Newswise — Melissa Jenkins, assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University, says teaching her Tales of Mystery and Terror writing seminar in the fall feels more appropriate than in the spring when it’s warm and sunny and the flowers are blooming. Jenkins recommended five books to read this Halloween:
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson/Frankenstein by Mary Shelley“You think that you know these stories, because so many of the details have trickled down into popular culture. So, reading the originals will be a surprise. Frankenstein and Strange Case have been popular for so long because they both ask universal questions about loneliness and guilt and human responsibility.”
Thinner by Steven King“A truly terrifying tale of a man who begins to lose weight uncontrollably after … an accident.”
Woman in White by Wilkie Collins“One of the greatest terror books ever written using the power of suggestion to induce fear in the reader.”
The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie“With 60 novels and 19 plays to choose from, you can’t go wrong.”
Jenkins is exploring what scares us in classic works of literature with her writing seminar students this fall. “In real life, fear is unpleasant, but through these stories we can experience it imaginatively, in a safe place,” she says. “In that way it becomes an escapist, vicarious pleasure.”
Through studying the popular works of Agatha Christie and Stephen King, alongside classics by Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Dickens, she has students examine the power of the authors to generate fear through a work of fiction. “In these stories, there is a contract between writers and readers. The writer must deliver a story that respects the limits of the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. A revolver can’t fire seven times, for example. On the other hand, a surefire way to pull the rug out from under the reader is to purposefully violate part of that unspoken contract.”
She draws a clear distinction between terror and horror. “Horror shows you the dead body. Terror shows a white sheet over something that might be a body or could be something else. Rather than focus on the shock factor, terror fiction forces you to approach problems logically. You learn to train and question your gut reactions.” Jenkins says horror stories are often deeply moral, with clear messages about right and wrong. “The farther you get from the horror genre, the more deliciously complicated the stories become,” she says. “Even Mr. Hyde has unexpected virtues that we identify with and make us question our own capacity for good and evil.”
Jenkins teaches her students that scary stories are not written in a vacuum, that the writers are responding to real social anxieties of their time. “Frequently the fear of technology is at the heart of the story,” she notes. “For instance, 19th century writers were responding to fears about grave robbing and anatomy labs, while later writers wrote about aliens and supercomputers.”
The students in her class began the semester acknowledging their own fears, which ranged from clowns and fires to illness and death, but Jenkins says she knows their biggest fear: “Writing papers!”
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