"The Nice House on the Lake" is a cozy riff on cosmic horror

Around this time last year, I wrote about my love for The Department of Truth by James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds, a sort of meta-level X-Files riff about conspiracy theories that literally bend reality. I deeply enjoyed Tynion's work on Detective Comics and tend to get a kick out his newsletter, but I hadn't read that much of his other work*, which until recently was largely DC Comics-based. — Read the rest

WRI 101: Monsters

Every so often I have an opportunity to teach a section of Davidson College’s first year writing course, WRI 101. It’s the only required class that all Davidson students take, but each section is shaped around a different topic. In Fall 2018 topics will range from “Writing about Modern Physics and Technology” (Section A) to “Monsters” (Section Y). In between are classes devoted to democracy, medicine, Africa, and much more. In the past I’ve taught a WRI 101 course focused on graphic novels and another on toys and games. But this fall, I’m the guy behind Section Y, i.e. Monsters.

Why monsters? Because horror is the literary genre best-suited for our scary times. And to that end, I’ve decided to teach only 21st century works. This means I could leave behind the old standards like Frankenstein and Dracula that appear on almost every monster syllabus. I also decided that each of my works would somehow be reworking the genre. Here’s the list of major texts (which will be supplemented with key theoretical readings as well as short stories, games, and films like Get Out):

• Tananarive Due’s The Good House (2003) reworks the haunted house;
• Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) reworks the zombie apocalypse;
• Stephen Graham Jones’ Mongrels (2016) reworks werewolves;
• Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters (2017) reworks, wow, everything. This graphic novel is a powerful metatext about the role of monsters in social life, drawn from the point of view of a young girl who sees herself as a monster on the margins of society. The mob of angry townspeople in the drawing above appears early in the graphic novel.

You can see from the list that I also leave behind the usual suspects synonymous with horror. The Stephen Kings and the like. Now more than ever it is critical to read, watch, and play horror coming from perspectives that are not CIS white males. The powerful race and gender implications of monsters come into sharp focus with this approach. I’ll share the syllabus when it’s finalized, but for now, here’s the course description:

WRI 101: Monsters

Ghosts. Zombies. Vampires and werewolves. What is it about monsters? Why do they both terrify and delight us? Whether it’s the haunted house in Tananarive Due’s The Good House (2004), Kanye’s monster persona in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010), the walking dead in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), Native American werewolves in Stephen Graham Jones’ Mongrels (2016), or even white suburbia in Get Out (2017), monsters are always about more than just spine-tingling horror. This writing class explores monstrosity in the 21st century, paying particular attention to intersections with race and gender. Through a sequence of writing projects we will explore a central question: what do monsters mean? Our first project asks students to reflect on the home as a space of monstrosity. Our second and third projects address the idea of the monstrous other. Our final project uses contemporary literary and media theory to understand how monsters expose the limits of what counts as human. Along the way, we’ll experiment with our own little Frankenstein-like compositional monsters.