What makes us shiver? What makes our skin crawl? What, more to the point, makes the reader shiver? It’s not just about ghosts, demonic possession, serial killers, pleasure-seeking immortals with pins stuck in their heads, weird little unblinking kids with posh accents, and unknowable amoral beings from the voids between the stars (though those things are part of horror, to be sure). Horror is everywhere. Sometimes subtle, sometimes not. Sometimes the monsters are, well, monsters. And sometimes the ‘monsters’ are a cruel father, a cruel system, a cruel situation.
Why are two stories, both set pretty much in a single room (Stephen King’s ‘1408’, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, published in 1892) so unsettling, so freaky? Why do they linger?
With a focus on short stories, this four-week course will look at just what horror fiction is, and how to write the best horror fiction we can.
Wednesdays
17.30-19.00 14th,21st,28th Jan, 4th Feb
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