![]() ![]() This is even clearer in Lovecraft: in "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", he writes: "He tried to drive them out, and repeated the Lord's Prayer to himself, eventually trailing off into a mnemonic hodge-podge like the modernistic Waste Land of Mr TS Eliot." Futurism, cubism, Einstein, Pluto, non-Euclidean geometry … all are entry points for the unspeakable. Look at James's "Casting the Runes", in which an advertisement in an "electric tram" brings the first shudder, or how a doll's house, a mezzotint or hotel bedsheets can become eldritch. (Victor Frankenstein, in the novel, doesn't use lightning to animate the creature Dracula is perfectly able to walk abroad at noon on the page.) Horror has its early 20th-century pioneers – MR James and HP Lovecraft, both, in their own way, traumatised by modernity itself. Horror has its classics – Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, for example, though both are better known from celluloid than paper. Yet it might be the genre most tractable to our contemporary concerns. But horror – the third aspect of "speculative fiction" – has had markedly less success. Sophie Hannah, Josh Bazell and Denise Mina have reinvented crime fiction Charles Yu, Iain M Banks and M John Harrison have given a literary uplift to science fiction while China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer and Kelly Link have done the same for fantasy. ![]() Literary writers such as Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt and Michael Chabon increasingly deploy tropes and images from genre, while genre writers have upped their stakes considerably in terms of complexity, moral resonance and style. ![]() For a while now, so-called "literary" and "genre" fiction have been moving from outright opposition to a cautious rapprochement.
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