The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
H.P. Lovecraft
The Horror genre is having a moment – or several, if you consider its split personality. Some of it is old, a lot new, but all of it wildly inventive.
And apparently quite a few subgenres of horror have to do with female empowerment – if you consider killing, and sometimes eating, your persecutors, a twisted version of empowerment. And it surely is, after all of the violence committed against women in literature, movies and the real world. Much of this type of horror falls under what’s being called “femgore”. Such novels push the boundaries in ways not seen before, and reader warnings are always included.
There’s also “weird girl lit”, wherein women, typically outsiders in some way, channel their angst into violence or strange supernatural behaviour.
“Splatterpunk” has been around since the 1980s. It features explicit violence and gore set amid the growing counterculture of the time. Clive Barker is one of its prominent authors.
Not being a fan of overt gore, I don’t think I’ll be getting into any of those horror subgenres any time soon.
However, I love the idea behind “sporror” – weird fungi rampaging around to destroy people. That one has its roots in 1950s science fiction – I’m thinking books like Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham, and all kinds of creepy scifi ‘B’ movies I’ve watched over the years, which I can’t recall the names of but which entertained me for an evening. Maybe it’s the strange appearance of fungi, maybe the idea that plants will some day revolt and swallow us up, but there’s something quite compelling about the horror therein.
“Eldritch horror” was invented by H. P. Lovecraft in the early 1900s. The word “eldritch” means of foreign, strange, other, of uncertain origin. Lovecraft was a rather strange fellow plagued by nightmares that haunted his waking hours. He imagined a world in which all of us little people were unaware of cosmic terrors: alien monster-gods whose mere awareness of existence would lead to insanity. Lovecraft’s horror was slow and full of dread. Some of his protagonists would run afoul of twisted cults that worshiped these monsters, some succumbed to the madness of their experiences. Perhaps his most famous concoction was a book of forbidden knowledge called the Necronomicon. There’s even a biennial convention in Rhode Island by that very name; I’d love to attend one day.
His eerie tales were a strong influence on my own writing.
“Horroromance” is a subgenre I’m going to be diving into in my next book, The Summer Door. It combines horror and romance (obviously) in dark ways, although in lighter versions it’s made an appearance in the past – I’m thinking movies like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), which added a female love interest for Dr. Henry Jekyll who gradually discovers the horrid truth about her boyfriend’s researches. It’s a burgeoning subgenre that I’m looking forward to exploring as we see the much darker side of the world introduced in The Chaos Roads. Can Llithfaen and area get even darker? Yes indeed. The original trilogy only scratched the surface. But you’ll have to wait until 2026 to find out more.
In the meantime, enjoy whatever gives you the creeps this week as we approach the eeriest night of the year, Halloween! I wish you a fun and delightfully shivery one.