I’ve been reading a bit of horror fiction of late, which I was guided towards via BookTok trends on TikTok.

TikTok is now one of the biggest influences of book sales, with trending titles getting big sales boosts, simply by catching on with the right creators. 

So maybe there’s something to it, and my thought process was that maybe I could learn what people are reading, and maybe that might resonate with my own work.

I also came to horror fiction via Jeff VenderMeer’s ‘Annihilation,’ which is a book that I love. Annihilation, the novel, is very different from the movie that Alex Garland made back in 2018, and the book has a whole lot more depth and structural resonance, based on literary devices, not on CGI creatures. 

I also love the way that it was crafted. VanderMeer says the idea came to him in a dream, and it definitely has that raw, unhinged creative feel to it, while also being tied back to a traditional Hero’s Journey model. 

So I decided to read horror fiction, based on recommendations on TikTok and the results have been…

Well, not great.

A lot of horror stories don’t work for me because they focus on the freaky elements, and not on the story and logic behind what’s happening. You see this in horror movies as well, some weird thing happens, and rather than offering explanation and resolution, you get ‘demon possession.’ The devil possessed them so anything can happen, which is really annoying for anybody that’s looking for a complete story, and a logic within the setting of the narrative.

If demon possession covers everything from heads exploding to people flying, then where’s the tension? And if there are no constraints, then where’s the consequence? I just can’t go with it when you explain away everything as ‘unexplainable,’ because it’s too open-ended to have any emotional pay off.

And so many horror novels are just badly written. They focus on the horror elements, the gore and violence, and everything else is just cliche. The bad guys are clearly bad, because they do bad things, then they get eaten by the monster and you don’t feel anything much about it. The good people are kind and caring and infallible. To me, that’s not how you write a compelling narrative.

But it is interesting to consider from a broader literary industry perspective, with respect to what’s selling at present.

Do you know which chain is the biggest book seller in Australia right now? It’s Big W, and Big W’s book section is primarily focused on cliche-ridden pulp fiction, with limited depth and far too familiar stories.

But that’s what readers are buying, and maybe, then, that’s what writers should be looking to write, if they want to actually sell their work. 

What BookTok recommendations have shown me is that cliches still work, and basic story structures still resonate. And maybe, given changes in reading habits, these are the only readers buying enough to sustain authors at present.