The Death of Horror

In the 1990’s there was a good deal of talk in American horror and fantasy circles about the “death” of horror fiction. At the time, horror magazines were failing, competition for slots in those few publications that did buy horror was fierce, and editors were not taking chances on newcomers. This decline in the publishing of horror should not have been too surprising. A parabolic spike in sales of dark fiction in the 1980s — spearheaded by the phenomenal success of Stephen King — had caused an unseemly publishing bubble.

As a marketing category, horror was hopelessly overbought and due for a sharp correction. But although these facts of supply and demand are hard to ignore, I believe there were other reasons — perhaps even more important — that explain why the 1990’s was such a bad decade for horror.

It is no coincidence, in my view, that the decline in horror’s readership during this time dovetailed with the ascension of the United States as the world’s sole, unchallenged superpower. It was during the 1990s that communism collapsed and, by implication, our free market system triumphed as the world’s most viable economic model. During that decade, American capitalism entered a boom time, and the entire planet seemed ready to do business with us. Unemployment and crime were at all-time lows, more Americans than ever before became shareholders of America’s corporations, and the stock market was soaring to breathtaking new heights. Our national success described a dizzying rise with no conceivable end in sight. Looking at it in this light, it makes perfect sense that Americans didn’t want to read horror fiction in the 1990s. Who wanted horror when everything seemed so good with the world, when peace was at hand and more and more average Americans were becoming rich? The American dream had become a stunning reality, and nightmares were relics of history. Horror was beside the point — it was the last bastion of incurable neurotics, the paranoid fantasies of isolated, immature minds.

After September 11th, 2001, all that changed. Our certainties suddenly faded into an ever-shifting landscape of contingency and risk. America was under attack. Acts of terror at home and abroad opened an existential can of worms no one should have ignored. It is now obvious that the globalization of our economic system, upon which we rely to extend our markets and grow our wealth, links us to danger as well as to opportunity. Indeed, it is the very interdependence of such a system — profoundly impacting other cultures and peoples as it does — that makes it impossible for us to escape the world’s violence. For the first time, Americans began to realize that not everyone in the world rejoiced in our political and social ideals, or our consumerist lifestyle.

In an age of terror, security is a growth business, but can any of us really feel secure? Our porous borders and open society make us an easy and inevitable target. The very nuclear and biological technologies of war we developed as adjuncts to world dominance may now be available to those who wish us harm. All it would take are a few nuclear suitcase bombs planted in our biggest cities, and. . . .Get the picture?

In many ways, things have never been scarier. But fear which remains raw, unconscious, and untransformed, is a massively destructive emotion. It is fear which is the ultimate cause of hatred — we lash out at what makes us afraid, distracting ourselves with violence to avoid an intimacy with the unknown. Isn’t it true that many of our belief systems — about evil versus good, self versus other, even the nature of happiness — are really just expressions of a primordial fear? This fear starts in individuals, then expands outward into the collective will of nations. Indeed, the history of armed conflict on this planet is a sad record of man’s inability to work with fear imaginatively. Working creatively with fear therefore becomes of paramount importance to the happiness — and survival— of the human race, especially so in an age when our technologies are capable of destroying the very planet we inhabit. Only when we can transform our fears can we achieve the wisdom to heal the world and become truly secure.

Which is another way of saying that we will always need horror fiction. As long as human beings fear death, and loss, and otherness, as long as we follow limited ways of looking at the world around us, we’ll need a language of metaphor to work its elixir of magical subversion on our hardened minds. Horror fiction may have taken a breather in the 1990s, but as we proceed through a dangerous new millennium, I suspect it will make quite a comeback.

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