TTH 3gr B

 1. The Metamorphosis, F. Kafka, 1915

a. It's about a man who wakes up and he's changed into a human-size insect.

b. We first know what he looks like after the metamorphosis, we don't know how he looked like before, and we get to know his reaction and his thoughts. He's not horrified, he's chill about it / he's sort of ok. It's a third-person narrative.

> Kafka was not published in his lifetime, he didn't want to. He asked his best friend to burn all his manuscripts after his death, but his friend sent them to a publisher instead.

 

2. The Thing on the Doorstep, H.P. Lovecraft, 1937

a. The story is about a man who kills someone in his cell. But he says he's not the murderer.

b. The narrator says people will call him a madman. This first-person narrative starts with "It is true", just like TTH. He also claims contradictory statements.

> Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre in the 1920s and 1930s, creating monstrous creatures plotting the downfall of man (Cthulhu for example), and fictional cities (Arkham) or books (the Necronomicon). He was an admirer of Poe. Many writers corresponded with him.

3. The Apple Tree, D. du Maurier, 1952

a. It takes place in December, Nat is a simple farmer. He looks at birds, and he likes to work alone.

b. We know he's married with children, and solitary ; it's a third person narrative. His environment is described. But there's another character, or characters : the birds.

> The Apple Tree is a short story anthology. A. Hitchcock bought the rights to The Birds and adapted it in the early 1960s, and changed the story quite a lot. She was not only a horror writer.

 

4. The Mist, S. King, 1985

a.  the action takes place near a lake somewhere in rural America. There's a family of three, the narrator, his wife Steff and their 5 year old son Billy. There's a "heat wave" that is about to provoke a "vicious thunderstorm." It's a late afternoon, and everything seems still and quiet.

b. S. King uses a very familiar context that the reader can recognize very easily. Likewise, the characters are likeable and can be immediately identified with. For example, the sentence "Billy is five," introducing that character, emphasizes the nature of who Billy is, and his fictional potential. 

Here, there's a different tradition of horror writing at work : instead of beginning the tale in media res, with horrific events right from the start, S. King chooses to take his time and give the reader an opportunity to discover a familiar context. This daily life (routine?) will be smashed at some point by evil forces.

 

5. Strangers, D. Koontz, 1986

a. The character wakes up in his dark closet, he has been sleepwalking. We learn he is a writer, he's single, and he's not afraid of the situation, but "embarassed."

b. the first two words are the name of the main character. Unlike The Mist, Strangers is a third person narrative. D. Koontz is famous for being a formulaic author : he always tend to follow the same ideas in most of his novels. He is also a representative of materialistic horror, just like H.P. Lovecraft : they write stories where all the fantastic elements have a rational explanation (science has not just found about it yet).

6. The Hellbound Heart, C. Barker, 1986

a. It's about a man who has a puzzle box, he bought it somewhere. At the beginning he doesn't have a solution for it, but in the end, and after many hours, he manages to open it. When the box opens there's a little music coming out of it.

b. we're given some names, Lemarchand (the boxmaker) and Frank. We know that Frank likes to solve puzzles, and that he's a bit of a traveller. He's also curious and determined. Coincidentally he's also one of the villains in the story.

The box could also be considered as a full-fledged character (un personnage à part entière) : it's "perverse" and its music is "sublime," connecting it to Poe and to the Gothic tradition. It has a French and Chinese origin. It's also mysterious and mirror-like on the inside, just like the story itself.

7. The Town Manager, T. Ligotti, 2003

a. this story is about a town manager who disappears one morning . He works in an office on "Main Street." After that, a man called Carnes wants to look for him, probably with the narrator and others.

b. Here, the eponymous character (le personnage éponyme) is introduced with THE, which conveys the feeling that he already know him. The story starts in media res. Likewise, the plot revolves around "Main Street," which could be anywhere in time and space. Finally, this is a first person plural narrative, distorting the traditional first person narrative famously used by Poe.

To put it in a nutshell, Poe has influenced many (if not all - si ce n'est tous) of these writers, because his stories didn't rely only on external horror (people coming back from the dead, dismemberment or other gruesome descriptions), but mostly on internal horror, with narrators doubting their mental health (FHU) or being scared by an old man's eye (TTH). Poe has transcended the Gothic genre by exploring the inner life of his characters. It's no coincidence if he fascinated psychotherapists and Freudian theorists like Marie Bonaparte.

rational explanation.