“I’m convinced horror can raise its game. Our postmodern, capitalism-in-crisis, media-saturated world is ripe to describe it anew. Our very language seems to demand it. A mortgage, literally, is a death grip. Negative equity means being haunted by your own house. Corporations have legal personhood: they can be held responsible for criminal actions and claim “human” rights, but ironically they have no body. PR and political spin are referred to as “dark arts”. Your computer can be a zombie, “possessed” by a Trojan virus. Charley Douglass started to make canned laughter in 1953 – and its still in use. Every episode of Friends is accompanied by the cachinnation of the dead.”

via Horror: a genre doomed to literary hell? | Books | guardian.co.uk.