Alex Davis
It’s fair to say that stories featuring elements of crime and the supernatural are nothing new – you can track them back to the days of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, among many others. However it’s fair to say that the form has never been much of a movement, and stories combining the ghostly or otherworldly and real-life mystery-solving have been relatively few and far between – that is until recent times. It’s likely that for many years publishers were cold to the concept because crime and horror were seen as such disparate fields, as well as the fact that horror had been relatively cold in market terms for the last couple of decades. But, as crime has grown ever darker, it seemed to become a better fit for elements from beyond the world as we know it to be featured, and the birth of useful genre stamps like ‘supernatural thriller’ or even ‘chiller’ have helped to enable a boom in the area. In fact if you look at any thriller section – to an extent in a bookshop but especially in DVD stores of streaming services – the crossover with horror fiction is unmissably huge.