As October draws to a close, the days shorten, and Halloween again rears its pumpkin head, one's thoughts naturally take on a darker hue. For me, this involves a long and lonely walk down a memory lane choked with weeds and cobwebs – to a teenage bedroom somewhere in west London in the mid-1980s …
Ah yes, the 80s was a great decade to be a fan of horror fiction. Stephen King was in his pomp, Clive Barker was enfant terrible, and James Herbert was … well, James Herbert was just good old dependable Jim really. Perched at the end of a bar in a squeaky black leather jacket, supping on a pint of bitter and knocking out another workmanlike Rat book (a far superior series to the Crabs and Slugs of messrs Smith and Hutson, as I'm sure any connoisseur of second-rate horror will concur) in between games of pool and packets of pork scratchings. And of course, there were still the old masters (Lovecraft, Poe, Stoker et al) lurking around waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation. Halcyon days if you liked that sort of thing, which I most definitely did. For me, these books had it all: they were exciting, imaginative, sexy (usually graphically, often outlandishly), violent and, most importantly, adult. They delivered everything I could possibly want of literature. Everything, that is, except horror.
At best, I had the thrill of nervous anticipation at reading my first-ever adult horror novels (for the record, a double whammy of Herbert's The Magic Cottage, and King's The Stand, loaned to me by an uncle one family holiday) and wondering if I were ready to take such a plunge or whether I should stay in the shallows with the safe SF of Johns Wyndham and Christopher. But take the plunge I did, only to resurface two weeks later, thinking, well, that was fun, but really, what was all the fuss about? The cautionary blurbs had got themselves all worked up over nothing. The hairs on my neck had not stirred. My palms had stayed dry, my guts unwrenched, my flesh ungoosed. I had not needed to go to sleep with the lights on. I'd loved the books, but remained unhorrified.
Now, this isn't intended as a boast to imply that I was made of stronger stuff than your average gentle reader – nor is it meant as a put-down of horror fiction as a genre (though I did quickly tire of Herbert and his interchangeable cast of improbably named heroes and heroines with supple limbs and nipples compared to various types of nut. Also, Fluke was rubbish.) No, all I'm saying is that these books failed to deliver the goods when it came to making me frightened.
It was a few years later, after my tastes had changed, that I finally experienced a feeling of genuine horror while reading a novel. George Orwell's 1984 has more than its share of suspense (the Thought Police, Room 101, "Do it to Julia!" etc), but for me the most genuinely frightening aspect of the novel is the dizzying depiction of power as an end in itself: the global war to maintain the status quo; the insignificance of the individual, with even Inner Party member O'Brien confessing that he is nothing but a slave to the ideals of the Party; the deathless logic behind the "collective solipsism" and continual rewriting of the past to create a present in which the Party can state that 2+2=5; the arresting image of the future as "a boot stamping on a human face – for ever". This was a far cry from demonic clowns hiding out in sewers and malevolent droplets of condensed water vapour.
Of course, fear is largely subjective, and one reader's The Horror, The Horror is another reader's Bah Humbug. So, are there any other non-genre works of fiction which provoke a feeling of horror in you? How about poor old Dick Diver, sat on a cliff edge, contemplating the ruin that is his life before being swallowed up by the anonymity of small-town America in Tender is the Night? Or the dehumanizing effects of Ludovico's technique on Alex the droog in A Clockwork Orange? Or the blasphemous feeling of eldritch terror induced when navigating the negative sentence structures of Elizabeth Bowen's Death of the Heart ("I wouldn't mind what you did, but I cannot bear the things I think now that you say"). Brrr. Here be monsters indeed.
