Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern

Michele Brittany is the book review editor for the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and is the co-chair of the Ann Radcliffe Conference held in conjunction with Horror Writers Association’s annual Stokercon. She lives in Glendale, Arizona. Nicholas Diak is a pop culture scholar specializing in Italian spy films, post-industrial and synthwave music, and the works of H.P. Lovecraft. He has contributed essays, editorials and reviews to a variety of books, journals, and pop culture websites. He lives in Glendale, Arizona.

“Engaging”—Horror Buzz

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsForeword: The Truth of Horror: A Brief History of the Genre’s Nonfiction Works … and Why We Need Them (Lisa Morton)Introduction (Michele Brittany and Nicholas Diak)Section One: Horror Writers Who Forged New Ground“The mist of death is on me”: Ann Radcliffe’s Unexplained Supernatural in Gaston de Blondeville (Elizabeth Bobbitt)Jekyll and Hyde Everywhere: Inconsistency and Disparity in the Real World (Erica McCrystal)ScatterGories: Class Upheaval, Social Chaos and the Horrors of Category Crisis in World War Z (J. Rocky Colavito)Section Two: SpotlightingHorror Writers Marjorie Bowen and the Third Fury (John C. Tibbetts)“When the cage came up there was something crouched ­a-top of it”: The Haunted Tales of L.T.C. Rolt (Danny Rhodes)Richard Laymon’s Rhetorical Style: Minimalism, Suspense and Negative Space (Gavin F. Hurley)Four Quadrants of Success: The Metalinguistics of Author Protagonists in the Fiction of Stephen King (James Arthur Anderson)Section Three: Exploring Literary Theory in Horror“The symptoms of possession”: Gender, Power and Trauma in Late 20th Century Horror Novels (Bridget E. Keown)“Not a Bedtime Story”: Investigating Textual Interactions Between the Horror Genre and Children’s Picture Books (Emily Anctil)Synchronic Horror and the Dreaming: A Theory of Aboriginal Australian Horror and Monstrosity (Naomi Simone Borwein)“Gelatinous green immensity”: Weird Fiction and the Grotesque Sublime (Johnny Murray)Section Four: Disease, Viruses and Death in HorrorNight of the Living Dead, or Endgame: Jan Kott, Samuel Beckett and Zombies (Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.)Koji Suzuki’s Ring: A World Literary Perspective (Frazer Lee)Mapping Digital ­Dis-Ease: Representations of Movement and Technology in Jim Sonzero’s Pulse and Stephen King’s Cell(Rahel Sixta Schmitz)Afterword: Guardians of the Damned: Horror Scholarship and the Library (Becky Spratford)About the ContributorsIndex