Opinion This is why everyone is reading more horror books now
The rise of horror fiction has historically coincided with periods of social unrest. The current surge veers towards the political and the feminist, a reaction to and escape from some of the more terrifying real-life prospects
The rise of horror fiction has historically coincided with periods of social unrest. Literary folklore has it that Stephen King’s predilection for the macabre came from having witnessed a friend die in a train collision as a child. He never quite remembered the incident, but for years afterwards, he was haunted by the morbid. Later, when he chanced upon books by H P Lovecraft, the American horror writer, King knew that he had found his calling.
Horror would be his métier for it allowed him the comfort of making sense of what terrified him. It is a truth seldom given its due that a fraught present and an uncertain future seek catharsis not in the familiar but in the eerie and the horrifying.
In a year worn out by wars — between Russia and Ukraine and Israel’s unrelenting retaliatory action against Palestine — lingering pandemic woes, economic uncertainty and climate anxiety, a recent report in The Guardian has shown that between 2022-2023, sales of horror books have risen by an unprecedented 54 per cent. The streak has continued into the first quarter of 2024.
The rise of horror fiction has historically coincided with periods of social unrest. In 1764, when Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto — acknowledged as the first Gothic horror novel — was published, it seemed at odds with the great modernist strides of the era.
Walpole’s novel, a retreat into medieval intrigue and supernatural terror, came as a reaction to the anxieties around the Industrial Revolution, the unprecedented economic transformations and challenges to organised religion that it had set off. Likewise, the rise in dystopian horror fiction in the 20th century could be traced to the possibilities of nuclear war.
Unsurprisingly, the current surge in horror veers towards the political and the feminist, a reaction to and escape from, perhaps, some of the more terrifying real-life prospects — a rollback on abortion rights or democratic freedoms in some of the world’s foremost democracies or the spectre of the climate crisis in the time of the Anthropocene. For a world on edge, fictional escapism might just be what the doctor ordered.
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