By, Alexandra Sokoloff

Granted, I’m a total newbie to publishing, with just two books plus an upcoming anthology out in the last two years. But even though I was mostly toiling in Hollywood for the previous ten years and reading only for, you know, pleasure instead of to check out the market, I was still somewhat aware of what was out there in bookstores and grocery racks. And I’m quite sure there used to exist a genre called “horror” and you could buy it in stores under the label “horror” and people called “publishers” bought it and published it, and people called “readers” bought it and read it. Stephen King was, well, the king of it and Anne Rice was the queen of it (but was she? More on that later…) but there were all kinds of other authors who also wrote it. And you could walk into a store and find it and buy it.

Cut to now, and I am much more aware of what is on bookstore shelves because my books are on them as well, and I’m much more aware of what publishers buy because it’s now my living. And this is what I see: Barnes & Noble has no horror section at all. None. There are aisles of mystery, and romance, and thriller, and Sci-Fi/fantasy, but no horror at all. Borders stores still have horror sections, but not anything like a horror aisle - not like the mystery aisle or the romance aisle or the sci-fi aisle. It’s more like a horror bookcase. A few Borders stores have a whopping total of two waist-high bookcases - one for paperbacks and one for hardcovers.

And publishers like St. Martin’s and Harper Collins tell their new authors who are writing horror not to call their books “horror”. We don’t even use the H-word at St. Martin’s. What we’re really writing is thrillers or supernatural thrillers, just in case you were wondering. And look, I’m fine with that. Call it whatever you want, just get it out there.

But I’ve got to ask - what happened?

I’m asking this not rhetorically and not as someone who actually has the answer that I’m waiting to spring on you at the end of this essay. I really would like to know.

I completely understand that genres go in cycles. As far as I can tell, Chick Lit became huge after the monster success of Bridget Jones’ Diary. Everyone wanted more, and publishers bought more, and published more, and it lasted for a good six years or so. Now Chick Lit is deader than a doornail. No agent or editor wants it, although paranormal chick lit - warm and fuzzy werewolves and vampires and such - seems to be going strong.

Other examples: the one-two punch of the film series The Lord of the Rings, which brought a whole new generation to the Tolkien books, and the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter series, turbo-propelled fantasy to new heights. Both are still going strong.

So basically, a while ago, this happened with horror, right? Only for a lot longer run, it seems to me. Stephen King, Ira Levin, William Peter Blatty (though he doesn’t consider himself a horror writer) and Thomas Tryon headed up a horror renaissance in the late seventies. And while King kept it going strong through the 80’s, Thomas Harris and Dean Koontz added a new dimension by crossing horror and thriller. Anne Rice came along and brought in a yet another whole new dimension - the huge female readership - including a significant segment of the massive romance readership. Horror kept on trucking, undoubtedly bolstered by the success of film franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Friday the 13^th.

And then…what?

Was it just a matter of saturation? Publishers over published and created a glut, and readers just didn’t want to see it anymore? Maybe horror moved more into the movies, where a younger audience craved the scares, but an aging reading population just didn’t want to see the gore any more? It does seem to me that movies aimed squarely at teenagers, like the I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legends, and Final Destination franchises - and more recently, the Saw series - kept horror going in cinema longer, but that’s petering out now as well; post-strike, the studios are just not interested in horror scripts.

Now, I have heard rumblings from the general direction of New York that horror fiction might not be completely dead, thanks to Scott Smith’s The Ruins, Dan Simmons’s The Terror, and Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box, and the hope those bestsellers hold out for the genre in general. And yet, when I go to conferences, I’m consistently hearing agents and editors saying they’re not looking for horror. And Scott Smith is not necessarily primarily a horror writer, and Dan Simmons has said himself that he doesn’t consider The Terror a horror novel, and it’s true that his brilliant book transcends the whole notion of horror.

So, okay. Those of us who are writing horror can call our books dark suspense or paranormal or supernatural thrillers – like I said, I don’t care what you call it. Maybe we’ve just gone back to the pre-King days when horror was shelved in fiction and literature, and maybe that’s a good thing.

But I wonder. Do we authors in this dark genre bear some responsibility for the apparent demise of the genre? And do we bear some responsibility for reviving the genre if we would like it to revive?

Did horror perhaps tank because authors started writing some truly terrible books that repulsed more readers than they were attracting? Did it marginalize itself with more and more outré offerings and lose the mainstream readership that Stephen King and Anne Rice and Thomas Harris had held on to for so long?

And is horror as a genre continuing to shoot itself in the foot (chest, head, groin, kneecap…) by not embracing and aligning itself with a related genre that is alive and thriving – meaning paranormal romance?

I don’t know if anyone could have ever truly called Anne Rice a horror author. She was shelved in horror because she wrote about the supernatural, but really what she was writing was paranormal literature with a large helping of erotica. But she sure did bolster the horror genre while she was at it.

So why exactly are we as horror authors and reviewers and readers not rushing to claim as our own books like Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series, and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and horror/thriller crossovers like Tess Gerritsen’s The Mephisto Club – all of which deal with the dark side and the supernatural while differing from other offerings in the horror genre because a) they’re cross-genre and b) they are wildly popular – not to put too fine a point on it.

As an author, I have no problem with my publisher calling my books “supernatural thrillers”. But as a reader, I feel a pang at what seems like the disappearance of a genre I have read and loved since I first began to read. And I can’t help wondering if there is something we can do.

I have no answers, just questions, mainly these two:  What did we do to get here… and is there anything we can and/or should do for the genre now?

I’d love to hear it from anyone and everyone who cares. Please share your comments below.

Alexandra Sokoloff is the author of the dark genre novels The Harrowing - for which she was nominated for both the Bram Stoker and AnthonyAward - and The Price. She is contracted with St. Martin's Press for her next two supernatural thrillers, both slated for release in 2009. Visit her official author website and MySpace page.

MUSE is the collective term for novelists Deborah LeBlanc, Sarah Langan, Alexandra Sokoloff and Sarah Pinborough. Visit these dark dames at their official website.