To be honest we don’t publish a lot of contemporary horror writing from local authors and don’t have any recent releases.
— Caroline Newbury, VP, Marketing and Corporate Communications, Penguin Random House India
Horror is a slow growing category. Well, we don’t get so many manuscripts for horror. The titles that we have published (eg. More Ghost Stories of Shimla Hills by Minakshi Chaudhry and Afterlife: Ghost Stories from Goa by Jessica Faleiro) have done moderately well.
— Kapish Mehra, Managing Director, Rupa Publications
We get a lot of anthologies from big publishing houses, and many people are buying those.
The number is not as high when it comes to new Indian authors writing horror, but when those books do come, there is a good demand for them.
— Asad Beg, Midland Bookshop, South Extension I
The genre is definitely picking up at the moment. The sales of these books are top ten for sure. We had a book last year with an author called Shantanu Dhar called The Company Red. It was India’s first vampire story. The sequel is coming. I think it’s the new rage of vampire horror that’s really working. So now, if we get hundred manuscripts a month, at least forty-odd are about vampires and ghosts. It’s got a lot of people writing it.
— Ajay Mago, Publisher, Om Books International
The joke in India has always been that our horror stories make you laugh and the comic ones horrify. Well-crafted horror, in fact, has been extremely hard to come by. And then horror generally needs to balance sheets horrors, which leads to a vicious cycle. Thrillers and horror stories are representative of a certain kind of maturity of readership and we are just about getting there. Our young adult series, Adventures of Nikki, by GS Dutt, has elements of horror, and so does recent books like Ten Days by Leena Nandan, but no out-and-out horror novels yet. Don’t seem to be offered too many either.
— Shobit Arya, Founder and Publisher, Wisdom Tree
