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Horror writers count their productivity in pages, and full-timers usually commit themselves to writing between eight and 12 a day. Dan Keohane puts down 1500 words during his lunch hour, writing without editing; Golden used to type 20 pages a day, but now aims for 10. Most have "trunk books": first, second, or even third novels that are so dreadful they’re hidden away like dead bodies. Some write under pseudonyms. Rick Hautala writes as the gender-neutral A.J. Matthews for Berkeley Books; the publisher asks him to write, under that alias, novels with a "female protagonist in a domestic drama with a supernatural element," though that’s what he enjoys writing, anyway. Holly Newstein and Ralph Bieber, who write collaboratively, came up with the pen name H.R. Howland after Jove, the publisher that bought their upcoming novel Ashes, decided that having both authors’ names on the book’s binding would be awkward. They picked the first letters of their first names and the last name Howland, because, Newstein says, it was "slightly creepy, but not over the top. It’s not H.R. Bloody-Eyeball."

For Newstein and Bieber, collaboration works well. Newstein says her writing partner is good at constructing plot twists and scenes, while her strength is character development. "He keeps my characters from being navel-gazers; I keep him from killing everybody."

I’m the Professor X of the group," says Christopher Golden. "People have a hard time pigeonholing me." It’s no wonder: in the past 12 years, the 37-year-old has published novels for young adults and adults, and even work-for-hire companions to comic-books incarnate like X-Men and Hellboy. He’s strung together Body of Evidence, a nine-book (soon to be 10) teen-thriller series that’s set in the fictional equivalent of Tufts, Somerset University, while his dark fantasy tale Straight On ’Til Morning is based on his Framingham adolescence. He’s also churned out "12 or 13" — again, he can’t remember exactly how many — studio-licensed Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels, including the best-selling Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide (a 304-page handbook of obscure factoids) and The Monster Book (detailed biographies of the Slayer’s otherworldly foes). And he’s flirted with Tinseltown more times that he can count. "My favorite Hollywood line ever was, ‘We want to be in the Christopher Golden business,’ " Golden recalls a producer telling him. "That’s such a completely obnoxious TV line. You almost can’t believe that people actually say stuff like that, but they actually do.

"I have a very odd career, by the standards of your average writer," Golden admits. That’s why he doesn’t find it insulting when people compare him to a pulp-fiction writer. "It’s about versatility," he says. The connection doesn’t imply that he’s a hack, he explains, but that he’s "capable of writing anything well."

A full-bearded man with a linebacker’s neck, Golden lives in Bradford with his wife and three children. By now, he’s established well enough that he supports his family on his single income. On the walls leading up to Golden’s second-floor office hang framed covers of his books: Of Masques and Martyrs, featuring a harlequin mask dribbling a blood teardrop; The Gathering Dark, depicting a bloodstain forming a fanged face; and Bikini, Golden’s first teen-horror book, from around 1995, with a B-movie-esque illustration of a two-piece bathing suit floating in water.

After graduating from Marion High School, Golden double-majored in European history and English at Tufts, with a creative-writing concentration. Even then, his ideas differed from those of his peers. "It was the late ’80s, during apartheid, and all my classmates wanted to write about marching on Washington," he remembers. "I wanted to write about zombies marching on Washington."

In his writing classes, he developed chapters that later became the basis for his first novel. "None of those people in those classes took me seriously, and as far as I know, I’m the only one from those classes who became a professional writer," he says proudly. After college, Golden moved to New York and landed an executive-assistant job at Billboard’s parent company. But in 1992, he quit when he sold his first novel, Of Saints and Shadows, a work he describes as a "huge, absolutely disgusting, gratuitous-sex-and-violence, massive-action fantasy" that pits brainwashed vampires against the Catholic Church.

Twelve years later, Stephen King has blurbed Golden’s upcoming novel Wildwood Road, which King compares to the suspenseful storytelling of Rosemary’s Baby author Ira Levin. "Basically, I do what I do for a living because of him," says Golden of King. Yet, his profession still makes people look at him funny. "A friend of my wife’s said, ‘How can you sleep next to him at night?’ My wife said, ‘If you were married to a surgeon, would you be afraid that you’d wake up and find him operating on you?’ "

Rick Hautala has a nickname that makes his gray hair bristle: "The other Maine horror writer." "I don’t want to look like I’m just coat-tailing [Stephen King], so it’s been a bit of a delicate balance," says the Rockport, Maine, native. "I’m much more aware of him than he is of me." Hautala knows King from the creative-writing program at the University of Maine at Orono; when he finished his first novel, it was King who hooked him up with an agent. "When Steve sold his first book, it really was a revelation to me: ‘Wow, it’s not only dead white guys who get book contracts.’ You read Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Poe, but they’re all dead. Seeing him selling Carrie really was an eye-opener.

"We were stupid little freshman at the time," Hautala jokes. But it wasn’t something in the Orono water that caused their shared vocation. "It might’ve been something we smoked."

In the business for nearly 25 years, Hautala saw the waking-nightmare industry skyrocket in the ’80s, collapse in the ’90s, and then recently start rising again. "We all thought we were going to be mainstream bestsellers in the ’80s, have movies done of our books," he recalls. Now there’s a whole new generation of horror writers in their 20s flooding the market.

Paul Tremblay isn’t in his 20s, but he does represent a transition away from the earnest, formulaic horror stories of the zombie-werewolf-vampire past. He’s sold stories to Razor and has a piece in Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis 3, a benefit collection featuring works by Peter Straub, comedian Margaret Cho, and Metallica frontman James Hetfield. Stewart O’Nan and Poppy Z. Brite have become like mentors to him — he met O’Nan at a reading and they’ve stayed in contact. Using horror the way Kurt Vonnegut used science fiction, Tremblay’s work is deadpan, ironic, sometimes twisted, even hip. A few of the pieces in his short-story collection Compositions for the Young and Old, a compilation inspired by a Bob Mould song, wouldn’t seem out of place in McSweeney’s.

Tremblay has also sold work to Gothic.net, which has similarly been moving away from the overwrought myths. Gothic.net’s submission guidelines discourage authors from sending stories about hackneyed characters like "serial killers, the mad or the ones slowly approaching madness, druggies, vampires, werewolves, zombies, witches, demons, dark angels, the occult, ghosts or the raised dead." Tremblay is also the fiction editor of Chiaroscuro. "The upcoming young writers that we’ve published definitely are focusing more on the human experience," he says. "What it means to have to live through something tragic and what it means to have to make a tough decision that could have tragic consequences. As opposed to being chased by some guy with a knife."

And that shift seems just about right. As Holly Newstein says, horror writers shouldn’t take themselves too seriously. "In this business, you have to laugh or you’ll just give up."

Christopher Golden and Rick Hautala sign books with Michael Laimo on October 29, at 7:30 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, 1 Worcester Road, in Framingham. Call (508) 628-5567. Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com