Elizabeth Erwin and Dawn Keetley Fall 2023 The genesis for this special issue was a hotly debated Twitter (now “X”) thread in which the term “literary horror” was discussed. While some viewed the term as a way of parsing out mainstream potential, others viewed the term as a disparaging way to apply to books the […]
Steffen Hantke While horror cinema has been a lively field of academic inquiry for decades, attracting young scholars who are in equal measure driven by their love for the genre and equipped with a keen sense of its historical scope and theoretical intricacies, horror literature has largely failed to match this attraction. This may have […]
Amira Shokr Horror texts incite in us a sense of fear. As readers and audiences, what we do with those emotions revolutionize how the horror genre works. When we choose to locate and analyze the horrors within a text, we hold the power to identify and dismantle the boundaries that the text is using horror […]
Irene Pagano Lonely, unwanted or neglected children often star as main characters in fantastical narratives. In the case of children’s horror, as Justine Gieni highlights in Punishing the Abject Child, this tendency originally derives from the entanglement of a proposed pedagogical intent and a willingness to challenge the strictures imposed by the former via the […]
Emma Hallock Traumatic loss and the grief that follows are central in Tamsyn Muir’s 2020 novel Harrow the Ninth. The second installment in The Locked Tomb series, Harrow the Ninth picks up where the first book left off, with the death of Gideon Nav, a cavalier, or swordswoman, who has sworn herself to Harrowhark (Harrow) […]
David Edwards “The movie that was (sic.) released is not the movie that was shot at Pinewood, and it’s not the movie that Clive wrote. If anybody has read “Cabal,” then there’s the movie, because the movie that was shot…is a very faithful, almost page-by-page faithful, adaptation of “Cabal.” And Fox, in my opinion, screwed […]
Kat Albrecht Despite a recent resurgence of nostalgia, pulp fiction horror books of the 1970s and 1980s are often pigeonholed as ‘cheap thrills’ or low-brow fiction.[i] This treatment mirrors some criticisms of horror films from the 1980s that get slotted into a category of creature features panned for showy special effects in scripts devoid of […]
Jacob Babb For a couple of decades now, horror has not been afraid to go meta. Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) and its subsequent sequels popularized the concept of characters being familiar with the tropes and conventions of horror films and using their horror knowledge to help them survive. Of course, as Murray Leeder notes, Scream […]
Gavin F. Hurley How do we evaluate diverse approaches to horror fiction: both old and new, canonical and non-canonical? How do we assess the artistry? Naturally, when assessing horror literature, “literary merit” is often evoked. We can question whether works of fiction have literary merit—and how much literary merit. But what about rhetorical merit? The […]