Reading Monsters

“This book started with an empirical observation of the many available sources of entertainment – both in the media and in literature – that wide audiences of viewers and readers derived pleasure from, as well as a sense of connection to certain types of films and fictional texts, whose main topic was always of a certain supernatural, unheimlich, kind. What could be seen with the naked eye was that films, TV series, fan fiction, and specialized fiction began to contain similar character typologies and drew similar viewers and readers, who began expressing a demand for more of such outlets, showing in the process a hidden need for subversive mechanisms of coping with contemporary reality and justifying the increasing success of these texts and films. In general, all these outlets contained elements of the supernatural, of horror, characters which were on either side of the monstrous spectrum – sub and post-human – that has been detailed throughout time, a general effect of the sublime over those they reached, and an ever-present sense of the uncanny, that unnameable, disembodied, feeling that something is amiss, yet promising some higher level of experience of oneself.”

Alexandru Paul Mărgău