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By Root 2007 0

early 1980s, the horror field seemed to be driving a steamroller over every other form of imaginative fiction. The number of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writers who climbed up into the steamroller’s cab—not to mention the occasional mainstream or romance writer such as Anne Rivers Siddons, author of the brilliant (if clunkily written) novel of haunting The House Next Door—only proved the field’s sudden viability (not only was it exciting, there was money to be made). The newly ghettoed genre became a repository for stories that couldn’t be published anywhere else (a very good thing, and I’m not the first one to notice this). It coalesced out of nearly nothing into something vibrant, exciting, and controversial—remember the heated arguments over “quiet horror” and “splatterpunk"?—and then ultimately, by the end of the decade, began to deflate and nearly disappear.

Why?

It’s tempting to blame the mindless, self-destructive, and bone-headed policies of a publishing industry that never understood the field to begin with, didn’t know poop from popcorn as far as what belonged therein, never gave a thought to anything beyond the bottom line, and then crap-published the genre nearly out of existence.

But that’s way too easy—publishers always follow trends and fads, always overpublish, and always, because of their inherent wish to make a profit (publishing is, after all, a business—and always was, despite what some of us remember as a kinder, gender industry before the corporations took over), tend to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Let’s look deeper.

There is a theory that the core readership of the horror field was always small, and that it ballooned in the 1980s with faddists: these were readers (and even those who don’t read very much) brought in by the promise of thrills like those given them by the horror bestsellers: books like ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and Ghost Story. These clowns were on the roller coaster only so long as it gave ‘em a good ride, and then they took their big feet elsewhere.

The definition of the end of a fad is, of course: death.

Or it may be that the visual entertainment industry—television, the movies, video games, more recently CD-ROM and other computer technology—did what it always does to something hot: chewed it up, spit it out, then lapped up the regurgitation and repeated the exercise—and, in the process, co-opted the field.

(Despite all of Harlan Ellison’s good and great efforts, isn’t this what happened in the science fiction field? Anyone remember Star Wars, which was released within five years of Again, Dangerous Visions?)

And then there is also flight to the suburbs to consider: many of the most successful writers in the horror ghetto moved out of it into the mainstream as fast as possible, leaving mainly the junk behind (there is no blame involved here; remember, we’re talking about a ghetto); couple this with the fact that the so-called mid-list in publishing (traditionally the industry’s AAA farm system, readying the next generation of sluggers for the big leagues) was in the process of being killed off at the same time, and it ain’t hard to figure out what might have happened.

Part Five: The Future

Are we headed for the Great Third Golden Age of Horror Fiction?

There are signs and portents, lately.

For one thing, the small press phenomenon—in particular, the limited edition business, which had constricted a few years ago nearly to the point of winking out of existence—has shown a robustness lately that is encouraging. Since small presses are a mixture of labor of love and moneymaking operation, this is indicative. The same thing happened at the beginning of the second Golden Age. The small publishers are jackals (I don’t use this term pejoratively); they come in at sharp angles and snap at the meal until the lions (the big publishers) amble over and put their jaws into it. The small publishers now are making bucks on projects the lions wouldn’t touch, but there are signs (this book is one of them) that the lions are beginning to get hungry again.

And