ABSTRACT
The rapidly expanding industry in the ‘contemplation of horrific eventualities’ raises important questions, according to Grixti, about the type of society in which we live, and our manner of developing fictions to help us make sense of contemporary experience. The need for a ‘contextualization and theorization’ of horror fiction as a form of discourse has, he believes, assumed ‘urgent dimensions’. What he therefore sets out to do in this book is (after the manner of Foucault) to discover who speaks, the positions from which they speak, and the institutions which prompt, distribute and store the speech, to set an analysis of the values and meanings which are to be discovered in popular forms of contemporary horror fiction against the background of a wider cultural debate. This declaration of intent signals early on what is in fact the weakness of his analysis, for, in considering texts as ‘social products which transform possibilities of experience into discourse, and which thus influence, reflect, and reinforce popular attitudes, assumptions, and prejudice’, it is never quite clear which of these objects-text, society, prejudice, or influence —is actually the subject of the book. The ostensible subject is, of course, horror fiction, which he defines as ‘a type of narrative which deals in messages about fear and experiences associated with fear’, though even here his object is not clear. Early on he writes that he will cut across the division between ‘horror fiction’ and the ‘literature of terror’, but in the event he stays closely with the former. In so far, then, as he deals with anything containing what is likely to arouse fear or repugnance, including, in his more general theoretical discussion, the portrayal of violence per se, his approach is not really applicable to the literature of terror as a distinct genre, however we might choose to define such a genre. Some representatives of the genre, he writes, reflect ‘considerable artistic, imaginative, and intellectual merit’, but the majority thrive on cliché and an interpretation of reality which is ‘hollow and
self-enclosed’. In concentrating almost exclusively on this latter he effectively neglects half of what, according to his own lights, is the genre he is discussing.
