splatterpunk n. 2

an author of splatterpunk writing

SF Criticism

  • 1987 D. B. Silva in Horrorstruck Sept.—Oct. 5/1

    The splatter punks are doing some excellent stuff. Ray Garton’s Live Girls is one of the best horror novels I've read in a long time.

  • 1988 Nova Express Summer 18/2

    But most of all, the new style gave the nascent splatterpunks an unprecedented freedom to do whatever they wanted to. In short, a new generation of horror writers found (like the tag line for Barker’s ‘Hellraiser’) that ‘there are no limits’.

  • 1988 Nova Express Summer 17/1

    They're young. They're gifted. And they're ready to rock and roll. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Splatterpunks.

  • 1988 Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine Oct. 25/1

    The New Horror’s most visible practicioners [sic] are a rude, unruly lot. Hip to the tendency of culture to instantly stencil labels on nascent movements, they've styled themselves ‘Splatterpunks’, in a deliberate, preemptive strike.

  • 1990 Thrust Winter 21/2

    There were only three deaths, and nothing there you wouldn’t see on prime-time TV. The treatment…was the work of our very own John Skip and Craig Spector, the original Splatterpunks, who actually didn’t splatter very much.

  • 2006 B. Keene Introduction in Long Last Call (2007) 3 page image Brian Keene bibliography

    I worshipped the Splatterpunks. Read every magazine article on them that I could find. Bought their books. Clamored for more. As a kid in the ’70s, I decorated my room with posters of KISS and Farrah Fawcett. Years later, it was the Splatterpunks. I wanted to be these guys. They had it all—women, booze, best-selling horror novels, and the adulation of the fans. Although they might kill me for saying so, they were sort of like the genre’s first boy band.


Research requirements

antedating 1987

Earliest cite

F. Paul Wilson in Horrorstruck

Research History
Jeff Prucher submitted a 1988 cite from Philip Nutman's "Inside the New Horror" in Twilight Zone.
Jeff Prucher submitted a 1987 cite from an article by F. Paul Wilson in "Horrorstruck".
Ben Ostrowsky submitted a 2006 cite from Brian Keene.

Added to the OED in March 2002. Earliest cite in the OED: 1991.

Last modified 2021-09-13 11:25:10
In the compilation of some entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries in OED.