The rotten city and the unreliable body are the same complaint, and very few novels admit it. Ahead of Lee Glenwright’s SOMA, a feature mapping British estate horror from Ramsey Campbell and Joel Lane to Gary McMahon and Alison Rumfitt, the body horror line from Clive Barker to Agustina Bazterrica, and the overlap almost nobody works.
Philip A. Suggars charts the four phase decline of horror franchise monsters, from the pure terror of Alien: Earth and Michael Myers to the merch shelf and the leash. Drawing on Freud, Robin Wood, and Mark Fisher, he asks why The Thing and It Follows stay frightening while everything else gets a Funko Pop. The domestication of horror monsters, it turns out, is exactly what the culture industry does best.
A.J. Vane argues that ambiguous horror is not a cop-out but the hardest thing the genre can do. Drawing on Robert Aickman, Shirley Jackson and Picnic at Hanging Rock, this guest essay defends the unexplained ending and the fear that keeps working long after the book is shut. From the author of The Night Fair.
Adrian Tchaikovsky has been writing cosmic horror and folk horror under a science fiction badge for years, and most horror readers missed it. His gothic horror novella Preaching to the Choir, out in August from Solaris, is the moment that excuse runs out. Here is why the Terrible Worlds: Transformations author belongs on your shelf.
Horror author headshots have quietly become their own genre, complete with a fixed set of clichés: the bare brick wall, the all-black wardrobe, the half-smile that hints at violence. This field guide roasts the lot, explains how Garth Marenghi turned the brooding-author pose into a punchline, then asks why the horror publishing boom has turned every author photo into a marketing asset. With a salute to Chuck Tingle for solving the problem with a pink bag.
Sam Neill has died aged 78. Most tributes will lead with Jurassic Park, but the horror world owes him a deeper debt. From Possession and Omen III to John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness and the cult favourite Event Horizon, Neill built one of the genre’s strangest and best CVs. Here is our farewell to horror’s quiet master.
Forget the shimmery monofins and the singing crab. Ava Morwood, author of Until We Drown, traces mermaid folklore through its strangest corners: Peak District drowning pools, Japanese ningyo, the Feejee Mermaid and a scholar who blamed the plague on rotting merfolk. Dark mermaid legends as you have never heard them.
“Gingerly” is supposed to mean cautious and frightened, but it has nothing to do with red hair and everything to do with bad faith. From Erik the Red and Elizabeth I to Shirley Manson and Ginger Wildheart, this is a celebration of the famous redheads who never once tiptoed, with one gloriously snarky paragraph about Mick Hucknall thrown in. Ginger Nuts of Horror goes to bat for its own kind.
