The F is for Fear Plan - Day 5 - For Science!!!

Thank you for joining us – and well done for surviving the spectres in Day 4.  You really tore up that bedsheet who knew the caretaker was behind it all along!  Next up on the FEAR programme Dr R Womble Esq will now explain today’s programme and hand out your syllabus reading material.

Day 5 – Push the boundaries of science!!

Horror can often be about NOT doing things. Don’t go into the woods; abandoned house; steal objects; and annoy the dead.  Now we can add to the list don’t break the laws of nature and this is where horror and science fiction tend to cross into each other.

The mummy of them all is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley which I only read for the first time this year and it’s fantastic. As I noted at the time the science is left vague and instead as all good fiction does it looks into the impact on characters. Intelligent, thoughtful and haunting there is a reason this has survived multiple retellings and doesn’t date. Looking at this with modern eyes a good companion read is  The Legacy of Frankenstein edited by David Thomas Moore where authors such as Tade Thompson and Emma Newman play with the themes of the novel with what that means today. 

And speaking of Mr Thompson he gets a bonus tale here with the novella The Murders of Molly Southbourne which has a young woman who all her life gets attacked by her clones that can grow from a single drop of blood.  Grim, relentless and weird.  A sequel will be read soon.

So today I need you to drink this flask; enter this locked room and just wait – it’s health tonic!

If you’ve got some alternatives please leave them in the comments!