Just in my own stuff I’ve moved from imitating Lovecraft to a more contemporary style of psychological horror (a trajectory Robert Bloch’s career also described) and tried to bring the supernatural tale up to my own date (as Fritz Leiber, another author influenced early in his career by HPL, magnificently did). Every so often I make a bid to scale the heights of awe that Blackwood and Machen’s greatest tales occupy. And maybe I’ve even discovered my own little niche in the genre, which I’d call comedy of paranoia. To sum up, I haven’t discovered the limits of the field, and I doubt I will.

Check In. Relax. Take a Shower: The horror boom didn’t last very long. The self-referentiality that had functioned to define it gave way to pure formula and by 1995, horror seemed all but finished....

Ten years later, Corgi had completely changed their tactics in the marketing of Psycho. In the intervening years, the horror novel had taken off...

From the initial publication of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, with its preface offering an elaborate counterfeit origin, what we now think of as Gothic has been intricately tied up as much with the way in which the text is presented to the public as with what that text might have to say...