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Introduction Why Write About Horror? I could give many reasons for writing this book, but ultimately they boil down to this: I didn’t feel that previous histories of horror had done the job right. That is, while other books have covered aspects of the history of horror literature, none of them did what I wanted them to do. None of them included modern Gothics none of them made more than a token attempt at discuss- ing horror literature written outside of the United States, the United King- dom, and western Europe none of them addressed horror written by LGBTQ+ people or African Americans or Australian Aborigines and none of them discussed horror comics and manga. So I wrote the book I wanted to exist, and addressed and discussed all those topics. If the limits of the book restrained me from going in-depth on most topics—to do justice to horror literature in full, I’d need three hundred thousand words or more—I at least made most of the points I wished to make. The broader question, though, is “why is horror worth writing about?” There’s an ingrained and long-held assumption in the world of letters and academia that horror literature is less worthy of study than “realistic” litera- ture. Horror is a popular genre of literature and is a genre of popular litera- ture, akin to mysteries, romance, science fi ction, and Westerns, so academics and literary critics have traditionally been loath to credit works of horror with aesthetic and literary merit, or to analyze works of horror with an unbi- ased eye. As Roger C. Schlobin writes about the genres of fantasy literature as a whole, One reason fantasy literature has succeeded in gaining only begrudging acceptance into mainstream, contemporary criticism is that most modern criticism emphasizes genres and specifi c literary aspects or tropes.