STEVE CARROLL WRITES

The following column originally appeared in Justin Marriott's PAPERBACK FANATIC #50 (sadly the final edition of this fine publication), which was published in August of 2025. You can buy a copy of it  HERE . That article has been slightly expanded upon for this blog. The Horror!   The Horror! I   grew up in a household with a mother who regularly read true crime murder magazines. She got stacks of them from her own mother and I was absolutely terrified of them as an elementary-age child. Maybe that   macabre sense of normalcy in middle   American suburban life is what led Mom to be a very early adopter of reading   horror novels. That became much easier in the 70s as horror found a willing   playground in mainstream publishing that further blossomed in the 80s. As Mom   would read what seemed a particularly good scary book, she invariably allowed   me to follow suit. In retrospect, I’m   not sure that was wise parenting, but I   am ...

The following column was originally printed in Justin Marriott's Paperback Fanatic 47, which was published in July of 2023. You can buy a copy of it  here. There is something inherently unsettling about being in deeply rural locations where we, considering ourselves as enlightened and educated intellectuals, find ourselves confronted with beliefs and superstitions that seem backward and downright uninformed to our modern sensibilities. It can sometimes be as simple as walking into a gas station in the middle of nowhere and suddenly feeling like we’ve stepped into another era of history and speaking to a representative of the local citizenry feels like navigating a wide gulf of both colloquial language and seemingly alien culture. It leaves us feeling decidedly ‘off’ and somehow inadequate. This discomfort lies at the heart of folk horror. Though the term ‘folk horror’ didn’t enter into the modern vernacular until...

I can clearly   remember when my mom discovered Stephen King. She had always had a passion for   a good scary read, mainly focusing on the horror   books that bubbled to the surface   of the mainstream in the late 60s and early 70s and ended up in our local   library. She read Ira Levin’s  Rosemary’s   Baby , William Peter Blatty’s  The   Exorcist ,  The Tribe (an underrated early breakthrough by Bari Wood), Tom Tryon's The Other plus Harvest Home , and then  Carrie  by Stephen King. It was when   she read King’s  The Shining  that I recall   her proclaiming that nobody had ever scared her like Stephen King could, which   intrigued me. I   was 15-years old in 1977 when  The Shining   was published, which means I was that age when I first   read  ‘Salem’s Lot  and the prime   motivator for that   endeavor was because I found out it dealt with vampires. I   wa...