It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

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Exploring a multitude of queer experiences from first kisses and coming out to transition and parenthood, this is a varied and accessible collection that leans into the fun of horror while taking its cultural impact and reciprocal relationship to the LGBTQ+ community seriously. There are spoilers for the movies but you don’t need to have seen all of them to gain something from the essays. What an intelligent, articulate, and culturally relevant anthology of essays by queer people reflecting on queerness in/and horror films. Edited by writing professor Joe Vallese, the book was published by The Feminist Press at CUNY on October 4, 2022.

Tucker Lieberman is the author of the novel "Most Famous Short Film of All Time" (tRaum Books, 2022), the poetry collection "Enkidu is Dead and Not Dead / Enkidu está muerto y no lo está" (2021), the 20th-century biography "Ten Past Noon" (2020), the memoir "Bad Fire" (2019), and the literary criticism "Painting Dragons" (2018). An impressively diverse array of queer voices contributes their opinions on how and why particular horror movies made a personal and indelible impression on them.

Kirsty Logan’s latest book is Now She is Witch (Harvill Secker, 2023), a queer medieval witch revenge quest. But, most of these stories couch their analysis in fantastic storytelling of personal experiences of the authors. HOWEVER, I was completely enthralled by the personal details of his writing, his marriage to a woman while struggling with his attraction to men, but even more, his blossoming secret interest in gaining weight and other men gaining weight. Werewolf transformations as metaphor for what closeted individuals in the past (and some now, of course) were made to feel - as if a monster were inside them.

He is currently clinical associate professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, and previously served as site director and faculty for the Bard Prison Initiative. Though there is not a unique definition universally agreed upon, because what might be horrific to some people, might not be to others, it seems that the themes explored in this genre are widely appealing to the queer community. Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties , which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the bestselling memoir In the Dream House . Jones also praised the essays for not being overly analytical, saying "[t]hese are personal essays, not queer theory papers. A really terrific collection of essays by a great selection and variety of different authors — both fiction authors, poets, and essayists — about the intersection between queer studies and queer identity and horror movies.Doyle on In My Skin , Addie Tsai on Dead Ringers , and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror. There are a couple essays in it that push past the line of pretentious academia enough to be mildly annoying. The Halloween, Child's Play, and Elm Street essays will stick with me, and I really liked the Get Out, Us, and Candyman essays as well. I especially liked the early triple whammy of "Both Ways" (Carmen Maria Machado), "My Hand On the Glass" (Bruce Owens Grimm), and "The Girl, The Well, The Ring" (Zefyr Lisowski).