The Depths of Horror: Exploring the Manifestation of Fear in the Natural World

The horror genre is uniquely powerful in that it is one of the only hands of fiction with the ability to reach off the page and follow you. The feeling of fear originally formed in the confines of a scary story can lie dormant in the reader after the story has finished and be resurfaced later by a related trigger. On a late night after work walking through a deserted car garage, home alone in the middle of a storm, or stumbling into an abandoned hospital, the reader is imbued with an ability to detect a threat that was previously undisclosed. Horror as a written artform acts as a mirror and a microscope, investigating the roots of what the reader is afraid of and allowing them to fully process that emotion. The traditions established within the horror genre have become typified as a result of differentiating the intended impact of horror, especially the body versus the mind. The impact of my poetics is empowered by the rich lineage of horror content tempering the reader's expectations, beginning with the 18th century Gothic horror movement. My contribution to the increasingly diverse and segmented horror landscape is a collection of short stories exploring the emotional depth of fear by invoking occult phenomena to engage with the reader's latent sense of everyday horrors.