Is there such a thing as a modern gothic horror?

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  • on 01.08.09
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  • Gothic horrors are generally quite old. Like Dracula, Frankenstein etc. but by todays standards aren't really that scary?

    Is there a modern style gothic horror that is actually scary for people today? Or are gothic horrors a thing of the past/have to be set in period?


  • Read J. Ramsey Campbell. He's been writing "horror" novels since the sixties, often called gothic or suspense and quite frankly, if Lovecraft were alive today he would be jealous. Steven King and Dean R. Koontz, who both have admitted reading him, are equally serious about writing genre pieces which are just as serious and just as modern. My frank opinions of them are -- King made his name at a time when publishers pressured everyone to put more in their books so they would be bigger and the publishers could charge so much more, and his first three or four books are more interesting than, for example those Gunslinger stories everyone who knows me says I should love but which I still can't read more than four pages at a time -- and Dean R. Koontz essentially learned to write by writing space operas like Gather in the Halls of Planets at a time when I was reading space operas heavily. He learned to write on me, in other words, and that is what it felt like -- on me. To this day, I will read a page and get a queasy feeling. I will take the sentence apart, and it will be fine, but I WANT to rephrase it. So I can't finish his books either, though I respect him as a writer.

    Jon Landis is problematic. There is genuinely a thriving serious Modern Gothic community, but I will leave it at the three I mentioned -- the Horror Writer's Horror Writer, J. Ramsey Campbell and the two commercially successful ones Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz who, whatever their problems, really didn't just luck into their success: they've worked hard for it.







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