by Matt Cardin
Horror fiction had already been moving in that direction via the stories of Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson. Throughout the 1940s Bradbury published horror stories in Weird Tales set in familiar small-town America, whose ordinary characters leading their mundane lives share more of a kinship with the everyday people of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, than they do with the creepy residents of H. P. Lovecraft’s legend-haunted Arkham, Massachusetts. More often than not the horrors in these stories grow out of ordinary human experience rather than some horrific incursion of the supernatural. In his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), a distillation of themes and ideas that he had addressed in his Weird Tales stories, Bradbury describes the people of Green Town, Illinois as “tired men and women whose faces were dirty with guilt, unwashed of sin, and smashed like windows by life that hit without warning, ran, hid, came back and hit again” (Bradbury 1998, 24). The unrelieved frustration and disillusionment with life expressed in this passage proves a magical incantation that summons Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, a dark carnival that magically appears in town one October, on the cusp of Halloween, to mock the residents and their unfulfilled dreams with Faustian temptations.
The fiction of Shirley Jackson can be read as a complement to Bradbury’s weird tales. Jackson’s work appeared mostly in mainstream publications such as the New Yorker, Charm, and Good Housekeeping, and a very thin line separates her stories of amusing characters’ mishaps from those in which similar mishaps prove more ominous. At the core of much of Jackson’s writing is a vision of the individual perilously out of step with his or her society and the status quo, most evident in such stories as “The Lottery” (1948), about a small New England town where long-established traditions have deteriorated into menacing rituals, and “The Summer People” (1951), in which a vacationing family discovers the terrible fate that awaits any out-of-towners who overstay the summer season. Her best-known novels—The Sundial (1958), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)—are modern Gothics in which characters who are usually more sensitive and self-conscious than others around them retreat to insular environments that bring their feelings of personal dislocation sharply into focus and concentrate what critic S. T. Joshi refers to as the “pervasive atmosphere of the odd” that pervades all of her work (Joshi 2001, 13).
The “banalization” of the macabre seen in the writing of Bradbury and Jackson became commonplace in much of the better horror fiction written in the 1950s and 1960s, notably in the work of Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. The leitmotif in all of Matheson’s stories, as he described it in his introduction to The Collected Stories of Richard Matheson, is “the individual isolated in a threatening world, attempting to survive” (Matheson 2005, 252–253). In the paranoid world of Matheson’s fiction, even the most common situations and settings have the potential to threaten: household appliances turn murderous toward their owner in “Mad House” (1953), and every slight or unwanted encounter in the everyday world is proof of a sinister conspiracy again the individual in “Legion of Plotters” (1953). In his novel The Shrinking Man (1956), a character shrinking in size daily as the result of a toxic exposure suddenly finds the house he has lived in comfortably for years to be full of dangerous snares and pitfalls—among them the household cat and a spider in his basement—as his diminishing size renders him more vulnerable. In Charles Beaumont’s fiction, horror often grows out of the stultifying effects of social conformity. In his story “The New People” (1958), a couple newly moved into an upper-crust community are horrified to discover that all of their neighbors participate in a black magic coven to alleviate the boredom of their successful lives. “The Dark Music” (1956), “The Hunger” (1955), and “Miss Gentibelle” (1957) all are concerned with sexual repression and the strange forms that its expression can assume. Matheson and Beaumont became two of the most prolific screenwriters for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), a television program that frequently focused on the dark side of ordinary human experience. The interplay between horror stories and representations of horror in extraliterary media such as television and film was another influence that shaped horror fiction in the postwar years in a way that it never had before.
The familiarizing of horror also extended to its most iconic tropes as writers sought to adapt and reconceive classic horrors to fit a postwar sensibility. Fritz Leiber, for instance, had begun doing this in the 1940s through short stories such as “Smoke Ghost” (1941), which conjured spectral presences out of the smoke and grime of industrial cities, and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949), in which an advertising model feeds vampirically off the sexual passions that she arouses in men. In his novel The Sinful Ones (1980), a man and woman awaken one day from their routine lives to discover that the world and all of its people are zombie-like automatons who go mechanically about their routines, oblivious to anything that deviates from the prescribed program. Another American writer, Jack Finney, reimagined the tale of supernatural possession in terms of extraterrestrial invasion in The Body Snatchers (1955), in which aliens from outer space appropriate the bodies of residents of a small California town, depriving them of their emotions and free will and forging a community through rigid social conformity. In his controversial novel Some of Your Blood (1961), Theodore Sturgeon expanded on the vampire theme, dispensing with traditional representations of the vampire as a creature of supernatural evil and presenting, instead, a case study of aberrant psychology in which a young man’s craving for menstrual blood provides him with the emotional fulfillment denied him by the norms of society. Norman Bates, the psychologically disturbed young man in Psycho (1959), who periodically assumes the persona of his overprotective dead mother to kill women who arouse his passions, was arguably Robert Bloch’s refurbishing of horror’s shape-shifter or werewolf theme for the tale of the modern serial killer. In Rosemary’s Baby (1967), Ira Levin reimagined the witch’s coven of gothic horror fiction as a clique of tenants in a modern Manhattan apartment building who worship Satan in order to reap advantages crucial to their social advancement.
A Timeline of Horror from 1950 to 2000
1954
Weird Tales publishes its final issue in September. Richard Matheson publishes I Am Legend.
1955
Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers.
1959
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House.
1959–1964
Robert Bloch publishes Psycho. Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone brings high-quality horror, SF, and fantasy to a prime-time American television audience, featuring scripts written by the likes of Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson.
1960
Alfred Hitchcock directs his iconic film adaptation of Robert Bloch’s Psycho.
1962
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes.
1963
Ray Russell, The Case Against Satan; director Robert Wise’s The Haunting; a cinematic adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
1967
Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby.
1968
Writer/director George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, partly inspired by Matheson’s I Am Legend, creates the modern zombie archetype. Roman Polanski directs a film adaptation of Ira Levin’s Rosemary Baby.
1971
William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist;
Thomas Tryon, The Other.
1973
Nine months after the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam in March, director William Friedkin’s film adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist—with a screenplay written by Blatty himself—becomes a cultural sensation and launches the era of the modern movie “blockbuster.” Ramsey Campbell publishes Demons by Daylight.
1974
Stephen King publishes his first novel, Carrie.
1976
Anne Rice publishes her first novel, Interview with the Vampire.<
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1977
Stephen King, The Shining.
1979
Stephen King, The Dead Zone; Peter Straub, Ghost Story.
1983
Stephen King, Pet Sematary and Christine.
1984–1985
Clive Barker, Books of Blood.
1987
David G. Hartwell edits The Dark Descent.
1991
Kathe Koja’s The Cipher launches the Dell Abyss line of contemporary horror novels.
1992
Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls.
1998
Caitlín R. Kiernan, Silk.
2000
The publication of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station marks the advent of the “New Weird.”
Levin’s novel, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were all marketed as mainstream novels that gradually revealed undertones of horror in varying degrees. They epitomize the degree to which the horror tale embraced mainstream conventions through the familiarization of its themes, settings, and characters. These novels, all popular best-sellers, laid the foundations for the modern horror boom and set the stage for the meteoric ascent of Stephen King, whose phenomenal popularity is understandable in part in terms of the achievements of these novels. Like Levin, Tryon, and Blatty, King uses horror fiction effectively as a vehicle for exploring fundamental human dramas. Perhaps more than any other writer of contemporary horror fiction, King is the preeminent creator of fables that use fantasy to transform ordinary individuals into archetypes, and the personal, social, and political conflicts that shape their lives into struggles with mythic resonance. As a member of the baby boom generation, he became a mouthpiece through his tales of horror for the anxieties of his peers as they matured from rambunctious childhood to doubt-ridden adulthood. His novels Carrie (1974) and Christine (1983) are both powered by their insights into the cruelty of teenage peer groups. The Dead Zone (1979) presents its protagonist with a difficult moral choice that sums up the political dilemmas facing the counterculture of the 1960s. The Shining (1977) is concerned partly with the devastating effects that one individual’s personal demons can have on a family, and Pet Sematary (1983) with the devastating grief that comes with the death of a loved one. At the same time, King’s very contemporary tales of horror often nod to or reprise ideas and themes from classic horror fiction in a way that shows his keen understanding of the mechanics of the horror story and his appreciation of horror’s ideas and formulas as an endlessly interpretable set of myths that can be resurrected and reshaped to fit the anxieties of each new age.
Although King’s success was one of the main drivers of the horror boom of the 1980s, the movement was also catalyzed to some degree by the era’s social and political realities. King emerged as a popular writer in the years immediately following America’s withdrawal from the Vietnam War (1955–1975) and the political turmoil of the Watergate scandal, when distrust of authority and paranoia about once-sacred institutions were at their highest in the United States. Horror fiction spoke to the anxieties of the generation that had come of age in the 1960s and that was now wrestling with apprehensions about the state of the world that they were inheriting. Abetted by publishers who, rightly or not, interpreted King’s success as a sign of the reading public’s appetite for horror fiction, rather than for King’s inimitable style of storytelling, a new generation of writers began turning out works of horror, some of which specifically addressed the fears and concerns that readers felt as both individuals and members of their society, but much of which simply reworked the themes of classic horror, albeit with a contemporary spin. Several writers, including Peter Straub, Anne Rice, Dean R. Koontz, Clive Barker, and Robert R. McCammon, achieved best-seller status, a reality all but unthinkable before the phenomenon of Stephen King. The proliferation of horror fiction and the profusion of writers devising new approaches to horror themes helped to transform several of the fiction’s classic monsters in these years. Anne Rice, with her novel Interview with the Vampire (1976), aided by the scores of vampire novels by other writers that it inspired, helped to transform the vampire into a sympathetic individual marginalized by his society. And the zombie, once a relatively innocuous entity resurrected by voodoo, was reinterpreted by writers nurtured on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead films as a relentless, mindless, undead, flesh-eating predator.
The rise of the zombie in late twentieth-century horror fiction coincides with the emergence of “splatterpunk,” a horror literature distinguished by graphic and occasionally gratuitous revels in gore and violence. Splatterpunk found its impetus in the fiction of Clive Barker, whose six Books of Blood collections published in 1984 and 1985 were notable for their artful but explicit depictions of sex and violence. Splatterpunk was also a response to the dark fantasy movement—promulgated at the start of the horror boom and popularized by Charles L. Grant through his Shadows anthologies—which encouraged the crafting of subtle horror stories with mainstream literary appeal. Splatterpunk’s most talented contributors—David J. Schow, John Skipp, and Craig Spector—produced work of indisputable merit, but the vast amount of splatterpunk fiction’s violation of taboos, for no better reason than to shock or revolt, constituted a new decadence, not unlike that seen at the twilight of the Gothic novel era two centuries before. The controversies the fiction raised among readers and writers foreshadowed the implosion of horror markets in the 1990s, as publishers retrenched from a genre label and a glut of fiction most of which never achieved the same success as the work of horror’s standard bearers.
Two trends that developed in horror publishing in the final decades of the twentieth century have persisted into the new century. A vibrant and dedicated small press, which helps to nurture new writers and assist developing writers in honing their craft, has become an indispensable fixture in horror publishing, one with fewer aesthetic constraints or reservations than commercial publishing. And the horror periodical has been largely replaced by the original anthology, whose varying thematic and nonthematic orientation has resulted in a renaissance for the short horror story. The legacy of horror fiction in the second half of the twentieth century is best measured by the profusion of works published and the pervasive presence of horror fiction in Western popular culture (and also world popular culture) at large. Once a subliterature that catered to the tastes of a small audience of devoted readers, horror emerged during the postwar years as a vital fiction that reflected the anxieties of its age and became a part of that age’s culture. Any literature of the next century that would present an accurate portrait of its time would have to contend with horror fiction as a ubiquitous presence in the modern literary landscape and a regular part of the general cultural vocabulary.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Anthologies; Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror; Part Three, Reference Entries: Barker, Clive; Beaumont, Charles; Bloch, Robert; Books of Blood; Bradbury, Ray; Brennan, Joseph Payne; Campbell, Ramsey; Dark Fantasy; Derleth, August; The Exorcist; “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”; Grant, Charles L; Harris, Thomas; Herbert, James; Interview with the Vampire; Jackson, Shirley; Ketchum, Jack; King, Stephen; Klein, T. E. D.; Koontz, Dean; Lansdale, Joe R.; Leiber, Fritz; Matheson, Richard; McCammon, Robert R.; Novels versus Short Fiction; The Other; Rice, Anne; Russell, Ray; The Shining; Something Wicked This Way Comes; Splatterpunk; Straub, Peter; Sturgeon, Theodore; Vampires; Weird Tales; Wellman, Manly Wade; Zombies.
Further Reading
Beaumont, Charles. 1962. The Fiend in You. New York: Ballantine.
Bradbury, Ray. [1962] 1998. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Avon.
Daniels, Les. 1975. Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media. New York: Scribners.
Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1999. �
�Contemporary Horror Fiction, 1950–1998.” In Fantasy and Horror, edited by Neil Barron, 199–343. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2001. “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror.” In The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction, 13–49. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
King, Stephen. 1981. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House.
Matheson, Richard. 2005. Collected Stories, Vol. 2. Colorado Springs: Edge Books.
Skal, David J. 1993. The Monster Show: A History of Horror. New York: Norton.
HORROR IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
The twenty-first century has seen an accentuation and continuation of events, trends, and inventions begun or created in the twentieth century that came to fruition in the 2000s. The widespread use and development of communication and digital technologies, the completion of the Human Genome Project, terrorist panic after the attacks of 9/11, and the culmination of neoliberal agendas and globalization have led to a consolidation of mistrust in governments and corporations. Horror has been affected by these events and shows a clear tendency toward apocalyptic scenarios, best captured by the zombie pandemic narrative, a form of dystopian fiction that focuses on the lives of survivors in a world of little hope and much suffering. But horror has also been positively affected, on a practical side, by the development of digital books. A significant number of out-of-print horror novels, especially from the 1980s’ “boom” period, have gradually become available as eBooks at low prices that make them easily accessible and affordable. At the same time, the possibility of self-publishing, via platforms like Amazon, means that horror novels have multiplied. In fact, it is safe to say that, although not as mainstream as it was in the 1980s, horror is undergoing a species of second golden age, with hundreds of horror novels having been published in the new millennium.