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Anna Warso

Department of English

University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw

awarso@swps.edu.pl

Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted: A Novel of Stories

and the Underbellies of American Culture

Abstract. Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted is a novel made of stories but also a novel

about the tradition of telling stories, particularly those meant to evoke terror and

shock, as well as related pleasures. Here, twenty-three tales told by writers trapped

inanabandonedtheatreeshouttheframenarrativewhosekeytakestheformofthe

"Nightmare Box," a mysterious apparatus allowing a glimpse into the indescribable

(or "the real reality"). The readers, too, are allowed a peek into the nightmare box

that the setting of the novel transforms into as its inhabitants, observed and recorded

by a Mr. Whittier, the owner of the original device and the mastermind behind the

plot, turn to murder, cannibalism and self-mutilation to enhance the effect that the

story of their survival will have upon its (and their) release. This article examines the

rhetoric of the unclean in the novel with the use of Julia Kristeva's category of the

abject and it rereads Haunted as both an addition to and a commentary on the canon

of works which capitalize on haunted spaces, fragmented bodies and the illusory

nature of the lived reality.

Keywords: Palahniuk; Haunted;horror;abject;metaction

In Shirley Jackson's 1959 The Haunting of Hill House, a Dr. Montague

talks about "houses described in Leviticus as 'leprous,' tsaraas," adding that

"the concept of certain houses as unclean, forbidden—perhaps sacred—is

as old as the mind of man" (2009: 70). His remark alludes to a culturally

persistent connection between the afiction (in this case, manifesting as

THEORIA ET HISTORIA SCIENTIARUM, VOL. XIV

Ed. Nicolaus Copernicus University 2017

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12775/ths.2017.007

100 Anna Warso

a skin disease in people, as mildew and mould in buildings and clothing)

and transgression: manifestations of tsara'ath were read by the rabbis of the

Mishnah as more than a physical ailment—it was a spiritual pathology the

treatment of which required several cleansing practices and a repentance for

sins which may have caused the condition in the rst place (sins such as

selshness,eviltongue,pride,murder,adulteryandvariousformsofsexual

immorality; tsara'ath has been interpreted either as a punishment or, more

generally, withdrawal of godliness from the affected site). Explorations

of the possible connections between the outward oddities reecting the

supposedly hidden trespasses have continued to inform the Western literary

tradition, with the Gothic mode utilizing perhaps to the greatest extent the

theme of built environment serving as a mechanism of control over the

unacceptable.

Infused with that mode—it has even been posited that "until gothic has

been discovered the serious American novel could not begin" and that "of all

thectionoftheWest,[Americanction]ismostdeeplyinuencedbythe

gothic" (Fiedler 1966: 143, 142)—American prose indeed frequently probes

the signifying possibilities of architectural structures. Whether it is the

"meditative look" of Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, suggesting

"that it had secrets to keep," barred nursery windows and the wallpaper

with "bulbous eyes" peeling off the walls in Gilman's colonial mansion, the

cracked facade of Poe's fallen House of Usher, Faulkner's decaying manors,

or the spiraling corridors and secret passages in Jackson's novel, the state

of the setting has been read by the scholars of literature as symptomatic

of the condition of the inhabitants, haunted by the ghosts of their own or

collectively repressed pasts, pains and desires, succumbing to or struggling

with the anxieties and pressures of the current cultural, political and social

crisis. Punter and Byron stress that in literature the Gothic "re-emerges with

particular force during times of cultural crisis and . . . serves to negotiate the

anxieties of the age by working through them in a displaced form (2004: 39).

What is particularly interesting, however, are the instances of those

narratives becoming self-reective and in this article I hope to explore

some of the potential of this turn referring to Chuck Palahniuk's already

infamous 2005 Haunted: A Novel of Stories. I take a closer look at the

rhetoric of excess, containment and expulsion, and the dynamic of the clean

andtheuncleanstructuringthenovel,alsobecausetheyseemtoreectthe

mechanisms described by Julia Kristeva in the Powers of Horror, especially

those characterizing "abject" and "abjection," concepts which may prove

useful for both the discussion of cultural hauntings and a rewarding reading

of Palahniuk's novel—Martin and Savoy rightly note that "The entire history

101

Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted: A Novel of Stories and the Underbellies

of the gothic lies behind . . . Julia Kristeva's understanding of the abject, that

whichis 'radically excluded' from individualand national self-denition"

(1998: viii). Focusing on the events taking place in a decrepit theater turned

into an artists' retreat, which is the setting of Palahniuk's frame narrative,

and a selection of interrelated stories within it, I hope to demonstrate

that Haunted: A Novel of Stories may and should be read as an example

of what Kristeva views as a culture's various means of purifying the abject.

Finally, laying itself bare already with the title which introduces a novel

made of stories (whose frame consists of twenty three tales, each preceded

by a Chaucerian prologue) but also a novel about stories (an interpretation

supported, among others, by the text's numerous references to the processes

of writing and storytelling), Haunted seems to be an attempt to review the

tradition of telling ghost stories, our need to tell them and the occasional

desire to become immersed in them. In fact, in its compulsive revisiting

of other texts, the novel itself may be said to perform an act of ghosting,

drawing attention also to the possible parallels between the Gothic and the

postmodern modes in their relation to the questions of epistemological and

ontological incertitude, tendency for pastiche and self-reexivity, delight

in excess as well as their potential for camp, bathos and grotesque (see also:

Beville, Lloyd-Smith).

The critical reception of the novel has been largely unfavorable, at least

in comparison to Palahniuk's other works, such as the award winning Fight

Club (1996) or the best-selling Choke (2001), and the author's public persona,

combined with the popularity of his work, may have further affected his

critical and scholarly reputation. Kuhn and Rubin cite several claims refuting

the value of Palahniuk's writing, including that by Jonathan Dee of Harper's

Magazine who views it as an exercise in "cheap, high school nihilism" (in

Kuhn and Rubin 2009: 2), and others who believe his prose to be a "literary

relative of NBC's Fear Factor" or a "shtick" based on "rewriting the same

book over and over again" (in Kuhn and Rubin 2009: 3). The fact that the

rststoryincludedinHaunted was published initially by Playboy (in March

2004) and that in 2009 a New York City teacher was suspended for assigning

it to his 11th grade English class (Buffa 2009: n. pag.) has undoubtedly

contributed to the notoriety of "Guts" which, as Palahniuk recalls in the

Afterword, caused over seventy people to faint during the public readings

of the text.

"Guts" is essentially a story describing three instances of masturbation,

progressively more inventive and disastrous. The rst one involves an

attempt at experimentation, performed by "this friend of mine" who, as an

adolescent, inserts a carrot into his anus, only to be disappointed by the lack

102 Anna Warso

of expected sensation. Called downstairs for supper, the boy "stashes the

slippery,lthy thing in the dirty clothes under his bed" (Palahniuk 2006:

13) and joins the family. He soon discovers that the carrot is gone, as are the

clothes which his mother recovered from under the bed to do laundry:

This friend of mine, he waits months under a black cloud waiting

for his folks to confront him. And they never do. Ever. Even now

he's grown up, that invisible carrot hangs over every Christmas

dinner, every birthday party. Every Easter-egg hunt with his kids

. . . that ghost carrot is hovering over them all. (Palahniuk 2006: 13)

This is followed by the account of another "friend" who attempted to

insert into his penis a long, thin piece of wax, having heard that it would

intensify the pleasure of masturbation. His experiment goes horribly wrong

with the boy ending up in hospital, his college fund spent on the surgery to

remove the wax-needle from his bladder. He, too, had been called downstairs

for supper in the midst of the act: "This wax kid and the carrot kid are different

people, but we all live pretty much the same life" (Palahniuk 2006: 15), the

narratorremarksasheproceedstothenalpartofhistale.

It involves his own habitual masturbation performed underwater while he

is immersed in the family swimming pool, except this time the narrator rests

his buttocks against the pool inlet hole in order to increase the pleasurable

sensation. Instead, he becomes stuck, his intestines sucked by the circulation

pump, which the narrator discovers only after a failed attempt to reach the

water surface. He is trapped and suffocating, his intestine pulled out of his

body as the pump continues to work, and surrounded by:

allthissoupofbloodandcorn[fromhislastmeal],shitandsperm

oatingaround me.Evenwith mygutsunravelingoutofmyass,

meholdingontowhat'sleft,eventhenmyrstwantistosomehow

get my swimsuit back on. God forbid my folks see my dick . . .

Whatmyfolkswillndafterworkisabignakedfetus,curledon

itself. Floating in the cloudy water of their backyard pool. Tethered

to the bottom by a thick rope of veins and twisted guts. . . Here's

the kid they hoped would snag a football scholarship and get an

M.B.A. Who'd care for them in their old age. Here's all their hopes

and dreams. Floating here, naked and dead. All around him big

milky pearls of wasted sperm. (Palahniuk 2006: 19)

The narrator manages to free himself by biting off the intestine and

adds: "it's hard to say what my parents were more disgusted by: how I'd got

103

Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted: A Novel of Stories and the Underbellies

into trouble or how I'd saved myself. After the hospital my mom said, 'You

didn't know what you were doing, honey. You were in shock'" (Palahniuk

2006: 20). The pool is swiftly cleaned by hired help, the mess blamed on

the dog. It is only from the last sentences of the story that we learn about

another event which may have contributed to the family selling the house

andmovingtoanotherstate,mentionedverybriey:"Thenmysistermissed

her period" (Palahniuk 2006: 21). Neither the swimming pool incident nor

the unwanted pregnancy, however, become the subject of conversation.

The water in the pool was changed, the girl received an abortion and "my

folks never mentioned it again. Ever. That's my family's invisible carrot"

(Palahniuk 2006: 21).

Palahniuk's excessive, perhaps shockingly detailed, descriptions

of bodily waste (including an orange vitamin pill oating among the

discharge) pulled violently out of the body alongside internal organs and

uidsinvolvedindigestionandreproductiontellthestoryofourengagement

with what Kristeva refers to as "abject" and "abjection" (discussed in more

detailinthefollowingparagraphs).Atthesametime,positionedrmlywithin

the literary tradition which explores the spheres of prohibition, inhibition

and repression, Haunted examines numerous social and cultural anxieties

revealing in the act the underbellies of contemporary culture. Savoy notes that

"Gothic texts return obsessively to the personal, the familial, and the national

pasts to complicate rather than clarify them, but mainly to implicate the

individualinadeepmorassofAmericandesiresanddeedsthatallownonal

escape from or transcendence of them" (2002: 169). The stories in Haunted

("Footwork", "Slumming" and others), and the frame narrative itself, contain

numerous crucial socio-economic referents, easily overshadowed by what is

seen as the sordid, self-gratifying and perverse character of the book, and

of Palahniuk's writing in general. Meanwhile, the novel operates rather as

a "palimpsest, revealing the traces of a narrative of commodication and

consumption" (Sonser 2001: 2) and addresses an entire range of issues

marking the everyday of contemporary American life, including unbridled

greed, persistent materialism, consumerism, egocentrism, prudishness and

hypocrisy saturating the culture still rooted in its Puritan past, the ever

increasing power of the mass media, the insanity of celebrity culture and the

ongoingprocessesofobjecticationoftheselfandothers.In"GreenRoom"

a character is advised that she needs to transform into camera-friendly

"content" (Palahniuk 2006: 53). Elsewhere:

We could picture the future: the scene of us telling people how we'd

taken this little adventure and a crazy man kept us trapped in an old

104 Anna Warso

theater for three months. Already, we were making matters worse.

Exaggerating. . . . No one will say it but Miss Sneezy's death would

make a perfect third-act climax. Our darkest moment. . . . Then, as

completion, Miss America would name her new child Miss Sneezy,

orwhateverherrstnamehasbeen.Asenseofthecirclemended.

Of life going on, renewed. Poor, frail Miss Sneezy. In the movie-

book-T-shirt story, we'd all love Miss Sneezy. . . her deep courage

. . . her sunny humor.

Sigh. (Palahniuk 2006: 84–86)

Ultimately, Sonser notes, "the essential horror of the gothic is not

goblins and vampires but its latent power to address the disenchanted world

ofproductionandthecommodicationofthesocial"(2001:12–13).

Consequently, "Guts" is more than a source of cheap thrill or an exercise

in nihilism of which it has been accused: the "apparition" of the carrot

hovering above countless dinner tables in America, humorous as it is, signals

also the presence and nature of sanctions regulating human (in this case,

teenage) sexuality, while the issues of production, reproduction, abortion

and overproduction invite a more detailed investigation of the novel whose

frame focuses, among others, on the processes of writing and storytelling.

The parallel setting of "Guts": an idealized "picket-fence ranch house,"

with a four-door Buick parked outside, where "pacing the front yard is

a man, pushing a lawn mower" (Palahniuk 2006: 10), and the stage of an

abandoned theatre where the starved and mutilated walking cadavers present

their stories, begs the question of the possible origin of Palahniuk's haunts,

preceded by a necessary gloss on the novel's highly intertextual and self-

reexivecharacter.

Haunted opens with a quotation from "The Masque of the Red Death"

foreshadowing both the theme of containment and the mood of the work:

as in Poe, where the castle doors are welded shut, Palahniuk's aspiring

writers are forcibly conned within the walls of a building where "much

of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the

terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust" will be

taking place (Poe in Palahniuk, n.pag.). The Gothic and creative themes

are alluded to several times via numerous references to Villa Diotati but

another,perhapsevenmoresignicantliteraryconnectionruns(alsothrough

Poe) between Haunted and Boccaccio's The Decameron, where a group

of people hides in a secluded villa from the horrors of a city ravaged by the

Black Death and engages in a storytelling game in order to pass the time

and provide structure to their days. The image on the cover of Palahniuk's

novel, originally a ghostly face printed with luminescent ink, in the second

105

Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted: A Novel of Stories and the Underbellies

edition uses the portrayal of a screaming female face, and the blurred quality

of the picture brings to mind an enlarged detail from an old pulp magazine,

relating the work to another popular tradition. But the fact that the features

of the portrayed woman, whose eyes and mouth are wide open, bear also

a vague resemblance to those of a sex doll should not be ignored either, as

one of the stories in Haunted describes the fate of life-like dummies used for

the practice resuscitation. Entitled "Exodus," it is a story of a bond between

the so-called "Breather Betty" doll and a female employee of a police station

uponherdiscoveryoftheotherpurposesthattheofcersusetheanatomically

correct mannequins for. Modeled on the corpse of a young woman, known as

L'Inconnue: The Mona Lisa of the Seine, who drowned in Paris over a century

ago (and who really did serve as an inspiration for Laerdal's Resusci Anne),

Breather Betty—although she is "just a torso with a head. No arms or legs.

Rubbery blue lips. Eyes molded open, staring. Green eyes" (Palahniuk 2006:

155)—still has a wig of red hair and eyelashes glued on; in another story,

"The Nightmare Box," beautiful, almost doll-like Cassandra Clark cuts off

hereyelashesinagesturewhosesignicancecanbefullycomprehendedonly

after the contents of the mysterious box are revealed. Following the formula

of story within a story, many of the embedded tales correspond to the themes

oftheframenarrativewhichincludealsothesignicanceofstorytellingand

theneedtoexperienceandregurecontentswhicharetobeabjectedoutside

the frame of art. The second edition of the novel carries a warning in the form

of a mock "parental advisory" sticker printed in the top left corner.

"To each ego its object, to each superego its abject," Kristeva notes

(1982: 2), emphasizing the role of the agency of prohibition and punishment

in deciding what is to be "ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the

tolerable, the thinkable" (1982: 1) into the sphere of the taboo: abject and

abjection (from abjectus: thrown down, cast away, from abicere: to throw

away, cast off, degrade, humble, lower) refer to the processes of expulsion

and to what had to be repelled or banished since its presence evokes an

unbearable mixture of repulsion and fear. To be precise, it is not as much

the lack of cleanliness that leads to abjection but rather the ambiguous

status of the abject: of bodily excretions (blood, pus, saliva, sperm) which

are no longer me but are still of me, or of the corpse (or ghost or zombie)—

no longer a subject but clearly not just an object, or of a body which has

lostitsform,becomedisgured,drasticallychangedormutilated.Notably,

what is abject is undifferentiated, positioned "outside the set": blurring

some of the fundamental distinctions between the outside and the inside,

between the I and the Other, the human and the non-human, it draws us

"towards the place where meaning collapses"—the actual source of fear—

106 Anna Warso

from which it also continuously beckons and fascinates desire (Kristeva

1982: 1–2). The processes of abjection are crucial for the mapping of the

clean and proper self and of the social structures: "by way of abjection,

primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order

to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which

were imagined as representatives of sex and murder" (Kristeva 1982:

12–13). Thus,

Abjection appears as a rite of delement and pollution in the

paganism that accompanies society with a dominant or surviving

matrilinear character. It takes the form of the exclusion of a substance

(nutritive or linked to sexuality) the execution of with the sacred

since it sets it up.

[It]persistsasexclusion or taboo (dietary of other) in monotheistic

religions, but drifts over to more "secondary" forms such as

transgression (of the Law) within the same monotheistic economy.

Itnallyencounters,withtheChristiansin,adialecticelaboration,

as it becomes integrated in the Christian Word as a threatening

otherness. . . (Kristeva 1982: 17)

Consequently, cultural narratives, whether verbal, visual, religious or

literary, serve to negotiate and manage the persistent and ubiquitous eruptions

oftheabjectintoourlives.Containedbytheboundariesoftheritualorction

(or the cinema hall, or the theatre stage), "safe" or sanctioned interactions

with the abjected are a way of purifying it through an "impure process that

protects from the abject only by dint of being immersed in it"—"one does

not get rid of the impure; one can, however, bring it into being a second time,

and differently from the original impurity" (Kristeva 1982: 28). Ritual and

art are a method to renew the original contact with the abject which is later

radically excluded (for instance by averting the gaze from the movie screen)

as the boundaries of the self become reinforced and the subject's position

in relation to the symbolic clearly redrawn.

Before they begin the process of bringing impurity into being

a second time, and differently, the characters of Haunted descend "into the

foundations of the symbolic construct" (Kristeva 1982: 14). Their bus is

steeredrst "down atight, dark alley,"one "so narrow thatyou can't see

down any length" and when the vehicle stops, its door slowly opens to

reveal another door, made of steel, and behind it, "a slot of pure nothing.

Just black. The slot just wide enough to squeeze through" (Palahniuk 2006:

26–27).Enteringwhatresemblesamonstrouswomb(ingenrectionfemale

reproductive functions are among the major sources of the abject while

107

Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted: A Novel of Stories and the Underbellies

rituals of delement frequently aim to "ward off the subject's fear of his

very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother"; Kristeva 1982: 64),

they are met by "the needle-sharp smell of mouse urine" (Palahniuk 2006:

27)mixedwiththesmellof"anold,dampbookhalfeatenbysilversh"and

"with the smell of dust" (Palahniuk 2006: 27). Hit with a bright spotlight

which makes "the dark more dark than black" (Palahniuk 2006: 27), they are

yetunawarethatfromnowontheireverymoveisgoingtobelmedbythe

hidden cameras installed by a Mr. Whittier and that the entrance is going to

besealedshutforseveralweeks.Oncethisisdiscoveredandconrmedwith

utmost certainty, even destroying available food supplies does not effect the

characters'release,forcingtheminsteadtoresorttoothermeansofnding

sustenance, such as cannibalism.

As the events begin to unfold, it is revealed that Mr. Whittier designed

more than a plan to entrap his guests. "The Nightmare Box" makes a reference

to a black apparatus "on three tall legs" resembling a nineteenth century

camera:

tted along every seam with complicated moldings, ridges and

grooves, that made it look heavy as a bank vault. . . . "Like a little

cofn," somebody in the gallery said. . . If you wanted to make

the box work right, you held both handles. You pressed your eye

to the brass peep hole in the front. Your left eye. And you looked

inside. . . .

On a little brass nameplate, a plate screwed to the top of the

box, if you stood on your tiptoes, you could read "The Nightmare

Box." And the name "Roland Whittier." The brass handles were

greenfrompeopleholdingtight,waiting.Thebrassttingaround

the peephole was tarnished with their breath. The black outsides

were waxed with grease from their skin rubbing, pressed close.

(Palahniuk 2006: 214)

The gallery owner does not know the exact content of the Box but

once in a while its ticking mechanism falls silent and what it reveals makes

a promising student "sit on his bed all day, cockroaches crawling in and out

ofhisclothes,hispantlegsandshirtcollar...hisheadcircledwithhouseies"

(Palahniuk 2006: 215). Another time it is an antiques dealer whom the police

ndsdead:"Inthetiledbathroom,whereanymesswouldbeeasytoclean

up, he's knotted the cord around his neck and then just—relaxed" (Palahniuk

2006: 217). Having looked into the Box also Cassandra Clark is allowed

to catch "a glimpse of the real reality": "What's in the box is proof that

whatwe calllifeisn't.Ourworldisadream.Innitelyfake.Anightmare"

108 Anna Warso

(Palahniuk 2006: 222). It is that experience which causes Cassandra to cut

off her eyelashes:

She's away and looking at the blank television screen. Maybe

lookingatherselfreectedthere,nakedintheblackglass....Her

eyelashes gone, her green eyes looking dull and fake because you

never see her blink. (Palahniuk 2006: 211)

Soon, she disappears for several months only to be found walking

downa highway,starved, missing ngers andtoes, and coveredin blood,

all of which is revealed to result from self-mutilation performed at Mr.

Whittier's retreat:

One dinner, just the two of them at the kitchen table, Mrs Clark

asked, did Cassandra remember the Nightmare Box? Did that night

in the gallery have anything to do with her disappearing?

And Cassandra said, "It made me want to be a writer." (Palahniuk

2006: 347)

The inside of the Nightmare Box is where the meaning collapses,

disturbing identity, system and the established order. The sensation it evokes

dees description but is compared to the jouissance-like experience

ofwitnessingaockofbirdsburstingsuddenlyoutofacageintothesky:

this white chaos. This storm exploded up from the center of the

picnic . . . For the countless hours of that one long moment they

forgot everything and watched the cloud of white wings twist up

into the blue sky. They watched it spiral. And the spiral open.

(Palahniuk 2006: 222)

But while a momentary immersion is meant to protect us from the

"original impurity" and result in a cathartic effect, in Haunted those subjected

to the effect of the real reality (also Kristeva associates the abject with the

intrusion of the Real into our lives) are unable to bring the sensation into

beinga second time, differentlyfromtheoriginal impurity,andreconrm

the boundaries of existence. Cassandra is killed by her own mother who

cannot cope with "that girl robot who could sit all day, painting the blue

jays that just screeched outside the window" (Palahniuk 2006: 350). While

anotheraspiringwriterconrmsthat"scary"storiesworkbyechoing"some

ancient fear," recreating "some ancient terror. Something we'd like to think

we're grown beyond . . . something you'd hoped was healed" (Palahniuk

109

Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted: A Novel of Stories and the Underbellies

2006: 343) and several of Mr. Whittier's prisoners successfully recreate such

terrors on the theatre stage, we know very little of their fate as they leave the

retreat (with the notable exception of Miss Sneezy, who stubbornly refuses to

die of allergies and is ultimately murdered by the others.) This failure seems

salient especially as for some readers Haunted itself may be an experience

in abjection, a kind of a Nightmare Box whose excess is sorted and portioned

into chapters and tales within tales.

Highly self-reexive and morbidly ironic, Palahniuk's extravaganza

of impurity,abjected bodily uids and mutilated body parts is, thus, both

an addition and a commentary on the literary tradition which capitalizes on

haunted spaces and minds, fragmented bodies and the illusory nature of the

lived reality. And while in some aspects it may seem to question the purifying

effect of the rite of delement, it nonetheless reveals, as the horror genre

and the Gothic mode do, the existence of numerous repressed areas of the

present cultural moment and several pressing issues haunting contemporary

American culture.

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ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

  • Kelly Hurley

Cambridge Core - English Literature 1830-1900 - The Gothic Body - by Kelly Hurley

  • Deborah Linderman
  • Julia Kristeva
  • Leon S. Roudiez

I. Approaching Abjection2. Something to Be Scared Of3. From Filth to Defilement4. Semiotics of Biblical Abomination5... Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi6. C line: Neither Actor nor Martyr7. Suffering and Horror8. Those Females Who Can Wreck the Infinite9. "Ours to Jew or Die"10. In the Beginning and Without End...11. Powers of Horror

  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman Note: The University of Adelaide Library eBooks @ Adelaide.

  • Robert Martin
  • Eric Savoy

Drawing widely on contemporary theory—particularly revisionist views of Freud such as those offered by Lacan and Kristeva—this volume ranges from the well-known Gothic horrors of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to the popular fantasies of Stephen King and the postmodern visions of Kathy Acker. Special attention is paid to the issues of slavery and race in both black and white texts, including those by Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner. In the view of the editors and contributors, the Gothic is not so much a historical category as a mode of thought haunted by history, a part of suburban life and the lifeblood of films such as The Exorcist and Fatal Attraction.

  • Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), escritora norteamericana representante del género de terror, ha ejercido influencia en narradores posteriores, como Stephen King. Realizó estudios superiores en las universidades de Rochester y de Syracuse. Entre sus obras se cuentan el libro para niños Nine Magic Wishes y la obra de teatro The Bad Children; es autora también de la colección de cuentos Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons (que narra la vida familiar de Jackson y la crianza de sus cuatro hijos); de las novelas The Road through the Wall (1948), Hangsaman (1951), The Bird's Nest (1954), The Sundial (1958), The Haunting of Hill House (1959, ha sido considerada una de las más importantes obras del horror en el siglo XX), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). Algunas de sus libros han sido adaptados tanto a la televisión como al cine. Entre los reconocimientos que recibió se cuentan la nominación al National Book Award (1960), One of Time's: Ten Best Novels of 1962, Mystery Writers of America, Edgar Award for Best Short Story (1966).

Teacher Suspended for Giving 'Self-pleasure' Reading to Students

  • D Buffa

Buffa, D. (2009). "Teacher Suspended for Giving 'Self-pleasure' Reading to Students." New York Post (9 November 2009). http://nypost.com/2009/11/09/ teacher-suspended-for-giving-self-pleasure-reading-to-students/, 11.07.2017.

The Haunting of Hill House. London: Penguin Classics Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

  • S Jackson

Jackson, S. (2009). The Haunting of Hill House. London: Penguin Classics. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.