ABSTRACT
If childhood is a time for learning to properly inhabit a culture, universally an experience where the means employed to cultivate the proper has been embellished through stories playing on infantile fears. Yet American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft once argued that the most primal of all human emotions was fear, and that even sophisticated readers retained a primitive “fear of the unknown” (cited in Sandner 2004: 102). The weird tale survives, he wrote, because neither rationalism nor Freudian psychoanalysis is sufficiently powerful to dispel the fascination for being terrified out of one’s wits. So while adulthood ostensibly signifies the time where these childish tales ought to be put away, wherever there is a “fire” today, you can still expect to find children and adults listening to scary stories to drive away the greater dark.
