It Came From Stephen King! How horror lit crawled out of the swamp and into a golden age

I have found the secret to immortality.

Or at least to reading with everlasting interest, to holding a smile on your face and leaning forward in your seat, while being asked the best question a book can ask: What happens next? My secret is: scary books. For here is a well so inky you can’t see the bottom, a library where serious and silly share a shelf with every big fear you have ever avoided in yourself. Reading scary books can return you to your youth, and point a long, skeletal finger toward your future. It is both the coziest reading, and least comforting.

Gather ‘round.

Feel that bite in the air?

I have a tale to horrify and delight, at the same time, a story of cannibalism, giant owls, suburban demons and pumpkin-headed killers, of technology stalking Pilsen gentrifiers and childhood haunts unnerving Humboldt Park. A dark harvest falls upon us, children.

Yet first, to set the stage, a morbid note:

Stephen King, now 75, will die. I mean, someday. So will I. So will you. After 50 years of books — as much I would like to bury him in a pet cemetery and get another 50 — mortality, the great subject of every horror writer, awaits. It has already found Peter Straub, who died last month at 79; Anne Rice, who died last year at 80; and even Waldenbooks (1933-2011), the mall chain where King, Rice and Straub once ruled the horror section.

The good news is, to quote Shirley Jackson — whose “Haunting of Hill House” (1959) has long been the “Moby-Dick” of horror literature — “When we die, we turn into stories; and every time someone tells one of those stories, it’s like we’re still here for them.” The better news is, horror lit is very ALIVE! Some even say it’s experiencing a golden age of creativity, popularity and fresh blood.

“We’re in a horror lit renaissance right now,” said Chicago horror novelist Cynthia Pelayo. “There was a horror paperback boom in the ‘80s. This is different. There’s too much smart stuff to keep up with. The people of color and LGBTQ+ writers entering the genre alone are remarkable.”

Stephen Graham Jones, among the contemporary best-sellers of the genre (and a member of the Blackfeet tribe of Montana), said, “The audience and critical establishment are now seeing horror in a conversation with the world. I owe some of it to the film ‘Get Out’ and (Victor LaValle’s 2016 genre deconstruction) ‘The Ballad of Black Tom,’ but the overall point is welcome: There was a sense that horror writers and fans were speaking only to themselves, and now, lately, horror literature is reminding everyone else that this writing can also matter.”

Its relevance is screaming.

When the reality in a supernatural story feels more real than the times you are living though, you know the moment is ripe. Unreal stories for unreal times.

The long-held cornerstone currency of horror — hate, a declining environment, ambiguity about the future — are now everyday conversation. Mainstream literary authors who would never be confused with horror now dabble. Many of its best-loved stars are women, Black authors, queer writers. A casual flip through BookTok — the vast book lover’s wing of TikTok — is often just a litany of what horror novels everyone is reading these days. Barnes & Noble recently added a horror section to many stores. “Talk to other book sellers and the idea that horror is something to be marketed in October is less of a thing today,” said Javier Ramirez, co-owner of the Exile in Bookville book store on Michigan Avenue. “A lot of these books would be overstock by the winter, and now it’s our stock year round.” Then he adds: “But really, this is all because the quality is soaring — the best of this stuff is better written than the books we’re supposed to call literary fiction.”

On a recent fall evening, just before Halloween, Becky Spratford — “the nexus of all horror lit these days,” said Daniel Kraus, a horror novelist from Evanston — stood just inside the doors of the Glen Ellyn Public Library. A reader adviser from La Grange who works occasionally for the Chicago-based American Library Association, she is tasked with training library staffs to connect their customers with the right books. She does not shy from suggesting horror. Indeed, this night, she welcomed dozens of families, who spilled through the library doors, waiting for a tour of the second floor, transformed into one-scene horror plays performed by Glenbard West High School theater students.

Each tiny act — with the exception of the blood-bucket prom scene from King’s “Carrie” — came from contemporary horror. It was charming and odd, like horror plays by Wes Anderson. It was also a kind of physical manifestation of what Spratford has long held:

“Horror lit isn’t actually getting better,” she said, “the quality has been there. It’s just creeping toward the mainstream right now.” Publishing data, she argues, suggests book buyers are looking to softer reads and scary reads. “The world is a dumpster fire, so we want to escape into something pleasant, or much worse, which can appear refreshing.”

Spratford herself was a light horror reader for years, mostly sticking to Gen-X totems like Stephen King and V.C. Andrews. But for the past 20 years she’s been evangelical for the genre, becoming secretary of the Horror Writers Association and a rallying point for young authors. Still, she’s not so naive to think all of this translates into genuine respect.

She recalls chatting with a woman next to her on a recent plane trip. Occupations came up and Spratford explained that she specialized in horror literature. The two sat in awkward silence for the rest of the flight. “You want to scream, ‘The Mark Twain American Voice for Literature Award last year went to Stephen Graham Jones! For a horror novel (”The Only Good Indians”)!’ Shouldn’t that legitimize this? This isn’t top-of-the-hill writing, this is where some of the best American writing is being found right now.”

As a child there was nothing scarier to me than the metal spinner rack at my neighborhood drugstore. It held horror novels, and since this was the late 1970s-early 1980s, lurid covers offered cracked dolls, skeleton nurses, snarling pigs, satanic altars and nude women bowing to demons, with crimson fonts, cover illustrations perfect for a ‘77 Chevy van and subtle titles like “Eat Them Alive,” “Satan’s Mistress” and “Girl Next Door” (beside an image of an undead cheerleader, of course). Trash, King, Straub and Dean Koontz was horror literature to me. It would take years before I realized Dracula and Frankenstein — never mind, “The Exorcist” and “Rosemary’s Baby” — had literary precedents. In fact, even as I read wider and got older, and as much as I liked King, English ghost stories and Shirley Jackson, my assumption was the genre was shallow, the classics already read and great new stuff a rare occurrence.

But I was the shallow one.

Gus Moreno, whose 2021 novel “This Thing Between Us” has been a sleeper hit (and the first book that Ramirez sold more than 100 copies of at the new Exile in Bookville), grew up in Pilsen and Bridgeport and now lives in Brookfield. He was a Goosebumps reader, not even a King reader. “I just wanted to be a literary fiction writer, period,” he said. “I didn’t really even think of myself as a fan of horror books. But whenever I wrote a short story, a serial killer would work his way into the narrative, or random weird things would get included. Maybe, I thought, this was my lane all along? There were certain expectations — mainly, to horrify — otherwise, it was the Wild West.” No joke: “This Thing Between Us” takes what could be the dumbest premise — a Pilsen condo haunted by a malevolent Siri-like smart speaker — and delivers a moving twist on grief and mourning.

When he finally got around to catching up to stuff like “The Silence of the Lambs,” he’d wonder: “How come nobody ever talks about something like this as a horror novel?”

It’s a good question, and a lesson in labels.

“Horror literature died for a while,” said Grady Hendrix, whose lightly satiric horror novels “My Best Friend’s Exorcism” and “The Final Girls Support Group” have been contemporary horror hits. “It died in the ‘90s, after ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ They were marketed as ‘psychological thrillers’ but also, often super misogynistic, focusing on torture. Good stuff was written, but way too many bad books, and the genre developed a reputation as gore porn. It deserved it. I remember when I sold my first novel, my mom was so excited, then I told her it was horror and the light faded from her eyes.”

The groundswell of respect that many critics and writers are now seeing feels akin to the newfound gravitas being granted to science-fiction novels — or at least literary fiction with speculative plots. “The smartest thing that science-fiction people did was adopt ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ as their own,” Hendrix said. “Horror had been taking some notes there and laid claim to Shirley Jackson, and now Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ — which is unquestionably a ghost story. That’s maybe the thing that cracks the cellar door and lets outsiders feel it’s no shame to read this if someone like Toni Morrison was working in it.”

The result is, “You’re seeing more big publishers playing with horror than they had in decades,” said Kelly Lonesome, executive editor of Nightfire, an imprint of Tor, a genre press and division of Macmillan. Nightfire, the first horror-centered imprint from a major publishing house, began releasing books last year and already has hits, including “What Moves the Dead,” a clever reworking of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” “But the big difference has been who is being published — we have people of color and queer voices taking on H.P. Lovecraft in books that would have made the master himself explode.”

Responding specifically to the innate racism in Lovecraft’s stories — early 20th-century pulp tales of cosmic horror and godlike monsters that became a foundation for the genre (including King) — has become nearly its own subgenre of contemporary horror.

LaValle, whose “Ballad of Black Tom” revisited Lovecraft from the vantage of a Black character, revealing depths only hinted by Lovecraft himself, said: “I love a good monster, but every one of my books is really about me working out something about myself. I’m through wrestling with Lovecraft’s racism, and now I’m planning a book continuing that story, wrestling with Lovecraft’s sexism, but also with my own sexism.”

If cultural change starts at the fringe, said Kraus, “horror has become our bellwether for probing reactions.” Of course, the supernatural has long been a vehicle for metaphor, used by Edith Wharton in her short stories, Henry James in “The Turn of the Screw,” Charles Dickens in “A Christmas Carol.” But whatever validity was to be acquired from those classics never quite attached to the genre itself. Tananarive Due, a former columnist for the Miami Herald, signed her first book contract in the mid ‘90s not because she was writing horror but because she was a Black author in the wake of Terry McMillan. Her first novel, “The Between,” now a genre landmark, told the story of a family man haunted (maybe) by a dead aunt.

As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, she remembers classmates looking “aghast” when, in a writing class, she said her favorite writers were Toni Morrison and Stephen King. Later, even as an adult with a career, “I hesitated telling my parents, who were civil rights activists, I had embraced being a horror writer. They had earned a hard-won respect. And they were dismissive of horror. Would it bring shame on my family?” Eventually, she decided, “The existential dread at the root of this genre takes so many forms. It’s not a surprise that culturally aware horror is big right now. A lot of us remember our first horror as being that realization that our lives didn’t matter as much as someone with light skin.”

LaValle started his career as a well-received author of literary realism before deciding: “I had grown up on horror, and yet now I wasn’t enjoying myself terribly much as a writer.” He found horror a better fit with his often historically-minded ideas. America, after all, a relatively young country, feels disproportionally haunted, defined partly by crimes many would prefer undiscussed. “On some level, I’m using horror to try and understand a country that I love and sometimes hate — but also loves and hates me.”

Holding up horror as a national mirror is a long tradition.

The great Universal monsters of the 1930s crawled out of the Great Depression. In the 1950s, fear of atomic power gave us enormous mutated insects and Godzilla, while the paranoia of the decade led to parables like “The Thing” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the latter now shorthand for an existential conformity. As the dream of American safety vanished in the 1970s, serial killer stories proliferated. If the 21st century has taught anything, it’s that there’s plenty of fresh hell left: Virtual reality. The feeling that your life, and body, is not your own. A fear of seeing your very identity hacked. Mental-health breakdowns, loneliness, nukes, environmental collapse. Pandemic isolation, or worse, too many people. Polarization. The fear of the neighbor you thought you knew. Social media itself, with its innumerable dead members and ads that stalk us online, has become the world’s haunted communal graveyard.

Horror lit, like resurgent horror films, stepped up.

Maureen Kilmer, a Wheaton-based author of self-described “book club-y women’s fiction,” remade herself this year with “Suburban Hell,” published by Putnam, a division of Penguin Random House. “I was a little burned out and had this story about suburban insanity, just ridiculous things that happen in my own neighborhood. And then I threw a demon in there.” She thinks of herself as one of the few suburban moms doing this. She sees horror as a mutable form, perfect not only for “writing about the well-deserved stereotypes of suburbia, but positive friendships, too.” Her next book will also be horror.

Authors like this — “borderline genre blenders,” Spratford calls them — are giving the genre a lot of mainstream steam, wearing supernatural elements and existential dread to various degrees. Chicago writer Julia Fine’s 2021 novel, “The Upstairs House,” merged ghosts with postpartum depression. The best-seller “Mexican Gothic” brings the supernatural to a 1950s Mexico-set “Jane Eyre.” The memoirist known as Casanova Frankenstein recounts his South Side childhood in the excellent new graphic novel, “How to Make a Monster,” using a dreamlike scrim of werewolf teens and predatory institutions. “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 National Book Award winner, placed ghosts alongside flesh and blood. George Saunders’ 2017 Booker Prize winner “Lincoln in the Bardo” was mostly all ghosts. “Babysitter,” the disturbing new novel by Joyce Carol Oates — so prolific, horror is like a side practice for the author — is based on the 1970s’ Oakland County Child Killer in Michigan. “Devil in the White City” and ‘’Shining Girls,” which retell Chicago history through its own serial killers, are horror in all but name.

When “The Hunger,” Alma Katsu’s lightly speculative retelling of the Donner Party, was released in 2018, “I was as surprised as anyone to find out that I was a horror writer. I had never even discussed the book as horror with my publisher.” It’s now considered a contemporary horror classic, adding a flesh-craving disease and man-beast killers to those infamous Midwest settlers’ itinerary of woes.

“I guess I just think we don’t need to create pretend monsters in these books,” she said.

Many other dedicated horror writers, however, recall being told they were too horror for a big publisher, or too thoughtful to qualify as horror. But Lonesome at Nightfire sees horror morphing into “more of a flavor placed on another genre now.” In other words, horror not as a genre but an outlook, tone — too pliable to contain itself. So many of the best contemporary horror writers — Brian Evenson, Carmen Maria Machado, John Langan, still with independent publishers, long the home of horror — have veer so confidently toward the literary, character-driven and introspective, bookstores now shelve them alongside the general fiction. Kevin Lucia, an editor at horror publisher Cemetery Dance, sees “this new horror writer as very much postmodern, versed in classics, with a sense of where the genre has been.”

But if they share anything, it’s Stephen King.

“He’s the starting point for so many of us,” said Andy Davidson, a Georgia writer whose 2020 novel “The Boatman’s Daughter” and new book “The Hollow Kind” read like King filtered through Southern Gothic notes of Faulkner. “(Horror) is the genre that brought most of us to books in the first place. It’s a first love, and I remain committed.” To sprucing up the old place, you might add. “The Hollow Kind” begins like a campfire story about a probably haunted house set back inside of a dark woods, only to settle into a tale of how crimes of our ancestors inform the present, right down to the very soil. The past is never past.

In fact, its tentacles are moving up your leg.

Cynthia Pelayo wants her ashes scattered in the Humboldt Park lagoon. Someday. She was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Hermosa, near Logan Square. Her horror novels — especially her most recent, “Children of Chicago,” about the Pied Piper of fairy tale fame, demanding a sacrifice in Chicago blood — are full of Chicago history, but also a palpable ache. They read like a way to process violence. “Because straight realism was too much for me to handle,” she said. “Poverty was part of my childhood. Gangs were around. My high school class started with 1,200 and graduated 300. So I gravitated to fairy tales.”

That is, stories where love and hate, horror and comfort, share a familiar fence.

Stephen Graham Jones knows this urge. Many of his characters are Indigenous, in a genre where “we were devices, the source of Indian graveyards, the exposition when a main character doesn’t understand something so they found a native at the edge of town to explain, then dispose of. That might not seem dangerous, but it is. And so, you recognize the genre, and then you come in with your hammer and nails.”

It’s this loving ambivalence — this contradictory need, as Spratford puts it, “to hug then throw the middle finger at what came before” — that’s freshened up horror lit, and is now moving it beyond the long, still viable shadow of the King. Today, to play around here is to stumble on a musty old mansion populated with a lot of young talent (including Joe Hill, King’s son), and forgotten classics, international discoveries and much-loved pulp. It’s hard to see in here. It’s way too dark. Some rooms have been pulled apart and reassembled, but light a candle, and on these walls, there, stories of bad parenting and hate groups and family secrets and political oppression and rotting torsos that crumble at a touch and vomit out maggots.

Sorry.

Ray Bradbury, that speculative Waukegan visionary — whose collection of horror stories, “The October Country,” just received a posterity-minded reissue from Library of America — put this feeling much nicer: “While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age or death, it can revitalize us amid it all.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com