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17
The Gothic Novel Emerges
In 1765, Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel. The book would have incredible impact on the emerging genre of horror. Later, Mary Shelley originated the genre of science fiction with Frankenstein (1818), while Dr. Polidori published The Vampyr in 1819. Edgar Allan Poe would bring the Gothic tradition to America; his first story, "MS Found in a Bottle" appeared in 1833. He has been called the father of the detective novel. -
1235
Inquisition Spurs Interest in the Supernatural
In 1235, the Vatican issued an order to reestablish the orthodoxy of the faith. Almost immediately, charges of heresy were inextricably tangled with allegations of witchcraft. Then in 1307, Dante published the first volume of his Divine Comedy, Inferno. In 1486, Inquisitors Henry Kramer and Jakob Sprenger published Malleus Maleficarum. -
Horror for Children
By this time readers are scandalized by the gruesomeness of Jakob and Willhelm Grimm's Kinder und Hausmarchen (1832) and the grisly details in Hans Christian Andersen's Tales Told for Children (1835). And although they certainly don't qualify as horror in their own right, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872) would influence horror writers over a century later, in the 1980s. -
Penny Dreadfuls
The Penny Blood (or Penny Dreadful) emerged as a cheap form of entertainment for mass audiences. Edward Lloyd made quite a fortune for himself off Penny Bloods. He'd already dipped into horror with Thomas Prest's The Calendar of Horrors in the 1830s, and he simply adapted that to a more recognizable form. -
Gothic Begins
In 1872, Sheridan Le Fanu pubished "Camilla". In this piece and others Le Fanu began to dismantle Gothic artifices, bringing elements of horror and the supernatural into everyday life. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the iconic novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885). Later, Jack the Ripper would wage his bloody campaign in London, giving us yet another archetype of horror. The French writers Charles Baudelaire, Joris Karl Huysmans, and Guy de Maupassant were important too. -
Modern Horror
Ambrose Bierce published Can Such Things Be? in 1893, a collection of ghost stories. H.G. Wells would go a step further in 1898; War of the Worlds, usually classified as blend of science fiction and horror. Also H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker were part of Modern Horror. Source: https://blog.bookstellyouwhy.com/-a-brief-history-of-horror-literature
