Is there another generation of titans in the wings, or is the glory age quite gone?

dondomat · Apr 24, 2011

I ask this question in an individual author market-share sense, not in the “recapturing the essence of the pre-WWII pioneers sense.”

If we have a first division guys like King and Koontz, with their nearly half a billion sales each; If then we have the second level of guys like John Saul and James Herbert with their 60 and 40 mil each; And if we finish off the mega-hit horrorists with the likes of Clive Barker and Graham Masterton, with their 20 – 30mil, the question is:

do you think that at some point in the near future, a horror author can harness successfully the energies that the likes of Dan Brown, Mayer and Rawling and Patterson are harnessing, or was the 80’s boom a fluke of gigantic proportions, which is gone forever, with people like Barker riding on the crest of the progressively diminishing waves. Which by now are mere ripples.

Or, to put the question another way: is the paranormal/urban fantasy tsunami a tackling of the same basic themes and symbols but through a more videogame/graphic noveloriented lens?

And if yes - will there be perhaps a sort of third wave in fifteen years, which will again have demons and shapeshifters and brain eating aliens, but not in a genre which we today would recognize as horror, or paranormal or science fiction?

And now the biggie: or could it be, that we first had a mass of intertwined speculative general themes, created by the likes of say Edgar Alan Poe, all the way up the pulp age, when Edgar Rice Burroughs for example wrote sci-fi and fantasy and horror and colonial adventure, and Robert Howard did the same…

And then by the late 1930’s this mess of a super-genre start splitting into “horror” and “hard science fiction” and “soft science fiction” and “sword and sorcery” and “weird”, and whatnot, with subcategories prolifirating, like “cyberpunk” and “steampunk” to name just a few.

And maybe now with the flood of urban fantasy and paranormal, there is an overall dissolving of boundaries back into the primordial chaotic super-genre? With a future splitting into different genres along different fault-lines?

Not least of all, the previous supergenre mix was a product of a time when women didn’t have the vote and were a considered generally stupider and sillier, although ‘wonderful’, and ‘colored folks’ and the ‘proles’ also dwelled in their separate reality ghettos. Now, a century of warfare has passed, space travel, computers, equal rights, subatomic physics, videogames, a hundred million dead from war, LSD and pot and crack and meths instead of opium and morphine and laughing gas and ‘magnetism induced trances’.

So, with like nine tenth of the population now suddenly being full-fledged citizens with rights and stuff, and everyone pretending it has always been this way, and with all the changes due to apocalyptic massacres and insane leaps in science – perhaps we’re reacting as a culture?

Trying to absorb and digest the changes in our moving parts, so to say, before the supergenre dealing with aliens and demons psychopaths breaks apart again?

And there is the end of my long, rambling question with a misleading title.

Amadan · Apr 24, 2011

Umm... short answer, I think it's impossible to predict what book trends will be hot 5, 10 or 20 years from now.

I doubt we'll see classic horror novels coming back as popular as ever in their old form, but horror hasn't gone away. Justin Cronin's The Passage was a bestseller, and zombies are still a cresting trend.

dondomat · Apr 25, 2011

True, true, but in a way these themes and sales both seem to hark to the pre-1970's days of say Matheson and Bloch. Still "bestsellers", still "selling rights to Hollywood", but mosquitoes compared to the 300mln or even 30mln copies selling spawns of the 70's and 80's

Amadan · Apr 25, 2011

dondomat said:
True, true, but in a way these themes and sales both seem to hark to the pre-1970's days of say Matheson and Bloch. Still "bestsellers", still "selling rights to Hollywood", but mosquitoes compared to the 300mln or even 30mln copies selling spawns of the 70's and 80's

Well, that's publishing in general. You could say the same thing about comic books -- a print run that would be considered a best-seller today in the comics industry would have been cancelled in the 70s or 80s.

dondomat · Apr 25, 2011

Ah, but that's exactly it: other genres are still producing mega-sellers: psycho thrillers (Patterson; Cornwell); mystery thrillers (Brown; Larsson); and the para and YA fields...
Even in space opera there are authors like Kevin Anderson with serious impact, whith numbers, which, even in they hayday, none of the Big Three (Heinlein; Clarke & Asimov) had

It's in horror, that there seems to be a lack of new titans. And in fantasy too, one has the 10 - 20 - 30 million mini-titans, but no Tolkien, no Lewis.

It is as if the demons & aliens have migrated to paranormal and urban fantasy, while the wizards have moved on to kids and teen books

RobJ · Apr 25, 2011

dondomat said:
I ask this question in an individual author market-share sense, not in the “recapturing the essence of the pre-WWII pioneers sense.”

If we have a first division guys like King and Koontz, with their nearly half a billion sales each; If then we have the second level of guys like John Saul and James Herbert with their 60 and 40 mil each; And if we finish off the mega-hit horrorists with the likes of Clive Barker and Graham Masterton, with their 20 – 30mil, the question is:

do you think that at some point in the near future, a horror author can harness successfully the energies that the likes of Dan Brown, Mayer and Rawling and Patterson are harnessing, or was the 80’s boom a fluke of gigantic proportions, which is gone forever, with people like Barker riding on the crest of the progressively diminishing waves. Which by now are mere ripples.

Or, to put the question another way: is the paranormal/urban fantasy tsunami a tackling of the same basic themes and symbols but through a more videogame/graphic noveloriented lens?

And if yes - will there be perhaps a sort of third wave in fifteen years, which will again have demons and shapeshifters and brain eating aliens, but not in a genre which we today would recognize as horror, or paranormal or science fiction?

And now the biggie: or could it be, that we first had a mass of intertwined speculative general themes, created by the likes of say Edgar Alan Poe, all the way up the pulp age, when Edgar Rice Burroughs for example wrote sci-fi and fantasy and horror and colonial adventure, and Robert Howard did the same…

And then by the late 1930’s this mess of a super-genre start splitting into “horror” and “hard science fiction” and “soft science fiction” and “sword and sorcery” and “weird”, and whatnot, with subcategories prolifirating, like “cyberpunk” and “steampunk” to name just a few.

And maybe now with the flood of urban fantasy and paranormal, there is an overall dissolving of boundaries back into the primordial chaotic super-genre? With a future splitting into different genres along different fault-lines?

Not least of all, the previous supergenre mix was a product of a time when women didn’t have the vote and were a considered generally stupider and sillier, although ‘wonderful’, and ‘colored folks’ and the ‘proles’ also dwelled in their separate reality ghettos. Now, a century of warfare has passed, space travel, computers, equal rights, subatomic physics, videogames, a hundred million dead from war, LSD and pot and crack and meths instead of opium and morphine and laughing gas and ‘magnetism induced trances’.

So, with like nine tenth of the population now suddenly being full-fledged citizens with rights and stuff, and everyone pretending it has always been this way, and with all the changes due to apocalyptic massacres and insane leaps in science – perhaps we’re reacting as a culture?

Trying to absorb and digest the changes in our moving parts, so to say, before the supergenre dealing with aliens and demons psychopaths breaks apart again?

And there is the end of my long, rambling question with a misleading title.

Who knows.

dondomat · Apr 25, 2011

RobJ said:
Who knows.

Quite, quite.

Inkstrokes · Apr 25, 2011

I'd like to think there are new titans in the wings. I think the Horror genre is always in flux.

Mostly I think we are in a generation that doesn't scare as easily. We've seen so much. Folklore and ghost stories once used to explain the unexplainable have been replaced by hard science. I think that's why Gorror is so popular. It's extreme not subtle.

I'd also like to think that there is a resurgence of Poe style horror/mystery also waiting in the wings. That's in my own best interest of course

dondomat · Apr 25, 2011

Inkstrokes said:
I'd also like to think that there is a resurgence of Poe style horror/mystery also waiting in the wings. That's in my own best interest of course

Ah, which in a sense would go together with my vague idea of the separate speculative genres combining back into the primordeal seething mass of the pre-1930's period, before splitting up again. Or not. Maybe this time it'll just remain a supergenre with a million tiny subgenres ala 'cybergoreneorustpunk'

By the way, the gorror is popular only in theory. It's like in the 1990's everyone talked as if death and black metal are super popular, but in the end that was just a surface impression. The biggest of them sold like 100K, a flea, a speck, compared to the likes of Metallica, Iron Maiden and AC/DC. So too the gore enthusiasts have impressive shadows but are market midgets, with the possible exception of ole Masterton.

muravyets · Apr 25, 2011

I don't think monster mega-sellers in any genre can be looked to for a trend or an indicator of the popularity of a genre. They are curve-breakers, freaks of sales, in my opinion. The sales of a King or Koontz, combining as they do dedicated hard work with pure luck of market timing, say more about those individual writers than they do about the popularity of their genre.

Of course, who wouldn't want that much income? But I think it's foolish, even self-defeating, to hold them up as examples of what is or is no longer possible in the genre. They are not the mainstream in that way.

As for the future of horror as a genre, fashions come and go. It is impossible, or at least very difficult, to predict what or who the next mega-seller will be or when he or she will emerge. There are too many factors that affect popular tastes from time to time.

In the 70s, aside from literature, there were fads for occultism and Victoriana. These both fueled the popularity of horror fiction. In the 80s, occultism continued to be popular while nuclear/tech nihilism boosted the horror tastes of that decade. From the 1880s through the 1930s, serials and then magazines were all the rage, and this supported a large short story market. Horror is well suited to short formats, so the masters of the genre were able to flourish.

But between high points such as those, there has always been a stable niche for horror stories. At least, I can't think of a period of history that did not have thrills and chills literature full of ghosts, monsters, dark magic, and the troublesome dead.

donatos · Apr 25, 2011

I think there will be new horror writers to equal the old but only if...they learn from the past. Let's face it, lack of interest in horror fic was for a reason. Horror writers started writing books for hardcore horror fans, thus leaving the mainstream out of the game. The 80s generation wrote for the mainstream audience. The generations that followed wrote for the grind house horror crowd, which is much smaller. There's a reason why you can still be a bestselling author in kids lit, because kids were a huge part of the audience to begin with! And yes, more boobs and more guts does not necessarily a good horror story make. A horror story cleaned up of bad language, gruesome and ridiculous kill scenes, sex scenes, is still just as powerful as horror with all of those elements in it. I'm not saying we need to clean up our act, just saying these are things to think about, seeing as how horror novels ARE bestsellers in the kids department and in pararomance. My opinion is that the mainstream audience didn't stop looking into horror fiction but that horror fiction turned its back on the mainstream audience. If you wanted to go that direction I honestly believe there's a wide open door.

Another thing, the movies. Why would I spend three days to a week reading a horror book when I can watch a movie in one and a half hours? Horror writers need to offer readers something they can't get at the movies. What is that thing that they can't get from a movie?

dondomat · Apr 25, 2011

"Curve-breakers" sounds just about right.

Although neither King nor Koontz could be called 'lucky' in a biographical sense, both being poor provincials from dysfunctional families, both pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, but, having said that, King was the luckier one - first book paperback bestseller, made into film, third book made into megafilm by Kubrik... Koontz had to write 40 novels to reach King's success with Carrie. 50 novels to reach the numbers of 'The Stand'. That guy just didn't know how to quit.

I mean - other people like Sigler or Little or anyone actually, they reach a workable level of prose and stay there. King and Koontz kept pushing themselves all the way to the mid-80's, before reaching a prose plateau. One became a character monster, the other a description monster. I shudder to think what would happen if any author managed to combine the two. You'd probably get a horror Dickens or Chekov, haha.

quicklime · Apr 25, 2011

I think horror hit an abnormal, exceptional peak in the eighties, and died under its own weight. It probably deserved to--McCammon is sorely missed, some new guys have picked up and the old guard is largely fading, but there were so many b-listers churning out absolute garbage back then, and houses tried to pub them all, seeking the next Saul or King. They poisoned their own well.

You're seeing (although I doubt you will see it on the same scale) similar trends with vampire UF now, boy-wizards, and chick lit. Horror now is maybe a bit small (although the market is what it is), but probably much closer to where it "should be". That sets the bar much higher to claw your way in, but if you can do it, the market is less susceptible to booms and crashes. I love horror, but not everyone does and the genre was probably never enough to sustain the 80's book boom, or the 50's creature feature glut on film.

As far as folks writing as you describe, it may not matter....Straub can write circles around Koontz, as can Piccirilli. Little is a bit of a mixed bag, but he certainly has moments, and Clegg does as well. All are sitting about where they were a decade ago, or like Piccirilli, have moved out of horror.

Horror and fantasy are both niche markets, probably smaller niches now that our world is smaller. I don't see any giant boom coming, and I don't see that as a bad thing--when the 80s died and a bunch of piss-poor authors got washed out to sea, those same tides also dragged a lot of mid-listers out; some of them may have BECOME the next King or Koontz, had the market not turned so artificially against them. In a world like todays, they'd have to work hard but they could surmount the obstacles. In the great purge of all things horror, many folks were culled who should not have been, and I'd rather not see such an artificial vacuum again just for the couple years of good times

muravyets · Apr 25, 2011

*dusts off the old Frankenstein lab set* Let's! Get! Combining!!!

Koontz's history illustrates my point. This guy's grinding dedication kept him going, but it was the luck of forces beyond his control -- the perfect market moment for the right book -- that got him to that pinnacle.

Personally, I would be looking more to the second and third tier writers in your OP for examples of success benchmarks I could plan to achieve. Koontz/King levels of success are like hitting the lottery. Yay when we get that kind of result, but making a plan that requires them? Not a good move.

But regardless, whatever plan any of us decides is realistic for our own careers, one of the big tricks will be building that audience, even if, at the moment, horror is a bit out of fashion.

In that vein, I'm interested by Donatos's comments, above. I don't know if many horror writers began targeting a narrower, "hard core" audience, but I do know that I have had an increasingly hard time finding new horror writers who can entertain me like the Old Masters do. And I consider myself fairly "hard core." I literally read Lovecraft before I read fairy tales. I was raised by a mother who collects horror and has a library of thousands of stories and novels and hundreds of movies. My own library is not far behind. And I have been lamenting the slow bleed of fear out of horror since the end of the 80s. I don't know why, but I often feel like we have slipped back into the age-old Grand Guignol fad of gory window-dressing instead of story. I look back to the earliest ages of gothic horror, and I see a lot of the same kind of shallow shock-pr0n I see in new horror today. I don't have anything against that, but it is kind of like a junk food diet. And worse, to a reader like me, who enjoys exploring the disturbing side of things, charnel houses just are not scary.

I could give an illustrative example of what I mean, but it would be a really bad spoiler to one of my favorite recent movies which, though technically a crime story, falls squarely into the horror genre, in my opinion. I'll pm details to anyone who's curious, but let me just say here that From Hell is a stellar example of how gore PLUS intimately human emotional story = bone chilling terror, while the Jason franchise, though amusing, illustrates how pure gore = nothing but a big housekeeping bill.

ETA: I also agree with quicklime that the glut of wannabes and imitators contributed largely to the backswing against horror. It's a cliche that "nothing succeeds like success," but "killing the goose that laid the golden egg" is also a cliche, and I think the commercial media do have a tendency to do that with any popular fad.

Rhoda Nightingale · Apr 25, 2011

The next big names in horror literature? I hate to be repetitive, but it really is hard to say. The ones I see the most of, at the front of the horror section with the big, shiny covers are Jonathan Mabury, Dan Simmons and of course the consistent pitch hitters like King and Koontz and Straub. I would love to see someone really knock it out of the park and put horror on the map again, but that kind of thing is just impossible to predict.

donatos · Apr 25, 2011

I do think the low key state of the genre right now is a good thing. It lets the new generation work in the dark to get down what they need to get down. I have a stack of to be read books, a lot of them horror books. I'm reading two books right now published in the last five years, one is the biggest horror novel published in 2009.....But which books in my TBR pile am I itching to read (like I mean, really itching to read)? The House by Bentley Little and Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon!

There's just something about that time period! It wasn't all just smoke and mirrors. There was an innocence like in the 50s sci fi toward writing that I really love and that everyone loved.

Well, okay, The House is late 90s, but Little writes like an 80s author.

Calla Lily · Apr 25, 2011

Swan Song rocks. It was summer when I read that for the first time, and I remember looking away from the page and out the window to make sure everything was still green and beautiful.

Little, eh. He's okay. I prefer Keene.

thothguard51 · Apr 25, 2011

Each generation has its own titans in music, sports, business, art and even in publishing.

The current generation has a lot more to consider and compete with in publishing styles (commercial, ebook, self publishing, etc), and in a market that is in flux because of the economic downturn.

I think once the economy stabilizes, we'll find this generation's Titans have been silently working in the back ground.

A titan is not made from a single painting, a single song or a single book.

Haggis · Apr 25, 2011

I'd like to think we have some pre-titans right here, but as RobJ says, "who knows?"

Inkstrokes · Apr 25, 2011

donatos said:
I do think the low key state of the genre right now is a good thing. It lets the new generation work in the dark to get down what they need to get down.
There's just something about that time period! It wasn't all just smoke and mirrors. There was an innocence like in the 50s sci fi toward writing that I really love and that everyone loved.

I totally agree. There may just be (fingers crossed) a generation of true horror writers brewing and waiting for their time. Honing their craft and learning from the past mistakes. I hope to be one of them BUT, the ambiguous nature of horror is that it often crosses borders and is hard to categorize. That, in the long run, hurts us. Publishers want your book to fit a cookie-cutter idea.

I'm having a hard time pitching my book because while it has horror elements, it doesn't, apparantly, have enough gore. It's more a psychological thriller, a gothic piece perhaps. It has more in common with Frankenstein than Saw.

Isn't horror an recent construct? Didn't Poe and Dickens fall under the mystery category? Even Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles could be considered horror, but it's not.

Horror is an unfair lable, but today seems to be all about lables.

What a GREAT conversation! I needed this. Thank-you!

feeblepizza · Apr 25, 2011

Maybe. Maybe not. RobJ said it best: who knows?

thothguard51 · Apr 25, 2011

Haggis said:
I'd like to think we have some pre-titans right here, but as RobJ says, "who knows?"

^^^ This

movieman · Apr 25, 2011

Inkstrokes said:
Isn't horror an recent construct? Didn't Poe and Dickens fall under the mystery category? Even Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles could be considered horror, but it's not.

That's something I've been thinking about; horror crosses over with so many other genres that since the 80s it may just have been mislabeled, rather than disappeared.

donatos · Apr 25, 2011

callalily61 said:
Swan Song rocks. It was summer when I read that for the first time, and I remember looking away from the page and out the window to make sure everything was still green and beautiful.

Little, eh. He's okay. I prefer Keene.

Keene is fantastic. He's my favorite of those that came out on the Leisure imprint. With Keene I always get my money's worth and sometimes more. I like Little for his non horror elements, the stuff that happens on the sides, character habits, pop culture references. But the top two for me are both Little and Keene. I really like Elizabeth Massie as well, she hardly puts out novels, does mostly short stories, but Sineater is a horror novel second to none.

Damn, sure will miss the old Leisure line.

dondomat · Apr 25, 2011

quicklime said:
In the great purge of all things horror, many folks were culled who should not have been, and I'd rather not see such an artificial vacuum again just for the couple years of good times

Agree. Although both K & K picked up mega-speed exactly after the boom was over. It's in the 90's and 00's that both moved from 50mil sellers to like 300 mil sellers. Mechanical momentum from the 80's? If so, why didn't it work for Saul or Masterton?

...Little's The House is great. In a way kinda like Van Vogt or early Delany - plot is shaky, characters are all one dimensional, but a compelling dream-like logic just propells you along from one scene to the next.

Is there another generation of titans in the wings, or is the glory age quite gone?

dondomat

Amadan

dondomat

Amadan

dondomat

RobJ

dondomat

Inkstrokes

figuring it all out

dondomat

muravyets

Old revolutionary

donatos

dondomat

quicklime

all out of fucks to give

muravyets

Old revolutionary

Rhoda Nightingale

Vampire Junkie

donatos

Calla Lily

On hiatus

thothguard51

A Gentleman of a refined age...

Haggis

Evil, undead Chihuahua

Inkstrokes

figuring it all out

feeblepizza

kinda human mostly cat

thothguard51

A Gentleman of a refined age...

movieman

donatos

dondomat