Tales of the Moderately Disturbing

I just got back from a trip to my local Barnes & Noble, and discovered that the Horror section has been reduced to an end-cap on the Literature aisle. Yikes! And the end-cap only had all the usual suspects: King, Saul, etc.

Is Horror further on the decline? If so, I've been reading all these genre mags, like City Slab, and can perhaps see a trend. Is it just me, or is most of what passes for HORROR these days more like, moderately unwholesome, disturbing and/or depressing, rather than horrorific? When we read Datlow's YBFH, I thought, "well, maybe it's been a bad year for horror." Nothing, really, gave me that electric thrill up and down the spine like I got the first time I picked up a book by, say, Clive Barker. Then I thought, "Well, maybe it's just Ellen's taste," since I find about half the stories she puts on SCIFICTION to be trivial, gross and dull. But, now I've plowed through Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales, City Slab, Flesh & Blood, and I find the same dull tone there. Where's the excitement?

If horror results from "fear for the soul," can we have horror in a materialistic age in which the soul plays second fiddle to the latest Chinese-manufactured gizmo? I read Ellen's interview in City Slab where she says she "doesn't believe in the supernatural," or in "life after death." Hell's Bells! Then what's the point? I'm not suggesting only the uber-religious can write good horror, but perhaps if horror has become only a prop for modern psychobabble, then that's why its market share is falling. It's just not satisfying.