GenresFiction
Horror
Dread, the body, the other.
Horror is a genre about fear that the reader has agreed to feel, which is a strange bargain and a generous one. They want to be unsettled, not merely informed that a character is scared. The difference is usually patience. You let a room, a habit, or a noise become wrong before you explain it, and you stay close enough to a person that their fear has a body attached.
Gore is a tool, not a requirement. Some of the best horror is hardly violent at all, and some of it is frankly horrible because the story needs it to be. What tends to fail is a monster, a ghost, or a curse with no relationship to the people in the book. The fear should mean something to them, even if you never spell the meaning out in a speech. And if you do explain the horror completely, be sure the explanation is more interesting than the dread was.
The kinds of book inside it
Gothic
Old houses, family history, and weather do a lot of the haunting, and the past is usually more active than the present would like.
Folk horror
The land and the customs of a place are the threat, and outsiders learn the rules late, which is rather the point.
Cosmic
People are small in a universe that isn't interested in them, and the fear comes from scale and knowledge more than from a creature in the hall.
Psychological
You are not sure the world is wrong, or only the person watching it, and the book can keep both possibilities alive for a long time.
Haunted house
A building holds the trouble, so the geography of the house matters, and so does the reason anyone is still sleeping there.
Survival
The immediate problem is staying alive, and character comes out in what people will do, and refuse to do, under that pressure.
Body horror
The body stops being reliable, which is frightening because nobody can leave theirs behind, and the writing should be precise rather than gleeful.
Quiet horror
Very little is shown outright. The unease accumulates, and the worst moment may be a sentence the reader only understands a page later.
When you want a first sketch, Storywell can draft a story summary in this vein. You are still the one who writes the book. Compose an idea.