A Reading Challenge: Why You Might Like Horror—Even if You Think You Don’t

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Hear me out: If you think you don’t like horror novels and short stories, you may not have the full perspective on horror fiction.

I started reading horror as an adult only recently as part of an experiment to try reading books in genres that I decided at some point in my growing up I didn’t like. Over the course of a year, I read novels of several different types in romance, mystery, detective, fantasy, and science fiction—among others.

To the mix, I added horror novels. I loved horror in my adolescence, but I turned away from it as I got older. My impressions of the horror genre evolved along the way from something intellectually engaging to something graphic and gory and nervous-system jangling—likely due to all the horror movies I had started to watch in my preteen and teenage years. By the time I got to university, I couldn’t stomach the gore and the screeching music and the jump scares. Life felt jolting and jarring enough by that point, having encountered enough real life by then.

(Side note: I even did some research and wrote an essay a while back on why some people like stressful entertainment, as I had lost all taste for horror movies as an adult.)

What I realized in my genre-reading exploration a few years back, though, was that horror novels aren’t at all like horror films. Though some horror novels are gory, reading gore isn’t the same as two-dimensional film visuals of gore. Novels can rarely achieve the jump scare. And as of this writing, no horror novel makes screeching sounds or has a tension-laden soundtrack or flashes from dark to bright and back again.

Also, I realized I like horror novels.

Not that I like all flavors of horror, mind you. The horror category has several subcategories, just as do all the other genres. You can read slasher-style horror, à la the old “Friday the 13th” and “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchises. There are haunted house stories. Ghost stories. Monster, demon, and creature stories. Horror stories set in the great outdoors (a natural world rarely all that “great” to the characters). Even horror that is completely psychological, in which the scares come from inside of the human mind, rather than the external world.

I could go on.

The Differences between Thriller, Suspense, and Horror

If you like thriller books and suspense novels, you could very well like horror.

The difference between these genres is slight. For example, many people will slot Thomas Harris’s novel Silence of the Lambs in the horror genre—and many others will argue that it’s unquestionably thriller.

Personally, I’d agree with the latter group: It’s a thriller.

Here’s why, and it ties to what I’d position as the main difference between the horror genre and the thriller and suspense category: Readers of thriller and suspense novels want to have a clear explanation of the what and the why and the how of what happened by the end of the book and horror readers tend to be more comfortable with ambiguity and open endings.

A secondary difference, based on my observation, is that the main characters of thriller and suspense novels don’t tend to mirror the reader. Instead, they’re iconic in the fashion of Ian Fleming’s James Bond or Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander. Readers need to enjoy watching the protagonists move through the stories, but they doesn’t need to identify or sympathize with them.

In horror, though, authors often hook readers through page-turning thrills plus the added nuance of characters with whom the readers identify and sympathize. By creating identification with the protagonist, the authors gets readers to care about what happens to their characters. The events on the page in and of themselves horrify the reader less than how those events affect the protagonist.

What Might Surprise You about Horror

Authors in the horror genre often do very intellectually interesting work that no other fiction seems to attempt.

Horror novels have a sense of intellectual and creative exploration and play—and even a subversiveness—that most mainstream fiction seems afraid to touch. Perhaps the genre’s tendency to get ignored by the wider public allows the authors working within it more freedom to go big.

You can find literary horror as well as pulpy stuff, but even the pulpy stuff tends to look at society and culture deeply and analytically. Through digging into what unsettles and even scares us, horror novels make us question why we fear what we fear and what these fears say about us as individuals and about us as a society, community, and culture at large.

Contemporary authors examine how today’s humans would rebuild society from scratch, and institutional failings, racism and bigotry and sexism, body autonomy and the lack thereof, and the disappearance of culture and traditions.

Horror as social commentary continues a long tradition. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, after all, confronts scientific advancements and their scientists’ responsibilities for the outcomes of their work.

Give Horror a Try

If you love to read but don’t think you love to read horror, maybe give what I did a try and pick a few as a reading experiment. I promise you can find a horror book or two in a subgenre of the category that compels you.

You might be surprised if you do.