Horror is also a genre in which critically acclaimed authors of color, such as Victor LaValle, Linda Addison, Carmen Maria Machado, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Stephen Graham Jones, are seeing critical and commercial success, offering inclusive tales that mine terror from both real-world racism and supernatural monsters. The struggle of the horror novel is often the struggle to restore order and normality to a chaotic world, community, or family.” When people are worried that the world is going to pieces around them, when they have lost faith in the idea that things will soon (or even someday) be better than they now are. According to Melissa Ann Singer, senior editor at Tor/Forge, horror “becomes increasingly popular during times of societal unease.

Horror is a complex mode of storytelling that probes deeply into readers’ emotions, eliciting uncomfortable feelings that many readers crave.

Today’s tales range from gory to subtle, from straightforward to weird. These recognitions are forcing people to confront a common bias against horror, which is often misunderstood as a genre doused in blood and filled with cheap jump scares. Stephen King was presented with the PEN America Literary Service Award, given to a critically acclaimed writer whose body of work “helps us understand and interpret the human condition.” Since the start of 2018, we have seen Jordan Peele’s blockbuster film Get Out win the Oscar for best screenplay and nab the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation at the Nebula Awards. Over the last 12 months there has been an explosion in the popularity of horror with a mainstream audience. To help ease that worry, last May I wrote “Making Horror Less Scary” as part of an LJ series of “Readers’ Advisory Toolkits.” When they were asked which genres they were most intimidated by, horror was one of the top four. A 2014 survey, developed by LJ with NoveList and the RUSA CODES Readers’ Advisory Research and Trends Committee, revealed that library workers had quite a bit of anxiety about providing readers’ advisory (RA) in unfamiliar genres. Despite its long-term and growing popularity, horror can be a tricky genre for librarians to recommend confidently.

Nothing to Devour by Glen Hirshberg