Fear plays a big part in everyone’s lives. While not everyone will admit it, everyone is scared of something. There is a lot that isn’t known about the world and everything in it. For some this is a tool that can be used to develop horror in literature as well as many other things. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”(H.P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”) This quote which has been stated by H.P. Lovecraft himself in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” reflects a big aspect of his writing. Lovecraft’s works make use of the unknown; the fear of it. By referring to the supernatural, things that are not known or widely understood, Lovecraft …show more content…
Lovecraft as well. This story is a first person narrative of a surveyor who journeys to a place referred to by the locals of Arkham as “blasted heath.” The surveyor is told of a mysterious meteor that had crashed onto the land. The mysterious meteor never cooled but began shrinking and was impossible to describe. Over the course of a year, all crops nearby the crash begin to alter in mysterious ways and eventually Nahum Gardner, the owner of the farm, and his family all die. As the narrator and a few others go to check a well that is by the house, they discover many remains at the bottom of it after which the “colour” begins to pour out and spread across the land before eventually returning to the …show more content…
Lovecraft tells a short story about protagonist Randolph Carter who is again with a good friend. This time around Carter’s friend, Joel Manton, and Carter are sitting around a cemetery in which Carter tells Manton about a mysterious entity that haunts the house and surrounding area. Since this entity cannot be described by the five senses it gains the name of the unnamable. Both men are attacked by the unnamable and wake up in a hospital with multiple injuries. The object is described as “It was everywhere — a gelatin — a slime — yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes — and a blemish. It was the pit — the maelstrom — the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!” (H.P. Lovecraft, “The Unnamable”) The unnamable is the source of horror in this piece of literature by Lovecraft. Like the unknown realm, and the colour, this is also another entity that the reader isn’t told a lot about. The characters describe it as an object that they can’t give a name to. It is described as something that can’t be perceived by the senses. All that is known that it left both men severely injured and hospitalized a few days. Just as the underworld and the colour in “The Statement of Randolph Carter” and “The Colour Out of Space” respectively, this piece also left the horror to the imagination of the
In the “Tale-Tell Heart”, by Edgar Allen Poe syntax, imagery and personification are employed to reveal that the protagonist is a mentally insane man who killed his neighbor to get rid of his “Vulture” eye. The story goes on to unveil that the killer eventually felt remorse for the crime he just committed and confessed to the police. Syntax was utilized to show how when the killer got excited more anxious he became more intense, therefore how he spoke become very short and choppy. It can be shown as early as in the first paragraph. ‘True-- nervous--very,very dreadfully nervous’ It has been proven that when someone is being honest about events that they can tell the story in a calm manner.
Stories from the horror genre leave little information to the imagination. Although, why do people believe this about most stories. Well authors use the horror genre elements to surprise, excite, and give a reader many emotions while reading.
The speaker, instead of describing the swamp as dark and seamless, describes the swamp as “glittered” and “rich”. The abundance of life juxtaposes the previous image of scarcity in the swamp. At this point, the speaker is absent and the poem only focuses on the image of the swamp. This absence suggests that the speaker became part of the beautiful swamp. The vivid imagery of “fat grassy mires” and “succulent marrows” give the swamp a life-giving quality.
He could imagine his deception of this town “nestled in a paper landscape,” (Collins 534). This image of the speaker shows the first sign of his delusional ideas of the people in his town. Collins create a connection between the speaker’s teacher teaching life and retired life in lines five and six of the poem. These connections are “ chalk dust flurrying down in winter, nights dark as a blackboard,” which compares images that the readers can picture.
oh, how unspeakable!” This piece of text shows how the author created suspense by making the reader think about whether or not the narrator was going to die. In this piece of text, the author uses imagery in order to create suspense by describing how dangerously close the pendulum was to him. I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. In the text it also states, “‘Death,’ I said, ‘any death but that of the pit!’...
Gothic literature is fictional works that create atmospheres of horror and dread, portraying the deterioration of the world as we know it, extruding extreme emotions. They are often perceived as barbaric, bloody and gloomy, including abandoned castles, wild and lonely landscapes, darkness, visions, monsters and supernatural events. Gothic works often seek to explore questions about the human ability to endure fear, experience terror and act for good and evil. In The strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the novella explores the good and evil that exists in people, portraying it as two separate characters until the end of the story when the respectable Dr. Jekyll makes the transformation into the horrifyingly murderous Mr. Hyde. The doubling
Have you ever read a story that causes chills or your emotionally invested in a character. The story’s Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The mysteries of udolpho by Ann Radcliffe are literature that are centered in fear. These story’s cause suspense or has ghost or some type of monster. A gothic is a great example of fear in literature. The settings, characters, and story line has a way of making the reader invested by hooking to their emotions.
Sigmund Freud says “Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.” (Freud). In Frankenstein, Victor’s nightmares describe his subconscious and shows what he is truly scared of. His nightmares are often morbid and depict many of his loved ones dead. Frankenstein is quoted saying “I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel” (Shelly 58).
Ironically Lovecraft’s life was humble and without fame, but after his death, the work created in that life, would inspire much more in the science fiction and pop culture of today. Before he became a writer as an adult, Lovecraft hailed from a surprisingly regressive background. He grew up as part of a conservative aristocracy. Born in a time of massive political change and new sciences he had to adapt. Despite the era his family was still old fashioned.
“ The Fall of the House of Usher “ by Edgar Allan Poe is a short story about a man named Roderick Usher who initiates some events such as evoking his friend The Narrator as a protagonist to the dreadful mansion. The images such as the house and gothic ambience are used to reinforce the idea of giving the mystery to the reader. Edgar Allan Poe uses gothic elements to show how they affect the atmosphere and the characters. In the beginning , the gothic atmosphere of the house is indicated with terrifying images such as “ dull, dark and soundless ” that the feeling of horror vaccinated into reader by the thoughts of the narrator.
He had the anxiety as the monster always appeared in front of him in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In addition, he explained that dread and fear of being delivered can turned into energy that triggered the infinite spirit
Lovecraft´s “The Outsider” is retold by a first-person narrator who lives his whole life in a castle without any light and form of human contact. After years he takes the courage to climb up the inside of the castle´s black tower and escape. At the top he comes out through a trap door in a dark room where he finds a door from which he goes outside and sees the moon for the first time and the stretching ground with a nearby stone church. Wandering through the countryside he stumbles upon a house where a friendly gathering takes place. Going inside the inhabitants flee in blank horror leaving the narra-tor alone, confused and afraid.
Frankenstein uses mysterious circumstances to have Victor Frankenstein create the creature. This is found in the raising of the dead and other aspects of the unknown unexplored fields of science. Frankenstein possesses an atmosphere of mystery and suspense pervaded by a threatening feeling enhanced by the unknown accompanying the monster. During the letters at the beginning of the novel, when describing the creature as “a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature” (9) it is not yet clear as to what Frankenstein is speaking of, unknowns like these are frequent throughout the book due to the concentric nature of the story, many questions are created based off of stories chronologically later than the rest of the book. Frankenstein has a way of making things sound overtly dramatic, “as if possessed of magic powers, the monster had blinded me to his real intentions; and when I thought that I had prepared only my own death, I hastened that of a far dearer victim,” (175) while surely Frankenstein does not have magic powers the reader is left with a question as to who could possibly be a “far dearer victim” (175).
Unlike many other works of gothic fiction, this story does not take place in your typical abandoned monastery, haunted house or ominous castle. The setting is described as a dark and shadowy place (“black as pitch with the thick darkness”), but the story probably takes place in a house located in an urban area instead of an isolated one. We know this because of the neighbors, who are able to hear the old man cry out at night and then proceed to call the police who later show up at the house. Because the house is so vaguely described, the reader is forced to imagine the setting and that makes it all the more frightening.
One can never forget the feeling of fear dripping down their spine, curling and crushing their frail heart with rotting fingers. It was exactly what Molly was experiencing that peculiar day, during that single encounter resulting from her insatiable wanderlust. The sky rang with a metallic buzz, darkness swallowing the sun at only four in the afternoon. Sharp pollen and sour air settled thickly on the back of her throat, foreshadowing the abyssal of dread and nightmares that she was about to fall into. Blood was flowing stickily from a gash on the female’s leg, which she had won during a battle with some stones sleeping at the edge of a murky pond.