Merrily We Go to Hell (Dorothy Arzner, 1932) Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946) Forever Amber (Otto Preminger, 1947) Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947) Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948) The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950) Don’t Bother to Knock (Roy Ward Baker, 1952) Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954) Pushover (Richard Quine, 1954) Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954) Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963) Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967) Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Richard Brooks, 1977) Looker (Michael Crichton, 1981) The Appointment (Lindsey C. Vickers, 1982) Mike’s Murder (James Bridges, 1984) Cold Heaven (Nicolas Roeg, 1991) Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992) Color of Night (Richard Rush, 1994) Torment (Claude Chabrol, 1994) Double Team (Tsui Hark, 1997) Unfaithful (Adrian Lyne, 2002) How Do You Know(James L. Brooks, 2010) The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg, 2022) Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)
Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen (1817) The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins (1868) The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H. G. Wells (1896) What Maisie Knew, by Henry James (1897; 1908 New York Edition) The House of Souls, by Arthur Machen (1906) Widdershins, by Oliver Onions (1911) Summer, by Edith Wharton (1917) Tales of the Jazz Age, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922) The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett (1930) Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith (1950) The Nothing Man, by Jim Thompson (1954) A Severed Head, by Iris Murdoch (1961) Aura, by Carlos Fuentes (1962) Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion (1968) Sula, by Toni Morrison (1973) The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1980) Bad Behavior, by Mary Gaitskill (1988) Ancient Images, by Ramsey Campbell (1989) Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates (2000) Border Crossing, by Pat Barker (2001) These Truths: A History of the United States, by Jill Lepore (2018) The Best of Both Worlds, by S. P. Miskowski (2020) Hi, It’s Me, by Fawn Parker (2024) Dark Matter, by Kathe Koja (2025) Wreckage / What Happens in Hello Jack, by Peter Straub (2025)
Guest-edited by horror scholar and fiction writer Mike Thorn, this robust issue presents six feature essays, two works of original fiction, a dossier of retrospective reviews, and two essays in our student forum. Feature essays cover both literature and the moving image from a broad range of perspectives. From reorienting human and more-than-human animal perspectives in the essays by Poulomi Choudhury, Dru Jeffries, and Britt MacKenzie-Dale, to epistemological and ontological shifts in the way we think of human and more than-human ecologies in the essays by Zoë Anne Laks, Jenni Makahnouk, and William Taylor, and the Introduction by Mike Thorn, the contributions to this special issue explore the challenge of thinking beyond harmful anthropocentric and hegemonic capitalist world systems.
For the first time, this issue of Monstrum includes original fiction. In “The Playground,” celebrated horror author Kathe Koja (The Cipher, Under the Poppy, Straydog) traces a shift in ecological sensibility to what might be called a necessary violence. And with “Cogno,” Mike Thorn (Darkest Hours, Peel Back and See) brings us into the terrifying world of tech-bro longevity at the expense of … maybe everything.
A selection of retrospective reviews considers literary and cinematic texts that strive to reorient human and nonhuman animal perspectives, including a critical reassessment of the (anti-)anthropocentrism in Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2018), the vegan aesthetic of Rob Zombie’s films via House of 1000 Corpses (2003), and the brutal struggle against becoming-animal in Stuart Gordon’s grim King of the Ants (2003).
The student forum includes two essays by emerging scholars that continue the issue’s investigations of radical otherness. A product of the SSHRC-funded “Horror Ecologies” workshop by CORERISC held in summer 2024 at Dawson College, Emerson Reault’s essay reads Ginger Snaps as a trans allegory, reconsidering the film’s metaphorical “curse” as less one of becoming a woman, than that of an understanding of one’s embodiment. In their essay, Luka Romney looks at radical empathy for the “animal” Other via Julia Kristeva’s concept of herethics in two of Larry Cohen’s most provocative 1970s films, It’s Alive! (1976) and It Lives Again (1978).
What do you desire from the natural world? For millions of years, we’ve been shaped and reshaped by the environment around us. If technology has the power to mimic lush lands and blue waters, how do we bond if we can’t tell what is real or not—or worse, does it even matter? In this issue, we journey through galaxies where love knows no bounds, nature that heals, wild hearts to be untamed, plants that lust.
Reading is arguably the most crucial practice for any serious writer. In this course, you will “reverse engineer” acclaimed short stories to determine how and why they work. You will use these stories as lenses into key aspects of effective fiction (dialogue, plotting, voice, character, etc.) The course will help you to identify the key features of various distinctive prose styles, and you will participate in guided writing exercises inspired by those styles.
Winter term:
Wednesdays, Feb. 11 to March 25 (6 weeks, no class March 4) 6:30 – 8 p.m. $135 (+ HST)
In this interview, we chat with Kasia Van Schaik about reverse outlining, asking “what if”, sublimating emotion through landscape, and so much more.
Kasia Van Schaik is the author of the Giller Prize-nominated story collection We Have Never Lived on Earth and the forthcoming book of memoir and cultural criticism, Women Among Monuments. With Myra Bloom, she is the co-editor of the essay collection, Shelter in Text: Essays on Dwelling and Refuge. Kasia’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, the LA Review of Books, Room, The Rumpus, the Best Canadian Poetry, and the CBC. Kasia holds a PhD in literature from McGill University and is assistant professor of English and co-director of Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Wolastoqiyik territory.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë
The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett
Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson
Boyhood; Youth; Summertime — J. M. Coetzee
Outline; Transit; Kudos — Rachel Cusk
The Days of Abandonment; the Neapolitan Quartet — Elena Ferrante
Mike Thorn seeks proposals of no more than 500 words for essays (5000-7000 words) on or related to the topics listed below.
He is especially interested in essays addressing multiple Straub-authored novels and stories, and in analyses of under-studied works, such as Straub’s poetry collections; Marriages; Under Venus; If You Could See Me Now; Mr. X; and In the Night Room. He might consider close readings of individual novels or stories in some cases, but he will give preference to proposals referencing multiple texts. Send proposals and queries to mikethorn@live.com.
Proposals should include descriptive titles, preliminary reference lists, and brief, 100-word personal bios.
Chapter Topics
Pre-Gothic Straub: On the Poetry and Early Literary Novels: Proposals should address Marriages and Under Venus; they might also draw on Straub’s poetry collections.
The Early American Gothic Sequence: Proposals should address Julia, If You Could See Me Now, and Ghost Story. They might also consider Under Venus.
Narrative Unreliability and Genre-Slipperiness: On Straub’s “Blue Rose” Novels: Proposals should address Koko, Mystery, and The Throat; they might also consider The Juniper Tree and Other Blue Rose Stories.
Straub Gets Weird: On Straub’s Engagements with H. P. Lovecraft and the Weird Tradition: Proposals should address the novels Mr. X and Floating Dragon. They might also consider A Dark Matter, The Talisman, or other novels or stories deemed Weird or Weird-adjacent.
American Serial Killer Mythologies: Proposals should address The Hellfire Club and A Special Place. They might also consider other novels or short stories depicting serial killers, including the “Blue Rose” novels (Koko, Mystery, and The Throat), The Green Woman, Black House, Mr. X, “A Short Guide to the City”, “Ashputtle”, and “Bunny is Good Bread.”
The Metafictional Straub: Intertextuality and Narrative Self-Reflection: Proposals should address lost boy lost girl and In the Night Room. They might also address the preceding Timothy Underhill “Blue Rose” novels (Koko, Mystery, and The Throat) and other metafictional works, such as The Buffalo Hunter and The Hellfire Club.
Straub’s Short Fiction: Proposals should address at least one story or novella from each of the following collections: Houses Without Doors; Magic Terror; Interior Darkness.
Writers and Writing in Straub’s Fiction: Proposals should address The Hellfire Club and at least one of the Timothy Underhill novels (Koko, Mystery, The Throat, lost boy lost girl, and In the Night Room). They might also consider Ghost Story or other novels and stories representing writers and writing, including Mrs. God, “The Juniper Tree” and “The Geezers.”
Gothic Trauma: Proposals should explore depictions of individual and collective trauma in Peter Straub’s fiction. They might address personal traumas in stories and novels like “The Juniper Tree”, “Bunny is Good Bread”, Julia, If You Could See Me Now, Ghost Story, Under Venus, The Hellfire Club,and A Dark Matter, and/or representations of PTSD and the Vietnam war in Koko, The Throat, and “The Ghost Village.”
Nonfictional Straub: Critical Commentary and Curations: Proposals should consider some of the author’s essays and introductions compiled in Sides, Conjunctions, Poe’s Children, “Beyond the Veil of Vision: Peter Straub and Anthony Discenza”, and American Fantastic Tales.
Straub’s Literary Legacy and Influence: Proposals should place Straub’s work in conversation with his literary successors. Proposals should examine one or more of Straub’s novels or stories in tandem with one or more works by Kelly Link, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Elizabeth Hand, Stephen Graham Jones, Brian Evenson, or another high-profile fiction writer who has publicly cited Straub’s influence.
Editor Biography
Mike Thorn is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in American Gothic Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Shirley Jackson, The Weird: A Companion, American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper, Thinking Horror: A Journal of Horror Philosophy, and elsewhere. He holds his PhD in English from the University of New Brunswick.
In this interview, we chat with Jean Marc Ah-Sen about comic books, literary scenes, flipping the script on what a book can be, and so much more.
Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, and Kilworthy Tanner. His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Literary Hub, Catapult, The Comics Journal, Maclean’s, The Walrus, and elsewhere.
Books mentioned in this episode:
The Fall – Albert Camus
I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp – Richard Hell
The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
Biography of X – Catherine Lacey
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle – Vladimir Nabokov
Anti-Woo: The Lifeman’s Improved Primer for Non-Lovers; The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating – Stephen Potter
Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones – Dee Dee Ramone
Endling – Maria Reva
The Dying Animal – Philip Roth
Striptease – Georges Simenon
The Handyman Method – Andrew Sullivan
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
The Island of Doctor Moreau; The Time Machine – H. G. Wells
Mike Thorn 