I will always be a horror girly. Always. I love the psychology of horror and what it means to everyone. I believe that horror in movies is a glimpse into the collective subconscious anxiety of a period in time, which makes it all the more interesting as a cultural time capsule! Think about it.

In the 70s and 80s, we had this surge of serial killers in the news and subsequently, most horror movies that came out of this era were slasher films.

In the 90s, we were understanding corruption and faced with the depravity of people in power being exposed, so we had a lot of horror movies about the corrupt behavior of the powerful.

In the 00s, we see the rise of splatter cinema, which I interpret as a direct reaction to 9/11 as a sociocultural means of processing the sudden exposure to wanton violence we hadn't experienced before.

The mid 10s showed us horror that relied on the ineptitude of systems meant to protect us like the military or police in reaction to cynicism around the Iraq War.

So you see, we use horror as a release valve, a method of processing things. We see it in books, too. One of my favorite things about horror in books? How evergreen the collective or lingering fears are that authors tap into. Horror books are different from movies in that the horror they focus on is timeless and layered. The horror of racism, oppression, random acts of violence, generational trauma, adoption trauma, etc. Horror books go deeper than just the sociocultural anxiety of the time, they also peel back the basest of human fear that we all experience no matter what time period we exist in.

Look at Frankenstein. Though we don't walk away afraid or haunted, we do walk away unsettled because the message Shelley is discussing transcends the time it was written and taps into a deeper horror we experience as a species instead of as a moment in history. All this to say, I love a horror book and I have so many on my TBR coming up. These, though, are a healthy mix of five I am most looking forward to.

The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers

First published in 1895, this is a horror staple. A story that goes beyond the 1800s and leans on our fear that nobody is safe no matter their "station" in life. This is a series of short stories about the same play - The King in Yellow - that end up being haunted by a figure from that play. It drives people to madness, which is commentary on this idea we have of inherent safety. We are not safe from our own minds, losing our faculties is a very human and evergreen fear that persists beyond the 1800s when mental health was much less understood than it is today.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

A new fantasy book about a shapeshifting monster who is fleeting monster hunters. When Shesheshen is in a human form, she falls in love with a human and believes she would be a perfect host to lay her eggs in. She discovers too late that her chosen host is sworn to hunt her down. These themes focus on hiding and othering, being an LGBTQ+ person and needing to conceal yourself and your feelings is a very real and challenging thing for so many people. This was something LGBTQ+ folks have dealt with throughout history and was also spoken about in The Picture of Dorian Gray, written decades prior. The fear of discovery is pervasive for LGBTQ+ folks and thus this horror is about the horror of being discovered and what that means.

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

I am so unbelievably excited for this one. The original was published in 1722! It follows the very real experience of Defoe as he wandered a plague-riddled Europe, but he fictionalizes his account to capture and process everything he saw and experienced. Defoe was only five when the plague occurred and this account is likely his way of processing the trauma of the Great Plague experienced as a child. He works very hard to be accurate and achieve verisimilitude for his story as much as possible. Plague has always been a feared and anxiety-inducing thing. We can read this book and likely see parallels to COVID-19 and the COVID-19 lockdown. Our fear of sickness and obliteration at the hands of bacteria transcends time, it is an everlasting terror humanity holds in our most base lizard brains.

Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark

This is a relatively short novella by an author I really like about a woman named Maryse who hunts demons known as Ku Kluxes facing a rising evil in Macon, Georgia. Clark was deeply inspired by experiences of ex-slaves and spent time reviewing and honoring those accounts as much as he could. He weaves in music and Gullah culture and the problematic Birth of a Nation film to create this layered world. This horror novella centers on the fear of slavery and loss of autonomy, the very real experience had by thousands - millions - of African slaves forcibly brought to America. We are not so removed from this era that we don't still feel the effects of it and an incredibly timeless fear is the loss of freedom, independence, and autonomy. Clark digs his fingers into that wound and presses in this book.

Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer

Camille wants to be a trad wife influencer. It's her only goal in life. When her content starts falling off, she knows the only solution is to pivot the way all her fellow trad wife influencers have pivoted: get pregnant and become a momfluencer. In order to achieve this goal, she allows a demon to impregnate her. There is so much here I could pull apart just from the synopsis, but the timeless fear this touches on is the consequences of our desperation. Faustian bargains are a constant theme in horror for centuries and this is a modern twist on an ancient terror. Losing bodily autonomy, not really knowing what she signed up for, and facing impossible consequences of her obsession with fame and notoriety are constant fears we see represented in horror. Human beings overdo it and cautionary tales about the horrific effects of going too far are pervasive throughout time.

So yeah. I love horror and everything it represents about being human. Whether that be the collective sociocultural anxiety of the time or constants about the human condition, horror pulls apart the threads of our subconscious and exposes us to what fears make us most painfully, terribly human.