Stephen King is apparently afraid that he may have lost the capacity to make the rest of us quake with terror. Doctor Sleep, his sequel to The Shining, is out next Tuesday and he's jittery about his readers' familiarity with the tropes and tricks of horror stories. It's good to know that there are still things in this world that can shake up even this most seasoned fright-meister. But is it really true that audiences are more terror savvy?

Certainly, it can be annoying when, yet again, a story ends with the villain being shot from behind by someone who's appeared just on time to save the imperilled hero or heroine. This really shouldn't be allowed any more. (It's so great in The Shining when Halloran, the chef, completely fails to do this.) But surely brooding, abandoned buildings, axe-wielding psychopaths, children seemingly possessed by malevolent spirits – among all the other staples of horror fiction – haven't lost their power to frighten people.

While it might be difficult to arrange the components of frighteningness in new and surprising ways, it doesn't look as though humanity is going to tire of nastiness any time soon. If the bottom line of most horror fiction is that it's possible to be killed in very unpleasant circumstances, horror will presumably continue to exist for as long as this is true. In other words, for as long as human beings live in free societies.

Still, I challenge any contemporary reader to be even remotely disturbed by 18th-century blockbusters such as Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. It's so boring! A lengthy description of a candlelit corridor is not, in itself, going to keep you awake at night. It might even send you to sleep in the daytime. When you're used to the narrative craftiness of Stephen King, William Peter Blatty, or almost any novel you can pick up in an airport, wafty stories about insipid girls running scared through the countryside really won't do. But Radcliffe's novels were written over 200 years ago and The Shining only came out in 1977. Is it really feasible that we've changed so much in such a short time?

Perhaps one of the more chilling recent developments in horror fiction comes from the world of neuroscience. Hollywood producers, under ever more pressure to guarantee success, are apparently turning to MRI scans to help them better manipulate our emotions. What do male and female brains respond to? What's the optimum amount of time for suspense to be sustained? What are the statistically scariest moments in cinema history, speaking neuron-wise, and how can they be cobbled together into one infallible screamfest? In other words, how can our brains be most excessively, and profitably, stimulated?

What is a mere human author to do when pitted against that sort of technological leg-up? Especially one who's already written over 50 novels and might be forgiven for finding himself hard-pressed to come up with fresh ideas? Maybe just carry on being the sort of supernatural-inspired sentimentalist that King fans know and love.

King's answer to the problem of writing stories that affect people isn't to look at printouts of the electrical activity inside their skulls and the stimuli that produced them (as dollar signs light up in his own head), but to make people care about his characters so much, by making them so understandable and easy to identify with, that he can scare the reader "in a really honourable way", as he so charmingly phrases it, by simply putting these fine human specimens in danger.

In that sense he's far more Jane Austen than Saw XIII, which makes me hope that Doctor Sleep stands some chance of being as diverting as its prequel. And even if it's only half as good, it'll still be sincere, old-fashioned entertainment.