Literature of Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction

For class this week, I attempted to read "A Wild Sheep Chase" by Haruki Murakami. Admittedly, I did not get very far into the novel as the nature or even the existence of good and evil is a debate I feel I don’t have the right to have an opinion on (which I know, can sound like a cop out, but if writing this blog post is any consolation, that is not my intention) and my prior experience with Eastern horror has been very little, but of what I’ve seen, is not my cup of tea. Let’s just dive in, shall we? I read up to the point of the narrator and his girlfriends arrival at the hotel. I can pinpoint the moment I rolled my eyes, checked to see how much more I had to read on, and gave up on really trying to understand this novel. It was very early on, when I found that the narrator was going to go unnamed for the entirety of the novel. After a traumatic high school experience with the novel "Invisible Man", I’ve come to loathe how much a reader has to find meaning in

The relationship's portrayed in Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire are that of subliminal plotlines stemming from the lack of a relationship for the novels pornographic author, intimacy and a (heavy) dash of patriarchal values. Frankly a thesis that would make my mother wonder what exactly they're teaching at art school. The interaction between the vampires in Interview With a Vampire comes from a place of seeking intimacy in a nontraditional way. Anne Rice was known for her...promiscuous...writing before Interview With a Vampire, but having gone through a traumatic life event which led to the lack of communication between Rice and her husband. Rice used her experience to shine a light on intimacy through communication. Sex is not the end-all be-all of intimacy for the vampires, described as being “a minute feeling of the kill”. This sense of intimacy panders to a female audience, and as anti-establishment as I hope to be against novels written “for women” it totally w

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a classic example of Gothic Literature, that is without question. The "gothicness" lies within the protagonists contemporary sensibilities and sympathetically familiar endeavors which quickly seep into a darker realm. Subjectively, Victor is such a cancerous person, playing god and holding no responsibilities for his actions. Yet we relate to him through the gothic narrative. Similarly, "gothicness" is expressed through terror. In discussion it was simply stated as "terror commences" which is true in Frankenstein through the monsters existence (even though, we know this is not his fault and everything that works against the monster is Victors wrongdoing). I understand that my response thus far would indicate my repugnance for the novel, which is not true. My loathing is strictly towards Victor as a character. Shelley's writing style is phenomenal, and she beautifully made Victor out to be one of the worst kind of me