For those of you
dedicated deadites who have been reading these weekly reviews, you
have perhaps taken notice of an ongoing, vital factor of horror
fiction that I have mentioned several times now. I am referring to
that slow build up of dread and foreboding that writers use so
potently in their stories. It is my belief that this is where the
true terror and tension of weird fiction exists and, when in the
manipulative, crafty hands of a talented scribe, it can be used to
torment the reader's mind with a sense of perfect horror that is
not easily forgotten. In "Afterward", a ghost story almost like no other, Edith
Wharton provides us literary masochists with a great, spooky high.(read more...)
