. Unfortunately, Jesus passed away before he could get very far with the project. Those first few columns were glorious, though, and held the promise of a wealth of knowledge to come. Reading them, I am reminded of so many conversations between Jesus and myself\u2014in our homes or our cars, at conventions or book signings, during innumerable dinners or over drinks. I\u2019m reminded of our full-on geekdom, and how we loved discussing authors like M. P. Shiel, Edward Lucas White, William Hope Hodgson, Manly Wade Wellman, Henry Kuttner, R. R. Ryan, Rex Miller, William Schoell, Ruby Jean Jensen, A. R. Morlan, Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, Nick Sharman, Frank Belknap Long, and many others whom\u2014depending on your level of geekery\u2014you may or may not have heard of, and may or may not have already read. I loved those conversations and (sometimes) impassioned arguments. Jesus\u2019s column was a glimpse into those. Sadly, like I said, he passed away before he could even scratch the surface.<\/span><\/p>\nSo, now I reckon it falls on me to do it.<\/span><\/p>\nWhy? Well, scroll back up to that list of folks I mentioned in the second paragraph of this long-winded prologue. That\u2019s a diverse list of people, but they all have one thing in common. They are all much smarter than me. I would suspect that almost all of them are college educated. I am not. I have never been to college (unless you count the two weeks of community college I took before dropping out and getting a job at a foundry instead). In truth, I barely graduated high school. I would bet that all the folks mentioned above know how to properly use a semicolon. After twenty years of writing professionally and full-time, I still do not. My grasp of proper punctuation and grammar has been known to make editors weep blood. Any one of the people listed in that second paragraph are far more capable and qualified to undertake such a task as this. But all of them are smart enough not to.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen Cemetery Dance\u2019s Richard Chizmar agreed to this column, my girlfriend\u2014author Mary SanGiovanni\u2014asked me, \u201cThat\u2019s a lot. It\u2019s going to be overwhelming. Why do you have to be the one to write it?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nAnd I answered, \u201cBecause I\u2019m the only living person stupid enough to try.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nWhy do we need such a column? <\/span><\/p>\nBecause I owe it to my friend.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.cemeterydance.com\/extras\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/triggerwarning.jpg?resize=217%2C346&ssl=1\")
(And since Rich has already paid me, I now owe it to him, as well\u2026)<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019m not the best person for the job, but I\u2019m the one you\u2019re stuck with.<\/span><\/p>\nSo, that\u2019s part of the answer. But there\u2019s more to it than that. We still haven\u2019t really answered the Why.<\/span><\/p>\nBack in 2011, I gave a keynote speech entitled \u201cRoots\u201d, which was subsequently turned into an essay, and included in my book <\/span>Trigger Warnings<\/span><\/i>. I\u2019m reprinting the speech below (with some cuts and revisions), because it forms the second part of the answer. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n* \u00a0\u00a0* \u00a0\u00a0*<\/span><\/p>\nThis speech is supposed to be about the history of the horror genre. In discussing such a topic, I should start with the cave paintings of primitive man, many of which depicted things they were afraid of. Then I should go into the <\/span>Epic of Gilgamesh<\/span><\/i>, and the various stories that make up the Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Muslim holy books. I should talk about <\/span>Beowulf<\/span><\/i>, and Lucian Samosata\u2019s <\/span>True History<\/span><\/i> (which, written in 200AD, is the story of the crew of a ship who are transported from Earth to the Moon and Venus, and details the monsters they battle and oddities they find). I should talk about 1796\u2019s <\/span>The Monk<\/span><\/i> by Matthew Gregory Lewis, and <\/span>Melmoth the Wanderer<\/span><\/i>, and, of course, the contributions of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen, and Edgar Allan Poe. But since we only have thirty minutes and since many of you are either hung over or here only to ask me if I\u2019ll ever write another zombie novel, I\u2019m going to focus on Modern Horror—fiction written during the 20th century. <\/span><\/p>\nGrowing up in the late Seventies and early Eighties, my generation was introduced to horror fiction in one of two ways: kid\u2019s books (John Bellairs was our J. K. Rowling) or comic books (<\/span>Man-Thing, Weird War, House of Mystery, Werewolf By Night, The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor<\/span><\/i>, etc.). From these, we graduated to Stephen King and Dean Koontz. It was King\u2019s masterful history of the horror genre, <\/span>Danse Macabre<\/span><\/i>, which introduced most of us to H. P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, and others who\u2019d come before him, and it was the delay between King and Koontz titles that allowed us to discover (in our late teens and as young adults) Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum, Joe R. Lansdale, Graham Masterton, the Splatterpunks, and many others.<\/span><\/p>\nThese days, we see a new generation of horror writers and readers—and what\u2019s curious is that their generation was not influenced by Stephen King or comic books. Their generation was introduced to horror primarily through video games and R.L. Stine\u2019s <\/span>Goosebumps<\/span><\/i> series, and they\u2019ve now graduated to books by myself, Edward Lee, Sarah Langan, Steve Niles, Carlton Mellick, Jonathan Maberry, J.F. Gonzalez, Joe Hill, and others of our generation. That seems strange to me. It makes me feel old. It also makes me feel that I should certainly be making more money than I am. But I digress.<\/span><\/p>\nThis generation also has more competing forms of media and entertainment than any other, and as a result, they are less well read than previous generations. Admittedly, this is a generalization, but it\u2019s one that, in my experience and the experience of my peers, is true for the majority.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd that\u2019s a shame.<\/span><\/p>\nA horror writer should know the genre\u2019s history for several reasons. First and foremost, they should know it so as not to repeat the mistakes of its past. They should draw upon that history, letting the books and stories that have been written in the past inspire and inform and shape their own work. You know that novel you\u2019re working on about Nazi ghosts haunting a tank? Graham Masterton beat you to it back in the Seventies. If you\u2019re writing about vampires, you\u2019ve probably read <\/span>Dracula<\/span><\/i>—but did you also read the works of Les Daniels, or <\/span>Salem\u2019s Lot, They Thirst, Vampyrrhic<\/span><\/i>, or <\/span>Lot Lizards<\/span><\/i>? Maybe you saw Ramsey Campbell at a convention and were told he is one of the most important living authors, but you\u2019re not sure why. This is unacceptable. Maybe (and most importantly) you want to become a better writer by studying and understanding the various styles of writers that came before you. The only way to do that is through reading.<\/span><\/p>\nReading is a crucial part of being a writer, and it\u2019s essential at all stages of your development and career. You should certainly read outside of your chosen genre, but it\u2019s also important to read inside your genre, as well. You may not like all of them, but you should read them anyway. Your writing will be better for having done so.<\/span><\/p>\nThis is just as important for those of you in the audience who have no desire to become a writer, and identify yourselves as readers or fans. If you\u2019re a reader, then you need to read fiction that has inspired and informed and shaped the genre into what it is today. Like those <\/span>28 Days Later<\/span><\/i>-style zombies? I bet you\u2019ll love Jim Starlin\u2019s <\/span>Among Madmen<\/span><\/i> or Simon Clark\u2019s <\/span>Blood Crazy<\/span><\/i>. Perhaps you enjoy the exploits of occult detectives such as F. Paul Wilson\u2019s Repairman Jack, Jim Butcher\u2019s Harry Dresden, or my own Levi Stoltzfus. But have you read Manly Wade Wellman\u2019s Silver John the Balladeer stories or William Hope Hodgson\u2019s Carnacki the Ghost Finder? Think it can\u2019t get any more hard-fucking-core than Edward Lee or Wrath James White? Then you haven\u2019t read <\/span>Echo of a Curse<\/span><\/i> by R. R. Ryan\u2014written in 1939! Like John Carpenter\u2019s <\/span>The Thing<\/span><\/i>? Yeah? But have you read John W. Campbell\u2019s <\/span>Who Goes There<\/span><\/i>?<\/span><\/p>\nAt least once in every decade since the First World War, the public has had a renewed interest in horror fiction. For the interests of our discussion, I have broken this era of modern horror down into six waves.<\/span><\/p>\nThat first wave, spanning from 1900 to the mid-1920s begins, more or less, with the 1901 publication of M.P. Shiel\u2019s <\/span>The Purple Cloud<\/span><\/i>, a post-apocalyptic novel. In it, much of humanity are killed by a mysterious, toxic purple cloud that floats across the Earth. The survivors learn that they are pawns in a battle between the forces of \u201cThe White\u201d (representing good) and \u201cThe Black (representing evil). The themes and ideas presented in <\/span>The Purple Cloud<\/span><\/i> are ones that have echoed in post-apocalyptic horror fiction for more than 100 years, influencing everything from Matheson\u2019s <\/span>I Am Legend<\/span><\/i> to Stephen King\u2019s <\/span>The Stand<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\nThat first wave of modern horror also gave us authors such as Lord Dunsany and William Hope Hodgson, and saw an increased public interest in ghost stories, particularly the work of M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and Edith Wharton (among others). 1923 brought us the birth of <\/span>Weird Tales<\/span><\/i>, a magazine whose long and varied history is so entwined with modern horror that it\u2019s as difficult to imagine the genre without it as it is to imagine the genre without Stephen King.<\/span><\/p>\nThe second wave, spanning the mid-20s through the late-40s, was an important period that gave us H.P. Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Shirley Jackson, and Seabury Quinn, among others, and the early works of Fritz Leiber.<\/span><\/p>\nThe third wave, spanning the Fifties and Sixties, gave us more mature works from Fritz Leiber, as well as the work of Anthony Boucher, Theodore Sturgeon, John Farris, Ira Levin, and five writers who are as important, if not more important, to the genre than even the works of the esteemed Mr. King: Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, and the early works of Ramsey Campbell. These five writers were among the first to truly begin centering horror fiction in contemporary settings, rather than crumbling New England waterfront towns or sprawling Victorian mansions. Their impact and themes still inform much of today\u2019s horror fiction.<\/span><\/p>\nDuring the first three waves, horror fiction was published as either mainstream fiction, science fiction, or mystery fiction. There was no horror marketing category. That category wasn\u2019t invented until the rise of the fourth wave.<\/span><\/p>\nThe beginning of the fourth wave, the Seventies and Eighties, brought us Stephen King, Dean Koontz, F. Paul Wilson, Thomas Monteleone, Karl Edward Wagner, Peter Straub, and others. When King became a bestseller in paperback, the marketing category of HORROR was invented. The genre waned briefly around 1979-1980 but then came back with a vengeance. The fourth wave ruled all through the Eighties and into the early Nineties, giving us Clive Barker, Charles L. Grant, James Herbert, TED Klein, Robert R. McCammon, Joe R. Lansdale, Jack Ketchum, Richard Laymon, Rick Hautala, Ronald Kelly, the Splatterpunks, Brian Hodge, and Poppy Z. Brite. This era also saw the early works of such current luminaries as Edward Lee, Tom Piccirilli, and James A. Moore. These were beautiful, golden years. A great time to be a fan, and a wonderful time to be a writer.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd then came the mid-90s crash. <\/span><\/p>\nSome say horror died in the mid-90s, but this is patently untrue. HORROR as a marketing category to be stamped on the spine of a book certainly died, but the stories and books and readers were still there. From 1991 to 1995, the most prominent mass market horror publishers were Zebra Books and the Dell Abyss line. <\/span><\/p>\nZebra was your traditional mass-market pulp house, cranking out novels with garish covers. Dell-Abyss was a little different. Started with the mission statement of getting away from the traditional horror of King, Koontz, and Straub, Dell Abyss was to publish more cutting-edge horror and, for a while, they did. Then the whole thing came crashing down, leaving folks like Brian Hodge and Kathe Koja homeless. Meanwhile, over at Zebra, authors weren\u2019t getting paid on time. Zebra collapsed, too, which left authors like Rick Hautala and Ronald Kelly scrambling.<\/span><\/p>\nDoes any of that sound familiar? If you\u2019re thinking, \u201cHey, that sounds like what we just went through with Dorchester and Leisure Books\u201d then you win.<\/span><\/p>\nWith the cancellation of Zebra and Dell-Abyss, other publishers began shying away from horror, as well. Or they called it something else. Unable to sell their work to mainstream publishers, horror authors turned to the small press. Likewise, readers who were unable to find horror novels in stores did the same. The late 90s saw the rise of the small press, something which had always existed, way back in the first wave, but which really came to prominence at the end of that decade.<\/span><\/p>\nThe 90s didn\u2019t kill horror. It was just a transition period. Horror fiction was still published, it just didn\u2019t reach as wide a readership. And it was also the birthing ground of the fifth wave.<\/span><\/p>\nMy generation—the generation of the New Weird, the New Pulp, Bizarro, and typified by writers such as Sarah Langan, Joe Hill, Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon, Jonathan Maberry, Carlton Mellick, Jeff Vandermeer, Bryan Smith, Sarah Pinborough, Weston Ochse, JF Gonzalez, Wrath James White, Tom Piccirilli, Jeffrey Thomas, and many more, including a good cross section of the folks in this room—make up the fifth wave. We rose to prominence in that last decade and in the first decade of this new century. We were the first generation to have the Internet. We bridged the gap between the fourth wave—authors who had to adapt to new technology—and your generation, the post-internet generation. As Mary SanGiovanni pointed out to me a few weeks ago, \u201cWe\u2019re the turning point generation, in a unique position to use both experience\/history and technology\/adaptation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nFor your generation, the Internet was already there. You didn\u2019t have to bend and shape it and figure out how to use it to the advantage of your writing or reading. We did that for you. And you do use it. You use it, and you use all of the other technology that\u2019s available. You post on Twitter and you play <\/span>Farmville<\/span><\/i> on Facebook and <\/span>Dead Island<\/span><\/i> on X-Box, and you get the <\/span>Nightmare on Elm Street<\/span><\/i> series streamed from Netflix. But what you\u2019re not doing enough of is reading.<\/span><\/p>\nThe editors and publishers your generation are submitting to come from the fourth and fifth waves. They know the genre\u2019s history. And while good writing will always triumph over anything else in the slush pile, if you submit something that you think is original and fresh and has never been done before, and the editor can think of twenty examples of it being done before, what do you think will happen to your manuscript? I mentioned the thematic similarities between Shiel\u2019s <\/span>The Purple Cloud<\/span><\/i> and King\u2019s <\/span>The Stand<\/span><\/i>—the end of the world, humanity dying off, the eternal struggle between good and evil. And yes, the themes are similar, but <\/span>The Stand<\/span><\/i> is King\u2019s own take on those themes, as is McCammon\u2019s <\/span>Swan Song<\/span><\/i> or Graham Masterton\u2019s <\/span>Plaque<\/span><\/i> or James Herbert\u2019s <\/span>Domain<\/span><\/i> or any other novel of that type.<\/span><\/p>\nI truly believe that in horror fiction, there is no such thing as an original idea. They\u2019ve all been done before. What\u2019s original is your take on the idea, your spin on the familiar old tropes and monsters, your unique perspective and voice—your twist. Don\u2019t waste a year of your life writing <\/span>The Stand<\/span><\/i>. It\u2019s already been written. Instead, write your take on the themes presented in the book—themes that have existed in horror fiction since primitive man first started painting stories on cave walls. Themes that make up those holy books I mentioned at the beginning. Themes that were tackled in the <\/span>Epic of Gilgamesh<\/span><\/i>. Novelist and comics writer Warren Ellis often says, \u201cTell people who you are and where you are and what the world looks like today.\u201d And that\u2019s what writing horror fiction—or any type of fiction—really is. It\u2019s taking universal themes and truths that have been examined by other writers for thousands of years, and offering your own perspective on them.<\/span><\/p>\nMy novel <\/span>Ghoul<\/span><\/i> is a coming-of-age novel about kids fighting monsters. There\u2019s nothing new about that. King did it. Dan Simmons did it. Jonathan Bellairs and Don Coscarelli and Joe Lansdale and dozens of others did it. But <\/span>Ghoul<\/span><\/i> is my coming-of-age novel. It\u2019s who I was at the age of twelve. It\u2019s where I was, and it\u2019s about what the world looked like then. And if it hadn\u2019t been that—if it had just been a retread of all those coming-of-age novels that came before it—it would have been rejected by my publisher, and rightfully so. Or, I would have self-published it and then discerning readers would say, \u201cThere\u2019s nothing new here. It\u2019s all been done a thousand times before.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nKnow your genre. Know your history. Read a book.<\/span><\/p>\nI talked earlier about the collapse of Zebra and Dell Abyss back in the mid-90s. Last year, we saw something similar happen with the collapse of Dorchester-Leisure. The year before that, myself, JF Gonzalez, Bryan Smith, Mary SanGiovanni, and other Leisure authors saw what was coming and prepared ourselves. This was long before the whole mess went public. How did we know to do that? Was it some form of intuition or ESP? No. It was because we know the genre\u2019s history. We saw the signs, saw the similarities to the Dell Abyss situation, and each of us took steps to prepare ourselves for the worst. And, in the end, we came out okay, while many who ignored the warnings have not. We knew the genre\u2019s history, and we knew that history was about to repeat itself.<\/span><\/p>\nKnow your genre. Know your history. Read a book.<\/span><\/p>\nOn a popular message board right now, there\u2019s a thread about Robert Bloch. I briefly explained why Bloch was so important and influential. I know that because I\u2019ve read him. Here are some quotes from members of your generation, taken from that thread:<\/span><\/p>\nFirst Poster: \u201cAside mentions\u00a0about <\/span>Psycho<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Yours Truly Jack The Ripper<\/span><\/i>, some funny\u00a0quotes from him, his Lovecraft connection\u00a0and that he often wrote stories with predictable 50s comic book twists (not that he was inspired by the comics, I presume he had more influence on them), I rarely see Bloch discussed\u2026 I would have thought the success of <\/span>Psycho<\/span><\/i> would have made the rest of his work widely read too. Did his other books sell well? I haven\u2019t read a single word of his fiction but what do you think of his stories, novels, screenplays and what on earth\u00a0are the Psycho sequels like? I can\u2019t begin to imagine what would happen in them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nLet me repeat that last sentence: \u201cI haven\u2019t read a single word of his fiction.\u201d So here we have a young man with a sincere wish to be an artist, and has some vague sense of who Robert Bloch was, but he\u2019s NEVER READ A SINGLE WORD OF BLOCH\u2019S FICTION. He can use Wikipedia to give him enough information to post about it online, but he apparently can\u2019t be bothered to pick up a fucking book and read it.<\/span><\/p>\nSecond Poster: \u201cIn Bloch\u2019s version of <\/span>Psycho 2<\/span><\/i>, Norman hacks a nun to death, escapes the mental hospital dressed in her habit, and returns to the motel.\u00a0Don\u2019t know what he does there, the back cover of the book didn\u2019t give that much detail and I\u2019ve not actually read it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nAgain, note the last sentence. \u201cI\u2019ve not actually read it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nThird Poster: \u201cI can\u2019t imagine Bloch\u2019s name fading entirely, but it will be interesting to see how his legacy fares, in time.\u00a0I\u2019m not certain he\u2019ll be much more than a footnote, twenty or thirty years from now.\u00a0But who knows? It\u2019s not about liking his work or not liking it (I can\u2019t even guarantee that I\u2019ve read him.)\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nAnd again, note the last sentence.<\/span><\/p>\nNow, let me be clear. I am not making fun of these three young authors. What I\u2019m doing is pointing out the ridiculousness of the situation. Do you see the common theme here? They can use the internet and all of the other technology available to them to discuss Bloch\u2019s career and quote the back covers of his books and pontificate about his importance, but none of them can be fucking bothered to pick up one of his books—or better yet—utilize that same technology and try reading him for themselves. <\/span><\/p>\nBut it goes beyond that. This isn\u2019t a case of young people who have simply not heard of Robert Bloch. That would be excusable. But as evidenced here, all three writers know that Robert Bloch is considered important. They just don\u2019t have a sense of why. Maybe that\u2019s our fault. I don\u2019t know. I know that the writers I looked up to from the fourth wave were always quick to recommend authors from waves one through three. I\u2019d like to think our generation does the same. So, maybe it\u2019s not our fault. At the end of the day, what matters is that they know Bloch is important. They just don\u2019t know why. And I bet some of you in this room today don\u2019t know why either.<\/span><\/p>\nWell, the only way to get that sense of why is to read him. Know your genre. Know your history. Read a book.<\/span><\/p>\nThere\u2019s no excuse for not reading. Sure, maybe there\u2019s no bookstore left in your town. Maybe Borders closed up shop and the local used bookstore only carries inspirational fiction and <\/span>Chicken Soup for the Soul<\/span><\/i> books. But that\u2019s no excuse, because your generation has the Internet. We already tested it out and broke it in for you. It\u2019s there for you to use. There\u2019s Amazon and Kindle and Nook. You can read on your cellphone or iPad or even on your video game console. And, if you\u2019re old school, I\u2019m sure you have a library nearby.<\/span><\/p>\nWhat\u2019s infuriating to me is that the public has greater access to books than at any time in our history, and yet less people are reading. You can change that.<\/span><\/p>\n
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Nope, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever tried to chronicle the entire history of horror fiction\u2026except for one person. J. F. \u201cJesus\u201d Gonzalez was attempting to do just that, with an ongoing column for Jacob Haddon\u2019s <\/span>