This special issue on horror literature ranges from the exploration of queer sexuality in a late nineteenth-century horror novella to explorations of creativity, ecological crisis, sexual taboo, trauma and grief in twenty-first-century horror fiction. The incredible span and diversity of the fiction taken up by the essays here – and the importance and complexity of […]
Isaiah Frost Rivera Though his interest in ecohorror is largely attributed to the notoriously maligned The Happening (2008), M. Night Shyamalan has consistently displayed throughout his career a “fervent environmental activism” (Flasz). His films, which range from folk horrors such as The Village (2004) to sci-fi thrillers like After Earth (2013), often position the natural […]
Carina Stopenski Queer love is one that lives at the margins, and the power dynamic relationship, more commonly known as the BDSM relationship, is no exception. To be sexually abject, cast out to the margins of society, is typical in narratives of queer identity. When a power relationship is introduced, it adds an extra layer […]
Dawn Keetley British horror writer Bernard Taylor has been completely ignored in the recent swell of folk horror criticism. He is not mentioned, for instance, in Adam Scovell’s Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017), my first go-to for folk horror (especially British). At least two of his novels, however, The Reaping (1980) and […]
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 […]