He reads it aloud to me, then pins it to my bedroom door:Ĥ) Papa’s medicine pouch: forbidden. Papa takes a piece of paper from his pocket. To keep his daughter safe from the disease, Iris’s father has instituted a draconian regime of solitude: Iris’s mother died soon after her birth, supposedly from a disease called Horror autotoxicus, a mysterious ailment that has cut swathes through the Villarca family for generations.

Iris Villarca lives alone with her father in a brooding, mansion known as Rawblood, situated in an isolated position on the Princetown side of Dartmoor.

The story begins simply enough, as most good stories do. Now we have Catriona Ward's astounding first novel, Rawblood, which seems equally destined to take its place in the horror canon. Helen Oyeyemi's White Is For Witching is another. Kiernan's The Drowning Girl is one such masterpiece. New trends are emerging, new sensibilities, new novels, and new writers who will eventually be measured alongside the seminal works and writers- Dracula, Jekyll, Frankenstein, Straub, King, Jackson-that have helped to ground and shape the genre in the first place. Guessing games can be enjoyable, though, and going by the best of what has been produced so far this century, I feel confident in predicting the survival of horror literature. Such judgements, if they are to be made at all, can come only with hindsight. It is difficult, if not impossible, to assess the potential longevity and eventual worth of a novel in the year, or even the decade, in which it is published.