Half-Wrong, Half-Right

“I’ve learned a lot from Mary SanGiovanni. Like, for example, that Brian Keene can occasionally be wrong about something.”

— Hailey Piper

This was my favorite quote from last month’s Scares That Cares’ Killer Pride event. Hailey was talking about my insistence a year ago that Horror Fiction is about to go through another downturn and market contraction. And I get why Hailey disagrees with me, because the objective fact is that Horror Fiction — throughout world history — has never been more popular than it is now. The genre’s abundance and accessibility dwarfs the gothic era, the post World War and pulp eras, the Seventies surge, the reign of King and Koontz, the 1980s, or my generation’s own Millennium emergence. There are more publishers and authors doing Horror Fiction than at any time in history, and thus, there is more Horror Fiction available than at any time in history.

But I still think there’s a downturn and market correction coming.

The last two big downturns — the mid 1990s and the 2009 crash — were brought about by a mix of two things: economic uncertainty and a flooded marketplace. In the case of the mid-2000’s crash, there was more product available than there were readers for it, and when those same readers began tightening their purse strings due to the Great Recession, the market contracted, leading to the shuttering of most Big 5 horror lines, and a wholesale bloodbath amongst the small and indie presses. This was particularly true of the time in regard to expensive signed limited edition hardcovers. It’s one thing when readers or collectors have an offering of one or two of these per month. But when they are suddenly being offered 25 of them a month, often in a price range of $100 to $275… well, there’s simply no way the market can support that.

These days, we don’t have the preponderance of those editions that we did back then, and the companies who made it out the other side of that collapse — publishers like Thunderstorm, Subterranean, Centipede, etc — are thoughtful and careful in what they produce and publish. So, they’re in a good place, and I think they can weather the storm. And I think the Big Five are better positioned to weather it this time, as well. We might see them cutting back on the amount of new horror they publish in a year or two, but folks like SGJ, Grady, Rachel, Joe, Paul, and others will still have homes.

What worries me this time is the state of indie horror. Because indie horror has had an incredible ten-year run. A documentary filmmaker pointed out to me not long ago that we wouldn’t have indie horror in the form it is today, if not for what myself, J. F. Gonzalez, Mary, and Bryan Smith pulled off back in 2009-2010. And while I don’t want to toot my own horn (or Jesus, Bryan, and Mary’s horn) the dude ain’t wrong. If you look at the success do-it-yourselfers like Aron Beauregard and Kristopher Triana (who are selling self-published units in numbers equal to Stephen Graham Jones or Paul Tremblay’s mainstream releases) or indie publishers like Shortwave, Crossroad/Macabre Ink, Valancourt, Grindhouse, Bad Hand, Ghoulish, Tenebrous or countless others (and yes, I know those last two don’t care for me, but it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the impact they’ve had on the indie market) — things have been good. And the readers have been there to support it.

But I’ve been hearing from a number of indie publishers over the last 5 months who report sales dropping off. They haven’t gone over a cliff. Not yet. But they are heading toward the cliff and the brakes only seem to be slowing the car down, rather than stopping. And we’ve been seeing the same thing happen at Vortex Books & Comics.

We opened Vortex in February of 2024. That first year was amazing, business-wise, with income from multiple sources — local foot traffic, out-of-town visitors, and online sales. But beginning around February of 2025, we have seen a consistent, slow decline in those first two things. While online sales remain good, in-store traffic has weakened with each passing month. We are not the only store experiencing this. Every other retail store owner along our street has seen a consistent and steady decrease in foot traffic month-after-month. Why is that happening? Well, the reasons are many. Merchants I have spoken with, regardless of their political or social makeup, agree on a few objective absolutes.

First, the American economy is a tire fire right now. It doesn’t matter what the analysts or the bankers or the investors or the government data says. Here, in small town America, the price of groceries and gas and many other things has gone consistently up with each passing month, and in tandem with those increases, people have less and less money to spend on other items. A weekly local customer who was perhaps sending $100 a week at my store in 2024 dropped down to perhaps $75 by March, and then $50 by June, and is now down below $25 or perhaps has stopped buying books and comics altogether. And those out-of-towners that we had all throughout last year? The folks from Taiwan, Australia, Germany, and Canada, as well as US states like New York, California, Texas, and Florida who came here specifically to visit the store? They’ve cut back on traveling, either because they can’t afford it or they have misgivings about traveling to the US currently.

Secondly we have a mayor and a borough council that vary from inept to ineffective, and law enforcement who, for the most part, seem either disengaged or simply filling their hours until they can get hired by someone else. Parking and parking enforcement are a maddening exercise in futility for both our customers and the merchants along the street, and a shining example of the complete and utter stupidity and dimwitted cruelty that comes with the worst of bureaucracy. We also have a homeless problem that is increasing by the month, aided and abetted by absentee landlords, abandoned buildings, and that same ineffective leadership and disengaged law enforcement.

These are the issues all of us face, but specific to Vortex, this past summer’s Pokémon and Magic the Gathering shortage, the sharp decline in quality and demand for Marvel comics, and the absolute mountain of malfeasance that was the Diamond Distribution bankruptcy certainly didn’t help us.

What has kept Vortex alive has been big events. But you can’t have a big event every single day, and the days in between those events are in steady slow decline.

With all that in mind, Mary and I decided a few months ago that come February of 2026, Vortex would be online only. We can still retain a good profit margin if we aren’t paying rent and utilities for a monthly physical space.

Now, transpose that to indie horror. If a reader who used to spend $200 a month on indie horror titles has to cut back to $25 per month because the cost of groceries, gas, and medicine has continued to rise… it doesn’t take long for indie publishers to feel that pinch. And when they do, the market contracts, just as it has before.

And I still believe that is coming. I would be very happy to be wrong, but I don’t think I am. So… maybe I was wrong about a wholesale crash. I no longer think we will experience that again. I think we will skirt around the edge of it due to the absolute overall popularity of Horror Fiction right now. But I do think a major market contraction is coming, based on economic uncertainty and too much being published, and I think that contraction is going to hit indie horror the hardest.

In the 90s crash, the loss of Big 5 Horror Fiction (although back then it was more like Big 10) led to the rise of the small press, as readers turned to that part of the market for Horror. The mid-2000s crash led to the collapse of Big 5 Horror Fiction and the small press, which led readers to indie horror, and thus indie horror rose.

Spitballing here, but if I’m right and there is another such downturn coming, and indie horror is forced to contract, could we see a subsequent rise in Big 5 horror?

Interesting times…

~

My pal Christopher Golden has been off galavanting around Wales and Ireland and other make-believe places with our other pal Tim Lebbon for the last month, but when he got home yesterday, he posted this, which all of you should take a moment to read.

Obviously, I 100% agree with everything Chris said there. And for those writers at the same level of success as Chris and I, who have the same amount of power and privilege — fuck each and every one of you who attacked Jamie Flanagan. You knew exactly what you were doing. And you don’t get to our level without absolutely knowing how much weight your words carry and how many people will see those words. I know full well how many people are seeing these words right now, so let me state again — fuck you. You want to have a go at somebody, want to prove that you can still swing your dick around, then instead of going after a young and talented editor and their first big project, how about you take a run at me. Chris is the nice one. I would like to be the other nice one, but as I told my therapist a few years ago, being nice never seems to get me results. “But I’m trying, Ringo. I’m trying real hard to be a shepherd.” The absolute last thing this genre needs right now is more in-fighting and shit-stirring to assuage your fragile fucking ego. So sit down, shut up, and just fucking write.

Currently Listening: "She's a Bad Mama Jama (She's Built, She's Stacked)" by Carl Carlton.
Currently Reading: Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine