Carla

Extremely offputting introduction. Listened for fifteen minutes before the author stopped talking about herself...then she talked about herself and the Covid epidemic. And she also squeezed in a plug for her first book, which is not on this topic, but rather about lipstick. She only then started talking about the Spiritualism movement, but led into it by talking about herself and how she mourns as opposed to how other people nowadays don't mourn. Made me very uncomfortable.

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.