“Horror isn’t just a genre, it’s a calling. A secret handshake in the dark.”
– Sadie Hartmann, introduction
“Since the turn of this century I have been a professional book recommender in the field of Readers’ Advisory. The crux of this work is matching books with readers through the local public library.”
– Becky Siegel Spratford, “Why Ask Why”
Becky Siegel Spratford is a professional librarian who specializes in horror. That is, she specializes in sharing her acquired knowledge of the genre of horror with other librarians and readers across the country, working to ensure that readers get the right books for their tastes. She does this through Readers’ Advisories, through articles and essays, through phone calls and emails with other librarians, and has become an acknowledged go-to person for information about the genre.
Spratford asked a number of writers for an essay of no more than 1,500 words about, “Why I love horror” and was surprised that so many busy writers found time to respond. Their answers are gathered in this book and the writers are Brian Keene, Hailey Piper, John Langan, Alma Katsu, Gabino Iglesias, Tananarive Due, Jennifer McMahon, Josh Malerman, Paul Tremblay, Grady Hendrix, Cynthia Pelayo, Clay McCleod Chapman, Nuzo Onoh, Rachel Harrison, Victor LaValle, Mary SanGiovanni, David Demchuk and Stephen Graham Jones. Sadie Hartmann (a.k.a. podcaster “Mother Horror”), author of 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered, provides an introduction.
The answers range from “I grew up with it” – quite a few boil down to that, though there were a variety of avenues leading there, leaving this reader nostalgic regarding his own reading history – to more intensely personal memoirs of sanctuary in and identification with the monstrous. I want to especially note essays by Cynthia Pelayo, in which a childhood overloaded with trauma was somewhat mitigated by watching monsters on the small screen; David Demchuk, who found sanctuary in horror from his struggle with disability and the sense of being an outsider because of being queer; and Rachel Harrison whose anger at societal views of women erupts in simultaneous humor and outrage. Pelayo’s essay spurred me to read her novel The Shoemaker’s Magician and Harrison’s essay lead to reading her The Return, neither of which was on my reading list before that.
Each essay comes with a brief introduction to the author and their works by Spratford, and the suggestion of another author a reader might like if the reader enjoys this author. The book is wrapped up by Stephen Graham Jones in a final essay that neatly summarizes much of what came before while offering personal insights into the genre and his own attachment to it.
Every so often one genre or another provides a book something like this, where fans of that genre, aware of a lack of scholarship or critical work devoted to the genre, take the challenge and produce a work examining the genre. That has led to volumes of one writer’s reminiscences about early reading and viewing, like Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, multiple writers offering reading suggestions like Horror: The 100 Best Books or one reader producing a snapshot of the genre in the present moment, like Hartman’s 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered. Like those, this one deserves to be read by current genre fans to glean insight into favorite writers, as an entryway into the works of unfamiliar writers, or just as a reminder that you’re not alone in your taste in fiction.
© 2026 Randy Money
Paperback | Saga Press
WHY I LOVE HORROR, Essays on Horror Literature ed. Becky Siegel Spratford
June 2025 | 272 pages
ISBN: 9781668 20 5099
Review by Randy Money
