Horror: The Novel

Horror stories, in the sense of stories designed to frighten the listener or reader, have been around for a long time. The free internet isn’t clear on when a horror story was first written down, but it seems like it was in ancient times.

Looking at horror novels specifically, it is still unclear. Narrowing down to European literature starts to give us more specific answers. 

It could be said that Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno is a work of horror literature. But is it a novel?

The ghost story The Apparition of Mrs. Veal is thought to have been written by Daniel Defoe in the early 1700s. Again, this work isn’t what readers in the 21st century think of as a novel.

In the late 1700s, Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, which some consider to be the first published European horror novel. Others don’t classify this story as horror.

A few years after the success of The Castle of Otranto, Matthew Lewis wrote The Monk. The free internet seems united in considering this a novel that contains horror, at least by the standards of the time in which it was published.

The genre of horror literature continued to grow throughout the 1800s. If you can name a horror novel that was written before the late 1900s, one of the titles you think of probably was published in the nineteenth century. 

These titles include:

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Dr. Jeckell and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Once horror novels became socially acceptable, there was no turning back. The 1900s saw many horror stories produced, including in novels.

As readers became accustomed to the various ways writers sought to cause fear, they were less terrified. This led to writers having to become more inventive to create feelings of horror. 

Today, horror novels have many subgenres. What scares you? There’s probably a horror novel in that category.