In the Book World, Eco-Horror Is the New Slasher…Because Climate Change Is Here
When it comes to horror sub-genres, folk horror asks, “What did they do?” whereas eco-horror asks, “What have we done?"
By Jackie Jennings | October 21, 2024 | 11:19amPhoto: Getty ImagesBOOKSENTERTAINMENT
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This is Fantasy Aisle, a monthly column from Jackie Jennings about everything related to horny dragon books.
Every few years there’s a fresh literary take on terror. From senseless serial killers to demonic children, aliens to zombies, every vehicle of fear has had its moment in the sun (or not, for vampires). But in the past few years, horror writers have turned to another form of terror. Super storms, wildfires, rising sea levels, and a rapid uptick in extinction rates in our real world have all led to eco-horror, a subgenre characterized by humanity witnessing the rise of a natural force that signals an end to…us.
Scary, right?
Michael Myers and freaky dolls will forever remain genre staples, but eco-horror is having a moment. Absolution, the fourth installment in
Jeff VanderMeer’s bestselling, eco-horrific Southern Reach series, comes out this month. It’s joined by other buzzy new releases like The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister, a novel that blends eco and folk horror to lovely and deeply weird effects. The eco-horror (that is, ecological
horror) subgenre trades in themes of a wronged planet and the
resulting debts that must be paid. It’s easy to love, easy to binge but
pretty tricky to define. Let’s try anyway!
Man versus nature stories are as old as recorded history; I give you, Icarus and his wax wings. And people have always been freaked out by the woods. Or, more accurately, we’re freaked out by what might be lurking in the woods. And therein lies the distinction: Eco-horror asks, “What if the forest itself was out to get you?” So though we’ve been afraid of nature forever, eco-horror as a subgenre is relatively new.
In fact, all speculative and fantastical literature is relatively new. In their excellent book, Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles put the start of fantastical writing somewhere in the late-18th to early-19th century. Unsurprisingly, right around the time industrialization started to visibly screw with the environment. That’s more or less the entire basis of the
anthropocene which, if you haven’t come across the concept in the course of climate change doomscrolling, is the unofficial term that
describes our current era—the one defined by homo sapiens’ impact
on the environment. Whether you put that at the start of the Industrial
Age or the Atomic Age is, for now, up to you. But even before there was
a term for it, mass production, pollution, and the rapid scientific
advancements led ordinary citizens (including—or especially?—
writers) to realize, “Huh, progress can be good…and also bad.”
In 1818, Frankenstein (subtitled or, The Modern Prometheus… you do the math!) is published, and we’re pretty much off to the speculative fiction races. Many eco-horror purists cite the 1954 film Them! as the first specifically eco-horror tale committed to celluloid. It’s harder to pinpoint an exact eco-horror genesis for books, if only because books have been around a whole lot longer—and also, I could make a pretty compelling case that the Book of Exodus is an example of eco-horror.
So the Bible and Greek myths probably don’t count as the first literary eco-horror, but it can be really hard to decide what does. As with that other hot subgenre, romantasy, there’s a lot of discussion about what exactly classifies a novel as “eco-horror” as opposed to say, folk horror or even science fiction; Micheal Myers, after all, is a product of his environment. What we can say is that eco-horror usually revolves around a human accident or a choice that negatively impacts the environment. In other words, whatever terror lurks within the book is understood to be the fault of people. Plus, the covers of eco-horror books usually feature weird neon plants or lots of jewel tones and funky-looking berries.
In other words, like many literary subgenres, you’ll know it when you see it. Or more accurately, you’ll know it when you read it. Recently on DTR (the podcast I co-host with Ali Plante, whose ideas have informed this article), we dove into eco-horror and folk horror only to arrive at the conclusion that classifying work as eco-horror really comes down to tone, focus and, for lack of a better word, vibes. If folk horror is concerned with the past, then eco-horror is obsessed with the future. Folk horror frequently asks, “What did they do?” whereas eco-horror asks, “What have we done?”
In this context, the rise of eco-horror makes a whole lot of sense. Humanity just experienced (and is still experiencing) the collective horror of a global pandemic. It seems we are now constantly either bracing for or recovering from superstorms, floods, and wildfires. There’s possibly no anxiety more urgent and ever-present today than the fear of what we have done to our planet—and what it will do in retribution.
If you’re ready to dip your toe into this super timely and utterly chilling mode of scary story, check out the Southern Reach series, Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher or the Climate and Environment section of the New York Times—because, like any good horror, the call is certainly coming from inside the house.
And at least on Earth, there’s nowhere you can hide.
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