The weird thing about these horror books

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]I don't know about you, but I'm the kind of person who likes to be as self-critical as possible. I try to make a habit of asking myself why I feel the way that I do about certain topics. And as a British person, I am a huge fan of American horror. And I have often asked myself why that is. What is it about modern American horror fiction that has me so invested, so wrapped up in it? I'm so drawn in by American horror stories.

[00:00:32]And like obviously American media is the most popular media in the world. That's how it is. That's how it's been since Hollywood came into being. But it isn't just a popularity thing. At least not for me. It's deeper than that. There is something about the tone, the style, the themes that get explored, the aesthetics on display within American horror fiction that really has me just completely absorbed. Why? What is it?

[00:00:56]I've asked myself this for years and I think I finally have my answer. Perhaps you'll feel the same. Perhaps this will teach you something about your tastes in fiction, horror or otherwise. Whether or not that's true, what I'm doing here is exploring the nature of American horror.

[00:01:13]What makes it unique? What makes the relationship between American culture and horror fiction so special? I do think there is something special about it. So, we're going to deep dive into that today. This all came about because I just finished reading Gothic by Philip Pricassie. Philip Pricassie has quickly become my favorite American horror author. I love everything that he does.

[00:01:37]And Gothic is a novel that came out a few years ago in the US, but for some frustrating reason, a lot of great American horror fiction struggles to find UK publishers. I couldn't tell you why. Horror is a very popular genre of fiction in the UK and we have plenty of great horror authors of our own. But American horror often feels in short supply here. It's irritating, especially when I find my favorite American horror author, Philip Ficassie, and half of his books just aren't here. Well, that is changing. Gothic, as I said, has just come out in the UK, published by Black Crow Books, and it's wonderful. It has a very 21st century approach to the classic formula that Stephen King was going for in his heyday in the 70s and 80s, which is also a description I would give to most of Joe Hill's books. In case you don't know, Joe Hill is Stephen King's son, and I personally prefer his novels to his fathers. Joe Hill is Stephen King, but with a bit more color to his characters, a bit more empathy to his stories, and some modern sensibilities. I find Joe Hill just Stephen King but brighter. It's all down to his character work in my opinion and the same can be said here about Philip Fassie. He's going for a very traditional American style of horror but he does it in a fresh modern way. And as I turn the final few pages of his novel Gothic, the thing about American horror, the thing that I think is so special about it finally hit me over the head.

[00:03:08]So, let's jump into it. I'm going to be using Gothic as an example of how and why American horror is so special. And in fact, my enjoyment of Gothic was so intense that I immediately upon finishing it went out and got his newest book, Saraphina, which I have also just finished reading. And because I'm still not done with my current ADHD hyperfocus on American Horror, I picked up and started reading Victor Laval's Lone Women, which I'm not going to talk about here because at the time of making this video, I am still reading it. And I already feel like this book is going to deserve its own independent video. So that'll be coming soon. Now then, let's finally answer the question, what's so special about American horror? To start us off, we need to talk about some of the tropes and archetypes of horror fiction. If I was stood at the front of a classroom right now instead of a camera, I could ask my students to raise their hands and give me some examples of the archetypes of horror fiction. Things like vampires, werewolves, witchcraft, ghosts in haunted houses, ancient unknowable Eldrich things, the devil himself. I could go on and on and obviously there are things here that I haven't mentioned, but everything that I have just mentioned here and many of these are the most popular archetypes and tropes and established formulas of the genre, they're all old. They're all very old. Vampires are so often depicted as having an ancient legacy. Vampires as individuals are often ageless, immortal.

[00:04:42]A vampire might look 20 but actually be a h 100red. This has been a thing forever. Then we have werewolves which have a deep connection to nature.

[00:04:52]They're about our relationship to our animal selves, what we once were, what we have seemingly evolved away from. Dr. Jackal and Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde represents the more feral undertones beneath our more refined vis which is paper thin for so many of us. Haunted houses are usually old places, places haunted by ghosts of the past. They might be a hundred years old. They might be a thousand years old, but they are old.

[00:05:23]The devil is old. The concept of witchcraft, demonism, the occult, all of these things are ancient. They hearken back to pre-Christian religions, to ancient ways of connecting with the landscape, ancient modes of worship, worshiping the natural world around us, the sun, the moon, connecting with gods of lakes and rivers and mountains. Or if they are inspired by Christian mythology, well, Christianity is 2,000 years old, and that means the devil is too at least. But if you believe in the devil, you believe the devil is far older than that. Ancient. Then we have Cthulhu and other Eldrich horrors.

[00:06:01]Things that are older than time, older than us, older than anything we can fathom. Things that are so dark and unknowable, things that stretch on beyond the concept of time. Old is a very important word when it comes to horror fiction. But what is the US? What is the US very much not old? Europeans make jokes about this when it comes to American history. The US is 300 years old. I like American history, by the way. I find it fascinating. I'm not I'm not poo pooing American history. I'm simply pointing out and it's important to note American history is new. It is recent history. The US is a baby. And that is integral to my love for American horror. Let me explain. To my fellow non-American audience members, and I'm thinking more here about my European audience members specifically. What do you think of when you think about the United States of America? For me at least, I think about capitalism. The US didn't invent capitalism, but it certainly refined it. And I don't just mean in a cynical socialist way. I mean the fact that everything about American culture is capitalistic. Whether or not you like or hate capitalism, I personally hate it. This is something that you can't really get away from.

[00:07:12]American culture is insular, but it's also exported. American culture is often something that exists in reverence for itself. American music, American films, American art. So much of it is masturbatory, congratulatory, the US patting itself on the back and then exporting that out to the masses within the states and to the wider world beyond as something valuable, as something worth money, as a commodity. America creates art about America and then sells that art to the rest of the world. But it's not just about physically, literally selling things. It also more simply takes the form of advertising.

[00:07:53]The US historically has always been a country that is very good at exporting an image of itself, an ideal, the American dream, making everything within it look glitzy and glamorous. When I was a kid growing up in the '9s and the naughties, I had countless friends who dreamed of moving to the States, of moving to New York and LA. These cities that are projected out to the rest of the world in their media as these glorious, exciting cities, beacons of art and culture, places where you can make a lot of money, but also places where you can make great art, places of opportunity and experience and success.

[00:08:30]And all of that is a kind of whirlpool that surrounds the concept of capital.

[00:08:34]Look at Las Vegas as the perfect example of this. I admit I've never been to Vegas myself, but that almost helps serve my point. The way that Vegas is advertised as just this giant neon sign, for gluttony, for greed, for fun and hedonism, and making money and losing money, but it's all in good fun whether you win or lose. It's just a place of entertainment and hedonism. But the US in general feels like that to so many non-Americans, a place where you can be successful and make great art and be part of some rich, broad, vibrant culture. The US doesn't look like that anymore to outsiders. And it doesn't feel like that when you're there. I've been to a lot of different states. I've lived in the US periodically and it does not feel like that at all. But that's how it's portrayed in media. And that's what's really important. It's the projection of the American image that makes American horror so exciting. Now, let's go back to the old stuff and what it has to do with the US. In order to do this, I need to talk about Philip Forassy's Gothic because this book exemplifies what I'm talking about here.

[00:09:42]Gothic is a novel set in modern-day New York City and it follows a modern American horror author named Tyson Parks. Tyson is very much a Stephen King type, but with a small difference. While the majority of the books that King has written in the 21st century have not measured up to his earlier success, his cultural capital has never really wavered. And there's a whole bunch of reasons why, and I'm not going to get into that now. But Tyson Parks, on the other hand, is 59 years old, and through his 30s and 40s, he enjoyed an enormous amount of success as one of the biggest best-selling authors, not just in the world of horror, but in general across the US, again, much like Stephen King.

[00:10:27]Now, however, Tyson Parks is all but washed up. He's staring 60 in the face very uncomfortably. His last few books have all been historical fiction and have not impressed anyone. And even though he married rich and lives in a lovely Manhattan apartment, he's too proud to just live off his wife's family money, he wants to rekindle his success.

[00:10:49]He wants to find a way back on top.

[00:10:52]Fortunately for Tyson, for his 59th birthday, his longtime partner Sarah has gifted him with this gorgeous writing desk. This antique that she managed to track down. This thing that has a dark stone top. It's a beautiful old thing that blends stone and wood and it's inlaid with carvings of faces. Very, very strange, very eerie. Whatever it is, though, it's expensive. It's old.

[00:11:21]And when it's moved into their home, it doesn't so much inspire Tyson to write a great work of horror fiction as it does put him in some kind of trance. He approaches the desk. He blacks out. And a day later, he wakes up sitting there at the desk. His fingers are bruised and sore and bloody. And sitting there on the desk next to him is a typed out, printed off manuscript, an 80,000page novel, finished, titled, and ready to go. He has no memory of writing it, but he did, right? And when he sends it off to his agent, who is as desperate as he is for a rekindling of his former success, his agent is over the moon. He says it's so good that he is sure he can get a six figure deal for it from a bigname publisher. This manuscript will bring him back, put him back on top.

[00:12:16]This is big news. But how did this happen? What is this desk? What did it do? Well, we find that out pretty early.

[00:12:22]not the details and I won't give those away but we find out roughly what this thing is see early in the book we are also treated to the perspective of a European woman who has been searching for this desk for a long long time it belongs to her family her grandfather spent his life searching for it trying to track it down and bring it home and then he passed that responsibility onto her and she's finally done it by hiring multiple PIs around the US she has managed to catch the trail of this desk.

[00:12:54]This woman is, I think, from Luxembourg.

[00:12:57]She lives in a big castle. Her family is of old money. She can trace her lineage back hundreds of years. And she can do the same for this desk, which has only recently become a desk. Before that, it was a dining table. Before that, it was something else. It was something else.

[00:13:15]But originally, it was an altar. an altar of black stone that was used for something terrible. People of all ages were sacrificed on this thing. Adults and children alike had their blood spilled on this thing in the name of demons and the devil in occult rituals to hell itself. This thing is dark. It has soaked up the blood of so many innocents. Now, again, the details of all of this are fascinating, and they do get revealed in the first half of the book, but I'm still going to leave it for now because even knowing that doesn't really answer the question of what the desk is doing to Tyson, what it wants. But even without revealing that, revealing the how and the why and maybe the who of the desk, we can still understand what it is about American horror that is so much fun through the context of this novel. Gothic exemplifies what I love about American horror fiction. It takes something ancient. And when I say something ancient, typically in novels like this one, that thing is specifically European ancient rather than African ancient or East Asian ancient. It's usually European ancient. And I think that's because again, cultural exports. People understand what European ancient looks like. Western audiences have an image of ancient Europe in their minds. And so the European version of ancient is what is leaned on. And so it's always about the relationship between ancient Europe and modern America. That's always the angle and it's that which I love.

[00:14:53]Vampires, ghosts, occult things. They are also often European coded. Dracula is Eastern European. There are many haunted houses, haunted castles around Europe. things that are demonic and occult are either leaning on Christian imagery, Christian mythology, Christian aesthetics, which most prominently have arisen in the Roman, the European interpretations of biblical imagery and Christian texts, etc. Or if we're talking about ancient evils, ancient gods, something that's more closely akin to nature and ancient gods in that respect, then there might be a Native American angle or an ancient European angle, which is probably going to at least loosely allude to paganism. And everything I'm saying here is purposely surface level. It is purposefully about its aesthetics, not any kind of actual historical or theological accuracy. When it comes to the ancient traditions and beliefs of Native American cultures or pagan European cultures, none of that matters when it comes to the aesthetics of American horror. You just want the vibes. That's what they're going for.

[00:16:00]And that's what the modern American angle on the occult, on vampires, on ghosts, on angry spirits and ancient gods. That's what it comes from. the vibe of the old, the unknowable ancient thing. And in the case of Gothic, what you have here so brilliantly is this merging of ancient evils, unknowable, frightening, dark, hellish gothic things blended up with the uncomfortably glitzy and glamorous style and aesthetics of capitalistic USA. Think about whatever the thing that lives in this desk is doing to Tyson. It is writing him a manuscript that will make him successful. That manuscript specifically is horror. It is frightening. It is unsettling. What does it want? Does it have some kind of power of its own? Has this thing written through Tyson's hands some kind of a spell like the anti-life equation in DC comics? Is this something that is going to spread like a virus? Is it going to take over people's minds?

[00:17:04]Maybe. I don't know. You'll have to read it and find out. And what is it going to do for Tyson? It's going to make him rich. It's going to make him successful.

[00:17:11]It's going to put money in his pocket.

[00:17:13]People will spend money on this thing.

[00:17:16]It's a book that serves to highlight the evil within us, the evil temptation of chasing fame and fortune. This need for recognition, this need for approval and appraisal, and the feeling of power that comes with success, that comes with fame and fortune. All of that is being promised to Tyson by this thing that wants something from him. It's a story that serves to highlight the fact that modern American capitalism dressed up in glitz and glamour. Fashion, Hollywood, rock and roll, all of that stuff. It is also darkly similar to the glitz and glamour of ancient monarchies, ancient Europeans who stole and then clung on to power and expressed that power through palaces, bejeweled clothing and fancy balls. The American dream is promising people that they can have that. But only a very select few can have that. Just as was the case with ancient monarchies in Europe, the modern American billionaire class are just monarchs. They are an oligarchy. They exist much in the same way that ancient European monarchs did by stealing and then holding on to their power and demonstrating that power through a show of wealth and privilege.

[00:18:33]What they have versus what the rest of us don't have. And this is what I love about American horror is the way that it uses the old to criticize the new. It takes ancient evils, ancient ghosts, vampires, whatever it is, occult things, pagan things, and it dresses them up in this American capitalist concept, bringing ancient evils and terrifying unknowable monsters into the realm of Hollywood stars and fiction writers and supermodels, whatever it might be. You can take an ancient evil and apply it to some American iconography that we grow up feeling inspired by and jealous of and hypnotized by fashion, Hollywood, whatever it might be. And it feels like such a weird clashing of concepts, clashing of aesthetics, but it isn't because deep down they all represent the same thing. Greed and the need for power and the paranoid desire to cling on to that power. Whether you're a writer who's chasing money and success and validation, or a wannabe Hollywood star who dreams of seeing their name in lights, or a tech bro billionaire, it it doesn't matter. They're all modern.

[00:19:49]They're all American. They're all glitz and glamour. But the themes at their core, the rot at the heart of all of this, can so easily have layers of ghosts and vampires and occult things stacked on top of it in order to blend the old and the new and have it all be horror. But it's also a blending of primal fears with capitalist fears. And they are different. Vampires are unknowable in their origins, in their legacy, in their history. What are vampires? Why are vampires? Their ancient history is terrifying. The same goes for Eldrich horrors. What is Cthulhu? What are these ancient gods?

[00:20:31]What do they need? What do they want?

[00:20:33]Where did they come from? All of that is beyond our understanding. And that unknowableness is what makes them so terrifying. The primal nature of a werewolf and how werewolves came to be.

[00:20:45]whether they were created by some sort of ancient god or came about through unknown or lost knowledge. There are so many questions. Questions of why ghosts behave the way that they do and what exactly the devil and his hordes of demons want from us and where any of this came from. There is mystery and unknowable lost ancient knowledge at the heart of these things. And so much of it is primal. Just the fear of the dark, fear of the afterlife, fear of death, fear of loss, fear of loneliness and isolation. These are such primal fears.

[00:21:20]And when you combine them with real capitalist fears of losing all your money, losing all your success, getting cancelled, not being able to afford rent, not being able to afford your health insurance. All of these modern-day fears that we have that are so relatable combined with the ancient primal terrifying fears that are so simple but are so inexurably linked to the human experience. Fears of death and the dark and loneliness and the loss of our loved ones. You can blend the modern life experiences of ordinary people with the primal fears of darkness and things that we just can't understand. You can just mold them together into this thing that we call American horror and I love it so much. Okay, that was a lot and I really hope you enjoyed it. I really hope you have thoughts and feelings of your own that you can share. Leave them in the comments. I want to know what you think. Agree, disagree. And if you enjoyed this, please consider supporting me on Patreon. I would so appreciate your support. Just a dollar a month from you makes a huge difference to my job, to my life. And recently, I have made a terrible habit of not promoting my own fiction, but I just spent a whole video talking about the brilliance of modern American horror. So, I would be remiss if I didn't talk about my horror. This is Managing and Other Lies, a collection of short stories that I wrote. There are six queer short stories in here. You can check them out by going to the links in the description, buying a copy, supporting me, leaving reviews. I would really appreciate that. And I also have a horror novel that I'm currently working on. I'm about 70% through it, at least the first draft, and all of the chapters are on my Patreon for $5 and up patrons to check out. Go read, go enjoy, check out my book. Support me on Patreon if you can, and subscribe for books.