Sleeping With the Lights On - The Unsettling Story of Horror Jones Darryl Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences at Trinity College DublinPevná vazba

It's four in the morning and the lights are on. Fear is one of the most primal human emotions, and one of the hardest to reason with and dispel. There's no way we're going to sleep, not after the film we just saw.

It seems almost mad that we would frighten ourselves for fun, and yet there are thousands of books, films, and games designed to do exactly that.As Darryl Jones shows in Sleeping with the Lights On, the horror genre is vast, ranging from vampires, ghosts, and werewolves to mad scientists, Satanists, and deranged serial killers. So why do we scare ourselves? The cathartic release of scaring ourselves has made its appearance everywhere from Shakespearean tragedies to Internet memes.

Exploring the key tropes of the genre, including its monsters, its psychological chills, and its love affair with the macabre, Jones explains why horror stories disturb us, and how