Horror fiction is, broadly,
fiction intended to scare, unsettle or horrify the reader.
Although a good deal of it is about the supernatural, any
fiction with a morbid, gruesome, surreal, suspenseful or frightening
theme may be termed "horror"; conversely, many stories of
the supernatural are not horror.
The horror novel has many antecedents, although the most
obvious well-spring is the gothic novel form of Bram
Stoker's Dracula, and, less obviously, Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein.
Neither of the foregoing qualify in themselves as horror
novels in that their ultimate intention is more one of mood
than of shock (and Ms Shelley's is also fundamentally a
philosophical novel), that sudden unquantifiable moment
when one's flesh writhes. Very few writers are capable of
bringing this off, and many modern practitioners of the
genre have resorted to progressively greater extremes of
violence in order to achieve some sort of effect. Early
exponents of the horror form number such luminaries as H.P.
Lovecraft and Edgar
Allan Poe, who were considered to be masters of the
art.
Nevertheless, contemporary writers such as Clive
Barker in The
Books of Blood and Stephen
King in his more considered work, such as Misery, are
capable of bringing this off without grand guignol which
characterises much of the current mainstream of this genre.
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