The Folk Horror and Crime Fiction Hybrid in 'Heart of Darkness'

This article explores hybridization and generic experiments within the crossovers and intersections between crime fiction and folk horror in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Published in 1899, this novella is a beautiful, grimly bleak look at colonialism. Chinua Achebe identifies Heart of Darkness racism and scathingly calls it “‘permanent’ literature,” which is, he explains, “read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics” (15). This article applies genre fiction to this revered canonical novella, retrospectively identifying it as a folk horror text. Heart of Darkness has been categorized as a crime/detective narrative before (see Brooks 238–63), but I will argue that examining Heart of Darkness as a hybrid of crime fiction and folk horror allows us to look askance at a text that has engendered so much scholarship and criticism. Mapping the narrative trajectory through, in particular, a folk horror lens, can deepen our understanding of the nuances and contradictions present in the text.