As the appropriately surnamed Monika Killer approached her 30th birthday, she started thinking about what her perfect job would be – and landed on opening a horror-themed bookshop. “Reading was always an escape for me, and my grandmother owned a bookshop when I was growing up,” she tells me. “So it made sense.”
As her city, Bristol, already had plenty of independent bookstores, a genre-specific shop seemed like it would fill a gap in the market, so Killer opened The Haunted Bookshop last month, offering horror and fantasy titles. She has quickly expanded to sell witchcraft, occult and folklore books too – “there was so much interest in witchcraft books,” she says.
She has timed the opening of her new business well: data published earlier this year showed that horror fiction has been enjoying a boom in sales. Killer thinks horror appeals to readers because “we live such fast-paced lives, it can be hard to focus. Horror stands out from the other genres because it pulls you in, and keeps you on your toes while you’re reading, so your mind wanders less”. Wife-and-wife writing duo Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta, whose horror novel Feast While You Can was published this week, think the boom is “at least partially because it’s a time of political insecurity and existential instability.”
“In an odd way, horror offers comfort and a sense of control,” they say. “When confronted with overwhelming doom on the news, it’s nice to imagine that the terrors of the world can be boiled down to a single monster or ghost or killer.” Similarly, it was “very cathartic as writers” to put their personal fears into a story that they could control, the pair say.
Horror as a genre is evolving – feminist subgenres, like femgore, have emerged in recent years, and though queer horror has a rich history, a new wave of LGBTQ+ writers have been turning to horror lately.
There has also been “a massive dose of humour” injected into the genre, say Clements and Datta. In recent titles such as Patricia Wants a Cuddle, Fang Fiction, Freakslaw and the work of Eliza Clark and Julia Armfield, “there is a weirdness and wittiness and a thread of absurdity that cuts through the gore,” the couple say. “Interacting with the world can feel so bizarre these days and horror is responding to that with irreverence and absurdity.”
Killer agrees that “unconventional indie horror books seem to be trending.” Though “the classics like Dracula or Frankenstein are always popular”, the current favourite among her customers in the lead-up to Halloween is Tender Is the Flesh by Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica. It’s a dystopia about a society in which a virus has contaminated all animal meat, so cannibalism becomes legal. Perhaps not one to read while you’re munching on Halloween sweets …
Kathy Bates in the film version of Stephen King’s Misery. Photograph: Cinematic Collection/Alamy
