I attended World Horror Con recently, where the issue of genre labelling repeatedly came up.

A few decades ago, horror was lumped in with science fiction; it wasn’t really a genre in its own right. Then in the 1970s it seemed to fall victim to over-exposure. But for most of the 1990s horror had fallen out of such favour - at least in the UK - you could not find a separate horror section in any British book store. There was the odd book in the SF & fantasy section, and then the likes of Stephen King and James Herbert in the ‘bestsellers’ section.

Now, of course, horror is ‘in’ again, thanks largely to the sub-genre of urban fantasy.But why is there still a need to label books in this way? Most writers think of themselves just as writers, not as writers of one genre over another. As one panellist pointed out at Horror Con, writing is all about human emotions, regardless of genre. It seems to be the sales people and the book stores that are more preoccupied with labels, in order to identify which particular shelf a book should live on.

Ultimately, any book is about the journeys taken by the characters. In horror the journey might be darker than the journey taken by a character in, say, a romantic comedy, but it’s a journey nonetheless, with pitfalls and obstacles to overcome before journey’s end.

My novel SUFFER THE CHILDREN (released by LPI on 19 April) can be labelled as ‘horror’ inasmuch as there are some fairly classic conventions there. The main plot involves the protagonists working out how to stop the supernatural creature that has been claiming victims. However, the main character, Leanne, also undergoes her own personal journey, one that’s far more grounded in the real world. Leanne is an emotionally damaged young woman who after years of neglect has learned to shut everyone else out as a defence mechanism. As the story unfolds, she struggles to come to terms with the fact that she must let down the barriers she’s erected over her heart and let in the family who want to love her.

I meet a lot of people who say horror isn’t their thing, but so many characters in horror novels are ordinary people, people we can all identify with, in extraordinary situations. I remain optimistic that we are moving towards overcoming this prejudice that still seems to exist towards the genre of horror, and it will one day become a genre that will speak to us all, and the journeys we take in our lives.