Horror Fiction Goes High Brow

With Colson Whitehead writing a zombie novel and “Granta” releasing a horror issue, monsters and scares aren’t just the domain of mass market anymore. Why?

From a piece in the Daily Beast...

The tropes and traditions of the zombie story are a recent development, but there’s a long history of great writers taking up other scary supernatural genres. Edith Wharton and Henry James were connoisseurs of the ghost story, the dominant horror tradition of their day, and wrote some of the best ever written. Mary Shelley started writing a ghost story but ended up with Frankenstein. More recently, Beloved was a ghost story.

Yet it seems as if we’re currently in the midst of an explosion in literary horror. One possible explanation is that writers like Cronin and Whitehead grew up during a golden age of horror that saw the release of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and the beginning of the Halloween and Alien franchises, among many other great and varied horror films. Both authors cite the movies and comics of their childhood as the inspiration for their turn to the genre.

“I grew up as a horror fan,” says Whitehead in an interview, “It was those influences that made me want to be a writer, to sit at home and make up stuff all day.” Zombies in particular had a powerful effect on Whitehead, and he says he always knew he’d write a novel about them one day. “Some folks have anxiety dreams about appearing in front of a class naked; since I saw Dawn of the Dead in junior high, my anxiety dreams have been zombie dreams.”

When respected writers cross over into horror, the decision is amplified by the publishing industry. “We live in a high-concept time,” says John Schoenfelder, the editor of Little, Brown and Co.’s new suspense imprint, Mulholland Books, and the publishing industry isn’t immune. Publishers are attracted to high-concept books that they think can grab an audience by premise alone, and with horror in vogue, a respected writer’s foray into horror is more likely to be trumpeted as a major literary event.