I am currently teaching an online horror literature course in “Psychos and the Psyche” for graduate students in our MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University. This month we are studying Freud’s article on “Das Unheimlich” and reading a fascinating new anthology of horror fiction called The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease, edited by Sarah Eyre and Rah Page (Comma Press, 2008). The book features some of the best British horror authors alive, including Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle, A.S. Byatt, Christopher Priest and many more…even Matthew Holness (whose double, Garth Merenghi, is echoed here). The book definitely deserved the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for “Best Anthology” for its ambition, and it makes for an interesting study in all things Unheimlich.

Mirrors, Doubles and Masks... Cover art for THE NEW UNCANNY designed by Sarah Eyre and David Eckersall

The book, essentially, is a literary experiment. All its contributors were challenged to read Freud’s seminal essay on “The Uncanny,” and then write a fresh fictional interpretation in order to explore what the Uncanny might mean 100 years later — today — in the 21st century, “to update Freud’s famous checklist of what gives us the creeps.”

The introduction by Ra Page is an excellent survey of “The Uncanny” in its own right, discussing how Freud provided a “literary template…a shopping list of shivers” that horror writers have managed to return to again and again over the past century. Page explains Freud’s essay in one of the most clear and careful ways I’ve ever seen in print. When discussing the tales in The New Uncanny, Page notes that the majority of the stories feature either the double or the doll most often, and turns to another essay on the Uncanny — Rilke’s “Dolls: On the Waxwork Dolls of Lotte Pritzel” (1913) — to discover convincing reasons why. I love the way Page concludes the introduction: “[The Uncanny] puts us on edge — that place we really should be from time to time — and reminds us: it’s us that’s alive.”

Keeping with the experimental spirit of this book, I thought I’d ask my “Psychos and the Psyche” class to review the book as a group. I have assigned each classmate a specific story in the book, and asked them to write a response (in a comment to this blog entry) that addresses the following three questions:

1) How does the author try to “update” the Freudian Uncanny in this story?
2) Does the story succeed as a work of uncanny literature?
3) What does the story teach us about the Uncanny in today’s culture?

[Warning: spoilers are inevitable! SURPRISES WILL LIKELY BE GIVEN AWAY. And all rights and opinions belong to the commenting students themselves. They will appear intermittently between now and the deadline of Oct 6th.]

Update: You can read MY review of this book (with fewer spoilers) on The Goreletter here: “A Double-Take on The New Uncanny” — MAA

You can order The New Uncanny directly from Comma Press online (be careful to note the different options for overseas orders).

The Canadian literary journal, Descant, is calling for submissions on the theme, “Ghosts and the Uncanny” (deadline: March 01, 2010):

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken
to a little before it will explain itself.
– Charles Dickens

For this special issue, Descant turns ghost hunter and dares to explore the murky connections between life and death, science and superstition, folk beliefs and fictions. We are looking for apparitions of all kinds. Do you have paranormal poetry? Are you haunted by the past? Do you have a ghost of an idea? Perhaps you’d like to address the role of ghosts in literature and film. We want to document the existence of ghosts, both literal and metaphorical, on our pages. – Guest editors, Alex Maeve Campbell and Christina Francisco

Visit Descant’s website for more information.

Blankety Blank: A Novel of Vulgaria by D. Harlan Wilson

This disturbing read is a breakthrough work of fiction that deserves a spotlight on the literary landscape as one of the best works of experimental writing of the year, if not ever. The story is quite a mess, and difficult to encapsulate in a review, and this is fully intentional, yet beyond the sheer irreal humor that permeates every page there is one strong epoxy that holds it all remarkably well together: the palpable sense of liberation that Wilson surely must have enjoyed as he sets out to unlatch his own memoir from every rule and formula and stricture of narrative ever made, with fervent, violent, glee. He rubs the face of Truth into the doggie doo of Fiction, with outrageously successful and bizarro results.

The Silo Means Something in BLANKETY BLANK

It’s a memoir but it’s not. The title of this story refers to the name of a serial killer clown, stalking his victims in the McMansion-bloated suburb of Vulgaria, set somewhere just outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan…just outside the borders of a parody of conventional reality…yet also somewhere inside of D. Harlan Wilson’s own historical past (and present, too). The bizarre humor and deft wit in Wilson’s writing makes for compulsive, compelling reading, and generates a lot of laughs along the way (I have a high affection for the passage where the narrator tries to grapple with the Freudian concept of Uncanny), but I have to warn horror fans that this book might challenge anyone who simply likes to escape into the world of a straightforward story. The emotional thrill-ride of Wilson’s writing is grounded in intellectual acrobatics more than character identification. His purpose, I think, is trying to reveal that there is no such thing as a coherent story in the first place and that history is a fiction, and that that’s where the horror always lies, because we can’t escape these fictions, these truths, this stuff called language. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves is a fiction that our lives are built upon, as post-structualists have argued for about as long as Wilson has been alive, and so “Mr. Blankety Blank” is a figure for the desire for erasure from history, compelled by a smattering of hope for anything but the banal. The storytelling attacks itself in this grand experiment of “avant horror” that might remind you of the work of a young Kurt Vonnegut (if the “gut” part of his moniker were literal), and though it helps to know your postmodernist theory if you want to understand a book like this, it’s still a rip-roaring read.  Despite it’s persistent intellectalizing this remains a genuine horror story because, much like Danielewski’s House of Leaves, it begs the question of its own capacity to capture something much larger and much more sinister than itself in language and narrative, and this is what Freud meant by “the return of the repressed.”  Somewhere, somehow, the id is unlatched within this masterful work of historiography, and that’s what gives this bizarro memoir its own unique and uncanny sense of horror. See if you can handle it. You’ll probably laugh a lot. $15 bucks from:  http://www.rawdogscreaming.com/blank.html

[This review will appear in the June 2009 issue of my e-newsletter, The Goreletter]

On Sarah Langan’s “Why I Write Horror” (The Humanities Review, Spring 2008)

All genres have their intended effects. In mysteries, readers are asked to analyze. They solve puzzles. In science fiction, they imagine new, and occasionally better, worlds. But in horror, readers are asked to feel. That is why, when they put the book on the nightstand and turn out the light, they imagine that the creaking floor might actually be the ghost from the novel, bursting through the fictitious world, and into their bedrooms. They are the Gepettos of the novels they read, and in feeling, they give Pinocchio flesh. — Sarah Langan, “Why I Write Horror”

Sarah Langan’s recent article, “Why I Write Horror”, is not only a great autobiographical reflection, but also an excellent overview of the appeal and significance — if not urgency — of horror fiction today.