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Title: A Dark Night's Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction (Understanding Contemporary American Literature) by Tony Magistrale, Michael A. Morrison ISBN: 1-57003-070-7 Publisher: University of South Carolina Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1996 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: Uneven quality, but two of the chapters are excellent.
Comment: In the past few years there seems to have been an explosion of commentary on horror fiction, but the quality of that commentary has been uneven. Some works seem more interested in "justifying" horror as a legitmate genre--they do more cheerleading and gushing than really insightful writing. I find much commentary on King to fall into this category (particularly, Winter's THE ART OF DARKNESS and some commentary on the genre done by Clive Barker). Others are so full of inflated scholarly jargon that it's hard to fight your way through the prose to figure out what the ideas are. Nina Auerbach's OUR VAMPIRES, OURSELVES comes to mind here.

A DARK NIGHT'S DREAMING falls somewhere in the middle. For the most part, this collection is quite readable, but the quality of the essays is uneven. I found little new or insightful in the background essays on the genre or on the influence of film, and that was disappointing. I was also disappointed in the chapter on King. On the other hand, I thought two of the chapters were very good--the one on William Peter Bladdy--which mixed some biographical background with commentary on the novel and the movie adaption of THE EXORCIST quite skillfully. And the chapter on Thomas Harris which really led me to think about THE RED DRAGON and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS in a different light--and especially to think about the popularity of "serial killer" fiction and how it fits into the horror genre.

One could hope for a better collection overall, but this one certainly had its moments.