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Posted on March 19, 2022

Looking into the Mirror: A Review of Alma Katsu’s The Fervor

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Alma Katsu, author of historical horror novels like The Hunger (2018) and The Deep (2020), returns to the genre in her latest The Fervor (releasing on April 26, 2022). Like her other novels, The Fervor centers on a main historical event, playing with the timeline and details ever so much. This time, readers are placed in 1940s America during Japanese internment, a time when American exceptionalism, isolationism, and, of course, xenophobia ran rampant. The links to our current cultural moment are pretty plain on the page. Like us, the characters are wrestling with a strange communicable illness thought to originate from Asia, and they witness a marked increase in the attacks on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in response. Unlike Covid-19 and the increased violence against AAPI people in the States and around the world, the sickness, “The Fervor,” is one part Japanese mythos and another part experimental bioweapon.

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Posted on February 24, 2022

Review of Gothic: An Illustrated History by Roger Luckhurst

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Gothic: An Illustrated History, by Roger Luckhurst (Princeton University Press, 2021)

At the climax of Viy, the intensely Gothic 1967 film adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s original short tale, the hapless seminarian Khoma is assaulted by a phantasmagoria of ghouls and goblins. Grasping hands burst from the walls, sinister, bat-faced demons creep out of the shadows, skeletons clatter their bones and chatter their teeth. Eventually, goaded by the witch who summoned them and empowered by the great demon Viy himself, the cavorting cavalcade break through the magic circle that surrounds Khoma and beat him to the floor. The last we see of the young man is as a motionless figure lain spread-eagled on the floor, dazed if not dead and his hair whitened by terror. It is a dizzying, joyful and unsettling piece of cinema that leaves the unwitting viewer in a similar state.

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Posted on February 13, 2022

You’re Pissing on My People: Midsommar and the Revenge of the Research Subject

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From The Body Snatcher (1945) to Black Christmas (1974, 2019), from Suspiria (1977, 2018) to The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), the academy serves as a common setting in the horror genre. But less frequent is the use of the academy not as a site of horror, but as a source of horror, particularly for those whose knowledges and customs the Ivory Tower simultaneously excludes and exploits. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhuwai Smith (2012) points to the failure of Western academic traditions to attend to the material realities of colonized peoples, all in the name of those Enlightenment requirements that research be objective, apolitical, and distanced from its objects. She claims, “Taking apart the story, revealing underlying texts, and giving voice to things that are often known intuitively does not help people to improve their current conditions. It provides words, perhaps, an insight that explains certain experiences—but it does not prevent someone from dying” (Smith, 2012: 3). Read more

Posted on February 6, 2022

The Villa and the Vortex: Supernatural Stories by Elinor Mordaunt

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The Villa and the Vortex: Supernatural Stories (1916-1924), Elinor Mordaunt, edited by Melissa Edmundson (Handheld Press, 2021).

Melissa Edmundson’s Women’s Weird anthologies were, for me, an invaluable window into the work of a number of long-neglected women writers and a trove of weird, unsettling short fiction of astonishing breadth. Stories like the cosmic horror of Francis Stevens’ ‘Unseen – Unfeared’, or the deeply oneiric tragedy of ‘The House’ by Katherine Mansfield, demonstrated that women writers are not just the equal of their male counterparts but, often, far exceed them. We should be thankful, then, that Edmundson has continued her partnership with Handheld Press to begin a series of single-author collections, starting with The Villa and the Vortex, a retrospective of Elinor Mordaunt’s strange, melancholy tales. Read more

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