Modern Horror & Beyond

Who he was: a shy, self-educated writer from Providence who published mostly in pulp magazines, earned very little and died poor at forty-six. His fame came after his death, when two admirers founded a small publishing house, Arkham House, in 1939 to keep his work in print.

“The Call of Cthulhu” (Weird Tales, 1928): a young man sorting the papers of his dead great-uncle, a professor, finds three stories that should never have met: a sculptor's nightmare of a monstrous figure, a police inspector's report of a cult in the swamps of Louisiana, and a Norwegian sailor's account of a dead city rising from the Pacific. Pieced together, they reveal that Cthulhu, a gigantic being older than humanity, lies sleeping beneath the sea — waiting.

The problem: Lovecraft's letters and stories contain open racism and fear of immigrants — most notoriously “The Horror at Red Hook” (1927), set among the immigrant communities of Brooklyn. Readers and writers today still argue about how much that fear of “the other” is built into his horror. We will meet one writer's answer in this lesson.

Why he matters: he invented cosmic horror, and his shared universe of invented gods, forbidden books and doomed scholars has been borrowed by writers, film-makers and game designers ever since.

Who she was: a writer and mother of four who lived in a small Vermont college town and wrote both comic pieces about family life and some of the most unsettling fiction of the century.

“The Lottery” (1948): on a sunny June morning, the people of a small American village gather, as they do every year, for a lottery. The atmosphere is friendly; children collect stones. Only at the end do we learn what the “winner” receives: she is stoned to death by her neighbours. Published in The New Yorker, it produced the most mail the magazine had ever received for a work of fiction; Jackson later wrote that of the three hundred or so letters she received that summer, only thirteen spoke kindly to her.

The Haunting of Hill House (1959): Dr Montague, a scholar of the supernatural, rents a notorious old house for the summer and invites people with psychic experiences to stay. Among them is Eleanor Vance, a lonely young woman who has spent years caring for her difficult mother. Doors close by themselves, words appear on the walls — and the house seems to want Eleanor. Jackson never settles whether the haunting is real, or Eleanor's mind breaking.

Why she matters: she showed that horror needs neither castles nor monsters — only a community, a family or a lonely mind — and her ambiguity is Todorov's fantastic at its purest.

Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby (1967): a young wife, Rosemary, moves with her actor husband into an old New York apartment building. Their friendly elderly neighbours take a strong interest in her pregnancy — and Rosemary begins to suspect that her husband has made a deal with a circle of Satanists. The horror is in the everyday: kind neighbours, a doctor's advice, a husband who will not listen. The 1968 film made it famous.

Susan Hill, The Woman in Black (1983): a young London solicitor, Arthur Kipps, is sent to settle the affairs of a dead widow at Eel Marsh House, which is cut off by the tide on the east coast of England. At her funeral he sees a pale woman dressed in black — and learns that whenever she is seen, a child dies. A deliberate return to the Victorian ghost story, it became a stage play that ran in London's West End for more than thirty years.

Who he is: a former English teacher from Maine, where most of his stories are set. In his memoir On Writing (2000) he describes throwing the first pages of his first novel in the bin; his wife, Tabitha, took them out and told him to keep going.

Carrie (1974): a bullied teenage girl with a religious, controlling mother discovers that she has telekinetic powers — and, humiliated at her school prom, takes revenge on the whole town.

The Shining (1977): Jack Torrance, a struggling writer and recovering alcoholic, takes a job as winter caretaker of the empty Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains, with his wife Wendy and their young son Danny, who has a psychic gift he calls “the shining”. Snowed in, Jack is slowly possessed by the hotel's violent past. It is a haunted-house novel, and also a novel about addiction and a father's anger.

Why he matters: he moved horror to Main Street — supermarkets, school corridors, brand names, ordinary American families — and wrote it in a warm, conversational voice that made millions of readers trust him before he frightened them.

Who she was: a writer from New Orleans, the city that became the setting of much of her work.

Interview with the Vampire (1976): in a room in modern San Francisco, a vampire named Louis tells a young reporter the story of his two hundred years of life: how he was made a vampire in eighteenth-century Louisiana by the charismatic, cruel Lestat; how he struggled with the need to kill; and how they created a child vampire, Claudia, who would never grow up.

Why she matters: she gave the monster the narrator's chair. Where Dracula shows the Count only through the eyes of his victims, Rice's vampires tell their own stories — lonely, guilty, glamorous outsiders — and readers fell in love with them.

Who he is: a Liverpool-born writer, artist and film-maker who began in experimental theatre.

Books of Blood (1984–85): six volumes of short stories, violent, inventive and often strangely beautiful, which made him famous almost overnight. Stephen King's praise was printed on the American editions: “I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker.”

The Hellbound Heart (1986): a short novel about a man who solves a puzzle box and opens a door to beings who offer extreme sensation; Barker directed its film version, Hellraiser (1987), himself.

Why he matters: he pushed horror towards body horror and the fantastic, and insisted that monsters could be as fascinating as they are frightening.

Who she was: one of the most celebrated American novelists of the twentieth century, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Beloved (1987): in Ohio in 1873, Sethe, who escaped from slavery, lives with her daughter Denver in a house haunted by the angry spirit of her dead baby. One day a young woman who calls herself Beloved arrives — and slowly the past Sethe has tried to forget, including a terrible act she committed to save her child from slavery, returns. Morrison drew loosely on the true story of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in 1856. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

In her own words: the novel begins: “124 was spiteful.” (124 is the number of the house.)

The debate: Beloved is usually shelved as literary fiction, not horror, and Morrison is not called a horror writer. Yet it is a ghost story, and a haunted-house story. Many critics now argue that it shows what the Gothic was always really about — a past that will not stay buried — applied to the history of slavery.

Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom (2016): a short novel that retells Lovecraft's “The Horror at Red Hook” from the point of view of a young Black musician from Harlem in 1924, drawn into a world of cosmic horror and everyday racism. LaValle, who loved Lovecraft as a teenager, dedicated it “For H. P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings.”

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (2020): in 1950s Mexico, a glamorous young woman from Mexico City, Noemí Taboada, travels to a decaying mansion in the mountains to help her cousin, who has married into an English family and sent a frightening letter. The house, High Place, hides a secret that keeps the family alive. The classic Gothic house is reread through the history of colonialism.

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties (2017): a collection of short stories, a finalist for the National Book Award, that mixes horror, fairy tale and science fiction to explore women's bodies and lives. Its first story, “The Husband Stitch”, retells a famous campfire tale about a woman who always wears a green ribbon round her neck.