Horror

Horror is, I think, my very first literary love.

Well, almost my first. My actual first literary love was Heidi by Joanna Spyri, but considering there is a major plot point about a disabled girl having her wheelchair pushed off a mountain, I’m not so sure that isn’t horror after all.

But, cheese on toast with Grandfather aside, I’ve always been drawn a little way towards the dark edge of the forest when it comes to my reading tastes. As with a lot of children, this started innocuously enough, with fairy tales. But, like, proper fairy tales, with dastardly kings who want to marry their own daughters, and wolves in dark wooded areas with glowing yellow eyes and remnants of their last meal still decaying between sharp teeth.

As my reading tastes grew, so did my sources of books. I had older cousins I stayed with regularly, and they had exceptional bookshelves: Robin Jarvis’s The Whitby Witches and The Deptford Mice books were not only firm favourites but are still some of the best examples of horror for children I’ve ever come across. Like, the henchmen of the main antagonist in the Deptford books were rats, one of whom had lost an arm and replaced it with a vegetable peeler. Which he used to skin young mice alive. Just because that never happened on-page doesn’t make it less… horrifying.

And I wasn’t repulsed or upset by these books, any more than I was turned off by Goosebumps, Shivers (there’s a Shivers book with horses that turn into skeletons as you’re riding them that have long haunted my dreams) or, slightly later, the spooky pleasures of Point Horror. I loved being scared by these books!

Proper writers talk about Pathos, don’t they? The way the written word can have a tangible, emotional resonance deep within a reader? Well, horror was my pathos of choice throughout my childhood, and my teen years, too. Sure, sometimes I over-reached. Or was pushed in that direction - I might have mentioned here before that at age 12 my paternal grandmother decided to give me a paperback called Let’s Go Play at the Adams’, which is… let’s just say not ideal reading material for a 12-year-old.

Also, my dad’s habit of buying me any-book-under-a-quid from the carboot with very little quality checking meant I read Stephen King when I was too young to understand fully why a man would want to handcuff his wife to a bed in Gerald’s Game. And I squarely place my lifelong aversion to rats on James Herbert’s shoulders, when actually maybe 13 was just too young to read Rats.

Over time, my horror obsession has slipped more into films than books, and I think that’s a shame. It’s partly because until fairly recently, horror films have seemed more accessible than new horror novels - the 70s/80s paperback boom utterly passed me by, after all.

But in recent years, I’ve read some exceptional, exceptionally scary books. Nod. Bird Box. Michelle Paver’s creepy historical ghost stories. The crawling dread of eco-horror in books like Sealed, by my dissertation tutor Naomi Booth. I’m not saying there hasn’t been horror between the ‘90s and now; of course there has! But somehow, it’s now that it’s pulling me back in.

And I’m enjoying every minute of it.