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- W237190012 abstract "I must not fear, chants Paul Atreides to himself in Frank Herbert's Dune, Fear is mind killer (8). One of narrative mainsprings that fiction writers install in their work to keep it ticking is fear. It's a reliable source of suspense, conflict, and reader identification--everybody is afraid of something. Only in one branch of fantastic, however, is fear so central that it (or one of its emotional cousins) names genre: horror. I don't want to get into niceties of definition here--how horror differs from psychological terror and how both are related to dread, loathing, shivers, trepidation, or abhorrence. I am thinking of uses of fear and way it seems to have replaced thought and hope in various forms of popular discourse. Walk around your local video store. How many yards of shelving are occupied by DVD boxes adorned by chains and axes, dripping with blood? How many Fridays 13th occur in a century, anyway? Hasn't every alien and predator and terminator already crossed over into universe of every other? When did we start outsourcing our horror to Japan and Korea? When I'm not composing rhetorical questions like these, I frequently find myself wondering who supports this industry or watching with my own brand of horror sight of families with small children snapping up these grim and violent films. Equally disturbing is role of fear in political rhetoric. Politicians have discovered that best way to court money and votes is to raise fright index. Too many elections are decided, and too many bills passed, simply because people are afraid of losing status or wealth or cultural dominance--or their lives. We have left era of only thing to fear is fear itself and entered one of Be afraid, be very Like movies, political speeches and warning signs in airports tell us a story, and it is a story of invasion, loss, and danger in various shades of red, orange, and purple. This kind of fear can be a mind killer. It supplants thought, prevents reasoned discussion, blocks positive action. It may be evident by now that horror fiction is not my first choice for reading, yet I sometimes find myself captivated by a work of genuine creepiness: a story by Algernon Blackwood or Shirley Jackson or Peter Straub. And I have to recognize that some of my favorite fantasy is wound up by that same mainspring of fear. The Lord of Rings is full of scenes that would fit equally well in a story by H. P Lovecraft (with some pumping up of prose). Ursula K. Le Guin's The Farthest Shore is a story about fear of death--about how timor mortis conturbat me, as medieval hymn put it: the fear of death unhinges me (to translate loosely). The folk narratives on which most modern fantasy is based--myth and legend and tale and ballad--hardly avoid raising fears. Ballads are full of violent murder and hair-raising eeriness, such as ghostly visitation of widow's sons in Wife of Usher's Well. Folktales present ogres and vengeful relatives (sometimes in same person). Supernatural legends offer black beasts and pale glowing hounds, shapeshifting bloodsuckers, banshees and corpse brides. And myths--well, it's hard to imagine a more terrifying scene than that of Actaeon hunter, transformed into a stag by angry Artemis, pulled down and torn to pieces by his own hounds. There is a difference, however, between these uses of fear and what many people term pornography of violence--scenes of torture and dismemberment that function only to stimulate senses and rouse violent emotions. In a fairy tale, hero is expected to face fear but not to be overwhelmed by it. There is a folktale, tale-type number 326 in Antti Aarne/Stith Thompson catalogue, whose entire point seems to be learning to be afraid. In end, though, fearless (and slightly clueless) hero of Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear, Grimms' version of tale, learns only appearance of fear. …" @default.
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- W237190012 date "2008-01-01" @default.
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- W237190012 title "Introduction: Fear and Fantasy" @default.
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