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Posted on October 28, 2023

Horror Literature: Special Issue #8

This special issue on horror literature ranges from the exploration of queer sexuality in a late nineteenth-century horror novella to explorations of creativity, ecological crisis, sexual taboo, trauma and grief in twenty-first-century horror fiction. The incredible span and diversity of the fiction taken up by the essays here – and the importance and complexity of the questions asked by that fiction – make it clear that horror literature may well be one of the most important of literary genres. And we may well be living through another boom, another golden era, of horror production.

We have essays by: Elizabeth Erwin, Dawn Keetley, Gavin F. Hurley, Steffen Hantke, Kat Albrecht, David Edwards, Marco Malvestio, Irene Pagano, Alissa Burger, Emma Hallock, Amira Shokr, Carina Stopenski, Jacob Babb, and Isaiah Frost Rivera.

Cover art by Andrew Foley

Enjoy as a flipbook or download the full issue

Book cover versions of Bernard Taylor's The Reaping. One cover shows a baby carriage with waves emitting from it. The second cover shows a fetus in utero with devil horns. The third cover shows a group of nuns walking to a house.

Posted on January 16, 2023

Prophetic Dread in Bernard Taylor’s THE REAPING (1980)

Podcast

With its languid storytelling and inversion of Gothic tropes, Bernard Taylor’s THE REAPING is an exercise in patience with a supremely satisfying payoff. In this episode, we discuss folk horror, the rejection of the maternal, and the importance of a good book cover. On this podcast we talk blood, guts, and spoilers so listener discretion is advised.

You can order Taylor’s novel from Valancourt’s Paperbacks from Hell site.

Listen Here:

decorative image of a collection of book covers

Posted on November 17, 2022

Call for Papers – Special Issue #8: Horror Literature

Call for Papers

Our featured image, which includes Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson’s popular Paperbacks from Hell series, evidences horror literature’s resurgence in recent years. There has been not only a reclaiming and reissuing of critically dismissed titles of the past but also a proliferation of new and diverse horror fictions. Whether disdained as pulpy trash or ignored for appealing to youth demographics, a large swathe of pre-2000s horror literature has frequently been deemed unworthy of critical analysis. But with developments that include Paperbacks from Hell, Valancourt Books’ new translations of horror novels, increasing numbers of film adaptations of horror youth literature, and decreasing rigidity between what constitutes high and low culture, titles that have long skirted the horror literature canon are increasingly being taken seriously as cultural documents speaking to societal norms and taboos as well as significant artistic works in their own right.

For this special issue on horror fiction, we invite submissions that critically reassess historically disregarded horror literature titles or that take up the works of new horror writers. We want to distinguish horror fiction from its more highbrow cousin, the gothic – and we are interested in horror. We do welcome, though, essays that self-consciously take up the critical difference between horror and the gothic.