Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Horror Picks to Take Your Reading Beyond Stephenkingitis

Titles like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Other catapulted horror into the bestseller lists in the 1970s, and what followed was a rapidly expanding category. In the 1980s, horror paperbacks were hitting the shelves at an astonishing pace. But everything that goes up must come down, and in the early 1990s, the horror bubble burst. The swan song of this era was the Abyss line, which launched with Kathe Koja’s The Cipher.
 
After the ’90s, most imprints turned away from horror. Since it was no longer a commercially viable category, the shelf space for horror was drastically reduced and we ended up with bookstores that only stocked a few horror titles and limited themselves to the heavy hitters that had managed to survive the upheaval.
 
Horror aficionados continued to operate and consume the books put out by small presses, but for the general public, horror seemed to vanish.
 
The erroneous perception that horror only constitutes a limited number of authors and titles obscures the breadth and history of horror fiction. Although some people think horror books need to give you a heart attack in order to be horror, or that horror only means violent murders, horror encompasses everything from Peter Straub’s elegant, slow-paced Ghost Story to Guy N. Smith’s pulpy Crabs: The Human Sacrifice (featuring my favorite book cover of the 1980s).
 
Recently, we have witnessed a resurgence of horror fiction in stores and libraries. We can thank books such as Stephen Graham Jones' The Only Good Indians, Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group, or Alma Katsu’s The Hunger for showing publishers and booksellers that horror has some life left in it. Truth be told, horror is like a poltergeist that keeps rattling the dishes and won’t be exorcised. 
 
But despite these successes, there’s still a fair amount of Stephenkingitis, which is the reason I’m penning this list of lesser-known horror titles. So no, Stephen King does not appear on this list, and neither does Clive Barker of the iconic Books of Blood, nor the queen of the undead, Anne Rice. But I hope we can dig up the coffins and unearth some hidden gems—or skeletons—for you.