![]() ![]() I scoured church-hall jumble sales for battered NEL paperbacks with gold embossed lettering, titles that began with ‘The’, and lurid and squidgy artwork. But straight up, bloody, unashamed, irony-free horror for adults has become harder and harder to find.Īs a teenager (actually as a pre-teen) I devoured novels by the likes of King, Herbert, Shaun Hutson, and many whose names are lost in the mists. ![]() It has even thrived in the burgeoning Young Adult sub-genre with the likes of Charlie Higson’s terrific and genuinely frightening The Enemy books. ![]() Horror is a hardy genre however, and has survived by infiltrating and disguising itself in other genres like crime, science fiction, and dark fantasy. Since the horror publishing bubble dramatically burst back in the mid-nineties, fans of horror as a literary genre have seen their corner of the local bookstore dwindle to (if they are lucky) a solitary stand largely stocked with Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and precious little else. Published in the UK last June, The Troop came to my attention when it won the inaugural James Herbert Award for horror writing (is it the Herbert or the Herbie? I’m not sure they have settled on this yet). ![]()
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