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Horror fiction

Horror is a genre of speculative fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten, or scare. A prominent sub-genre is the Gothic, a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting based on the Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages.

O horror, horror, horror!

Quotes

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  • Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
  •       But that I am forbid
    To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
    I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
    Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood,
    Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
    Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part,
    And each particular hair to stand on end
    Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
    • Shakespeare, Hamlet (1601), act 1, sc. 5 (Ghost)
  • ’Tis now the very witching time of night,
    When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
    Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,
    And do such bitter business as the day
    Would quake to look on.
    • Shakespeare, Hamlet (1601), act 3, sc. 2 (Hamlet)
  • O horror, horror, horror!
    Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!
    • Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606), act 2, sc. 3 (Macduff)
  • Double, double, toil and trouble;
    Fire, burn; and cauldron, bubble.
    • Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606), act 4, sc. 1 (Witches)
  • Not a soul
    But felt a fever of the mad, and play’d
    Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
    Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,
    Then all afire with me: the King’s son, Ferdinand,
    With hair up-staring—then like reeds, not hair—
    Was the first man that leapt; cried “Hell is empty,
    And all the devils are here.”
    • Shakespeare, The Tempest (c. 1610), act 1, sc. 1 (Ariel)
  • Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold.
  • Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist.
    • Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818), ch. 25
  • This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.
  • The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.
  • Last night I saw upon the stair
    A little man who wasn’t there
    He wasn’t there again today
    Oh, how I wish he’d go away...
  • Do you think she can see us, talking to one another now? Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?
  • The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.
  • Terror ... often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.
  • Smells of dirt and wet and long-gone vegetables would merge into one unmistakable ineluctable smell, the smell of the monster, the apotheosis of all monsters. It was the smell of something for which he had no name: the small of It, crouched and lurking and ready to spring. A creature which would eat anything but was especially hungry for boymeat.
  • I’m interested in the Gothic novel because it’s very much a woman’s form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, ‘Your husband is trying to kill you’?
    • Margaret Atwood, in an interview (July 1978)
    • Reported in Earl G. Ingersoll (ed.) Margaret Atwood: Conversations (1990)
  • The great horror stories of the 19th century—starting with Radcliffe, then entering the popular bloodstream with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)—represent the most significant contribution by British writers of the past century to the mass culture of this one.
    • Christopher Frayling, in The Sunday Times (8 December 1996)
    • Reported in Peter Kemp (ed.) The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, 2nd ed. (2003), p. 127
  • “I swear it on my own mother’s grave.”
    “Does she have a grave?“ asked Coraline.
    “Oh yes,” said the other mother. “I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl, I put her back.”
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