E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ghost writers Horror is back, but this time with attitude and a sense of character development BY CAMILLE DODERO

Vampires order luncheon special number nine — a glistening dish of spicy beef and vegetables with extra sauce on the side — at Chef Chang’s House, in Brookline. Or at least that’s what Lawson, Boston’s very own vampire enforcer, ate here in 2002’s The Invoker, the second novel in Jon F. Merz’s mass-market series starring the pistol-packing bloodsucker. Lawson loves Chef Chang’s; he brings guests here in three of Merz’s four novels.

Not that the restaurant’s wait staff would have known that Lawson is a creature of the night. "The vampires in my books — they aren’t the typical vampire," says Merz, 35, on a recent afternoon, before ordering Lawson’s favorite dish. "They’re not undead; they’re an evolutionary offshoot of humanity. They don’t live in coffins. They can walk around in the sunlight and eat garlic and all that stuff. They can even go to church." Merz’s vampires not only look like humans, they also live in Jamaica Plain, hang out in Harvard Square, and drink Bombay Sapphire in Lansdowne Street nightclubs. And Merz’s Lawson series has drawn such a cult following that independent booksellers are hawking The Fixer, his out-of-print debut that originally sold for $5.99, for between $64.65 and $199.99 on Amazon.com.

Horror, it appears, is back. After a mid-’80s horror explosion and a subsequent drought during the ’90s, writers like Merz are gradually gaining more acceptance, getting more projects, and flirting with Hollywood a little more. With the success of films like The Ring, the small press Borderlands, and mass-market-horror publisher Leisure Books, there’s not only an onslaught of young, hungry gothic writers who’ve flooded the market, but increased mainstream interest. And some of those younger writers are telling stories in a hipper way, moving away from the standard widow’s-peaked vampires, moon-howling werewolves, and decaying zombies. This is horror, after all, and the best way to frighten readers is to surprise them.

"The direction of horror I see is little bit more ironic, a little less cliché," says 33-year-old Paul Tremblay, fiction editor of Chiaroscuro webzine. "The characters come first. They might not be likable or be normal, but they represent how real people deal with tragedy — not how they deal with being eaten by a werewolf."

Perhaps the best local sign of horror’s resurgence is the establishment of the New England chapter of the Horror Writers Association, a three-year-old offshoot of a national nonprofit founded in 1986 by Joe Lansdale, Robert McCammon, and Dean Koontz, among others. HWA-NE (www.horror.org/ne) has 29 members; the most prolific is Christopher Golden, a Tufts graduate with more than eight million copies of his works in print, who’s churned out so much copy that he claims not to know how many books he’s written. There’s also Stoughton resident Tremblay, a high-school math teacher whose wryly told short stories are more Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) than best-selling bogeyman Koontz. And there’s Dan Keohane, co-chair of HWA-NE, who specializes in Christian horror, a God-glorifying genre its publishers prefer to classify as "suspense," in which, says Keohane, "you can’t swear and you can’t have sex, but you can kill as many people in your book as you want."

"We’re pretty normal people," says Holly Newstein, one of nine women in HWA-NE, who lives outside Portland, Maine. True, horror writers don’t have dismembered heads under their beds. But as a group, they do see things differently than most folks. They write stories with names like "Electroshock Therapy for Mimes" and "Chum." They publish short-story collections called The Woman at the Funeral and Christmas Trees and Monkeys. They appear in 12 Scary Guys, a 2005 calendar that marks disastrous dates, like the Titanic’s sinking and the first spontaneous combustion, instead of holidays. They like it when things go bump in the night.

"When I have a nightmare and wake up screaming in a cold sweat, I go, ‘Oh man, that was cool,’ " says 55-year-old Rick Hautala, Newstein’s husband, who’s written 28 horror novels in his 25-year career. "I’d go into the attic or the cellar on purpose without the lights. I always liked that eerie, creepy feeling."

"My wife said, ‘You really should write contemporary fiction. The everyday, normal-people-type stories. Those sell better,’ " says Keohane. "So one time we were camping, and I was like, ‘All right, I’ll write this story about a campground.’ So I’m thinking about it. And then I picture these things flying out of the lake and everyone getting eaten. And then I got excited about the story. So then I had to admit, ‘I guess I’m a horror writer.’ "

The New England chapter of the Horror Writers Association doesn’t require members to sell their work professionally, which makes the group more like a loose-knit social club for networking, book signings, and appearances — unlike the national 777-member HWA, which recently amended its rules to require that members have been paid at least once for their writing (minimum $25 for a short story; $200 for a book-length manuscript). For a while, there’s been a trend toward self-publishing in the horror-writing biz, but HWA frowns on it; in self-publishing, there’s no editing process, and no external validation is necessary. In many cases, those who publish their own work use the term "writer" loosely — as in, you are a writer because you can pay someone to publish your words. You don’t have to be very good.

If you want to be good, you have to start writing. Those who want to be horror writers aren’t pursuing a traditional path, so they have to make their own. If they’re young enough, they study creative writing at school. If they’re out of school, they hold down day jobs, banging out spooky tales in their spare time. If they have a family, they pound at the keyboard while their kids nap. They teach at high schools, and sneak away to write on their lunch hours. Some even write on the job. Take Jon Merz, who wrote two novels while working as a security guard for Fidelity Investments. Management fired him when it found one of his 90,000-word novels on a company computer. "They’re like, ‘You can’t do this!’ " Merz recalls. "And I said, ‘Well, at least I’m not sleeping like the other security guards.’ "

In fact, his guard job was where Merz got the inspiration for the first short story he sold. "I used to deal with bike couriers. And I was sitting there thinking, ‘Wow, what if they weren’t just carrying packages, what if they were carrying, say, injectable diseases?’ " The result was "I, the Courier," which Merz sold for five dollars to Rictus magazine. "I still have the five-dollar check hanging above my computer," he says. "Above that, I have a couple-thousand-dollar check for some nonfiction work that I did. Then I have an open space above for my next big paycheck. I think, exponentially, the next check has to be five million dollars."

But horror writers aren’t in it for the money. Cemetery Dance, a bimonthly magazine with a feature column devoted to what’s described as "exclusive insider information" about Stephen King, doles out three to five cents per word for a story; for pieces not longer than 5000 words, the maximum payment is $150. Chiaroscuro, funded by notoriously low-paying Leisure Books, pays five cents a word for previously unpublished fiction up to 4000 words, with a $200 maximum. Contrast that with a mainstream-fiction magazine like Razor, in which Paul Tremblay published a short story and earned $1500. Rick Hautala’s smallest book advance was $2500, in 1980. His largest was $85,000. "I’d like those days again," he says.