I’ve just finished reading this article from The Guardian website about the demise of Point Horror books and it took me right back. I used to devour those books. Many a day was spent with my head in a book, pondering who would turn out to be the killer in this one - the janitor, the window cleaner, the main character’s split personality…
That was back in the days when ‘horror’ didn’t require 6 gallons of blood and several medieval torture devices - ok, so Point Horror’s weren’t particularly scary examples by any standards but there was something compelling about them. I distinctly remember being fascinated by the runes and frankly the idea of a hot bloke with white hair in The Forbidden Game Trilogy, reading all 3 of The Babysitter books and wondering what to make of the ‘twist’ in the third one, and loving the utter cheese of Beach Party. At one point, I even wanted to become a teen-horror writer myself - spurred on by my love of this series of books.
But somehow, as the years passed, I graduated on to the ‘adult’ horror novels of some of the writers and there they lost me. I didn’t need to know the graphic details of how it’d feel if you had air injected in to your bloodstream. Or quite how gruesome murder really could be.
It was much nicer to read about buff American teenagers being chased by (as one commenter on The Guardian article points out) Scooby Doo-like villains who would, undoubtably, be foiled at the last post than it was to read about realistic death at the hands of (more) realistic characters.
