Aerosmith frontman Stephen Tyler may have sung, “Pink, it’s my new obsession” back in the glory days of late-90s rock, but it wasn’t until the early 2020s that the horror genre fell in love with pink — and, with the success of 2023’s Barbie that put Pantone 219C front and center in the current color culture collective, it’s unlikely that the trend will end any time soon.
When it comes to pink in horror, though, like Australia’s famous “pink lake” Lake Hillier—safe to swim in but inadvisable to drink — the tide is just starting to rise, and there are not one but two beautiful pink waves washing through the literary landscape today: the works referred to in the subgenre now called “pink horror” and all the absolutely breathtaking pink book covers flooding the subgenre. From Mona Awad’s Bunny to Rachel Harrison’s debut The Return and Sarah Gailey’s Gothic Just Like Home, today, pink horror is all the rage — literally.
But first, let’s talk “pink horror” to better understand what this concept is all about (and no, it’s not all strawberry milk girly horror — though it certainly can be).
While the themes of “pink horror” and women’s roles in horror are not at all new, many give credit to author Wendy Dalrymple, who said, “Pink horror takes back all of the real-life horrors that we who identify as femme experience just living our everyday life and shoves it back in your face,” for pioneering the term. As a subgenre, pink horror focuses on women’s issues and women’s stories in a direct response to misogyny, societal pressures on the construct of womanhood, and the historical and systemic silencing of women’s voices in horror.
It’s an inclusive subgenre that recognizes that there is no singular feminine experience while celebrating unlikeable and flawed female characters in stories that range from slow-burning Gothics to bloodthirsty slashers and twists on Final Girl tropes to body horror, literary horror, dark prose and poetry, and beyond. Works of pink horror may tackle themes of abuse, grief, identity, or they may explore the complicated female dynamics of self-love, female friendship, motherhood, sisterhood, love, lust … rage. There may be monsters of either the supernatural or real-life variety. There may be internal conflict or external pressures. Whatever the story, pink horror stories all revolve around one central truth: No one knows horror like a woman.
Today, from our stories to the way we tell them, women are taking horror back, and we’re not ashamed to express our feminism — or perhaps, our dismissal thereof — through the pink brand that’s been put on us, for many women, since birth. But it’s not just authors and readers enjoying the pink horror craze. Cover designers are having just as much fun stretching their creative wings and embracing the color. From Big 5 publishers to indies and small presses, pink is becoming not just a subgenre by content, but a beautiful beacon on bookshelves — and its burning bright.
“What I find most thrilling about a pink palette, is that it immediately offers a sense of a particular feeling. The feeling pink brings can be that of madness, of tension, disturbance, sweetness, sophistication — it can also transport you to a time and place,” says Katie Klim, who created the UK-edition cover of Bless Your Heart for Solaris Books, which features a sassy Southern lady in her coffin bed, winking over a smirk and two bleeding vampire bites. “Bless Your Heart introduced me to the Evans women at their funeral parlor in Texas, [and] I was immediately taken back in time to a beauty parlor in Northern Wisconsin where my Grandma used to go and get her ‘permanents’— where ladies gathered to do hair and make-up, to gossip, plot and conquer. There was a sweetness to it, with an underlying element of power and force.”
Her vision for a pink cover then? “The woman on this cover knows something,” says Klim. “She IS something more.”
Designer Najla Qamber of Qamber Designs and Media, who designed the cover for Tiffany Meuret’s Little Bird (Black Spot Books), also shared her thoughts on why she’s using pink in horror today. “There’s something about pink that immediately screams Powerful Woman!,” says Qamber. “It’s the one color to symbolize strong female elements in a genre filled with black and red. Pink just brings a whole new, fresh level of horror to the genre.”
Says Tiffany Meuret, “I fell in love with this cover immediately — it just captures all the eccentricity of the book with such perfection that it stuns me to this day. One of my top moments as a published author was seeing the cover of Little Bird for the first time.”
While it’s good wisdom not to judge a book by its cover, readers should expect power in pink.
As for the future of pink horror? Well, in the words of “Mother Horror” Sadie Hartmann herself, “Pink horror books are the best of both worlds, appealing to the dark and whimsical sides of our hearts. We don’t have nearly enough of them.”
The Chill Quill is a twice-monthly Horror, Suspense and Speculative Fiction column by Lindy Ryan. Read previous editions here.
