Carla
Stopped reading at 13%.
The audiobook is so drily and…well, the word is aggressively narrated. Plus, the incredibly long introduction is narrated by two (uncredited) voices, the narrator and one other, so I am assuming the second voice is the author’s. It juts in unexpectedly and at odd junctures to read certain passages, no less drily or aggressively. How disappointing.
If I am to ever reapproach this work, it will have to be on paper…and I will be skipping the unnecessary detour on Freud’s work. I never thought I’d read the phrases “anal menstruation “ and “anal birth” more than once in a book on horror, and never have it refer to body horror. That section of the intro felt pretentious. I, too, read Freud in grad school—his entire oeuvre—but I don’t shoehorn his theories in where they might not belong. “Have you noticed a lot of horror fans are men? And that horror is often centered around the male gaze?…Did you know Freud had a one-sex theory about the genders?”
On second thought, I don’t think I will be returning to this book. There are so many other books, including academic studies of the horror genre, that I want to read.
Stopped reading at 13%.
The audiobook is so drily and…well, the word is aggressively narrated. Plus, the incredibly long introduction is narrated by two (uncredited) voices, the narrator and one other, so I am assuming the second voice is the author’s. It juts in unexpectedly and at odd junctures to read certain passages, no less drily or aggressively. How disappointing.
If I am to ever reapproach this work, it will have to be on paper…and I will be skipping the unnecessary detour on Freud’s work. I never thought I’d read the phrases “anal menstruation “ and “anal birth” more than once in a book on horror, and never have it refer to body horror. That section of the intro felt pretentious. I, too, read Freud in grad school—his entire oeuvre—but I don’t shoehorn his theories in where they might not belong. “Have you noticed a lot of horror fans are men? And that horror is often centered around the male gaze?…Did you know Freud had a one-sex theory about the genders?”
On second thought, I don’t think I will be returning to this book. There are so many other books, including academic studies of the horror genre, that I want to read.