‘Why horror has a hold on us…’
Anna Bogutskaya is a London-based writer and broadcaster who first came to my attention through her work on the Evolution of Horror podcast. She is also co-host of The Final Girls podcast and has previously published Unlikeable Female Characters – an exploration of how ‘bitches’ and ‘crazy women’ have taken over pop culture. Feeding the Monster (subtitled: Why Horror Has a Hold On Us) is a treatise on how horror has ceased being something that people embarrassingly discuss in hushed tones around the office and has now become an all-conquering cultural force…
Feeding the Monster is a series of non-fiction essays that breaks down the horror genre and our enjoyment of it into categories such as Pain, Anxiety and Power. Bogutskaya has the passion and the knowledge to write about horror in a way that is both insightful and compelling – never resorting to cliche or just echoing what has already been said many times before. As the horror genre is now more popular than ever, it has become harder and harder to say something new about horror movies and their impact and yet Feeding the Monster does feel fresh and innovative. This is partly because Bogutskaya has a clear vision of what she wants to say about horror movies and her own relationship with them and partly because she spends more time with modern horror classics such as Hereditary, Get Out and Talk to Me than with the more established horror staples that have already been discussed to death (and then reanimated, decapitated and discussed to death again).
I bought Feeding the Monster on a whim as I have always enjoyed the author’s contributions to the various horror podcasts on which she has appeared and unsurprisingly it is excellent. It is the rare horror book that is accessible to newcomers to the genre that also has something new to say to horror geeks and veterans like myself – a success.