Horror Genre Quotes

Can you imagine life without the horror genre? There would be no monsters. Only a**holes.

A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.

Horror itself is a bit of a bullied genre, the antagonist being literary snobbery and public misconception. And I think good horror tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it's there to be seen.

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge… It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it.

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.

It was a weird thing for me, because I don't read vampire books. I don't watch vampire movies. I'm not into the horror genre. I'm a wuss, I'm a scaredy cat.

I think horror can and should be classy. I enjoy seeing it raised up not lowered down to the lowest common denominator. There's prejudice against the horror genre and I think sometimes that's the fault of the authors involved.

Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care.

No amount of therapy can replace the joy of revenge writing.

Part of what horror is, is taking risks and going somewhere that people think you’re not supposed to be able to go, in the name of expressing real-life fears.

There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.

There can be no such thing as “philosophical horror”, at least as a premeditated genre. Why? Because philosophy implies enquiry, reflection and an open mind, whereas the genre of horror demands certain conclusions in advance.

Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that’s appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.

Horror is not a genre, it is an emotion. It is a progressive form of fiction, one that evolves to meet the fears and anxieties of its times.

I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, 'You know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story.' And she's absolutely right. In some ways, genre is a marketing tool.

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

The world is increasingly unthinkable – a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched seascapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction. In spite of our daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a part. To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all – an idea that has been a central motif of the horror genre for some time.

Quick note here: if this crush-slash-swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach; if you’ve never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you’ve got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into.

Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.

God help me, I’m gonna make sure we get out of this alive and I’m going to kill that son of a bitch...I’m gonna make him wish he never stepped foot in this town” -Emerson Shaw

I must not deceive myself; it was no dream; but all a grim reality.

But, more than that, my mom knew the value of horror as a genre. She knew there were distinct benefits to be gained by spending time with our fears, getting to know them personally.

From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.

It was Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed, while also shaping the broader urban fantasy field from the late 1990s onward. Many of you reading this book will be too young to remember when Buffy debuted, so you'll have to trust us when we say that nothing quite like it had existed before. It was thrillingly new to see a young, gutsy, kick-ass female hero, for starters, and one who was no Amazonian Wonder Woman but recognizably ordinary, fussing about her nails, her shoes, and whether she'd make it to her high school prom. Buffy's story contained a heady mix of many genres (fantasy, horror, science-fiction, romance, detective fiction, high school drama), all of it leavened with tongue-in-cheek humor yet underpinned by the serious care with which the Buffy universe had been crafted. Back then, Whedon's dizzying genre hopping was a radical departure from the norm-whereas today, post-Buffy, no one blinks an eye as writers of urban fantasy leap across genre boundaries with abandon, penning tender romances featuring werewolves and demons, hard-boiled detective novels with fairies, and vampires-in-modern-life sagas that can crop up darn near anywhere: on the horror shelves, the SF shelves, the mystery shelves, the romance shelves.

Geeks are not the world’s rowdiest people. We’re quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint the Emerald City red involves light liquor, heavy munchies, and marathon sessions of video games of the ‘giant robots shooting each other and everything else in sight’ variety. We debate competing lines of software or gaming consoles with passion, and dissect every movie, television show, and novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. With as many of us as there are in this town, people inevitably find ways to cater to us when we get in the mood to spend our hard-earned dollars. Downtown Seattle boasts grandiose geek magnets, like the Experience Music Project and the Experience Science Fiction museum, but it has much humbler and far more obscure attractions too, like the place we all went to for our ship party that evening: a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Electric Penguin on Capitol Hill.

twenty years after McCauley’s effort, I concluded that it was time to prove, once and for all, that the horror and suspense genre is a serious literary one. I had other reasons

Cinema – all art really – has great power. Power to illuminate. Power to transform. For those of us who experience film as literature, classic movies comprised an introductory education in the genre. As kids, many of us went searching through library shelves for obscure source novels after seeing some old movie or other. It was the start of many an adventure.

...the materials of genre - specifically the paired genres of horror and the fantastic - in no way require the constrictions of formulaic treatment, and in fact naturally extend and evolve into the methods and concerns of its wider context, general literature.

The only way to achieve success is by believing you can achieve your goals, no matter what. The story you tell yourself has the power to transform your life or destroy it. When you change your story, you can change your life.

I think horror is a good genre for exploring anything, because everything is pretty horrifying. And I think the most effective horror things, and even maybe the most ineffective ones, are pretty absurd, and usually pretty funny.

Sus gritos resonaban en las paredes de aquella casa, en la que ahora solo la muerte vivía y andaba. Con los ojos desorbitados, la cara lívida, el pelo erizado, Louis gritaba. Los sonidos que salían de su garganta congestionada eran como las campanas del infierno, unos gritos terribles que marcaban la pérdida no del amor, sino de la razón.

So Basically I'm the Antichrist , and the whole world is fucked because of me" - Jordon Hanson.

The mind of the demented was a dangerous place to play and the psychologist never wanted to stay too long for fear of not finding her way back.

Todos tenemos derecho a vivir una gran historia de amor.

La primera vez que me vi en realidad, fue el día que amanecí muerta.

I wouldn't dare attempt to sanitize the actions of the Devil. Either IT is the most abominable creature set upon us to endure, or IT is not. There's no in-between.

There are as many ways to discover your story as there are to trip over a dog in the kitchen--and some of them feel about as planned.

With Eyes Like Charles Manson, a life similar to H.P Lovecraft, and lyrics like Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Cobain was the master of horror in music.

Psychic change, as Todorov has recognized, subverted the genre in another way, by revoking the cultural taboos, the social censorship, that had prohibited the overt treatment of psychosexual themes, which then found covert expression in the supernatural tale. 'There is no need today to resort to the devil [or to posthumous reverie] in order to speak of excessive sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly or indirectly inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised terms. The themes of fantastic literature have become, literally, the very themes of the psychological investigations of the last fifty years.

Arguably, horror may be understood as a fictional indulgence in fantasies of violence, and our fascination with it seen as a form of sublimation of repressed desires. If we accept this line of thinking, then horror has the benefit of, at least, being one of the most honest of genres.

Any writer of horror needs to at least have a good, solid love of the genre. Also, good horror writers need to have a slightly twisted sense of humor. Without humor, horror just isn’t as good.

The problem is that horror is not a genre, it is an emotion. Horror is not a kind of fiction. It's a progressive form of fiction that continually evolves to meet the fears and anxieties of its times.

Nevertheless, the potential and actual importance of fantastic literature lies in such psychic links: what appears to be the result of an overweening imagination, boldly and arbitrarily defying the laws of time, space and ordered causality, is closely connected with, and structured by, the categories of the subconscious, the inner impulses of man's nature. At first glance the scope of fantastic literature, free as it is from the restrictions of natural law, appears to be unlimited. A closer look, however, will show that a few dominant themes and motifs constantly recur: deals with the Devil; returns from the grave for revenge or atonement; invisible creatures; vampires; werewolves; golems; animated puppets or automatons; witchcraft and sorcery; human organs operating as separate entities, and so on. Fantastic literature is a kind of fiction that always leads us back to ourselves, however exotic the presentation; and the objects and events, however bizarre they seem, are simply externalizations of inner psychic states. This may often be mere mummery, but on occasion it seems to touch the heart in its inmost depths and become great literature.

It should be particularly stressed that the fantastic makes no sense in an out-and-out strange world. To imagine the fantastic in it is even impossible. In a world full of marvels the extraordinary loses its power.

Big Tom Daly didn’t regard himself as squeamish, but in that infinitesimal moment, Big Tom did indeed scream as an eight-year-old boy might. Never had he felt more alive as he landed on that soft-limbed bed of death. He let out a helpless rollicking wail before rolling off his uncomfortably comfortable rigour Mortis mattress with prickling fear and repulsion.

Horror is made of such base material—so easily rejected or dismissed—that it may be hard to accept my postulate that within the genre lies one of the last refuges of spirituality in this, our materialistic world. But it is a fact that, through the ages, most storytellers have had to resort to the fantastic in order to elevate their discourse to the level of parable.

Q: Do you have any advice for upcoming writers who want to pen weird stories? A: READ, damn it. Fill your brain to the bursting point with the good stuff, starting with writers that you truly enjoy, and then work your way backward and outward, reading those writers who inspired the writers you love best. That was my path as far as Weird/Horror Fiction, starting with Lovecraft, and then working my way backward/outward on the Weird Fiction spiderweb. And don’t limit your reading. Read it all, especially non-fiction and various news outlets. You’d be surprised by how many of my story ideas were born while listening to NPR, perusing a blog, or paging through Vanity Fair. Once you have your fuel squared away, just write what you love, in whatever style and genre. You’ll never have fun being someone you’re not, so be yourself. When a singer opens their mouth, what comes out is what comes out. Also, don’t be afraid to fail, and don’t be afraid to walk away. Writing isn’t for everyone, and that’s totally fine. One doesn’t need to be a writer to enjoy being a reader and overall fan of genre or wider fiction.

Horror is not simply a literary genre. It is a reality. Those who read horror are closer to understanding its malevolent nature and the engrossing peril of its hold. Whereas those who don't haven't a clue until it is far too late to save themselves from the horror.

Horror is a woman’s genre, and it has been all the way back to the oldest horror novel still widely read today: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, daughter of pioneering feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian) made her the highest-paid writer of the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Charlotte Riddell were book-writing machines, turning out sensation novels and ghost stories by the pound. Edith Wharton wrote ghost stories before becoming a novelist of manners, and Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget) wrote elegant tales of the uncanny that rival anything by Henry James. Three of Daphne du Maurier’s stories became Hitchcock films (Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, The Birds), and Shirley Jackson’s singular horror novel The Haunting of Hill House made her one of the highest-regarded American writers of the twentieth century.

Good horror is written by people who understand that fear is one of the cardinal passageways into the core of humanity. Good horror is generally written by folks who grew up on horror; books, movies, etc. You can’t simply decide to write—in any genre—if you don’t first have an understanding of the topic and a strong mental backlog of reference.

Pretty doll," rasped the dark haired vampire as he went about behind her, and she could feel his ravenous hunger practically radiating off him.

In the absence of love, evil thrives.

Horror writers...trouble writing? The Force cannot help you. You must tap into the dark side.

I Grew Up In A Family With No Prejudices. My Father Always Believed There Were Good And Bad In Every Ethnic Background, And Nationality.

Horror is a genre as broad as the range of human fears, and it takes as many shapes.

The sea spits back what doesn’t belong to her.

Shadowchild! - Don't let her get in your head!

Kurt Cobain was a musical lyric genius. He was the Edgar Allan Poe of songwriting.

As the helpless vampire watched the transformation, it started screaming. It was still screaming when his rows of razor sharp teeth sank into its throat.

I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it's all the same genre.

horror MUST stimulate the reader’s mental pressure points more effectively and more consistently than other genres.

I will not die on Totem Lake.

Now listen here Matt, and listen carefully”, the man asserted, “Since I know your dirty little secret, I need you to do something for me”.

It’s a freak-of-nature reserve.

And I've learned to hit the brakes at these kinds of stop signs rather than t-boning a tanker truck filled with 200 proof mediocrity.

American Horrors is one of the only shows out there showcasing the best new talent working the genre. It's also one hell of a good time" ~Michael J. Hein/NYC Horror Film Festival Founder/Director

Ansigterne på den flygtende menneskemængde var forvrængede af et åbenlyst vanvid, født af en uudholdelig rædsel, og deres læber formede ord, der var så frygtelige, at ingen magtede at standse op for at få fat i meningen.

It's safe to say that 'Horror,' as a fictional genre, has claim to it's own canon. There is a definite history that can be traced back to the origins of human language, both orally and written, and now multimedia based. We at this point, have access to the full gambit of 'genre' Horror in all its hybrid forms (electronically at least). Sub-genres ensure that Horror can and will multiply in its complexities and evolve along with human fears.

Horror demands answers to the deeper questions; it requires the contemplation of life and death and the examination of good and evil. I know of no other fictional genre that puts morality as front and center as horror does.

At this point, a few words on this term 'horror' are perhaps called for. Some amateurs of this kind of literature engage in endless hairsplitting disputes, centered around this word and its close companion 'terror', as to which' stories may so be categorized and which may not, and whether or not descriptions such as weird or fantasy or macabre are preferable. The designation 'horror', with its connotations of revulsion, satisfies me no more than it does the purists but I believe that it is the only term which embraces all the stories in this collection and which succinctly suggests to the majority of readers what is in store for them. Horror then, in this instance, covers tales of the Supernatural and of physical terror, of ghosts and necromancy and of inhuman violence and all the dark corners and crevices of human belief and behavior that lie in between. ("An Age In Horror" - introduction)

Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it has often accompanied or predicted change, and served to shake up rational Complacency, challenging reason and reminding man of his darker nature. Its popularity has had its ups and downs, and it has always been the preserve of a small literary minority. As a natural challenger of classical values, it is rarely part of a culture's literary mainstream, expressing the spirit of the age; but it is an important dissenting voice, a reminder of the vast mysteries of existence, sometimes truly metaphysical in scope, but more often merely riddling.

Thrall is a feast of both visceral and existential horror – the gut tightens and the mind reels. Mary Sangiovanni joins that select cadre of women writers who are ignoring the safe old tropes and pushing the genre in new directions.

Why are women great at writing horror fiction? Maybe because horror is a transgressive genre. It pushes readers to uncomfortable places, where we aren't used to treading, and it forces us to confront what we naturally want to avoid.

Am I Dead?" Had she fallen to her doom and this was all an elaborate fantasy? Was this the place between life and death? Her eyes welled up with tears and she ran towards the man that wasn't there, wanting to cling to him, to find something to save her from this torture.

As for my being a horror writer, I actually think horror is a very conservative genre. The horror comes when you do something wrong--when you challenge religion or society or nature--and then you must pay. I personally consider myself a radical, but I publish conservative material. That's quite a paradox.

In the manuscript and on True Crime Diary, Michelle always found the perfect balance between the typical extremes of the genre. She didn’t flinch from evoking key elements of the horror and yet avoided lurid overindulgence in grisly details, as well as sidestepping self-righteous justice crusading or victim hagiography.

In 2018, critic Angelica Jade Bastién wrote a cri de coeur for Vulture that argued against reducing a horror film’s merits to whether or not it scared you. Bastién posits a more expansive definition of horror, one I’ve fully embraced: it’s a genre that explores fear, how it motivates and shapes our lives and those of the characters we’re watching.

As much as 1980s America was telling itself that things were looking up, all was not well. Not by coincidence did the American small town, the epitome of the conservative vision of the nation, become the prime setting for 1980s horror fiction: a sunny, cheerful place of white picket fences and apple pie where something would always be really, really wrong.

CREATED by an eighteen-year-old girl during the freakishly cold, rainy summer of 1816 while on holiday in Switzerland with her married lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and two other writers, the poet Lord Byron and John Polidori, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein would become the foundational work for two important new genres of literature—horror and science fiction.

Finalmente, los monstruos, con sus extrañas y extraordinarias apariencias, niegan la perfección del mundo y del orden establecido. En definitiva, los monstruos proyectan lo que los individuos y las sociedades niegan y temen de ellos mismos y, por lo tanto, mirando al monstruo, nos vemos a nosotros mismos y los defectos individuales y sociales que consideramos despreciables".

One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves. I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford.... I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary.

As a writer, I've never limited myself to a specific genre or topic. A person is never just one thing. Like multi-faced dice, there are so many sides to a person; Funny, dramatic, romantic...the list goes on. When I write horror, I do it to my best. When I write comedy, I do that to my best. But, I'm a jack of all trades. It's fun to challenge yourself, breaking the limits of a genre.

In seconds the trickles had turned to rivulets, each red line running a race against the other. Meandering through the grooves of her wrinkled skin, slowed by puckered lips, the winner reaching her haired chin then it dropped into her lap. A single red dot, followed by another, then another, till her pinafore dress became patterned with bright red poppies.” From - Hunted: The Abarath Trilogy

About the only law that I think relates to the genre is that you should not try to explain, to find neat explanations for what happens, and that the object of the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny. Freud in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of the uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully expressed in art than in life, which I found very illuminating; it didn’t help writing the screen-play, but I think it’s an interesting insight into the genre. And I read an essay by the great master H.P. Lovecraft where he said that you should never attempt to explain what happens, as long as what happens stimulates people’s imagination, their sense of the uncanny, their sense of anxiety and fear. And as long as it doesn’t, within itself, have any obvious inner contradictions, it is just a matter of, as it were, building on the imagination (imaginary ideas, surprises, etc.), working in this area of feeling. I think also that the ingeniousness of a story like this is something which the audience ultimately enjoys; they obviously wonder as the story goes on what’s going to happen, and there’s a great satisfaction when it’s all over not having been able to have anticipated the major development of the story, and yet at the end not to feel that you have been fooled or swindled.

أنا شاب أعزب قد فاتنى قطار الزواج، متوسط التعليم أسكن وحيدا فى شقه متواضعه من غرفه واحده ، أعمل بأجر يومى قد اكسب قوت يوما و يفوتنى اقوات ايام ، كانت غرفتى المتواضعه بسيطه بها اثاث مستعمل ترى فى شقوقه قسوه الزمن و رعب الجوع و الفقر ، كان التيار الكهربى المغذى لها متذبذب حتى لتشعر انه من فرط قدمه و فقر الغرفه يأبى أن يدخل اليها ، يترفع عن زيارتى كما يفعل معظم من يعرفنى و يعرف حالتى، كانت غرفتى مظلمه ، كئيبه ، ككل أمنياتى التى لم تتحقق

When longing overtook them, they drew together and made the most intense and tender love Sarah had ever known. She was a freshly exposed nerve in the bleeding heart of Christ. He was devout in his reverent passion as her healer. Their love was a hallelujah chorus, a quiet prayer of exaltation, a holy union in the moonlight before dawn. It was here in this crystalline space that Sarah and Johnny took each other the true way to God, or they found God in each other, whichever it was.

Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories - most included in this volume - which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller part of his vision could be seen as "mysteries." For Woolrich it all was fantastic; the clock in the tower, hand in the glove, out of control vehicle, errant gunshot which destroyed; whether destructive coincidence was masked in the "naturalistic" or the "incredible" was all pretty much the same to him. RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, THE BRIDE WORE BLACK, NIGHTMARE are all great swollen dreams, turgid constructions of the night, obsession and grotesque outcome; to turn from these to the "fantastic" was not to turn at all. The work, as is usually the case with a major writer was perfectly formed, perfectly consistent, the vision leached into every area and pulled the book together. "Jane Brown's Body" is a suspense story. THE BRIDE WORE BLACK is science fiction. PHANTOM LADY is a gothic. RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK was a bildungsroman. It does not matter.

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode. This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains. Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.

The heroes of urban fantasy come out of the hard-boiled mystery, while the villains, monsters, and antagonists have their own roots in classic horror . . . but it is the combination that gives this subgenre its juice. For these are two genres that are at heart antagonistic. Horror fiction is a fiction steeped in darkness and fear, and set in a hostile Lovecraftian universe impossible for men to comprehend, a world where, as Poe suggested, death in the end holds dominion over all. But detective fiction, even the grim, gritty, hard-boiled variety, is all about rationality; the world may be dark, but the detective is a bringer of light, an agent of order, and, yes, justice. You would think this twain could never meet. But bastards can break all the rules, and that’s half their charm. The chains of convention need not apply.

Before starting work on this book, we had to ask ourselves a question what is science fiction? Seemingly simple, but in reality the answer was hard to formulate. This is the definition we settled upon: Science fiction is a member of a group of fictional genres whose narrative drive depends upon events, technologies, societies, etc. that are impossible, unreal, or that are depicted as occurring at some time in the future, the past or in a world of secondary creation. These attributes vary widely in terms of actuality, likelihood, possibility and in the intent with which they are employed by the creator. The fundamental difference between science fiction and the other "fantastical genres" of fantasy and horror is this: the basis for the fiction is one of rationality. The sciences this rationality generates can be speculative, largely erroneous, or even impossible, but explanations are, nevertheless, generated through a materialistic worldview. The supernatural is not invoked.

In my introduction to Warriors, the first of our crossgenre anthologies, I talked about growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, in the 1950s, a city without a single bookstore. I bought all my reading material at newsstands and the corner “candy shops,” from wire spinner racks. The paperbacks on those spinner racks were not segregated by genre. Everything was jammed in together, a copy of this, two copies of that. You might find The Brothers Karamazov sandwiched between a nurse novel and the latest Mike Hammer yarn from Mickey Spillane. Dorothy Parker and Dorothy Sayers shared rack space with Ralph Ellison and J. D. Salinger. Max Brand rubbed up against Barbara Cartland. A. E. van Vogt, P. G. Wodehouse, and H. P. Lovecraft were crammed in with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mysteries, Westerns, gothics, ghost stories, classics of English literature, the latest contemporary “literary” novels, and, of course, SF and fantasy and horror—you could find it all on that spinner rack, and ten thousand others like it. I liked it that way. I still do. But in the decades since (too many decades, I fear), publishing has changed, chain bookstores have multiplied, the genre barriers have hardened. I think that’s a pity. Books should broaden us, take us to places we have never been and show us things we’ve never seen, expand our horizons and our way of looking at the world. Limiting your reading to a single genre defeats that. It limits us, makes us smaller. It seemed to me, then as now, that there were good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered.

If I had a dime for every time I heard someone say that they're tired of a genre (zombies) because it's only a fad, I'd be rich. #DeadRising

It's not just the hair-prickling adventure. It's the relationship between the two of them. All await their newest adventure- and the next installment of Demon of Dartmoor. I predict Raven and Rowan shall... well, we shall see. It's not only their extraordinary encounters with all manner of unearthly creatures that hold everyone enthralled, but the pull between them. All I can say is that when the two are together- the combination of peril and passion- well, one can fairly feel the way they sizzle-and so does my flesh!" "My God, you make it sound as if they're real people!" "An acknowledgement to the author's talent to think of them so, don't you think?" "Perhaps, but it sounds like an erotic novel, not a horror novel, or even a Gothic novel." Aidan tipped his head to the side. "Knowing you, Alec, now I begin to see why you are so entranced.

If nothing else, Rocky Horror proves that the line between the scary and the plainly dumb is as old as the horror genre itself.

Except horror, as a genre, isn’t all that fond of destiny either. It smacks too much of stability and fixed points and too little of chaos.

In another genre the consequences of that identification may also be innocent, but in horror the guilt spreads, because if you identify with monsters doesn’t that mean that part of you understands them? Even if you don’t know they’re a monster—especially if you don’t know. If the identification is innocent then there’s no bias; the recognition is untainted. And if you recognise a monster by your identification with it, by its reflection in yourself, doesn’t that make part of you a monster too? An innocent monster, perhaps. One not awake to the potential of your own nature… but the potential remains regardless. And when the monster acts as monsters do, then don’t your sympathetic responses share the responsibility for it?

Where evil walks, hell follows.

The Trump administration would do well to hire some fiction writers. Those of us who write horror are the cons. Those writing any other genre are the pros. Either way, we know how the story will end.

But unfortunately, vampires lost some of their cultural panache, partly because the romantic vampire genre has portrayed so many bloodsuckers as merely harmlessly eccentric. This isn't to dis the romantic vampire—it's a trope for a reason—but the trope started to occupy the majority of headspace in fans’ minds. People forgot that vampires, as cool and sexy as they might sometimes be, are monsters.

He smelled like a cage fighter's armpit and his feet ached.