Are most horror novels too linear?

Something I was thinking of recently, is a problem with horror novels. The action can be too linear. I’m thinking of something I recently read, centred around a haunted/cursed house. As a reader, you know that something is going to emerge in this place which the happy couple have brought. It’s in the middle of nowhere, the history starts emerging and you are just waiting for the supernatural things to start, that were promised on the back cover. I admit that the idea is that we are supposed to be getting the tension while we get to know the characters.

The drawback is that if you don’t like the characters, it gets to be a long wait. True, you can play guess-the-victim. However, the problem for me is that it already feels familiar already. As you have guessed from the above paragraph, I was waiting for the moments when the monsters emerge or something supernatural happens. A lot of the surprise of the narrative felt as if it had gone.

A possible solution to this is to try to avoid a conventional narrative for telling the story, to stop the reader getting too relaxed. I’m not a fan of ‘It’ by Stephen King but that does have the story move in two different time periods. Or ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’ by Haruki Murakami. That appears to be two different narratives with the connection being gradually revealed. Or ‘House of Leaves’ by Mark Z. Danielewski. There is nothing set in stone, to say that a horror story has to be completely conventionally told. It could be told from different flashbacks, multiple viewpoints, starting with the ending and working backwards. The text could even move into different media as the story continues. I think that experimentation with the narrative will become more common, just to stop the reader getting too comfortable with the material.

Finally finished the first draft of the short story, I want to submit to an anthology. Unfortunately, it now has to go through the whole process of re-writing and re-drafting.