This eBook records the proceedings of the 3rd Annual 'Fear, Horror, and Terror' conference, which was held at Mansfield College, Oxford in September 2009. A group of academics from disparate subject areas, including literature, film studies, religious studies, social psychology, and psychoanalysis, came together to discuss fear, horror, and terror.

This volume is a collection of essays whose diversity of insights and methodologies facilitates a kaleidoscopic look at a universally-recognizable cluster of phenomena and experiences of fear, anxiety, horror, and terror that often defy straightforward categorization or even description.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. This volume comprises numerous academic papers concerning essential subjects in relation to fear, horror and terror, from cinematic representations and their subsequent responses, to first person accounts of terror by way of literature and journalism. Key scholars are employed to develop these important research areas as they provide new insights into cultural experiences and evaluations of fear, horror and terror, and their consequent analysis. Contributors also explore cross-cultural fear, the memorialisation of violence, and female experiences of fear represented through literature, theatre, and cinema. Valuable research is also demonstrated by way of the conceptualisation and management of fear, including the control of public fear in relation to mental illness, along with significant insights concerning depictions of sexual violence, the concept of the sublime in relation to the visualisation of the universe, and the relationship between scales of fright and the bulk of the on-screen monster.

The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror are all covered in its pages. Close readings of key texts by Clive Barker, Richard Laymon, Joseph D'Lacey, Matthew Stokoe, Tony White or Stanley Manly are provided alongside in-depth analyses of landmark films such as Re-Animator (1985), The Fly (1986), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Human Centipede (2011) and American Mary (2012). Contents Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic Chapter 1 – Splatterpunk Chapter 2 – Body Horror Chapter 3 – The New Avant-Pulp Chapter 4 – The Slaughterhouse Novel Chapter 5 – Torture Porn Chapter 6 – Surgical Horror Conclusion: The Gothic and the Body Notes Works Cited Filmography

"Combines the otherworldliness of Jeff VanderMeer’s “Annihilation,” the menacing irony of Shirley Jackson and the cold feminist fury of Margaret Atwood" --The New York Times Book Review Named a Fall Read by The Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune The mundane becomes sinister in a disquieting story collection from the author of The Grip of It In Jac Jemc’s dislocating second story collection, False Bingo, we watch as sinister forces—some supernatural, some of this earth, some real and some not—work their ways into the mundanity of everyday life. In “Strange Loop,” an outcast attempting to escape an unnamed mistake spends his days taxiderming animals, while in “Delivery,” a family watches as their dementia-addled, basement-dwelling father succumbs to an online shopping addiction. “Don’t Let’s” finds a woman, recently freed from an abusive relationship, living in an isolated vacation home in the South that might be haunted by breath-stealing ghosts. Fueled by paranoia and visceral suspense, and crafted with masterful restraint, these seventeen stories explore what happens when our fears cross over into the real, if only for a fleeting moment. Identities are stolen, alternate universes are revealed, and innocence is lost as the consequences of minor, seemingly harmless decisions erupt to sabotage a false sense of stability. “This is not a morality tale about the goodness of one character triumphing over the bad of another,” the sadistic narrator of “Pastoral” announces. Rather, False Bingo is a collection of realist fables exploring how conflicting moralities can coexist: the good, the bad, the indecipherable.