- Where Should We Bury the Dead Racist Literary Giants? – The Awl – At the same time, focusing on race in Lovecraft can also lead to a greater appreciation of his work, and a better understanding of its horror. Joshi may think he's protecting Lovecraft's legacy by minimizing the role of race in his stories, but the truth is that, to the extent that Lovecraft is still meaningful, it's in large part because of his portrait of his own racism. Lovecraft isn't a great artist despite being a racist, as Joshi would have it. Nor is he a lousy artist because he's a racist, as Older says. He's a great artist and he's a racist: Lovecraft's world is one in which racism poisons everything, in which the fear of anyone who isn't white is so overwhelming that it fills the seas and the skies and everything in between with gibbering demons and cosmic despair. The bleak, clotted hatred with which he renders that world is precisely what makes his work valuable.
- What to read on the Tory proposals for a “Bill of Rights” | Jack of Kent –
- GUEST POST: Of Meat Hooks and Desire by Max Gladstone | Brian Staveley – There’s more to life than stabbing people in the gut. Or melting their faces off with a fireball. Or being dropped out of a helicopter, or tortured with a potato peeler.
- Fantasy-Faction World Tour of Wonderment: The Netherlands | Fantasy-Faction –
- Marvel & Jack Kirby Family Settle Long-Running Legal Dispute – Page 5 – So what happened wasn't that the Kirby family sued Marvel just because they one day decided to up and want more money. They didn't even sue. What they did was file for termination of copyright assignment — the very thing that the law allows creators to do. They didn't do this against the wishes of Kirby himself — Kirby had been all for doing it, ever since the law had been changed. But they had to wait a certain amount of time, and Kirby didn't live long enough to see it happen. But he was always on board with it.
Articles with the Tag Horror
Your Happening World (August 22nd through August 25th)
On horror
In a recent discussion on genre in rec.arts.sf.written, someone quoted a post of mine I had written a year or so earlier. Looking at it, I thought it would be interesting enough to share here too.
Horror is a mood, fantasy is a genre.
To explain a bit: horror can be evoked through the mundane (Silence of the Lambs), the science fictional (Who Goes There?) or the fantastic (Dracula).
Horror revolves around evoking a mood of dread, of being scared shitless, a growing sense of unease or discomfort, the sense that something is wrong with the world.
Fantasy revolves around magic in some sense or other, like science fiction revolves around science in some sense or other and mainstream or memitic fiction revolves around “the real world”.
Horror can be evoked in all three of them.