Horror Fiction: An Introduction

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "Horror Fiction: An Introduction", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 8, pp. 753-755. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710818207

One of the challenges about horror fiction, Wisker suggests, is that people are ashamed to be seen reading it. Evan so, as a genre it extends back through Edgar Allan Poe and the Gothic to early myths and legends, and grew in the 19th and 20th century into the cross‐media (books and films and television) monster it is today. Mention names like Stephen King and Alfred Hitchcock, Anne Rice and Angela Carter, and films like Halloween and Alien and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and everyone knows exactly where we are. A respectable critical tradition has grown up around the genre, with books by Punter and Royle, Dijkstra and Gelder. Add to that the substantial feminist and lesbian critique of the form, and of sexualities in the form, and there is certainly enough to justify a study like this.

It part‐critical and part‐reference, with an introduction saying that horror mixes violence and sexuality, ghost stories and the uncanny and vampires, fear and disgust with entertainment, and with a “key terms” chapter asking whether it is voyeuristic or defamiliarizing, and how it sits amid feminist and postcolonialist discourses. A chapter on “reading horror writing” speaks about the exposure of fear and guilty pleasure, political and sexual subversion, and challenging the normal, above all in the work of Angela Carter.

Another introduces us to (or reminds us of) the “best and best‐known” in the genre: the memorable storylines of Poe and Bram Stoker, Lovecraft and Blackwood, Bierce and M.R. James, writing in fact up to Stephen King and Michael Arnzen. Bibliographical and some biographical detail is provided there. US writers from Hodgson and Oates to Rice and Brite come out clearly, as do feminist and lesbian writers like Gomez and Due. Films noted included The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Silence of the Lambs, the work of Cronenberg and Wes Craven, films like The Birds and Don't Look Now adapted from Daphne du Maurier, and television work like Buffy and The X Files. Support is provided in an extensive bibliography and filmography at the end of the book.

Wisker (lecturer in English at Anglia Polytechnic University in England) is alert, too, to the critical approaches taken to horror over the years, devoting a chapter to that and paying particular attention to Julia Kristeva's The Powers of Horror and to the ways it has shaped understanding of women in horror (basing it sardonically on the proposition of the horror in women and the horror evoked in male readers by women). The very closeness of the genre to real life, to actual feelings of fear and disgust and attraction, makes it a very suitable focus for post‐Freudian and Lacanian criticism. Another major chapter is constructed around some 16 major themes and issues in horror fiction – supernatural, Gothic, slasher, ghost, body horror, bugs and reptiles, werewolves and so forth – with notes and references under each.

While Wisker's analysis of particular issues has sound critical thoroughness, the book as a whole turns out to be a very useable handbook to horror fiction in a more bibliographical sense: with its lists, extensive bibliography, and succinct summaries, it could well be used by librarians in adult lending libraries to check and extend stock as well as by librarians in children's and school libraries to do the same. Some items might be identified for not buying, but at least you would know about them and be able to give reasons why you do not stock them. Purists will find the book irritatingly organized and the bibliography (mixing primary and secondary materials, editions of Poe and Bierce and Brice with critical studies by others) headlong, but there is a lot here and people in stock selection will have added confidence once they have read the book. The series is to continue with others on crime and science fiction.

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