Is Horror Doomed to Literary Hell?

For a while now, so-called "literary" and "genre" fiction have been moving from outright opposition to a cautious rapprochement. Literary writers such as Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt and Michael Chabon increasingly deploy tropes and images from genre, while genre writers have upped their stakes considerably in terms of complexity, moral resonance and style. Sophie Hannah, Josh Bazell and Denise Mina have reinvented crime fiction; Charles Yu, Iain M Banks and M John Harrison have given a literary uplift to science fiction; while China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer and Kelly Link have done the same for fantasy. But horror – the third aspect of "speculative fiction" – has had markedly less success. Yet it might be the genre most tractable to our contemporary concerns.