Horror Fiction in the 20th Century: Exploring Literature's Most Chilling Genre by Jess Nevins

Author:Jess Nevins [Nevins, Jess]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Horror, Nonfiction, History
ISBN: 9781440862069
Publisher: Praeger
Published: 2020-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

Germany

The German dime novels, or heftromane, flourished through the 1950s and provided the German reading audience with cheaply produced, sensationalist genre fiction, including horror. Although the horror was usually of the most unsubtle and elementary sort, quite unlike the classics of prewar German and English horror that the German reading audience was used to, the heftromane was at least something that horror loving Germans could read during the otherwise lean years.

Italy

Dino Buzzati is acclaimed for his horror stories, which are imbued with his existentialism but go beyond that into the surreal and the weird. Critics have compared his work to that of Kafka and Stefan Grabinski and argued for the influence of Italo Calvino and Primo Levi. These critics also charge that Buzzati’s work lacks the grandiose imagination of Calvino and the profundity borne of the life experience of Levi. But Buzzati’s work, though undoubtedly influenced by those writers, was uniquely his own. Buzzati’s stories are fabular, lacking in supernatural elements but filled with weird dreads of no apparent or explicable cause. The horror in them comes from their angst, bleak pessimism, and sense of futility, their paranoia and feeling of impending catastrophe, their contes cruel endings, from the way in which ordinary institutions become menacing and destructive monsters. Buzzati’s journalistic realism adds to the horror in its matter-of-fact narration. His stories are terse and slickly told, narratively dextrous, emotional in the way of the best contes cruel, and effective in their argument that life is futile and that all dreams of achievement come to nothing in the end.

Tommaso Landolfi’s work was primarily fantastika, much of it horrific. His work, which tends toward the surreal, magical, and grotesque, is usually told in an elegant narrative style whose graceful, complex vocabulary is jarringly at odds with the stories’ subject matter and Landolfi’s frequent use of nonlinear or fragmented narratives. Though Landolfi frequently used supernatural devices, much of his work is psychological, with Landolfibringing the reader into the mind of either a victim of some incomprehensible ontological transgression or into the mind of someone unbalanced and violent. His horror is modern horror: no Gothics or traditional ghost stories for Landolfi, rather stories that are set in spaceships, that build on the works of earlier horror writers, from Poe to Gogol to Kafka, that incorporate existentialist attitudes toward society. In Landolfi’s stories, horror can never be controlled, conquered, or exorcized; humans are small next to whatever terrorizes them, “abandoned, each on their own in a narrative of fear without resolution.”33

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