Hello my scary lil goblins and ghouls! and welcome, WELCOME to the friiiight of your liiiiife!
Did you read that in a vampire voice? I hope you did. Long time no talk! Are you enjoying the spooky season? Have you watched Hocus Pocus yet? Are you tired of me asking you lots of questions the very second you open these dispatches? Bummer for you! Please keep reading.
It is pure coincidence that this newsletter is #13 but boy, oh boy, do I love that spooky accident. I’ve always been into things a little bit macabre (the catacombs, weird bones, true crime, Edgar Allen Poe) and the month leading up to Halloween is truly when I’m at my best. Everything is cozy! And a little bit spooky! The leaves! Warm beverages! I have 15 assorted gourds decorating my front porch! All my favorite movies are Halloween movies! Although they’re usually kid Halloween movies because despite my penchant for true crime and mystery, I am the worlds biggest scaredy cat when it comes to movies. Books, on the other hand, should be perfectly full of heart-stopping horror. When I get a craving for something truly scary, I run as fast as possible away from the Blockbusters and I reach instead for a “paperback from hell.”
For me, the biggest draw to horror is the lesson that everything is survivable. Horror books ease my anxiety in ways that would sound truly neurotic if I really tried to lay it out, but the basis is this: if I can learn from a character’s mistakes, I might not make those same scary mistakes in the real world. Its bananas, I know. But if the anxiety exists anyways, doesn’t it make sense to soothe it whatever way we can? Another major point is the longevity of the genre. While every literary genre is somewhat confined to the trends and styles of the literary world, the broad horror genre is so all-encompassing that it never really fell out of fashion- it just changed what it was wearing.
Horror in literature can be found as far back as the early 13th century, when mentions of gruesome death and Satanic forces started popping up in everything from Dante’s Inferno (1307) to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1580ish). The first books to be associated with horror with witch hunting guides distributed during the early Inquisitions. As a genre, horror really started to take off in England in the 1700s, with the emergence of gothic horror which combined horror and Romanticism. The first true book to fall into the gothic horror genre was The Castle of Otranto (1764), which used a lot of supernatural and fantasy elements.
As the 19th century started rolling in, horror fiction shifted away from the super-natural and started to focus on fears a bit closer to home, like science and mental health. From these we get the classics, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885), and (my personal favorite) everything by Edgar Allen Poe. It was about this time that horror fiction began to take on more subgenres as well: Poe popularized the first detective novels alongside his macabre short stories and Shelley is considered the mother of science fiction. This is also when we get the first real definition for horror as a genre, when the French poet Paul Verlaine said “it is made of a mixture of the carnal spirit and the sad flesh, of all the violent splendors of the declining empire.” Yay?
Original Spooky Boy, Mister Edgar Allen Poe (alongside a pocketbook edition from my own collection, printed in 1944).
Horror in the beginning of the 20th century had made the move to pulp magazines, with most authors making a switch from novels to short stories in pulp publications like Dime Mystery Novels, Terror Tales, and Weird Tales (in which H.P. Lovecraft got his start). As Lovecraft honed his style in what would later be called the cosmic horror subgenre, real life horror stories were beginning to fill the papers and the atrocities of World War II pushed horror books out of the public’s mind for a while. It was the crimes of serial killers Albert Fish and Ed Gein in the 1950s, that would give horror writers fresh material. While serial killers were obviously already in existence, they hadn’t quite lived on in fiction yet. The crimes of Ed Gein would inspire Robert Bloch’s Psycho in 1959 and pave the way for what horror enthusiasts would call the Golden Age of Horror.
The 1960s introduced the slasher subgenre on screen and on paper, and the major successes of a few select books (like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist) led to publishers really pushing through horror books, leading to a booming few decades for the genre. Throughout the 1960s-70s, horror books became so popular that even the most milquetoast reader would likely find one to interest them, with subgenres in abundance. If you liked gothic horror it wasn’t too hard to find, but a boom in availability meant you could also pull a book centered on the paranormal, or satanic panic, or slasher or sci-fi or the post apocalyptic world. And it was in this boom, that the father of contemporary horror, Stephen King, released his first published novel, Carrie, in 1973.
It isn’t hard to see humanity’s unending interest in the macabre throughout history, and that interest lives on in the way we consume horror today. We’re murderinos, and true crime fanatics, we’re still pining for horror movies even after Paranormal Activity scared the life out of all of us. Quite a few popular books in recent years have those original horror writers to thank for their success (we wouldn’t have Twilight without Anne Rice’s Interview With A Vampire). And while horror in literature has come a real long way from those original gothic roots, it’s still captivating audiences hundreds of years later in ways that a lot of genres can’t keep up with. As H. P. Lovecraft said: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
For more reading on the horror genre: I got a lot of my resources from Books Tell You Why and The Circular. I highly suggest Rebecca Bauman’s piece on collecting paperbacks from hell, and Rebecca’s twitter account, @arkhamlibrarian. For more info on the golden age of horror, check out Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell. This piece on Black storytellers using horror is an excellent read as well.
If I’ve convinced you to pick up a horror book after all that, might I suggest you buy from one of these mystery bookstores?
The Cloak & Dagger in Princeton, NJ
The Mysterious Bookshop in Tribeca, NYC
Books From The Crypt, an online store focused on rare and used horror books and pulp magazines
REMEMBER you can also buy anytime from bookshop.org for discounted prices that still support local indie bookstores! PLUS if you’re planning to order books for Christmas presents, why not help a local bookstore out with their end-of-the-year push and go ahead and order early?
If you’re tired of spooky season and just want some normal flipping reading recs, here you go, I aim to please:
Another excellent Maybe Baby newsletter from Haley Nahman, who I recommend so often I ought to just bookmark her substack page. Haley has a way of always putting words to how I’m feeling, and although this particular issue (aptly titled Are you wearing despair goggles?) of Maybe Baby is a month old, it still rings true.
This Ina Garten profile in promotion of her newest cookbook, Modern Comfort Food. Geez, how can you not love Ina Garten? She’s fantastic and I look forward to reading her memoir one day.
1/4 of Practical Magic, and also the subtitles of the movie, same name. I love this movie and wanted to love this book but I couldn’t get into it.
22 Ways to Make Thanksgiving Into Your Own Weird, Perfect Holiday. Great ideas if this is the year you’re not travelling home to eat turkey.
Chrissy Teigen's personal essay on the loss of her third child, Jack. It is very honest and beautiful and heartbreaking.
a recipe for Election Cake.
An incredibly insightful opinion piece from Polly Klaas’s sisters about prison reform. For context: Polly was a 12 year old girl that was taken from her own bedroom in 1993, you can read about her murder and the aftermath here.
my first Tana French book, In The Woods, which came to me with extrememly mixed reviews but I really quite liked it, thankyouverymuch.
I don’t have a vocabulary word this week because this dispatch has been long enough as is.
If you stumble across a word you’d like to see shared in this section, I’m all ears.
Thank you, delightful humans everywhere. If you learned something, or enjoyed this dispatch, please share it with everyone you know. It would truly mean the world to me. If you’d like to follow us on social media, you can do so at the buttons below. Every book I recommend can be found on this Goodreads shelf. If you want to chat, ask for book recommendations, or correct my punctuation, you can reply directly to this dispatch or leave a comment on substack, where you can also find an archive of every dispatch I release. Thank you so much for being a part of the Lost Friends Literary Club.