken the horror short story in the popular consciousness. The problem is that while the horror novel was and continues to be popular, there was no continuity of long-form horror up to that point, since as we can see, looking over this pretty lengthy piece of mine, the horror novel in English, for nearly 200 years, only existed sporadically. As Hartwell says in his introduction:

It is evident both from the recent novels themselves and from the public statements of many of the writers that Stephen King, Peter Straub and Ramsey Campbell, and a number of other leading novelists, have been discussing among themselves—and trying to solve in their works—the perceived problems of developing the horror novel into a sophisticated and effective form.

With the exceptions of a few novels which are unspeakably old at this point (Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stoker’s Dracula, and a couple others), the novels making up the horror “canon” have come about no earlier than 1950; and indeed recency bias has come into effect with horror far more profoundly than with science fiction, if only because there are so few horror novels published between 1900 and 1970 that one could even name, let alone think of as “canonical.” The horror novelist is a relatively new animal, being a mutation, somewhere between the Gothic novelist and the SF novelist. When King dies (hopefully later rather than sooner), we’ll have to reckon with his legacy with regards to his own body of work, but also the industry he helped create. It’s possible that in one year or in ten there will be a conspicuous King-shaped hole in horror writing, after Anne Rice and Peter Straub’s recent deaths. And Ramsey Campbell is looking quite old now, as is Dan Simmons, although Simmons is an asshole anyway. Hartwell himself died in 2016, and I’m not sure if he ever found a solution to the problem that is the still-young and uncertain world of horror novels as “serious” literature, which we are to study alongside examples of “canonical” SF and fantasy. It’s not a problem for me to think about much longer, since I tend to prefer short stories and novellas, but it’s food for thought.