Splatterpunk

The word was coined by David J. Schow in 1986, to describe a group of young writers who were tired of horror that cut away before the worst happened. John Skipp and Craig Spector's The Light at the End (1986), about a vampire in the New York subway, became one of the movement's signature books, and Clive Barker's Books of Blood (1984–85) gave it a literary champion.

It had forerunners. Jack Ketchum's Off Season (1980) was trimmed by its publisher over its violence, and restored in a 1999 unexpurgated edition, and Richard Laymon's The Cellar (1980) set the tone for his long career. Ketchum's The Girl Next Door (1989), based on a real murder case, is often cited among the most disturbing books of the movement. Skipp and Spector's zombie anthology Book of the Dead (1989) was the first anthology of Romero-style zombie stories.

The movement faded from the big publishers in the 1990s but never disappeared. Small presses kept it alive, and in the 2000s and 2010s writers such as Edward Lee, Wrath James White and Brian Keene carried it on, often under the label “extreme horror.” The Splatterpunk Awards, founded in 2018, honour the field.

Expect graphic violence, explicit sexual content and cruelty described in detail. Plots are often simple, such as a siege, an abduction or a cult, and the books are usually short and relentless. Many have a dark, transgressive sense of humour.

This is the most extreme shelf in horror, and its books carry content warnings for good reason. Readers who love it often value it for its honesty about violence and its punk refusal of good taste; readers who don't should start somewhere else.