Monstrophy: The Academic Study of Monsters

‘Monstrophy’ is a term referring to the academic study of monsters as representational and conceptual categories, which has gained recent currency in several related fields of study (literary and cultural history, sociological theories of identity and difference, et al.), as well as in a number of recent books and articles about monsters as subjects of theoretical interpretation. Etymologically derived from Latin ”monstrum” (meaning prodigy, ominous sign, monstrous creature or person, abomination) and Greek ”sophia”(?????, wisdom), hybrid compounding of monstrophy is not uncommon in disciplinary names, e.g. [[sociology]], another Greek and Latin compound.) Monstrophy literally means “wisdom about monsters,” and in academic usage refers to the broader study of monsters in society and history.

Monsters have been widely catalogued in their historical and ethnographic contexts, and have been commonly included in cultural products such as epic, folktale, fiction, and film, but have only begun to be studied seriously as semiological markers indicating the seams of internal cultural tension. Interpreters commonly note the “monstrous” as occupying space at the borders of a society’s conceptual categories, such as those relating to sexual and behavioral transgression, or to inherent prejudice and internal conflict (for instance, in race, gender, politics, and religion). Monsters are rarely fully distinct from the “human,” but are often comprised of hybrid features of the human and non-human. This issue of Preternature invites contributions that explore how the category of “monster” is used to define and articulate what a certain group of people articulates to itself to be properly human.

Contributions are welcome from any discipline, time period, or geographic provenance, so long as the discussion highlights the cultural, literary, religious, or historical significance of the topic.

Contributions should be roughly 8,000 – 12,000 words (with the possibility of longer submissions in exceptional cases), including all documentation and critical apparatus. If accepted for publication, manuscripts will be required to adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (style 1, employing footnotes).

Preternature also welcomes original editions or translations of texts related to the topic that have not otherwise been made available in recent editions or in English.

Submissions are made online at: www.preternature.org.

Final Papers are due February 15, 2012

Queries about submissions, queries concerning books to be reviewed, or requests to review individual titles may be made to the Editor: Kirsten C. Uszkalo: kirsten@uszkalo.com

Inquiries about book reviews should be sent to the Book Review Editor: Richard Raiswell: rraiswell@upei.ca

For more on the journal, please consult www.preternature.org.

Salem witches, frontier wilderness beasts, freak show oddities, alien invasions, Freddie Krueger. From our colonial past to the present, the monster in all its various forms has been a staple of American culture. A masterful survey of our grim and often disturbing past, Monsters in America uniquely brings together history and culture studies to expose the dark obsessions that have helped create our national identity.

Monsters are not just fears of the individual psyche, historian Scott Poole explains, but are concoctions of the public imagination, reactions to cultural influences, social change, and historical events. Conflicting anxieties about race, class, gender, sexuality, religious beliefs, science, and politics manifest as haunting beings among the populace. From Victorian-era mad scientists to modern-day serial killers new monsters appear as American society evolves, paralleling fluctuating challenges to the cultural status quo. Consulting newspaper accounts, archival materials, personal papers, comic books, films, and oral histories, Poole adroitly illustrates how the creation of the monstrous “other” not only reflects society’s fears but shapes actual historical behavior and becomes a cultural reminder of inhuman acts.

Poole discusses aspects of this great book in TheoFantastique Podcast 2.6. You can order your copy of Monsters in America through the TheoFantastique Store.

Quite some time ago I promoted a forthcoming interview with Stephen Asma regarding his book On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford University Press, 2009). As I worked my way through my growing collection of books for research, review, and interviews, On Monsters finally crawled to the top, and I am pleased to share my recent discussion with Dr. Asma. Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he holds the title of Distinguished Scholar.

In the interview that follows Asma discusses the thesis of his book as informed by the natural sciences, philosophy and religion.

TheoFantastique: As a philosopher and academic, how did you come to an interest in and exploration of the monster in history?

Stephen T. Asma: I’ve always been a fan of old natural history collections and museums, and wrote a book about them in 2001 called Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads. A lot of these collections contain macabre wet preparations of teratology specimens (severe birth defects, conjoined twins, and so on). So originally my idea was to write about the history of teratology, but then I started to think about the monster as a larger category (folklore, art, and so on). And I wondered what the connection was between all these things called “monster.” That’s how it started.

When I was getting my PhD, one of my areas of specialization was philosophy of biology. I was interested in Aristotle’s teleological notion of nature and Darwin’s rejection of purpose in nature. The monster is a concept that brings us to the heart of organic form and deviance.

TheoFantastique: In light of Darwinian evolution, how do you see monsters developing in the human imagination?

Stephen T. Asma: After Darwin, Nature is no longer the rational system of Aristotelian Final Causes. God is not in his heaven orchestrating the natural kingdom. Even Isaac Newton’s mechanical watchmaker God is undone by Darwin’s brutal survival of the fittest. This changes the conceptualization of monsters. Monsters after Darwin are just other species (e.g., aliens, or cryptids, etc.) who are also just trying to survive. They bear you no ill-will, and they’re not “evil.” They just need your body to gestate their larval offspring. It’s nothing personal.

TheoFantastique: In your Introduction you describe the monster not only as an archetype, but also as as a cultural category. Can you describe what you mean by this?

Stephen T. Asma: Well, “archetype” is a loaded term because Carl Jung gave it a psychoanalytical meaning. But the term is older than Plato and I mean it in this more general sense. I think there are a few perennial archetypes or patterns that repeat themselves in monster fears. There are “slithering” creatures, “giants,” “hybrid” chimeras, “swimmers”, “crawlers” of the arachnid type, maybe big “carnivore predators” and so on. These prototype monsters have some basis in real biology, but they obviously become heavily embellished. As a cultural category, each of these (and more) can be further articulated and nuanced through folklore, literature, pictorial traditions, and so on.

TheoFantastique: Also in the Introduction, you state that “imagination is more active in our picture of reality than we previously acknowledged.” How significant is the monster to our imaginative conception of the world around us?

Pencil drawing by Stephen Asma

Stephen T. Asma: We don’t just record the external world like a camera, nor do we mirror it. Instead, we shape our experience of nature through the expectations of our values and desires, and our imaginations intermingle with perceptions to create an already mediated reality. Psychologists have demonstrated, for example, that when a person is afraid, they will radically exaggerate the size of the perceived threatening person –adding a full foot to the size of an intruder. I think our human vulnerabilities are always swimming around in our imagination, and as we make our way through a dark street we hasten our step or whistle to mask our fear. All the while, we can’t help but imagine some worst-case scenario, involving serial killers, or sewer mutants or whatever. Our brains seem hard-wired to err on the side of caution, so all of us have phobia potential. In moderation, some imagination-based fear is a good survival trait.

TheoFantastique: Your book is divided into four parts with an analysis of ancient monsters, medieval monsters (of the religious type), scientific monsters, and inner (psychological) monsters. Which of these categories, and the monsters within them, are the most frightening for you and why?

Stephen T. Asma: I’m most phobic about deep or murky water. Like any average urbanite, I don’t have to fear predators from the forest, but there are still many places where one can be killed by animals. I just spent a few weeks in East Africa, and there are many ways you can die there if you’re not careful (e.g., big cats, crocs, buffalo, etc..). Like many others, I’ve also hiked in Grizzly bear country and felt great fear. But as a Chicagoan, I go around without much worry about natural predators. Still, Chicago has its share of human predators, as every big city. This might explain why monster narratives these days stress the serial killers, or criminal pathology monsters. Most people are living in dense cities and their fears are less about nature and more about other people.

Pencil drawing by Stephen Asma

TheoFantastique: You make an interesting comment at the conclusion of chapter 12 when you state, “That older paradigm held out the inevitability of monstrous defeat by divine justice, but the contemporary monster is often a reminder of theological abandonment and the accompanying angst.” It would seem that monsters can serve both the religious and secular imaginations. Would you agree?

Stephen T. Asma: Yes, I would agree. I try to show that monsters and fear of monsters cross many paradigm shifts –from Pagan to Christian, to biological, to psychological, and so on. Theological monsterology usually sees monsters as part of a larger morality tale. For example, giants are laid low because of their arrogant pride, and spawn of Cain –like Grendel –meet their deserved destruction in time. Whereas secular monster narratives are more disturbing because they lack the righteous restoration of justice and good that one finds in most theological narratives.

TheoFantastique: One final question if I may. In the end notes for chapter 12 you state: “Undead monsters are particularly uncanny, I would argue, because they embody our narcissistic commitment to extended life, but also our mature commitment (via the reality principle) that no such possibility exists.” This is similar to my thoughts on an aspect of the popularity of the zombie. In a postmodern and post-Christendom West I wonder whether the zombie may be understood in part as a form of resurrection, but in reaction against the perceived loss of credibility in the Christian metanarrative, resulting in a bodily “survival” of death that represents a more nihilistic apocalyptic. Your thoughts?

Stephen T. Asma: This is an interesting interpretation. The old metanarrative of resurrection is untenable in our skeptical and ironic age, but the deep drive for immortality can’t be squelched. Zombies also have unique qualities that trigger the dynamic of love/hate, attraction/repulsion. The zombie, like the vampire, is a kind of immortal: chop his leg off, he’s still coming; blow a hole in his chest, he’s still coming. His life span is indefinite and he’s indestructible. So the little narcissist inside us really likes the immortal aspect of the zombie and the vampire. We unconsciously crave that kind of staying power and durability, but our narcissistic desire to cheat death is impossible to sustain in the face of mature experience. Reality regularly reminds us, as we are growing up, that we will not cheat death.

We love to hate zombies because they simultaneously manifest our craving for immortality, and our more mature realization that the flesh always decays. As “living dead,” all zombies elicit those conflicting impulses in our psyche. The more disgusting they are, the more we are reminded of our inevitable decomposition, but the more they keep getting up and chasing, the more we are delighted by the promise of immortality. The psyche seems to carry out an unconscious vacillation: the zombies live on forever, those lucky sods, but wait…they’re disgusting and repellent and…and…run!

You’ve added another cultural dimension onto this psychological dynamic. We’re a post-Christian culture, but still in the grip of those old values and metaphysical aspirations. So, maybe zombies represent our now ironic and sardonic view of immortality.

TheoFantastique: Stephen, thank you again for the copy of your book, and for taking the time to discuss it here. It makes an important contribution to our historical and cultural understanding of monsters and the monstrous.

Beast Legends is a new six-part series that journeys around the world using scientific data to reconstruct what mythological monsters, from Krakens and Griffins to Fire Dragons, would have looked like.

In each of the hour-long episodes, Beast Legends uncovers historical and eyewitness accounts by zeroing in on archaeological and other physical evidence to assemble the most accurate picture possible of these monsters, from where they might have lived to how they would have behaved.

Beast Legends then moves to the ‘Beast Lab’ to build the creature, first as initial sculpts and wire-frame forms, before finally bringing it to life in stunning 3D CGI. The investigations are conducted by the “Beast Seekers,” an expert team of specialists that includes anthropologists, biology professors, archaeologists and adventure seekers.

From the high seas to the wilds of Vietnam to the deserts of New Mexico, Beast Legends takes viewers to the boundary where myth and reality collide, and beyond.

The program will premier this Thursday at 10/9 Central. See the program’s website for more information.

Monsters and the Monstrous was originally launched in May 2003 in Budapest under the title: Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil.

In light of the success of the inaugural meeting and in light of the development suggestions made by the assembled delegates from all over the world, the Steering Group decided to broaden to remit of the project to a consideration of Monsters specifically and of themes of the monstrous in general.

This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary project seeks to investigate and explore the enduring influence and imagery of monsters and the monstrous on human culture throughout history. In particular, the project will have a dual focus with the intention of examining specific ‘monsters’ as well as assessing the role, function and consequences of persons, actions or events identified as ‘monstrous’. The history and contemporary cultural influences of monsters and monstrous metaphors will also be examined.

Indicative themes for research and development will include ;

* The “monster” through history
* Civilization, monsters and the monstrous
* Children, childhood, stories and monsters
* Comedy: funny monsters and/or making fun of monsters (e.g. Monsters Inc, the Addams Family)
* Making monsters; monstrous births
* Mutants and mutations
* Technologies of the monstrous
* Horror, fear and scare
* Do monsters kill because they are monstrous or are they monstrous because they kill?
* How critical to the definition of “monster” is death or the threat of death?
* human ‘monsters’ and ‘monstrous’ acts? e.g, perverts, paedophiles and serial killers
* Revolution and monsters
* Enemies (political/social/military) and monsters
* Iconography of the monstrous
* The popularity of the modern monsters; the Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, Vampires
* The monster in literature
* The monster in media (television, cinema, radio)
* Religious depictions of the monstrous
* Metaphors and the monstrous

The project will centre around an annual conference held each May in Eastern and Central Europe. The work of the project is to be supported by an email discussion group, ISSN ejournal, ISBN publication series and and evolving research and resource centre.

The network includes a blog, a discussion group, has also published a number of books that arise as a result of their conferences, including Our Monstrous (S)kin; Hosting the Monster; Monsters and the Monstrous; The Monstrous Identity of Humanity; Dark Reflections, Monstrous Reflections; The Role of the Monster; Monsters and the Monstrous (2nd ed.); and another volume on Vampires.

It is indeed a great time for the academic analysis of the monster and the monstrous.

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Has the legendary, blood-sucking monster, El Chupacabra, been shot and killed in Texas? The Discovery Channel’s description of Chupacabra:

Mysterious animal deaths sparked mass hysteria on the small island of Puerto Rico. In 1992, Puerto Rican newspapers reported a series of strange killings had taken place, of a variety of animals including birds, horses and especially goats. The killings occurred around the village of Moca, and the local people believed a mythical creature called El Vampiro de Moca was responsible.

Over a period of six months the slaughter became more widespread, causing mass panic and hysteria. Researchers coined the term “Chupacabra” meaning “Goatsucker” in Spanish. The name related to the puncture wounds and lack of blood found on the victims. The reports of Chupacabra activity then began to spread into the Americas and for the last decade sightings have been reported as far north as Carolina, USA and as far south as Chile.

The Chupacabra grew from a village vampire to an international phenomenon. El Chupacabra became a merchandising dream with t-shirts, toys and even a song being produced. By the end of the 1990s the hysteria died away and less sightings were reported.

Unexplained animal killings still continue on Puerto Rico and the locals are left with a real mystery to whom or what is killing their animals.

Sightings and video of the alleged creature continue. As the new video above indicates, some residents of Texas think the creature has been killed in their neighborhood, even while animal control offers are skeptical, yet open minded. The animals in the new video and photograph look similar to animals on videotape from Texas in the past (see below). As officials await DNA testing on what appears to be at least a diseased or mutant form of dog, our continued fascination with monsters and cryptozoology is evident. And for someone like me who has a lifelong interest in cryptozoology, and who has a personality that is a combination of The X-Files‘ Mulder with a little bit of Scully’s skepticism, this is intriguing, even if in all likelihood it is not the legendary beast.

Related posts

“Gary Varner: Creatures in the Mist and Comparative Mythology”

“Of Sewers and Flukemen”

Patheos, a website exploring various facets of religion, recently featured an article by Jay Michaelson, a Ph.D. candidate in Jewish thought at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, titled “Demons, Dybbuks, Ghosts, and Golems.” The article provides an introduction to Jewish monsters from the Kabbalah, the Talmud, and folklore, including the female “demonic personality” of Lilith, the dybbuk and the phenomenon of possession with one soul connected to another (as depicted in The Unborn [2009]), the ibbur which is a possessing entity similar to the dybbuk, and the golem (most famously depicted in the expressionist film The Golem [1920]). For those interested in a brief introduction to cross-cultural considerations related to the monstrous this article is worth a read.

I became aware of the first one while reading a book proposal for my friend W. Scott Poole, author of Satan in America. It is On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by Stephen T. Asma (Oxford University Press, 2009). The dust cover for this book reads as follows:

We feared them lurking in our closets and under our beds in our childhood bedrooms. They were the characters exploited every year in our Halloween festivities and rituals. They stalked the pages of some of our favorite books, and now with the release of Where the Wild Things Are, they will roam freely on the movie screen. They are…MONSTERS! And as we continue to walk that fine line of fascination and fear for them, it is valuable to learn and analyze their place in history, so that we are able to face them, regardless of the form they take.

Stephen Asma’s ON MONSTERS explores the history of monsters and analyzes how they have evolved over time, what functions they have served for us, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future. Asma describes how monsters, from the obvious movie creatures to terrorists to serial killers, embody our deepest anxieties and vulnerabilities, and symbolize they mysterious territory just beyond the safe enclosures of rational thought. Exploring philosophical treatises, theological tracts, newspapers, pamphlets, films, scientific notebooks, and novels, Asma illuminates the many ways monsters have come to represent our insecurities and uncertainties in daily life. And in these somewhat frightening times, Asma shows how we can live with our monsters, even if it means holding up the mirror to ourselves.

Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago.

The second volume I am enjoying is Vampire God: The Allure of the Undead in Western Culture (SUNY Press, 2009) by Mary Y. Hallab. From the back cover of this book:

It seems we’re awash in vampires these days, in everything from movies, television shows, and novels to role-playing games, rock bands, and breakfast cereals. But what accounts for their enduring popular appeal? In Vampire God, Mary Y. Halab examines the mythic figure of the vampire from its origins in early Greek and Slavic folklore, its transformation by Romantics like Byron, Le Fanu, and Stoker, and its diverse representations in present-day popular culture. The allure of the vampire, Hallab argues, lies in its persistent undeadness, its refusal to accept its mortal destiny of death and decay. Vampires appeal to our fear of dying and our hope for immortality, and as a focus for our doubts and speculations, vampire literature offers answers to many of our most urgent questions about the meaning of death, the nature of the human soul, and its possible survival after bodily dissolution. Clearly written, with wry human, Vampire God is a thoroughly researched, ambitious study that draws on cultural, anthropological, and religious perspectives to explore the significance and function of the vampire in relation to the scientific, social, psychological, and religious beliefs of its time and place.

Hallab is Professor Emerita of English Literature at the University of Central Missouri.

Look for an exploration of these great books here in early 2010.

TheoFantastique: Dr. Flannery, thank you for your willingness to discuss GOLEM journal. What was the inspiration behind the beginning of the journal?

Frances Flannery: My research specialty is in ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature, such as Daniel and the Book of Revelation. Monsters are everywhere in this literature, and I was really intrigued to discover their function and meaning. When I examined anthropological sources across an extremely broad band of cultures, both ancient and modern, I found monsters in every single culture I ran across, whether ancient Greece or modern Polynesia and Canada! I literally could not find a culture that did not have some being that was identified by the culture as a monster. Since I didn’t believe that all of these monsters actually existed, (although some probably did or do), it was obvious that societies have a great need to create monsters.

As I continued to research what Big Foot, Dracula, Frankenstein, Nessie, and the Dragon of Revelation have in common, I came across definitions of monsters by scholars from numerous fields, including anthropology, religion, aesthetics, and psychology. I finally settled on this definition: monsters are those socially constructed entities that either blur existing categories or that must exist between categories, where nothing else fits. For instance, Frankenstein is both living and dead, and Big Foot is only scary if he is both human-like and ape-like. A giant lowland gorilla species would not gather the attention that Sasquatch has attracted! In turn, this definition implies that the function of monsters is exactly, then, to allow a given society to express 1) the category formations that are important to it, 2) the boundaries that are being challenged in that culture, and 3) the very potent societal fears that exist about these boundary crossings. Monsters thus show us what a culture both cares about and fears, and the expression of those fears is usually a catharsis. Godzilla is an ancient creature awakened by atomic energy, which expressed the fears of Post WWII Japan and America in the nuclear age. Monsters are thus vital to the mental health of a culture, and they tell others what a culture values. I’d encourage readers to think hard about what monsters their culture currently finds fascinating, and why.

I started GOLEM out of a desire to create a forum for other scholars from a variety of disciplines to share their thoughts about monsters and religion. The remarkable diversity of approaches, topics and fields of interests of our contributors has affirmed my hunch that monsters are significant in a broad array of interdisciplinary areas, including religious studies, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, theology, and sociology. I would hasten to add that there is also a section for student publications in the journal, entitled “GREMLIN”.

TheoFantastique: I am pleased to see the focus of the journal as indicated in the subtitle with its look at “religion and monsters,” an interest that dovetails with part of the exploration of TheoFantastique. How did you arrive at this focus, and in what ways has the journal explored this topic?

Frances Flannery: Following sociologist Clifford Geertz, I consider religion to entail much more than just “beliefs,” but rather a whole cultural system: beliefs, symbols, ethics, worldview, rituals, and an entire construction of reality. Monsters are vital to the cracks and overlaps in the categories of cultural constructions of reality. Thus, they appear in the sacred literature or mythology of every traditional religion, whether Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or indigenous religions, as well as of new religions, such as Scientology.

As I mentioned, from the outset GOLEM journal has been committed to interdisciplinary methodologies that result in a broad range of topics for investigation, and this is clearly reflected in the journal’s contents. So far GOLEM has generated articles, to name a few, on monsters and otherness, disability, the construction of normalcy, horror films, posthumanism, ecological devastation, class, ethnicity, the Ancient Near East, and Christian Evangelicalism and intelligent design. I find this variety so exciting!

I would like to add that beginning with Issue Three, Rubina Ramji of Cape Breton University has replaced me as Senior Editor. I cannot say enough to support her excellent work and the direction in which she has steered GOLEM, which is evident in the fine quality of that Issue. Currently, the journal is seeking to explore the connection between monsters and violence, and monsters and terrorism, and I can hardly think of anything more timely.

TheoFantastique: How does the academic study of monsters in popular culture help us to “shed light on the particular societies and cultures that imagine them” as your website states?

Frances Flannery: Monsters appear in “popular” culture as well as in “elite” culture, in the art, literature, film, histories and religion of a vast array of societies. As I mentioned, monsters show us what a society values, what cultural categories it creates, and what chaos and fear feel like to its members. But perhaps most of all, monsters are simply uncanny . . . and that makes them innately interesting. Thus, the phenomenon of monsters speaks to the universal human societal condition. No culture seems to be able to make every experience or person fit neatly into its categories. Something will always blur or bleed over. That’s a monster.

TheoFantastique: Frances, thanks again for your fine publication, and for talking about it with my readers.

“The riddle of the ‘curse of the pharoahs’ is finally solved via a radical anthropological treatment of the legend as a cultural concept rather than a physical phenomenon. The most penetrating study of the curse ever conducted shows that its structure and meaning changed over time, as public attitudes towards archaeology and the Middle East were transformed by events such as the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Victorian women writers likened unwrapping to rape, but to exploit the growing popularity of Egyptology, Hollywood turned mummies from victims into monsters, destroying the curse’s power to challenge abuses of human remains. Mummies came to symbolize everything wrong and rotten: pollution, age, death, difference and defiance of authority, becoming imaginary friends or cautionary examples for children.

“The Mummy’s Curseuncovers forgotten nineteenth-century fiction and poetry, revolutionizes the study of mummy horror films and reveals the prejudices embedded in children’s toys. Original surveys and field observations of museum visitors demonstrate that media stereotypes – to which museums inadvertently contribute – promote vilification of mummies, which can invalidate demands for their removal from display. The Mummy’s Curse asks: must we debase other cultures in order to promote our own?”

The second volume that deals with a neglected aspect of horror is The Monster Hunter in Modern Popular Culture  (McFarland, 2008) by Heather Duda. Of course, monsters have received a great deal of attention from readers and viewing audiences throughout the centuries, and most recently from scholars in a variety of disciplines, but Duda points out in her book, based on a revised and expanded form of her doctoral dissertation, that the figure of the monster hunter has been neglected. The back cover of Duda’s book describes its contents:

“As monsters in popular media have evolved and grown more complex, so have those who take on the job of stalking and staking them. This book examines the evolution of the contemporary monster hunter from Bram Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing to today’s non-traditional monster hunters such as Blade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Watchmen.

“Critically surveying a diverse range of books, films, television shows, and graphic novels, this study reveals how the monster hunter began as a white, upper-class, educated male and became everything from a vampire to a teenage girl with supernatural powers. Now often resembling the monsters they’ve vowed to conquer, modern characters occupy a gray area where the battle is often with their own inner natures as much as with the ‘evil’ they fight.”

Look for interviews with both of these authors here in the near future as we explore these neglected and important aspects of horror.