It's time to start making a dent in the reading list... and man it's getting to be a big pile. Kinda.
I've pretty much moved over to reading digital books now but still can't resist going into the bookstore to see what's happening. And the answer is - pretty much as it was a year ago - nothing is happening. I go in there and take the odd picture of a book that looks good and then leave. I'm not the only one. I've seen many people do this (though they are more than likely scanning barcodes with that nifty amazon app).
So, if the bookstores can't provide me with what I need, the internet will - and sure enough it came up with Abiding Evil by Alison Buck. Not the greatest name for a book but it's really very, very good! I also picked up The Haunting of James Hastings by Christopher Ransom (which looks great and has a cargo-load of less than stellar reviews on amazon), The Well by Peter Labrow (which looks awful but has a ton of great reviews on amazon) and a book called Seed by Ania Ahlborn just because it was in the "also bought this" section.
What's interesting about this pattern is that I was looking for a modern supernatural kind of book and these are the ones I found that looked pretty shapely. The interesting part is that I never once looked to see who they were published by. This is probably the first time in my life that I have bought books based on reader reviews and a few sample pages rather than heading for a big publisher who is guaranteed to have spent time and money on the product.
Go into any branch of Waterstones and check out their horror section. It's dead, dead, dead - and yet there are these three books which all look like pretty good reads to me (Haunting of James Hastings is "proper" published and thus exempt from this sentence) and even if you think I'm an arse, I do know what I'm talking about when it comes to books. Honest I do.
So, to those of you asking the big question "where did all the supernatural/horror books go", the answer appears to be that nobody wants to publish them at the moment. Go figure, and while you're busy figuring, get online and hunt them down. Read them and then tell everybody else about them - many will be shit. In fact, most of them will be shit but this is the future. Not necessarily because of the publishers but mostly because of the way bookstores are behaving. Pretty soon, they'll start closing branches faster than you can get to them. It will be a shame, but take a look at our habits...