Supernatural Horror

People have told ghost stories for as long as they have told stories. The modern literary form grew out of the Gothic novel and came into its own in the nineteenth century, when the ghost story became a fixture of magazines and Christmas annuals. Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898) and M. R. James' Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) set standards that writers still measure themselves against.

In the twentieth century the haunted house moved into the suburbs. Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) made a house's malice and its heroine's loneliness impossible to separate. Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967) and William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971) became bestsellers and films, and showed how large an audience the form could reach.

Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot (1975) and The Shining (1977), and Peter Straub's Ghost Story (1979), led the horror boom of the 1970s and 1980s. The form has never gone away since, and recent writers such as Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Paul Tremblay and Grady Hendrix have brought new readers to it.

Expect a familiar setting, such as a house, a small town or a family, slowly invaded by something that shouldn't be there. Most supernatural horror builds gradually: small wrong details first, then disbelief, then confrontation.

The genre ranges from quiet ghost stories, where most of the horror is implied, to big, cinematic novels of possession and siege. Many of its classics are short, and its best novels are as interested in grief, guilt and family as in the ghost.