Maria Caraballo: literature of horror, fantasy and sci fi.

When thinking about balance in nature, and life Shunkin and Sasuke's story reflects this concept the best. We start by getting background information of Shunkin's social class. The narrator lets us know they aren't normal by previous standards. They're pale, skinny and shut inside their homes, when supposedly they should be outside.  There's no stereotypical happy endings in these stories. Shunkin and Sasuke both die, they are never formally recognized as a couple. They never feel remorse for their children. It isn't up until both of them are blind, and one of them disfigured, that they find a sort of balance. When both of them make a sacrifice, mainly, a sacrifice that lowers them in the societal hierarchy. Shunkin only shows slivers of good temperament, she has complete control over a man. She is older, he is submissive.  Both of the characters break our western expectations, Shunkin is the complete opposite of the gothic heroine. It defied my expectation...

I’ve never quite read something like this. The most similar book I can name is Do android’s dream of electric sheep? And I can’t quite pinpoint why. One characteristic of this read that I found interesting was the coldness of the protagonist. We never know her name, and she slowly starts to reveal her personal life to the reader. I like the fact that we never find about the character’s names, it makes everything even weirder and creepier. This also parallels with how her opinions on her husband change. She thinks he is shallow in the beginning, but discovers that there was an inner life to him by reading his journal. I didn’t know if this counted as horror, since I wasn’t scared for most of the time I was reading this piece. As it went along, it became scarier and scarier. When she found the human cells in animals. The horror/thriller of this book lies within the conspiratorial and biological elements. The supernatural being the entirety of area x, its mysteries and what happened ...

This is my first time ever reading an HP Lovecraft story. At first glance, I can feel the gothic style of writing in this piece. I've read Frankenstein before, so the word choice and rhythm of the piece feel familiarly gothic.  As soon as I finished the piece, I immediately thought it felt like a dream sequence, not quite horror, just disturbing. The passage of time feels relative, I can't help but compare it to Frankenstein, in the sense that both main characters in these pieces have a desire for the forbidden. Victor wants to create life, Elton wants to go to a forbidden place no one has returned from.  The piece is also very straightforward with it's message.. It seems like Lovecraft was letting us know that pursuing pleasures and wonders is worthless. The melodrama of Basil fantasizing and thinking with such passion about the places he cant reach, again, comparing it to Frankenstein. Victor wants to do something similar, the impossible, play God. There’s recurrin...