ABSTRACT
Contemporary writers of popular horror and thriller novels often draw from Gothic and grotesque tropes to describe key characters – most often the bad guys – with distinctly memorable and disquieting facial deformities or other characteristics that serve to mark these characters as other. While these narrative choices may create easily recognizable figures, they also work to perpetuate stereotypes about people with facial deformities and encourage stigmatization and fear of facial difference. In James Hankins’ paranormal thriller Drawn , it is significant to find a facially disfigured character who bucks the literary trend of simply being made other by his physical deformities. While Hankins’ characterization of Boone Forrester does follow a predictable model of what disability and humanities scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder identify as “narrative prosthesis,” the “perpetual discursive dependency on disability” (47), Boone's character also expands our understanding of disability and disfigurement due to the psychological realism through which Hankins develops him. Boone was severely burned and partially blinded in an auto accident, and his disfigurement has made him severely agoraphobic since. As he is drawn into a paranormal adventure with three strangers, he must overcome crippling panic attacks and learn to view himself as more than the sum of his facial scars in order to not only save a child in trouble, but to ultimately save himself.
