It’s time for Stephen King to give up the horror crown
Andrew Pyper is poised to become the brightest star in the horror cosmos — will The Damned make it happen?
‘What will happen next will decide everything,” says Professor David Ullman, the protagonist of Andrew Pyper’s 2013 bestseller, The Demonologist, as he teeters on a precipice. He is facing a man possessed by a demon. He knows he can either challenge and reject the horror before him, or engage with it and accept his world being irrevocably redefined. This is the moment everything changes in the novel. It also happens to be the moment everything changed for Andrew Pyper.
“The Demonologist was a really liberating ‘f--k it’ gesture,” says the Torontobased writer over a recent afternoon coffee in the city. His sixth novel proved to be a surprising career swerve: an unapologetic horror story from a writer who had mostly aligned with the “literary” part of “literary genre fiction.” “I think [my previous novels] are marked by a degree of tentativeness,” explains Pyper. “I think it was, frankly, an impossible struggle to write the books that I was inclined to write, but at the same time not have them categorized as strictly supernatural or horror or commercial fiction. I simply tired of it.”
Hence the ‘f--k it’ gesture. It paid off. The Demonologist proved to be an unprecedented success for Pyper. It spent 18 weeks on The Globe and Mail’s Canadian bestseller list (nine as a hardcover, nine as a trade paperback), sold more e-books than his previous two hardcover novels combined, was on several best of the year lists, established his name in the American market, secured a movie deal, and beat out Stephen King and Lee Child to earn the 2014 International Thriller Writers Award for best hardcover novel.
Now, it is Pyper on a precipice: will his momentum hold steady for the release of his newest entry into the horror genre, The Damned? On the heels of The Demonologist’s unlikely triumph, this book could very well lead him to upgrade from successfully reinvented up-and-comer to big-time genre author. If The Damned recreates The Demonologist’s success, Pyper could be the next Stephen King.
Now is certainly an ideal time for someone new to ascend to the thriller throne. Readers — especially in the United States — seem to have developed a fresh taste for horror stories. “There has been a really explosive tectonic shift in terms of the American marketplace,” Pyper says. “Works like horror or dark thrillers aren’t just for bloodthirsty freaks anymore.”
If the growing demand were supplied by someone with the right kind of horror story, bestselling glory could ensue. The market is primed, but becoming the next Stephen King isn’t just about writing like him; it’s about writing accessible stories that captures King’s “I don’t usually read horror, but this is great” demographic.
Today, Pyper is writing exactly that kind of horror story. After years of flirting with the deep-end of the genre pool, with Lost Girls and The Guardians, for instance, The Demonologist found him finally diving in. He is an unapologetic horror genre writer now — no asterisks, parentheticals or “literary” prefixes necessary. As such, he’s carving out his territory in the universally appealing brand of scary campfire stories King has excelled at. The Demonologist and The Damned are stories that evoke the things we imagine are snapping twigs in the dark of the woods, creaking beneath our floorboards, controlling the severed hands of serial killers, and the worlds waiting for us in the beyond.
Pyper’s stories are anchored in everyday fears and emotions. They are accessible and relatable, something that was important for Pyper leading into
The Demonologist. “I wanted to make that commitment [to the genre] but at the same not be untethered from the real world,” he says. “The Demonologist was, ‘Yes, the demons are real, there’s not going to be a debate about that.’ But they will be tethered to a context that is hopefully recognizable.”
It’s in how Pyper defines that context that he can see himself standing onside with King. “The shared ground is a concern with character and a concern with answering the question, ‘Why this person?’ Why are the events of the story relevant to this person? How does this person react to the events in this story? All of those things are, broadly speaking, literary concerns. It’s just that in a literary story that event might be a husband leaving a wife. In a horror story that may be a daughter becoming possessed by a demon.” For both Pyper and King, horror is about people. That’s something readers — being people, naturally — can easily identify with. All the more because the writers share a tendency to ensure their stories are about everyday themes. Not just monsters.
Take The Damned. The novel focuses on Danny Orchard, a man whose evil twin sister, Ash, died as a child in a fire. Danny died trying to save her, ending up in “The After” (Pyper’s spin on Heaven), but came back to life with proof of its existence. So he writes a book and becomes famous. But Danny doesn’t get to enjoy it; he is haunted by Ash for decades. When Danny gains a wife and stepson, his vengeful, dead sister makes it her mission to kill them. Danny descends into the Underworld to stop her. Obviously, The Damned has no qualms about using ghosts, demons, serial killers and variations of Heaven and Hell. But it’s not about any of that.
In the same way that The Shining is really a story about parental guilt and responsibility, or Pet Sematary is about grief, The Damned is about making difficult choices, the nurturing and toxic effects of familial love, and the almost elemental force of parenthood. If that all sounds a little hokey, hokeyness is precisely its appeal. There’s a reason King — whose writing has always possessed a sentimental, dorky dad-like quality — has succeeded over the years. It’s also why Pyper may potentially follow suit.
No King-like success, however, can be achieved if the writing isn’t as accessible as the storytelling. A horror novel written like Ulysses is (unfortunately) unlikely to succeed. But here, too, Pyper seems ready for broader success, thanks to a shift in style that will inarguably benefit him: The prose of The Demonologist and The Damned is almost unrecognizable from his previous work. Pyper has worked his prose into a lean, pumping muscle: these books are all crisp sentences and snappy chapters, where one-sentence paragraphs abound — but with staccato bursts of his skilled literary flourishes.
“It was conscious,” Pyper says. “It was recognizing, over the course of a career, that there are things you’re good at, and things maybe not so much.” Pyper knew it’s what he needed to tell the stories he wanted to tell. The horror novels are written in a style that not only works, but suits him — and, by extension, his readers. While his prose style has become undoubtedly commercial writing, it never seems like a compromise.
Consider this moment in The Damned, where Ash visits Danny: “The hands came up and found her face. What was left of it. The fingernails hooking in. Pulling away … Kept ripping until there was only bone. Until her body was no longer visible and she was nothing more than a white skull floating in the hallway’s darkness.”
Those frequent periods produce beats that allow for a reader’s anxiety to expand and the empty spaces of paragraph breaks open the door for readers to let their imaginations in. Most of all, Pyper’s new style accomplishes what King’s always has: it functions as narrative accelerant. You’re sped toward wanting to read one more line, page and chapter. It’s the reading equivalent of covering your face from seeing something horrible but peeking through your fingers anyway. Only good writing will do that without cheap manipulations. And it’s the kind of writing that will appeal to those wanting their horror and page-turner fix in the same novel.
Which brings us to one more crucial similarity between Pyper and King that bodes well for The Damned author: they both write with an infectious joy. Their books are damn fun to read. That’s long been a notable feature of King. You can always tell he loves telling these macabre stories. There’s a child-like pleasure present on the page.
The Demonologist and The Damned evince that same pleasure. There’s a joyful confidence in Pyper’s work now, and he’s the first to admit it. “It’s fun. It’s just a pleasure to write in a way where you’re unburdened and there aren’t those tweaks of caution I had before.” He adds, “In terms of both subject matter as well as prose,” says Pyper, “I think The Demonologist and The Damned represent, ‘Oh right, this is where it took me probably longer than other novelists, but it feels like this is where I was going.’ ”
What remains to be seen is if readers will help him go further, far enough to send him into the Stephen King stratosphere. He’s got the talent, he’s got the style and he’s got the stories. But will The Damned provide the sales? From here, it looks like Pyper finds himself once again mirroring Ullman’s turning point: what will happen next will decide everything.