I was excited to see that Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst recently won the British Fantasy Award for “Best Non-Fiction” with last year’s important release from dead ink books, called WRITING THE UNCANNY: Essays on Crafting Strange Fiction. Coxon and Hirst’s book is an excellent anthology of mostly-UK writers sharing their strategies for writing […]
Author: Michael Arnzen
Michael Arnzen holds four Bram Stoker Awards and an International Horror Guild Award for his disturbing (and often funny) fiction, poetry and literary experiments. He has been teaching as a Professor of English in the MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University since 1999.
Folk Horror Expedition
I’ve been spending a lot of my research time lately investigating the subgenre of Folk Horror and enjoying what might be called the revival’s second wave, or a rising appreciation of it among cinephiles, spearheaded in recent days by the recent release of Kier-La Janisse’s documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched from Severin Films. I’m […]
The Return of Dexter Notes
With the return of the television series, Dexter, after such a long hiatus (rebooted this November 2021 from Showtime as Dexter: New Blood), it is inevitable that so much of what we will see will hearken back to the past, uncanny as a visitation by a ghost as our memories are conjured up magically by […]
New Online Course: “The Uncanny & The Abject”
“The Uncanny and The Abject”: Applying Psychology to Disturb the Reader Live Saturday, May 22, 5 P.M. EST — StokerCon 2021 Online Also Available Asynchronously Following the Event! Details TBA DESCRIPTION: This two hour online workshop will unravel the psychological theories of the Uncanny and the Abject. Together, we will explore how they pertain to […]
Exploring Dark Short Fiction
I’ve been publishing as “Academic Advisor” to the Exploring Dark Short Fiction series of primers, put out by Dark Moon Books. Every title features a horror writer that deserves more attention particularly in the area of the short story, and includes four representative works plus a new short story they produce for the volume. I […]
Doublement
One of the reasons that the Double is often considered frightening is because it represents a kind of evil twin — an Other that threatens the ego. We find such doubles everywhere — from fictional tales to unexpectedly catching our own reflections in the mirror. These encounters with the doppelgänger threaten to erase the ego […]
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