![]() ![]() ![]() His books were gloriously, shockingly un-PC (try reading ‘The Fog’ now and see how that works for you). ![]() Here the genre was in the doldrums, trapped in a prewar twilight of ghost tales told in gentlemen’s clubs, and James Herbert was the former copywriter rude boy who shook the good taste out of literary horror. While not much of a stylist, his great skill was in setting up character conflicts that paid off in really satisfying ways for readers.Īs the US horror genre took wing and started to soar, UK publishers sought ways to induce the same effect with homegrown writers. King married old, old plots with an appealing kind of new populist Americana. The most famous genre writers are rarely the best (compare JK Rowling to Susanna Clarke) but they touch a nerve in the greater part of the reading public, which I regard as an entirely separate, brilliant skill. Publishers suddenly saw that there were some excellent writers emerging, including Michael McDowell, Jeffrey Konvitz and Thomas Tryon, and striding above them all was Stephen King. The US literary horror boom of the 1970s didn’t go unnoticed over here. ![]()
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