The Epistemology of the Horror Story

NOWHERE ARE NARRATIVE'S IMAGES of unfolding, of hesitation, of the step and the key more thematically profound and more clearly worked on the level of effect than in the horror story. Because the horror story is adaptable to narrative techniques of face to face communication, the printed text, the cinema, and the simulated events of the amusement park, we might suspect that this form operates by a manipulation of narrativity itself, that its common effect works through the possibilities offered by information unfolding in time. The narrative structure of the horror story exaggerates and displays the sequentiality of all narrative structures; hence its adaptability to the monologic narrative voice, to the phenomenon of one page after another, to the sequential shots of the film, and to the temporality of directed travel through the landscape of the house of horrors. The horror story form thus spans both preindustrial and postindustrial modes of fiction making and provides an important example of the ways in which folklore and literature share a repertoire of narrative devices.