Harrison Konick - Lit. of Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction

Man, o’ man, would I hate to have a stepmother, because it seems that in these stories all they want is to kill, or make people miserable. I read Baba Yaga and The Wicked Stepmother, and I have to say they paint an interesting view on the world, and a particularly interesting one on family, and the women within one. Both the stories I read included nefarious stepmothers, attempting to do wrong to their children.             This brings you to a point of asking, why are women stereotyped into these kinds of roles, particularly stepmothers? One thought is that one might feel as though stepmothers do not care for the children of the husbands past, and even resent them, in a real-world context. So, when creating these tales of witches, these feelings from the authors come forward into the story. I am pointing this out because in the tales I read, the women in the family having evil intentions reoccurred more than the witch being evil. In The Wicked Stepmother, the ste

Lovecraftian horror has become a particular interest to me in recent years. I find the focus in the stories in the fear of the unknown to be really quite interesting, and I feel that this story provides a perfect example of that type of horror that he is so well known for.          The whole story is focused around his fear of how the moon transforms the landscape and world into a new, different, more terrifying one. This easily falls within the themes commonly expressed within most of his body of work. The way he describes the world, and the way it transforms in front of him also pushes forward those themes of the unknown. In fact, Lovecraft even says this in the piece, “And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon.” To add to this, using the moon to transform the known, into the unknown, and therefore terr

            Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, felt to me as an interesting character study. By the time I finished the book, but even by around Chapter 10 and before, it had me asking the interesting question, who truly is the monster? It’s a question that I find interesting, particularly because the name Frankenstein is already often confused for the monster he created, but who is to say that Frankenstein isn’t already a kind of monster?             So, a big reason why I find that question interesting is due mostly to the chapters 10 through 16. The chapters tell the monsters story of his life during the time that passes over the first few chapters. To say that it is a miserable one would be an understatement. It gives you a glimpse of what a life that should have never been given is like. We see the monster live a solitary life, hated by everyone around him. A being abandoned by the thing that created him. Left to begin his cursed life alone, a reality that will always haunt him.