Stephen King: a master of horror who finds terror in the everyday Mia Farrow in the 1968 film adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby.
#The world after the fall novel series
This contributed significantly to the growing perception of the genre as a series of predictable clichés, devoid of the capacity to truly deliver the aesthetic affects – suspense, thrills and terrors – emblematic of the genre. The extraordinary profitability of low-budget slasher films spawned franchises of increasingly formulaic sequels. This oversaturation was not helped by the film industry’s opportunism. The late Anne Rice released three novels in 1985 alone, while Dean Koontz published 17 novels during the 1980s. King was not the only hyper-commercial, hyper-productive horror writer of the period. Even the most optimistic view of the demand for horror fiction could not miss the obvious perils of excessive supply. The dizzying commercial success of the boom’s most recognisable protagonist, Stephen King, led to equally high levels of overproduction.Īt the height of his cultural power, King would publish no fewer than three novels per year – a feat he achieved in 1983, 19. But it was not until the late 1960s that the genre reached hitherto unforeseen levels of mainstream cultural prestige and commercial profitability.Ĭover of the first edition of William Peter Blatty’s bestselling novel The Exorcist (1971).Īccounting for the horror boom could provide an account of its eventual demise. In the United States, horror fiction had prodigious subcultural roots, dating back to the singular figures of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Horror had been present, in one form or another, in the literary imaginary of the Western world from the onset of modernity – at least since Matthew Lewis’s satanic monk died a slow, agonising death and Mary Shelley’s deranged genius fashioned a body out of corpses.įrankenstein at 200 and why Mary Shelley was far more than the sum of her monster's parts This term refers to a period in US popular entertainment during which horror fiction nearly dominated the publishing and associated cultural landscapes. The so-called “horror boom” is behind us. The genre I speak of is the genre of the dead and the undead, of monsters and malevolence, of spectres and sinister spirits. Its ghoulish spectre manifests an incorrigible undead spirit its menace threatens the narrative of unimpeded cultural progress. A coarse, primitive genre that, from the perspective of our unstoppably advancing tastes and proclivities, should have no place in the current pantheon of literary refinement and accomplishment.īut this genre continues to haunt the contemporary. This essay concerns a literary genre that should, by all accounts, be dead and buried. And they also reproduce battered remains of literary forms and genres of the yesteryear. Newer and more progressive whims and approaches result in the ascendance of newer and more progressive authors and genres. Mass production of the novel in the 19th century the arrival and domination of cinema in the 20th the omnipresence of the digital in this century – these all have propelled us forward. Progress, then, is indistinguishable from destruction – creative, positive and necessary destruction, perhaps, but destruction nevertheless.Ĭulture in the modern world has its own tales of progress. The modern world is a world of progress and it leaves in its wake the ruins of the old world. The winds that propel us forward also uproot and tear apart what we leave behind. Progress, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote, is a storm.