Literature of Horror, Fantasy, & Sci-Fi

Jeff VanderMeers' novel, Annihilation, does an excellent job in depicting what anxiety feels like and dealing with human-kinds fear of the unknown. It does an especially good job at making you feel perpetual uneasiness by never identifying any of the characters by name, making it even easier for you to project yourself onto them and their fear. Throughout a large portion of the story, the main character, the biologist, takes note on how it feels as though she's being watched even though no one is there and how everything feels "off" or "wrong" but she can't ever really explain why. This is a good representation of what it's like to live with anxiety. Sure, most people experience anxiety in the way that one would before giving a very big important speech to a huge crowd of people, but having an anxiety order is another thing entirely. You experience anxiety over everything. Over nothing, really. You make things up in your head or you just get the sens...

For this blog post I'm deciding to focus on the short story The Tale of the Porcelain God from Lafcadio Hearns' Chinese Ghost Stories Curious Tales of the Supernatural. The main thing that struck me about this story is that for the first few pages it seems that all this story is is just some guy gushing about how much he loves porcelain. He goes on and on listing "this porcelain and THAT porcelain and who could forget about THIS porcelain" and you start to wonder if this is even a supernatural tale at all. Finally, towards the end of the story you get to see what the supernatural element is. Unto Bu literally pours his heart and soul into his work and sacrifices his human life so that his artwork may be perfect. I think it's pretty straight forward what this story is trying to say; that if you put your all into your artwork then you will be rewarded with a great product. Unto Bu does, after all, end up becoming a god after achieving what he believes to be the impo...

One of the things I've always loved most about Anne Rice's novel, Interview with the Vampire is the duality of Louis and Lestat's characters and what they represent. You look at them and right off the bat go "oh, Louis is the good vampire and Lestat is the bad vampire." Yet, Louis isn't really a good vampire. He's a "good" vampire, in that he tries very much so to repress his vampiric side and abide by the human ideas of what is right and wrong. He clings desperately to his past and tries to act human rather than accepting himself for who he is now and his newfound nature. Lestat, on the other hand, is the ideal vampire. We may look at him and point and say "bad" but he is true to himself and what a vampire is supposed to be. He isn't bogged down by human constructs and allows himself to follow his more animalistic desires that come with being a vampire. So, while Lestat may be the "bad" vampire of the story, he is objecti...

Something that comes up time and time again when people discuss Mary Shelley's gothic horror novel, Frankenstein , is a discussion about who the true monster is. Is it Frankenstein himself or the creature? More often than not, especially in modern times, people come to the conclusion that Victor Frankenstein is the true monster of the story, and I can't really contest that because they're not wrong. Victor Frankenstein is not a particularly great human being. He abandons his creation immediately after giving it the gift of life and serves as a dead-beat dad character so to speak . When given the chance to stop his creation from going on a murderous rampage simply by making him a wife, he doesn't take it. Not to mention, he did this all to himself and only really takes partial responsibility, searching around every corner for anyone or anything else to put the blame onto. So sure, Frankenstein is a monster. However, I don't think enough people give the creature the c...