Where is horror fiction going?

[RJUrsell]

Morning everyone.
Hope you are all well.
Pleasure to meet you.

I'd be interested to hear other peoples thoughts on how the genre survives and grows in a modern publishing environment dominated by crime fiction, women's fiction and historical fiction.

Where is the horror genre going? What is popular?

Thoughts

rjursell - horror writer
http://rjursell.tumblr.com

[TheBossInTheWall]

Not really sure. These days i'm reading horror from the 1970s to about mid 1990s. A lot of the horror i see coming out is a variation of zombie, post apocalypse, often young adult. Maybe because its easier for people to find out about various books the industry is able to churn out less than mediocre books. It does not have to be good to make money. Like Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey. Maybe horror novels are now even commissioned/planned by publishers and writers so they can have a high degree of an expected amount of profit. Once I'm out of my current phase of horror I'll probably go back to small press books coming out now. Which can be frustrating because they publish a lot of badly written novels.

*Stating Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey as bad is my opinion, not fact. However I wanted to use a recent example in a different genres that have been easier to make a profit from for a longer much further in the past.

[anglewitch]

I am starting to get sick of these zombie apocalypse stories. A little is okay but there is no need to be over killing the whole zombie thing.

[VanEaston011]

Right now, at least as far as short fiction goes, I'm seeing a renewed interest in Lovecraft and weird fiction in general -- lots of mentions about the "King in Yellow" ever since they dropped the references on HBO's astoundingly excellent series "True Detective" (if you haven't seen it, get off your ass). I think weird fiction is especially appealing, too, given the increasing post-modernity of our world -- that is, a superfluous blending of genres that weird fiction in particular lends itself nicely to IMO.

[Erwinblackthorn]

I feel popularity in any genre will always go through a steady flow from one thing to another. I have no idea what it was in the 90s, but i know for sure that the 2000s was when vampires came back with said Twilight and other(far better) things like Blade and 30 Days of Night. 2010s seems to be filled with zombie because of the Walking Dead show.

But what comes after Zombies? I hope it is not ghosts, like with the mass amounts of found footage films like Paranormal activity. Having jump scares in books would be stupid and silly. So I personally thing an alternative of that would simply be demons, or any other type of dark and evil creature that can be conjured or summoned like a vengeful spirit.

So yeah, demonic possessions or a conjured creature with any kind of frightening power like invulnerablity or teleportation. Something like that. Either that or more of that annoying post apocalyptic stuff. I, personally, dislike that kind of dystopian setting that has been done to death. The only good one recently was Mad Max and that was an action movie(which was an epic action movie as well!)