Several leading authors of the horror genre took to social media today to announce their official departure from all things horrific, suspenseful, and remotely squirm-inducing, following a shared revelation that nobody was forcing them to write such terrifying content.
“It’s a game changer,” admitted Stephen Graham Jones (pictured above), the bestselling author of countless horror novels, short stories, and novellas drawing from Blackfeet folklore, most recently The Only Good Indians. “For years, I had just been churning out this gut-wrenching, white-knuckle sort of content, the type of story you wouldn’t read to young children if your life depended on it. It never occurred to me to stop for a second and question myself — does this need to be scary?”
Nationwide Adjustments
The answer to Mr. Jones’s question, as echoed by leading horror writers across the United States, has been a resounding no. Countless masters of the macabre have pulled their works from bookstores, announcing the need for emergency edits to remove all of the “icky, spooky, gory stuff.”
“I won’t say it isn’t challenging,” said Paul Tremblay, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel A Head Full of Ghosts. “At the time of writing it, I saw fit to give my story the most heart-shattering, ‘WTF just happened’ ending possible and mix it in with imagery rendering my audience unable to sleep. Thankfully, I’m cutting out those nasty bits, so all my characters survive okay. It’s not easy, but nobody ever said good writing was supposed to be. As always, I’m doing what I’m doing for the readers.”
Fan Backlash
Early this evening, a mob of roughly 15,000 angry horror fans took to the streets of Bangor, Maine, to protest the butchering of their beloved genre. Stephen King’s house was looted and burned to the ground by the furious horde, after news broke of the horror maestro revamping every single one of his worldwide bestsellers to cut out all mentions of haunted hotels, telepathy, vampires, rabid dogs, aliens, and murderers.
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