A swing of the pendulum: the horror literature that’s making its way up – Cherwell Online

There are a few horror stories thattend to get academic and critical attentionFrankenstein, Dracula,The Turn of the Screw, The Yellow Wallpaper, maybe I Have NoMouth And I Must Scream or something by Edgar Allen Poe. Everything else tendsto be blanketed as bottom-of-the-barrel pulp, dismissed as non-literary popularfiction.

Recently I encountered an essay byJane Tompkins, commenting on the critical reception of 19th-century womensnovels, which could easily describe the sort of elitism that claims theinferiority of genre fiction. She notes that critics have taught generationsof students to equate popularity with debasement, emotionality withineffectivenessanything that is read by millions stinks of the unwashedmasses; for decades even Dickens was merely a great entertainer, in the wordsof F.R. Leavis. His criticism may be pass, but the assumptions it is groundedin are still going strong. Just look at how few sci-fi, fantasy or horror filmsmake it to the Oscars.

But (to make a rather silly referenceto Poe) the pendulum is swinging the other way. Modern academics are reexamininggenre fiction, helped by a number of critical movements breaking down literaryelitism, and theres a world of horror which is intelligent, complex and, mostimportantly, terrifying. Thats why Id like to nominate five counterparts tothe literary horror stories Ive cited, as examples of what I think modernhorror has to offer.

The stories on this list are classicsfor a reason, and even now Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaperis spine-chillingly intense (perhaps because it hasnt been adapted andparodied to death). Its a justifiably iconic feminist text and portrait of mentalinstability, and the best counterpart to it is Asa Nonamis Now Youre Oneof Us. About a young woman slowly becoming suspicious that something iswrong with her husbands family, I first read it on the way to a restaurant,and by the time I was there I literally felt nauseous. Theres no violence orsupernatural scares, just a terrifying portrait of gaslighting and emotionalmanipulation. It takes the themes of Gilmans story and places them in thecontext of the dark side of Japanese traditions and hierarchies, weaving astory that can sicken and fascinate.

Next on the list is a counterpart to Dracula.While I considered some modern vampire novels, I settled on a left-field choicethat takes the fear of invasion and societal destruction that Bram Stokerexplores in a new direction. Liu Cixins The Three-Body Problem and itssequels are technically sci-fi, but I found them disturbing enough to merit aspot on this list. Instead of vampiric invaders, this novel imagines aninvading alien fleet and a terrifyingly plausible explanation for theirhostility. Instead of heroic men of the British Empire defeating a rapaciousforeigner, its a world rooted in the real horrors of the Cultural Revolutionand international politics. And while in Stokers novel the Count crumbles intodust, in this series there are no easy solutions, only a bleak race to delaydoomsday.

Even as a devotee of Henry James, Istruggle to call The Turn of the Screw a horror story. Its a hauntingpsychological tale that merits multiple re-reads, but I find that James slowand complex prose takes the horror out of the story. This may soundhypocritical when the book Im about to suggest is experimental both in plotand format, but House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is The Turn ofthe Screws perfect counterpoint. James is a short story set in aVictorian mansion, while Danielewskis is a massive novel imagining an Americanhouse which opens into a vast, ancient labyrinth. But theyre both about theunreliability of knowledge, how trauma lingers in families, and the way goodpeople go mad, set in houses which become claustrophobic reflections of theirowners. Someone who wants a relatively simple horror story can focus on theparts about the titular house and the mad, doomed expeditions through it, but Ifound its metafictional weirdness and its interwoven narratives equallyfascinating. While you can rightly accuse it of being pretentious, as far as Imconcerned, its cleverness outweighs its flaws.

The most recent entry on my list ofacademically recognized horror stories, I Have No Mouth and I Must Screamis essentially Harlan Ellisons rendition of a nightmare, where bizarretortures are visited on the storys protagonists by a godlike, demonic AI. Itsdream-logic finds a counterpart in the manga of Junji Ito, where anything andeverything can be frightening. I like to joke that his supernatural threatswere created via mad libs: zombie fish on robot spider-legs, human-shaped holesin a mountain, a planet with a giant tongue, and spirals. Yes, this is a manwho made the idea of spirals terrifying. Psychologists talk about theuncanny, the sense of something ordinary becoming strange, and Itos works findhorror in mundane scenarios and peaceful domestic scenes, taking root in theirrational side of your subconscious. Its delayed-action horrorwhen you firstread it, its absurdbut then, as night drags closer, you start to wonder whyyoure afraid.

And now, to conclude the list, a workof fiction which parallels Mary Shelleys Frankenstein as an explorationof technological nightmares. For this, I reach not for lightning and revivedcorpses, but our fears of surveillance, conspiracies and the fear that sciencecannot explain this world, the building blocks of the SCP Foundation. Its anonline collaborative fiction project, imagining the threats collected by asecret organization whose purpose is to protect the world from the supernaturalnightmares that threaten normalcy. I could have written the entire articleabout this site, whose contents range from comedic to heartwarming to stuffthatll keep you up at night. The sheer range of minds connected by this sitehave yielded some of the most original works Ive ever read, as muchphilosophical puzzles as horror stories. They deal with the relationship offiction to reality, the failure of reason and human knowledge, moral dilemmasand religious ones, and so much more. Reading them, Im reminded of Jorge LuisBorges short stories and how they all manages to explode some philosophicalidea with deceptive ease; the SCP Foundation, at its best, gives the lie to theclaim that genre fiction is just crude entertainment. Its a microcosm of theinternetat its worst it magnifies stupidity, but at its best it concentratesbrilliance.

Theodore Sturgeon famously noted thatcritics who claim that 90% of science fiction is crap are in fact correctandthat this statistic is true for all literature. The best science fiction is asgood as the best fiction in any field, he wrote. Times are changing for horrorfans, and for anyone who needs a little convincing that theres true greatnessin the genre, perhaps my list will be your starting point.

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A swing of the pendulum: the horror literature that's making its way up - Cherwell Online

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero