Deep dread of the world we inhabit

Modern horror writers are moving away from jump scares towards atmospheric dread and unease and reinventing the genre

- Bibek Bhattacharya

It was in the dog days of the first wave of cov-id-19 that I leaned heavily into reading horror. I wanted the terror seasoned with a generous dose of unease, dread and the unknowable—a fictional mirror image of an unprecedented life under a global lockdown.

So, I started searching out writers of the “New Weird”, which includes a galaxy of Gen X writers who have been taking horror and weird fiction in thrillingly strange new directions over the past 15 years, deconstructing genre tropes, and mixing them with other pulp genres like noir to significant effect.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote in 1927 that the weird tale has a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread” and a “malign and particular suspension or defeat of...fixed laws of nature”. Here are four writers who have perfected that recipe.

HORROR AND TRAUMAStephen Graham Jones' 2025 novel,