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What is so appealing about contemporary women's radical horror writing is its transgressive nature. Not only does it critique and disturb social conventions, it also refuses to conform to the formulae of conventional horror. Its celebration of the erotic, the Other, the dark exciting side of life/death, dream and nightmare is essentially creative and liberating. Like the erotic in its many selves, contemporary women's radical horror writing challenges conventional norms, translates and re-scripts the discourses of oppressive ideologies and their popular manifestation in fictional and filmic formulae, refusing the value systems which underlie them. Desire, it seems to argue, does not have to be linked to sin and duty. Philosophically, and then actually, much contemporary women's horror denies the destructive polarities of male/female, good/bad, passive/active and life/death. This it does by refusing to configure women as victims, hags or femmes fatales, and celebrating women's sexual energies in both lesbian and heterosexual relationships, breaking taboos and rewarding this conventionally assessed transgression. The formulae of horror, re-scripted, revalued, can be used to critique rather than reinstate forms of power. Angela Carter's "Company of Wolves" (1981), Pat Califia's "Vampire" (1993), Katherine Forrest's "O Captain, My Captain" (1993) and Cheri Scotch's The Werewolf's Kiss (1992) amongst others, will be explored for their refusal of horror's conventional policing and closure and for their energizing and liberating force.
Horror is a branch of the literary Gothic which depends upon ambiguities, upon gaps and fissures, silences and excess, paradox and contradiction. It exposes the dual nature of all things and the artifice, counterfeit and deceit which we maintain as part of society and sanity. It is contradictory, but ultimately (ironically, perhaps, given its insights), frequently conservative, restoring that order which it has labored to fissure and puncture, to reveal as crumbling artifice. The Gothic has always enabled a recognition of the balance of opposites, the ways in which dark and light, male and female, night and day, good and evil are flip sides of the same whole. But in conventional Gothic, once the fissures have opened and revealed a terrifying instability of order, cataclysm and catharsis follow, and the status quo is restored. Gothic exposes and dramatizes contradictions in order, ultimately, to reconcile them. Conventional horror also exposes the terrors of...