When Clive Barker addressed the Horror Writers of America at their annual awards ceremony in Redondo Beach this summer, he sent chills down his colleagues' spines.

"You guys just aren't scary anymore," declared Barker, formerly horror's \o7 enfant terrible \f7 and a newcomer to Southern California.

Stories about vampires, demons, exorcisms and werewolves are no longer frightening--certainly not in Los Angeles, where freeway shootings, an AIDS epidemic, interminable gang warfare and unbreathable air abound.

Unless you people get real, warned Barker, you risk becoming silly, and ultimately irrelevant.

Barker's call for a new age in horror was sounded here first for a reason. In recent years, the center of gravity for what is now called dark fantasy appears to have shifted away from the East Coast, where it has reigned during most of this century under the twin stars of H. P. Lovecraft and, more recently, Stephen King.

This year, the drift westward became a virtual stampede because of the recent softening of the book-buying market. Dozens of horror writers--some from as far afield as the United Kingdom and even the Far East--have settled in Southern California. Feeding off of a heady mix of local fears and universal human anxieties, they are contributing to the glimmers of a new kind of horror that can best be described not as dark fantasy, but, perhaps, as sunlit suspense. At the least, they have transformed the region into a New Jerusalem of fear.

Traditionally, these writers have come eager to work in film. And indeed, the film industry has affected their work--and behavior--in fundamental ways.

"People are very conscious of opportunities to adapt their books to scripts," says Jessica Horsting, editor of an irreverent, Sherman Oaks-based literary journal, Midnight Graffiti.

She cites a recently published novel that has a 200-page chase scene she terms purposeless other than it would look good on film: "That happens a lot out here. I don't think this town is always good for literature."

But horror writers also genuinely enjoy basking in the psychic bleed-off of a region that wallows as much in terror as it does sunshine.

"There is a dysfunctional compression going on here," says R.C. Matheson, son of horror grandmaster Richard Matheson and a television and film writer/producer who is consolidating a second career as a horror writer with his upcoming novel about the TV business, "Created By."