Trends on Horror

Here are some trends I picked up on recently.

The big push for horror isn’t in October.  It’s June, July and August.  As someone who self publishes books, I’m not at all interested in what’s trending.  Mainly because I just need to write as many and publish as many books as possible.  Following trends gets thrown out the window when you want to publish four to six books a year.

I already knew that books and dvds, perhaps most streaming get released on Tuesdays.  At one time I knew why.

It was the whole business of everything getting shifted because of the pandemic that I realized that the push for horror was June through August.  Harrow the Ninth was supposed to be released in 25 June and now is 4 August.  The Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones was supposed to be released on 14 July and is now 1 September.  That was supposed to be my Birthday book this year.

What I found out about Stephen Graham Jones is that a novel of his should have already been released, but it got pushed to 14 July and the one book that I wanted got pushed out to 1 September.  The book that comes out on 14 July is The Only Good Indians, which is the most anticipated horror book of the year.  I have pre-ordered the audiobook along with the novella The Night of the Mannequins.  The name of the title also revealed that the author is Native American.  He will be the first Native American I read since I graduated college the last time.  The last being Sherman Alexi while I was in college.

So those are the trends that I discovered.  Horror is pushed in the summer.  I think the reason for that is because it gives consumers time to find a couple of good reads before October.

On the whole horror genre, I’m currently listening to The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel.  Of the most ‘literature’ of horror novels, I find that the beginnings are all obscure.  They are kind of like mysteries that way.  Where the mystery of the whole novel is revealed at the end.  So far this one is about drug addicts in Canada.

I have decided to embrace the horror side of me for the next few months.  In my WIP, I’m looking for ways to add horror.  With a character like the Dark Prince, that shouldn’t be hard to do.