In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a new introduction to horror fiction Trying to tell the story of the horror genre in under 200 pages may seem a daunting prospect – indeed, almost a horrifying one. But thankfully in Sleeping With the Lights On: […]
Spencer Blohm examines the history of screen adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein For nearly two hundred years the archetype of the ‘mad scientist‘ has been dominated by a single name: Dr. Victor Frankenstein. When Mary Shelley wrote and published her groundbreaking novel in 1818, there’s no way she could have known that her scientist […]
Fun facts about the author of I Am Legend, Richard Matheson 1. He was a huge influence on Stephen King. The king (pun intended) of contemporary American horror fiction has called Matheson ‘the author who influenced me the most as a writer’; Matheson’s vampire novel I Am Legend was, King has said, […]
‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ as Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton began his 1830 novel Paul Clifford (and, in doing so, gave us perhaps the most famous – or infamous – opening line of them all). Since Halloween is looming, we at Interesting Literature thought we’d blow the dust off some mouldy […]
By Tracy L. Bealer, Colorado State University Power, good looks, and a preoccupation with penetration. These qualities unexpectedly describe both privileged masculinity and vampires. With their preternatural strength, lethal attractiveness, and penetrative fangs, the figure of the vampire has long been understood, by Nina Auerbach and others, as a literary […]