6,815,000 pageviews


Monday, May 31, 2021

The Legacy Of The Horror Genre

The horror genre has a great literary history. Hawthorne, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, many others found a depth and seriousness in it which made horror more valid, more interesting and more worthy than the general run of mystery fiction. Horror was about the invention of clever puzzles. It dealt with profound emotions and real mysteries, not who had left the footprints under the gorse-bush and how the key to the library had wound up in the colonel's golf bag. Horror could touch people, change them, make them think. While horror fiction was certainly entertaining, there was much more to the genre than mere weightless entertainment.

Peter Straub in How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by J.N. Williamson, 1991 

No comments:

Post a Comment