‘Horror Fiction In The 20th Century’ Is A Dense But Rewarding Reference Book For Horror Nerds

The Dunning-Kruger effect refers to a counterintuitive dip in confidence as someone learns more about a particular subject — it’s triggered by their realization of how little they know, a realization that can only be brought on by learning a lot in the first place.

I most recently experienced this effect soon after starting Horror Fiction in the 20th Century: Exploring Literature’s Most Chilling Genre, and I’m not sure I’ll ever regain my unwarranted confidence that I know anything about the genre: Jess Nevins’s global history of horror fiction across that century is such a deeply dense and informative read that I was exhausted working my way through it.

That’s a compliment, by the way. I can’t imagine the effort it took to research the myriad of primary and secondary sources — Nevins mentions in the acknowledgements section took him multiple years — but any horror fiction fan will hugely appreciate it. The tome is split into three sections by timeline, covering the golden age of the 1900s-’30s, the 1940s-’60s midcentury years, and the horror boom across the 1970s-2000s. Each section is further divided by location (English writer, American writers, and dozens of countries outside the Anglosphere) as well as by the “mainstream vs. cheap” binary.

Even with all this, Nevins seemingly can’t help himself from packing in more history, slipping in a quick look at horror fiction prior to the 20th century at the start of the book, alongside a note that the book’s chapters on international horror were limited by space, and that interested readers should track down a copy of his 2018 reference book, Horror Needs No Passport: 20th Century Horror Literature Outside the U.S. and U.K.

The immediate appeal of this history book is as a source of fun facts, as it can be opened to any page and reveal something new about a little-known author or localized horror tradition. Did you know that the most forgotten of 1974 US horror best-sellers was Max Ehrlch’s The Reincarnation of Peter Proud?

But the real magic of the reference book is the connections between authors that it highlights. It’s easy to say that all fiction draws on what came before, but Horror Fiction in the 20th Century constantly lays out each author’s influences and those that each author went on to influence. Indian author Rabindranath Tagore’s Gothics were a great genre for highlighting the hybridity and ambiguities of gender relations in colonial Bengal, so Tagore’s horror was “influential on numerous other Indian writers.”

Granted, this can mean the book tempers some connections that might be overblown in more popular narratives, like one claim that noted horror comics publisher EC comics “kept horror alive in the first half of the 1950s,” which Nevins terms an overstatement, while noting that EC was indeed one of the most popular venues for the genre at the time.

The book also takes a few paragraphs to dispel the notion that HP Lovecraft created cosmic horror rather than popularized it, citing the earliest examples of the nihilistic horror subgenre as Vladimir Odoevsky’s “The Cosmorama” and French poet Théophile Gautier’s “Une nuit de Cléopâtre,” both published in 1838.

If you’re interested at all in the channels and avenues that a world of horror authors have bumped and wound their way through across the previous century in order to arrive at the present day, Nevins’s hard work is just the cartographic map you need.