The fol­low­ing is from Dark­ness Absolute: The Stan­dards of Excel­lence in Hor­ror Fic­tion by Dou­glas E. Win­ter, a critic and biog­ra­pher of Stephen King and Clive Barker:

If you would excel in this field, remem­ber that a fun­da­men­tal mis­take is to strive to emu­late the com­mer­cial hor­ror novel or story. The bulk of this fic­tion is poorly writ­ten and itself imi­ta­tive; you will risk learn­ing your craft at the feet of medi­oc­rity. And even if you choose the field’s most orig­i­nal voices to guide your efforts, the dan­gers of pas­tiche should be obvious.

If you admire Stephen King or Peter Straub or Den­nis Etchi­son, fine; but save that admi­ra­tion for party con­ver­sa­tion. When it comes to com­mit­ting words to paper, you are the writer, and it must be your ambi­tion to bet­ter those you admire. If not, you are con­demn­ing your­self to be second-rate before you have even started.

Orig­i­nal­ity can­not be taught. But the task of find­ing your own voice will be eased if you stop read­ing what the mar­ket­place calls hor­ror fic­tion and join me in an impor­tant bit of heresy:

Hor­ror is not a genre. It is an emotion.

It can be found in all of great lit­er­a­ture, not sim­ply that with lurid dust jack­ets. Read Con­rad. Read Faulkner. Read Kozin­ski. Read Bal­lard, Cormier, Fuentes, McGuane, Stone, Whit­te­more. Read and read and read of the ways in which writ­ers relate hor­rors with­out the stric­tures of genre.

Then return to your writ­ing with a new per­spec­tive, unguided by the pub­lish­ers who pack­age their prod­ucts for mass con­sump­tion with labels such as “hor­ror.” Rec­og­nize that the fic­tion that we hold dear­est, the fic­tion that you are seek­ing to write, is not a kind of fic­tion, meant to be con­fined to the ghetto of a spe­cial book­store shelf like sci­ence fic­tion or the western.

It is any and all kinds of fiction.

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