how do i say “horror novels these days are too woke” without sounding like a right winger. what i mean is: this one is about a woman serial killer who kills Bad Men, that one is about ~anticapitalist activists~, this one is ~queer~, that one is about *spins wheel* someone dealing with the ghosts of their immigrant roots, all of them are about intergenerational traumaaaaa. okay. cool. but is it good though. is it fucking scary
something something, losing the ability to convey horror through abstraction, through metaphor, through symbolism, through allegory, through raw unexamined un-psychiatrized feeling. if the real horror is…. dun dun dun! the patriarchy then i just feel preached to. don’t use fiction as a vehicle for Saying Something About Society. write with total vulnerability and then see what it says. it will be probably be far more interesting and horrifying than what if the monster was uhh my mom’s abuse or whatever. this brand of new horror writers are all so terrified of actually disclosing anything about themselves. it’s like if an instagram infographic performance was a mediocre contemporary novel
ALT
YOU ARE MAKING THE TEXT DO THE WORK OF ANALYSIS!!!!!!!
“Maybe if Biden hadn’t let those four sacred harts eat Yggdrasil’s leaves, it wouldn’t have had to come down, but by the end, that thing was completely infested—you had the squirrel Ratatoskr scurrying up and down its trunk and the dragon Nidhogg biting at its roots, and down in Hvergelmir, they say, so many snakes. More snakes than you’ve ever seen. But now that we’ve gotten rid of that health hazard we’re going to build something even bigger and better there, and Odin’s going to use it as a gallows to sacrifice himself to himself and it’s going to be so incredible.” At press time, Trump reportedly pivoted from discussing Yggdrasil’s demolition to defend his unauthorized military strikes on Jörmungandr the World Serpent.
ALT
