I know what you read last summer (and it was probably horror)
In the mid-2010s, moviegoers embraced the so-called 'elevated' horror boom, with films such as The Babadook, Get Out, Midsommar and The Witch at the vanguard – low-budget, high-concept genre fare that used classic horror tropes to probe contemporary societal ills like toxic relationships, racism and mental illness. (The 'elevated' label was a bit of clever rebranding, like slapping an 'organic' sticker on a hamburger; these movies function the same way great horror always has – you just feel a little less dirty about enjoying them.)
Now it seems it's literature's turn. In 2023, there was a record number of new horror books both published and sold, and two years on, the trend shows little sign of slowing. Literary agents are reporting submission piles filling up with more tales of the weird and eerie, from eco-horror to folk horror to the aptly named 'femgore' – hyper-violent, female-centric body horror.
In the last year alone – and this is but a tiny sliver of what's on offer – we've had Gretchen Felker-Martin's Cuckoo, which made the very real horrors of gay conversion camps manifest in a grotesque body-snatching teen epic. Rachel Harrison's So Thirsty took a big, bloody bite out of 21st-century female friendship with its ultra-gory vampire antics. The Lamb, Lucy Rose's fairytale debut, told the touching story a young girl caring for her mother … by bringing her stray hikers to satiate her cannibalistic urge for human flesh (pair it with Monika Kim's The Eyes are the Best Part for a stomach-churning family-sized feast).
And 50 years after the publication of his first novel, Carrie, horror stalwart Stephen King released his latest short story anthology You Like It Darker (just months after a brand-new novel, Holly – also featuring cannibals).
King isn't the only elder statesman jostling for shelf space alongside the BookTok generation. George A. Romero, the man responsible for our modern conception of zombies, with films like The Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, released his final novel earlier this year, somewhat fittingly from beyond the grave.
Co-written by Daniel Kraus, who discovered the incomplete manuscript in an archive box at the University of Pittsburgh Library in 2019, Pay the Piper is a sweaty, cosmic eco-horror set in the muggy depths of the Louisiana bayou, where a nine-year-old girl named Pontiac and a rag-tag group of townsfolk from her home of Alligator Point come up against an ancient, vengeful evil that's been lurking in the swamp and preying on children.
While Romero will forever be remembered primarily as an orchestrator of gnarly kills and ground-breaking special effects, his zombie movies always had more than merely brains on the brain. His seminal Night of the Living Dead is often read as a critique of racial tensions in 1960s America; it features a Black protagonist (played by Duane Jones) who survives an undead horde only to be shot by a white sheriff. The 1978 follow-up, Dawn of the Dead, set entirely in a shopping mall, can only be seen as a satirical indictment of rampant consumerism.
Pay the Piper continues this tradition of smuggling hefty themes into seemingly straightforward horror schtick. Young Pontiac's home is under threat from a nefarious character known only as The Oil Man – a phantom-like stand-in for the entire fossil fuel industry – as well as The Piper itself, an aquatic Lovecraftian creature seeking restitution for the thousands of slaves slaughtered and dumped in its waters by the infamous Pirates Lafitte in the 1800s. Romero and Kraus' book mutates from gooey Southern Gothic to a full-throated treatise on human cruelty and environmental calamity; it's spooky, stirring Cajun cli-fi with a healthy dose of tentacles.
Closer to home, this March saw the release of Margot McGovern's riveting supernatural YA slasher This Stays Between Us. McGovern's second book boasts a little bit of everything: early 2000s nostalgia, late-night seances, teenage crushes, buried secrets and a predatory entity known only as Smiling Jack that hunts its four young female protagonists as they try to survive year 11 camp in a remote, abandoned mining town. McGovern's first book, Neverland, released in 2018, hewed much closer to magical realism – but a life-long love of horror helped inspire her sophomore stab.
'I've always been a huge horror fan,' says McGovern. 'I read and watched a lot growing up, but there wasn't a lot of Australian horror at that time. Most of the movies came from the US. And with horror books, in the '90s it felt like you had R.L. Stine and then there was this huge gap before you jumped to Stephen King and Clive Barker.'
Teen horror films filled that gap for McGovern. 'I always knew I wanted to write a book that was set here in Australia and evoked the Australian landscape and personality, but embodied all the fun of a late-90s slasher,' she says. 'Kevin Williamson's screenplays were a huge influence on me. I love Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer and Teaching Mrs. Tingle – even movies like The Craft.'
Of course, the defining feature of all these movies – and many of the books already mentioned – is teenagers. In horror, teens are often the heroes, the hapless victims and the target audience all at once.
'Horror occupies this really interesting liminal space for teenagers,' McGovern says of her passion for writing YA. 'It gives you that last little bit of make-believe.
'It offers a step up into the adult world, where things can be genuinely terrifying and violent. When you're 13 or 14, you feel like things are out of your control – you're going through this huge transition, you're figuring out who you are, your body's changing, all the rules are changing! – and horror not only explores that, but gives you a way to take back some power and agency.'
Perhaps that explains our present-day horror boom, then. We're all of us teenagers in a world that feels increasingly out of control – but instead of regressing into childhood and escaping into all-out fantasy, we're ready to confront our fears; to look the monster under the bed, or the creature in the swamp, or the thing in the mirror dead in the eye.
'Horror has always responded to what's happening in the culture,' McGovern says. 'I think that's part of the reason why it's making such a comeback now. In times of uncertainty and upheaval, horror offers a set of familiar tropes that lets you approach your darkest fears in an almost comforting way.'
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