Project Fear: New Horror for Our Times

There is something monstrous about capital, something alive and creeping about it. It’ s been compared to a parasite, a vampire, a zombie-maker; one that transforms human lives into dead labour, and marshals all creative, free-thinking individuality into the long trudge that is work, money-making, aspiration. The philosopher Mark Fisher famously compared capital to the alien in John Carpenter’ s The Thing: an ‘ infinitely plastic entity capable of metabolising and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.’ For the latest book in its acclaimed horror series, Comma has invited ten authors to explore this emergent, monstrous property of capital through supernatural and surreal means. Thus, we see characters disappearing into algorithm-driven spending addictions, property development spreading like a virus across cityscapes leaving buildings empty and people homeless, and citizens so addicted to the ‘ news drug’ that promises everything is about to change that nothing does. We may think of capitalism as the ghost in the machine, driving things forward. But what happens when we become the ghosts?

Ra Page is the CEO and Founder of Comma Press. He has edited over 20 anthologies, including The City Life Book of Manchester Short Stories (Penguin, 1999), The New Uncanny (winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, 2008), and most recently Resist: Stories of Uprising (2019). He has coordinated a number of publisher development initiatives, including Literature Northwest (2004-2013), and the Northern Fiction Alliance (2016-present). He is a former journalist and has also worked as a producer and director on a number of short films. He read Physics at Balliol College, Oxford and has an MA in English