Back to the Begining

I think that every post before mine did a great job of covering Clute's analysis. I agree that his use of language was evocative and that his general theory was sound (if nearly universally applicable). What Clute describes is a perverse version of the theory of stage magic presented in The Prestige. The first stage of an illusion is "the pledge": the audience is show that all is as it appears. In horror the pledge is twisted to show the reader that something is not quite normal. "The pledge" can be seen to combine both the "sighting" and the "thickening". The next stage is "the turn" in which the magician, in this case the author, makes the object presented do something extraordinary (or extraordinarily horrific). This is the "revel" in which the world is turned upside down and expectations are defied. However, during this stage, the audience is looking for the trick. Surely there must be something that can reconcile what they are experiencing with their internalized understanding of the how the universe works. Then there is the final aspect, "the prestige." In this part, "you see something that you have never seen before." In magic, this tends to be something that shocks you out of your state of skepticism and into a state of wonder. In horror, "the prestige" or the "aftermath" is the revelation that "the world so exposed is in fact the real world," which pushes the audience from a state of confusion, terror, or disgust to the state of horror.

While I do not have much experience in the genre (what little experience I have is derived mostly from Michael Crichton novels and the game Bioshock) and do not have any ghost tales of my own to tell, I am really excited about this class. Like John, my tastes in literature have a rich fantasy pedigree. I began with Redwall, the Chronicles of Narnia, ect. moving on to pulp high fantasy such as Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms. From there I moved to better high fantasy such as Mercedes Lackey and Michael A. Stackpole. I confess I am not a Tolkien fan, I like his plots but cannot stand his writing style. Recently, most of my reading has been directed at Scifi however. The little fantasy I have had time to read lately has been either Terry Pratchett (who is a great satirist/fantasy author) or Piers Antony (who I must confess I read not for literary merit).