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"Supernatural fiction"
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Alice isn't dead : a novel
Spotting her late wife in news-report backgrounds, truck driver Keisha Taylor stumbles into an otherworldly conflict on the nation's highway systems.
Book
Transmedia Terrors in Post-TV Horror
In the twenty-first century horror television has spread across the digital TV landscape, garnering mainstream appeal. Located within a transmedia matrix, Transmedia Terrors in Post-TV Horror triangulates this boom across screen content, industry practices, and online participatory cultures. Understanding the genre within a post-TV paradigm, the book readdresses what is horror television, analysing not only broadcast TV and streaming platforms but also portals such as YouTube, Twitch.TV, and apps. The book also investigates complex digital media ecologies, blurring distinctions between niche and general audience viewing practices, and fostering new circulation pathways for horror television from around the world. Undertaking netnography, the book further offers an innovative model - abject spectrums - to empirically explore myriad audience responses to TV horror, manifesting in various participatory practices including writing, imagery, and crafts. As such, the book greatly expands what is considered horror television, its formatting and circulation, and the transmedia materiality of audience engagement.
eBook
Perfect shadow
Gaelan Starfire is a farmer, happy to be a husband and a father; a careful, quiet, simple man. He's also an immortal, peerless in the arts of war. Over the centuries, he's worn many faces to hide his gift, but he is a man ill-fit for obscurity, and all too often he's become a hero, his very names passing into legend: Acaelus Thorne, Yric the Black, Hrothan Steelbender, Tal Drakkan, Rebus Nimble.But when Gaelan must take a job hunting down the world's finest assassins for the beautiful courtesan-and-crimelord Gwinvere Kirena, what he finds may destroy everything he's ever believed in.
BOOK
Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures
Monstrous Beings of Media Cultures examines the monsters and sinister creatures that spawn from folk horror, Gothic fiction, and from various sectors of media cultures. The collection illuminates how folk monsters form across different art and media traditions, and interrogates the 21C revitalization of “folk” as both a cultural formation and aesthetic mode. The essays explore how combinations of vernacular and institutional creative processes shape the folkloric and/or folkoresque attributes of monstrous beings, their popularity, and the contexts in which they are received.
While it focuses on 21C permutations of folk monstrosity, the collection is transhistorical in approach, featuring chapters that focus on contemporary folk monsters, historical antecedents, and the pre-C21st art and media traditions that shaped enduring monstrous beings. The collection also illuminates how folk monsters and folk “horror” travel across cultures, media, and time periods, and how iconic monsters are tethered to yet repeatedly become unanchored from material and regional contexts.
eBook
Dancing on the edge
A young girl from a dysfunctional family creates for herself an alternative world which nearly results in her death but which ultimately leads her to reality.
Book
From Extraordinary to Ordinary: Heroic Images in British and Chinese 18th-century Supernatural Fiction
Heroic images appear in ancient myths, legends, or folktales from almost every corner of the world. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung proposed the concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes in the early 20th century, and his hero archetype has inspired numerous literary critics, mythologists, and writers to investigate the narrative structures of the hero’s journey. The 18th century witnessed a boom in British Gothic novels and Chinese supernatural tales, among which Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi are the most prominent. Both literary genres belong to supernatural fiction, with the hero being the typical character. Based on archetypal criticism and qualitative approaches like comparative method, historical approach, and textual analysis, this study attempts to compare the heroic images in British and Chinese 18th-century supernatural fiction, revealing the resemblance and diversity of human cultures through the analysis of the heroes’ characteristics and journeys in The Castle of Otranto and Liaozhai Zhiyi. The findings show that their heroic images are created by the hero archetypes from their national mythologies and social contexts, which demonstrates the transformation from the extraordinary to the ordinary.
Plain language summary
Heroic images in British and Chinese 18th-century Supernatural Fiction Shift from Extraordinary in Mythology to Ordinary in Literature
This study aims to explore the heroic images in British and Chinese 18th-century supernatural fiction. Why was the study done? Heroes are important characters in mythology and literature. Many scholars study the implications of hero myths and heroic images from the perspectives of psychology, mythology, and literature. The analysis of heroic images in British and Chinese 18th-century supernatural fiction could provide a cross-cultural view of hero studies. What did the researchers do? The authors summarized the famous British and Chinese hero myths, the social contexts of the 17th and 18th centuries, and analyzed the relationship between the heroic images in literature and the hero archetypes in mythology, using The Castle of Otranto and Liaozhai Zhiyi as representative supernatural novels in 18th-century Britain and China. What did the researchers find? Through the comparison of heroic images, the different cultures between Britain and China were discovered. The heroic images in literature are the “displacements” of the hero archetypes in mythology. What do the findings mean? Findings show that hero archetypes are similar across cultures and that human civilizations in different regions have commonalities. The different heroic images reflect different cultural and social contexts. From the mythological heroes of noble origins to the ordinary human heroes in 18th-century literary works, heroic images are increasingly close to the everyday lives of human beings.
Journal Article
Monstrous media/spectral subjects : imaging gothic from the nineteenth century to the present
Monstrous media/spectral subjects explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that emerging media technologies from the phantasmagoria and magic lantern to the hand-held video camera and the personal computer both shape Gothic subjects and in turn become Gothicised.
In a collection of essays that ranges from the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh to the music of Tom Waits, world horror cinema and the TV series Doctor Who, this book finds fresh and innovative contexts for the study of Gothic. Combining essays by well-established and emerging scholars, it should appeal to academics and students researching both Gothic literature and culture and the cultural impact of new technologies.
eBook
The vampire diaries
Presents the first two volumes in the Vampire Diaries series, in which popular and beautiful high school senior Elena finds herself torn between two vampire brothers, the dark and brooding Stefan who wants to protect her from the horrors of his past and the dangerously attractive Damon, who is determined to use her to get revenge on his brother.
Dr. Cinderella and the Bronze Artifact, Cardinal Napellus and the Copper Globe: Was Gustav Meyrink an Early Adopter of M.R. James’s Ghostly Fiction?
Hitherto unnoticed similarities between two short stories by Gustav Meyrink and two of the most renowned and widely read ghost stories of M.R. James are detailed through comparative literary analysis. Specifically, one early occult horror tale of Meyrink, The Plants of Dr. Cinderella (1905), shows no less than about 15 congruences beneath the plot level (concerning specific story requisites) with M.R. James’s ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904), as does, to the same extent, a later, widely known Meyrink tale (The Cardinal Napellus, 1914) vis-à-vis M.R. James’s Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance (1911). Although direct, conclusive evidence is unavailable, a nexus of circumstantial evidence, building on extensive biographical and bibliographical inquiries, convergently attests to these assumed literary influences on Meyrink: for both cases, the chronology is intact and thus possible; Meyrink was expertly fluent in English and well-connected to England and English literature; and, these borrowings are reminiscent of other, already known originality issues surrounding Meyrink’s work. Altogether, these new discoveries shed fresh light on idiosyncrasies of Meyrink’s creative process, imagination, and literary production; on his still under-researched literary inspirational sources; as well as on the early reception of M.R. James’s ghostly fiction beyond the anglophone sphere.
Journal Article