{"id":125,"date":"2015-02-24T16:31:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-24T16:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/?p=125"},"modified":"2017-01-05T20:54:22","modified_gmt":"2017-01-05T20:54:22","slug":"sincerely-sinister-for-the-love-of-epistolary-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/sincerely-sinister-for-the-love-of-epistolary-horror\/","title":{"rendered":"Sincerely, Sinister: For the Love of Epistolary Horror"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, my short story, “The Man in the Ambry,” made its debut in Typehouse Literary Magazine<\/a>. I remember quite vividly receiving the acceptance letter: it\u00a0came on Thanksgiving Day, giving me\u00a0one more thing\u00a0for which to\u00a0be\u00a0exceptionally grateful.<\/p>\n

Letters are of the utmost importance to this conversation, seeing that “The Man in the Ambry”\u00a0unfolds through a series of\u00a0letters\u00a0written by\u00a0a young girl and\u00a0delivered to the creature living in the walls of her family home. Epistolary fiction–that is, stories that use documents, be it diary entries, blogs, or regular old send-in-the-mail letters–isn’t quite as popular as it once was, but the format remains\u00a0one of the most tried-and-true of the horror genre.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

My personal\u00a0inspiration for\u00a0writing “The Man in the Ambry” came after\u00a0I recently reread Richard Matheson’s “Graveyard Shift.” Matheson’s 1960 story\u00a0unfolds through correspondence between two family members who are trying to make sense of what happened to a little boy and his now-deceased mother. It’s a pithy little tale–only four pages–but the diminutive length in no way diminishes its effectiveness.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0Twilight Zone<\/em> scribe Matheson was neither\u00a0the first nor the last to use the epistolary form in the name of horror. The earliest devotees to the narrative-by-letter format would be Bram Stoker’s Dracula<\/em> and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein<\/em>.\u00a0That’s right; the\u00a0epistolary form has\u00a0pretty much\u00a0been around as long as horror literature has.\u00a0If\u00a0counting two of the\u00a0original\u00a0genre stories in your corner doesn’t earn respect, then nothing can.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0it wasn’t just 19th century writers who loved epistolary. Everything from Stephen King’s teenage-angst-gone-wild Carrie<\/em> to Max Brooks’s World War Z<\/em> includes letters, interviews, and\/or newspaper articles as storytelling devices.<\/p>\n

These days, the epistolary format has morphed to reflect new technology. You can find\u00a0a variety of twenty-first century\u00a0stories that use tweets, blogs, and other social media to tell gruesome and otherwise macabre yarns. For as long as there’s horror literature, epistolary will be there, lurking around corners and in mailboxes to haunt your nightmares.<\/p>\n

Happy reading!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month, my short story, “The Man in the Ambry,” made its debut in Typehouse Literary Magazine. I remember quite vividly receiving the acceptance letter: it\u00a0came on Thanksgiving Day, giving me\u00a0one more thing\u00a0for which to\u00a0be\u00a0exceptionally grateful. Letters are of the utmost importance to this conversation, seeing that “The Man in the Ambry”\u00a0unfolds through a series […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2279,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions\/2279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}