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Links of Darkness: Hypertext and Horror

Abstract

Category fiction adopts a formal narrative framework to explore topics of mutual interest to readers and writers. Originating as a means of assisting retail booksellers and movie theaters in their work of matching readers and writers, categories like “Mystery”, “Western”, and “Horror” have shaped modern storytelling. The frameworks that underlie category fiction are often confounded with their conventional surface characteristics. For example, mysteries are not puzzles, but rather interrogate how a damaged world can be understood and, with understanding, repaired. We observe that that framework of Horror is congruent to the affordances of literary hypertext. The technologies and trappings of hypertext itself share the slippery uncanniness and unheimlichkeit of other horror staples: mirrors, twins, rivers, and crossroads. Finally, it is intriguing that the history of hypertext and the World Wide Web itself falls neatly into the framework of horror.

By: Mark Bernstein & Stee McMorris

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Notes

Categories (and genres) help set the expectation of the audience. It also streamlines exposition: in detective fiction, for example, everyone already knows the standard steps taken at the start of an investigation, or in sci-fi certain technology may be trope-y enough for the audience to understand what it does without explanation.

Paper discusses four stages of horror. 1) Sighting: A flaw in reality is seen. 2) Thickening: In trying to understand or explain the flaw, more evidence accumulates that things are seldom what they seem. 3) Revel: We look on the world as it is understood—the naked face of God, or his absence. The truth is maddening, is incomprehensible, or sickens us. 4) Aftermath: We return to the world and try to live on as best we may.

They make the point that "the spatial propensities of horror are equally clear: if the world we know is a sham... we may need to travel to the heart of darkness... to see the world as it is."

Interesting notes toward the end about the nature of early hypertext and the role of links to set the expectation of readers—which may not be honest (for example, clickbait or phishing schemes).