It is a peculiarity of the horror genre that most of what’s sold as horror in books or movies is really something else masquerading as horror. Every kind of genre from mystery to adventure to romance gets classified as horror if it fits a few superficial genre conventions. A novel about smolderingly sexy vampires seducing unsatisfied women isn’t a horror novel, it’s a romance. A movie about a serial killer torturing victims in creative ways isn’t a horror novel, it’s suspense or a thriller. Prominent horror writers who may have written something truly horrific once upon a time like Stephen King or Clive Barker or Dean Koontz branch out and explore their interests and their books are still being sold as horror when they’re really fantasy or metaphysics or some sort of expanded article from DogWorld Magazine.

I don’t mean to suggest that some of these ‘horror’ works aren’t excellent literature in their way. They just aren’t truly horrific and disturbing in that special way which makes the skin crawl and makes you want to turn away as you’re riveted in fascination. You experience this in truly effective horror like the scene when you see the shadow of the little girl stabbing her mother with a trowel in the basement in Night of the Living Dead or the moment in Clive Barker’s Damnation Game when the dead puppies return to nurse on their mother. It’s the element of the unnatural and inconceivable which H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen captured in their best work and which very few others are able to access consistently.

One of the few who has that touch of true horror is British writer Ramsey Campbell. When he is on his A-game he is arguably the most truly and consistently horrific writer working today. Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in his most recent novel The Grin of the Dark, a truly disturbing work which is one of the strongest examples of contemporary horror I've read.

The story centers on Simon Lester, a film journalist who is looking for a way to upgrade his career so he can hold onto his long-time girlfriend and her son who he's come to think of as his own. He's under a lot of pressure and not handling it well. He doesn't get along with his inlaws, his publishers are flaky, and his girlfriend's ex is now rich and showing renewed interest in her. He decides the way out is to write a groundbreaking book on film, and increasingly he's drawn towards a particular figure from the early days of cinema, a vaudeville comedian turned early film star named Tubby Thackeray. Thackeray is a mysterious figure who vanished from the public eye under a cloud, having starred in a series of slapstick comedies which started as theater of the absurd and became increasingly disturbing and unfunny over time.