Volume 33, Number 1 · January 30, 1986
EEK!
By S. Schoenbaum
Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror
by James B. Twitchell
Oxford University Press, 353 pp., $18.95
'Is this the promised end?' asks the good Earl of Kent, devastated, in the last scene of King Lear as Lear enters, carrying in his arms the body of the murdered Cordelia; to which Edgar adds, 'Or image of that horror?' Images of horror are Twitchell's theme in Dreadful Pleasures. He doesn't pause over this episode, although Lear isn't entirely absent from his pages. Images of actual horrors, of which there has been a sufficiency in modern life, are only glancingly alluded to: the victims of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, the swollen bellies of starving Ethiopian children we see on the evening news as we settle down to dinner. Nor is Twitchell concerned with the transformations wrought by art upon horrifying realities—Elephant Man is mentioned only as an instance of the genuine horrors which do not interest him here. Artificial images of horror—especially those conveyed by Gothic fictions and mass-culture films—are Twitchell's concerns.
Review, 3333 words
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