We expect to find American children being possessed by the Devil in brightly-lit suburban homes, and vampires to turn up in the familiar school canteen. The established distinction between the natural and the supernatural is an essential component of any horror story. The ghost is not only in the machine, but it is made by it. The ghost is not in itself frightening, or any more frightening than an aggressive human would be, and it only acquires its horror from a setting in which it does not belong and cannot be explained. James would then proceed to slip a ghost into this hitherto safe and predictable reality. James, for example, evoked a clockwork world in which a lonely bachelor would, say, go to the seaside to play golf. Horror writers have traditionally accepted a distinction between humdrum reality and a more potent unreality. Thomas Ligottiās Teatro Grottesco (2006) is based upon a fundamental error, which is at once aesthetic and philosophical.
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