With Hallowe'en on the horizon, now is the perfect time to enjoy a healthy dose of horror. Why scaring ourselves should be such fun is a mystery. But sometimes vengeful ghosts, an ancient curse or a horde of flesh-eating zombies provide welcome relief from endless bad news about the financial crisis, global warming, terrorists - or even the thought of your electricity bill.

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror is the 19th such annual from the editor Stephen Jones. Cannibals, the walking dead and serial killers do feature in the 26 stories, but there are also more subtle chills, and most stories raise a shiver through style and atmosphere rather than explicit nastiness. Authors include well-known novelists such as Ramsey Campbell, Michael Marshall Smith, and Christopher Fowler, as well as the rising stars Joe Hill and Mark Samuels. Few of the stories are likely to be familiar to any but the most dedicated readers, and certainly not to the casual bookstore browser. Almost all were originally published by small presses; five appeared in the quarterly magazine PostScripts. The American author, editor and critic Douglas E. Winter has pointed out that “Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the western... Horror is an emotion. It can be found in all literature.” At the time he wrote, in 1988, horror was a genre, a very profitable publishing category, but that hadn't been true since the early 1990s, when overpublishing and derivative hack-work caused the market to collapse.

Since then, although Stephen King, who launched the original boom, remains hugely popular, publishers seem wary of the label. Horror fans looking for a fix may find it in the occasional, very violent thriller, such as the forthcoming Afraid by Jack Kilborn (published next month by Headline) in which brutal killers attack an isolated community in a welter of carnage, or on the crime shelves, where monstrous serial killers reign.

There is also a growing sub-genre, often called “urban fantasy,” that features vampires, werewolves, witches and demons, but most of these are romantic novels, more sensual than scary: “His lips caressed my palm, a shudder rippled through his body and I felt an answering shimmer resonate through my own. My eyes closed as he licked hot lines along my hand. Sharp fangs scraped my wrist ...” (from Suzanne McLeod's The Sweet Scent of Blood , published by Gollancz). Supernatural horror, weird tales, strange stories, particularly at less than novel length, don't have the commercial presence they once had, and new writers in this field usually come from the small presses, if they aren't self-published. Even Joe Hill, whose first novel, Heart-Shaped Box was a New York Times bestseller, started out with PS, the independent British publisher now “showcasing” Mark Samuels (dubbed a modern master of “urban weirdness” by Ramsey Campbell) in Glyphotech .

While new writers struggle to establish themselves, there are a lot of older books out there, and readers just want to know what's good. For lots of answers, check out The Book of Lists: Horror , a frightfully delightful compilation by Amy Wallace, Del Howison and Scott Bradley. More fun than a box full of zombies, and I'd say that even if I wasn't in it.

Penguin has just released a new line of “Red Reads”, ten attractively designed volumes (in yellow and black, not red). While it's hard to see the need for another collection by Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, or H.P. Lovecraft - all widely reprinted - the series includes several books that were previously hard to find, including Richard Marsh's weird and creepy The Beetle , and six elegant, gothic tales by the often-overlooked Vernon Lee (aka Violet Paget) in The Virgin of the Seven Daggers . For me, the revelation was The Spook House , by Ambrose Bierce: I'd forgotten just how good his crisply written tales could be.

Gollancz recently reissued the “Terror Eight”, a collection of novels by “masters of terror,” all modern, ranging from Peter Straub's Ghost Story through the darker side of childhood as explored in Graham Joyce's The Tooth Fairy to the necrophiliac love and slaughter of Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite.

And what of the future? Stephen Jones, who has must have a better sense of the genre than almost anyone in this country, says: “In the past decade, horror has never been stronger than it is now. Publishers are looking at the genre again, and there are countless small press imprints in Britain publishing horror fiction these days. None of this means we are returning to the heady days of the 1980s, and most horror writers still need another job, but the signs of recovery are there.”

At Gollancz they're pushing next year's release, Hater by David Moody, a tale of a sudden change that turns ordinary people into crazed killers. If that sounds familiar, maybe you read it when the author self-published it in 2006. Then the film rights sold, and Guillermo del Toro was signed to direct. Del Toro's name is also linked to Drood, a novel by Dan Simmons about a dark secret shared by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, to be published in March by Quercus.

Harper Voyager, publisher of Clive Barker - one of the big names from the 1980s - will be publishing The Un-Dead, a sequel to Dracula by a great-grand-nephew of Bram Stoker, sometime next year. Be afraid, as the saying goes. Be very afraid.

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