Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern

In early 2022, Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern: Critical Essays was published by McFarland, becoming the first academic book from the Horror Writers’ Association. The edited collection is comprised of essays edited from presentations from the first two years of the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference. The purpose of this book was not only expand on horror literary studies, but to help propel the AnnRadCon presenters with the next step in their academic careers. Michele and I are humbled that many of the essays in here are these academics’ first professional publication and have already begun to be cited in other works.

Table of Contents

• “Foreword: 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: Spotlighting Horror 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 Horror

• “Night 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

Reviews of Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern

Review at Cemetery Dance
Review at HorrorBuzz
Review at the Journal of Ecohumanism vol. 3 no. 1 (2024)
Review at Revenant Journal

Citations

List of texts that have cited Horror Literature.. and the essays within.

“Bound by Elusiveness: Transnational Cinema and Folk Horror” by Keith McDonald in Routledge Companion to Folk Horror.

“Funeral Doom Metal as the Rhetoric of Contemplation: A Burkean Perspective” by Gavin Hurley and published in Metal Music Studies Vol. 8 #1.

Cites Hurley.

“(Wo)men-flowers and Urban Gardens in the Weird Fiction of Clark Ashton Smith: Vegetal Hypallage as an Ecopoetic Device” by Joachim Zemmour.

Cites Murray.

Errata

The following mistakes are in Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern. For transparency, they are listed below:

Page v – Michael Torregrossa’s last name is misspelt.

Purchase

Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern can be readily bought at the following websites:

• McFarland (preferred place to purchase)
• Amazon