HomeHorror Fiction A Select Whos Who by Richard Bleiler

Horror Fiction

A Select Who's Who

by Richard Bleiler

An enormous number of fine writers are currently working in the horror fiction genre, in which stylistic experimentation is actively encouraged. Readers (and readers’ advisors) cannot claim even a rudimentary knowledge of the field if they have not read the authors discussed below.

• Peter Ackroyd (1949– ). Ackroyd’s best-known work of horror is Hawksmoor (1985), a stunning combination of historical novel and contemporary detective story that discusses architecture and its influences while showing the events of one century shaping the events of another. The wonderfully dark House of Doctor Dee (1993) plays with ideas of death, betrayal, and fiction itself.

• Clive Barker (1952– ). Barker initially attracted attention with his six-volume Books of Blood (1984–85); these short stories showed there was no subject too risky or outré for him. Barker has written a number of fantastic novels, but as a horror writer, he is at his best in the short story form.

• Ray Bradbury (1920– ). Bradbury is occasionally dismissed as a sentimental chronicler of bygone ways, but he has a horrific streak that manifests itself in simply told stories of great power. His earliest collections are almost impossible to find, but his short stories are reprinted in The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980).

• Poppi Z. Brite (1967– ). There is no topic too risky for Brite, no sensibility that she will not try to outrage. Her fictional obsessions include vampires and serial killers, and her portrayals of these characters frequently involve graphic (if often unarousing) sex. Her first three novels—Lost Souls (1992), Drawing Blood (1994), and Exquisite Corpse (1996)—are the ones horror fans will like.

• Ramsey Campbell (1946–). Campbell’s first book, published when he was 18, was the Lovecraft-inspired Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (1964). His short story collection Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961–1991 (1993) offers an excellent introduction to his cold, bleak vision. Such novels as The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976), and The Face That Must Die (1979), show him at his peak.

• Nancy Collins (1959– ). Collins’ best work is the series featuring Sonja Blue, a vampire first introduced in Sunglasses after Dark (1989). There is nothing noble or aristocratic about Blue; she was at one time a mortal, and her hatred of the being that converted her sustains her for much of the series. The Blue stories are dark, memorable, and psychologically interesting.

• Tananarive Due (1966– ). With only three novels to her credit—The Between (1995), My Soul to Keep (1997), and The Living Blood (2001) —Due has shown that she is one of our most original contemporary horror writers. Her works feature African Americans as protagonists and are steeped in African American culture.

• Stephen King (1947– ). Probably the most famous living writer of horror fiction, King tends to be traditional and familiar. Picking his “best” work is difficult, for he has written many, many books—some would say too many—but his short stories and novellas arguably best display his craftsmanship.

• Dean Koontz (1945– ). There is no question that Koontz has written too much, and he is simply not as good a writer as many of the other writers discussed here; his plots and characters are repetitive and too often interchangeable. At the same time, the best of his work offers relentless paranoia, showing ordinary people caught up in events they only dimly understand and forced to flee forces almost beyond their comprehension.

• Joe R. Lansdale (1951– ). Lansdale has written westerns, mysteries, and adventure stories. What makes the author so enjoyable is his style, which, at its best, is folksy and homespun, quirky, animated by a B-movie sensibility, and deceptively humorous. He won an Edgar award for The Bottoms (2000), a gentle tale of childhood set in Texas during the Great Depression.

• Patrick McGrath (1950– ). A love of the grotesque and a gleeful black humor enliven almost all of McGrath’s work. His output is small, but his first collection of short stories (Blood and Water and Other Tales, 1988) shows a bizarre imagination at work, and his first novel, aptly titled The Grotesque (1989), features one of the most unreliable narrators ever created.

• Richard Matheson (1926– ). Matheson has been writing since the 1950s and describes ordinary people caught up in terrifying situations. He wrote some of the best episodes of the original Twilight Zone (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and “The Invaders”) as well as such books as I Am Legend (1954), which inspired George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.

• Kim Newman (1959– ). Newman’s fiction (written under his own name as well as under the pseudonym Jack Yeovil) blends many influences, narrative traditions, and cultural references. His longest work of horror is Jago (1991), in which the psychic Reverend Anthony William Jago is able to unleash people’s fantasies.

• Joyce Carol Oates (1938– ). Though horrific elements have always appeared in Oates’ writing, not until 1980 did anyone seem to think that she could or would admit to being a writer of genre horror fiction. In that year, however, Oates’ short story “The Bingo Master” appeared in Dark Forces, an enormously influential anthology, and she started a long series of dark fantasies and horror works, including Bellefleur (1981) and Zombie (1995).

• Anne Rice (1941– ). Like Stephen King, Rice needs no introduction. She has the capacity to take seemingly exhausted subjects—the vampire novel, for example—and cast them in a different light.

• John Shirley (1953– ). It is hard to resist somebody who publishes books entitled Really, Really, Really, Really, Weird Stories (1999) and The View from Hell (2000). He has written science fiction as well as horror, and in his hands, the two are occasionally indistinguishable, as in such works as City Come a-Walkin’ (1980).

• Peter Straub (1943– ). Horrific elements were present in Straub’s earliest works, but he was not commonly considered a horror writer until he published Ghost Story (1979), which shows a town besieged by a malevolent being that forces characters to confront their past misdeeds or die. He followed it with Shadowland (1980), perhaps his finest work of dark fantasy.

Richard Bleiler is Humanities Reference Librarian at Homer Babbidge Library, University of Connecticut, Storrs.

(Booklist/August 2002)