horror – Interesting Literature

Horror Story: Darryl Jones’s Sleeping with the Lights On

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: The Unsettling Story of Horror, the erudite Darryl Jones is our guide, picking up just the right example on the end of his pen (to borrow from and adapt Chesterton’s description of Jekyll and Hyde author Robert Louis Stevenson) and weaving together the disparate periods of horror fiction in all its forms – not just literature but film and TV too – in order to give us not so much a brief history of the horror genre as the story of the genre’s themes, tropes, interests, and preoccupations.

Frankenstein Through the Years: An Established Mythology

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 and his creation would come to symbolize so much of the human condition and would be reimagined and reinvented countless times. Soon, what is sometimes referred to as the first science fiction novel, will once again be told on the big screen, this time in Victor Frankenstein.

Five Fascinating Facts about Richard Matheson

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, ‘an inspiration to me’. (We compiled some fascinating facts about King here.) Ray Bradbury, too, paid homage to Matheson, calling him ‘one of the most important writers of the 20th century’.

Interesting Literary Facts for Halloween

‘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 tomes in the Gothic library here at the Castle, in order to bring you some of the most eye-watering literary facts and fancies from the season.

Guest Blog: Revamped – How the Twenty-First Century Vampire Is Redefining Masculinity

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 and cinematic representative of the … Read more