Granta 117: Horror (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)

It haunts us; it stalks us; it shapes us. It creeps into our dreams and, if we allow it, can plague our ponderings of the future. The same ?monsters’ that lived under our childhood beds can reappear, alive and toothsome, in our adult lives. And perhaps most frightening of all: without reason or apology, one person’s fancy is another person’s torment. Granta 117 takes a stab at understanding the phenomenon that is horror.

With award-winning writing, Granta has illuminated the most complex issues of modern life. In 117, Stephen King writes of a retired judge who pays repeated visits to a patch of sand capable of predicting human mortality. Don DeLillo climbs into the head a moviegoer-turned-stalker. Joy Williams writes of a father with a grown son even stranger and less stable than he suspects. Rajesh Parameswaran presents us with a tiger who narrates its own escape from a zoo and its subsequent terrorizing of a neighborhood, while Daniel Alarcon explores the phenomenon of staged, high-camp blood baths. And Mark Doty ruminates on a close encounter between Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker. Also new work by Paul Auster, Will Self, and Julie Otsuka.

Come along. Hold tight. Get scared?

John Freeman’s criticism has appeared in more than 200 newspapers around the world, including the Guardian, the Independent, The Times and the Wall Street Journal. Between 2006 and 2008, he served as president of the National Book Critics Circle. His first book, THE TYRANNY OF EMAIL, was published in October by Scribner in the US and Text in Australia.