Literature of Horror, Fantasy, & Science Fiction

Three Moments of an Explosion opens with a deadpan enumeration of all the ways in which corporate America has influenced the setting. A burger company (probably Burger King) sponsors a demolition. Apple has expanded its repertoire from technology to actual apples.  The narration flaunts terminology such as "squib" and "rotvertising," a portmanteau of rot  and advertising . But hey, that's not important. In an equally perfunctory, matter-of-fact tone, the narrator describes a child from the Make-A-Wish foundation pressing the plunger for the demolition. This is weird fiction in a nutshell. Weird fiction, as a genre, requires the storyteller to have a thorough understanding of the original genre so it can then be subverted. Weird fiction usually takes place in dystopian universes. These dystopias are usually taken to an absurd extent and received by the populace as completely ordinary; corporations exert an outlandish degree of control over society as a whole.

Supernatural evil in the Western world is often inexorably connected to religion. Supernatural abominations, especially demonic apparitions, are usually banished through religious artifacts; specifically through exorcisms. Japanese horror employs iconography which has become instantly recognizable to American audiences: sullen, ethereal women with long, dark hair, pallid skin, and bulging eyes. These antagonists are usually wrathful spirits of dead lovers; women who were scorned by men in life and return in death to haunt them. Evil in J-Horror carries a sense of tragedy. Good things become evil once they've suffered a violent death. In Audition, even the gratuitous torture and violence inflicted by its antagonist, Asami, was preceded by a history of mistreatment at the hands of men. Evil, even in extravagant amounts, is usually not unprovoked. Conversely, just as the antagonists of Japanese horror are not always portrayed as complete monsters, the protagonists are not always i