Stephen Harper

Fear causes people to do bizarre things. In literature, fear can be used to make the reader feel sympathetic towards the protagonist. In Edgar Alan Poe’s book, The Pit and the Pendulum, Poe uses fear to captivate the reader into wanting to know what happens next. In the Crucible by Arthur Miller, fear is used in two ways, overcoming fear and letting fear ruin your life. There is always some sort of fear in literature, even if it isn't obvious. You can never escape fear, you can only overcome it…

My first book for ABU was The Perks of Being a Wallflower. In this book it starts out with a fifteen year old boy named Charlie who writes about his life in a letter format. In the beginning of the book Charlie talks about the first year of high school and his friend Michael who went suicide. He talks about how much he misses Michael and he was confused on why he didn’t tell him that he was depressed. Then he describes his family. In his family Charlie has a sister, a brother, a mother, a…

In “Why we crave horror movies”, Stephen King gives several points on why it is people like watching horror movies. In the first part of the essay he says, “I think that we all are mentally ill; those of us outside of the asylums only hide it better – and maybe not all that much better after all.” (378) In this statement, King is simply explaining that in everyone there is a little crazy. Some of us can maintain a clearer head then others. When people go and pay money to see horror movies, it…

What is Gothic Literature? Riding a rollercoaster, hydroplaning on a rainy day, or watching scary movies are all instances where fear arises. Everyone has experienced fear or paranoia at one point or another in their life. Fear is a sensation that can cause anxiety, a sense of unease, agitation, and distress. All people have felt fearful at least once in their lifetime. Although fear is a simple word, it encompasses many different emotions. Fear is a difficult expression to explain, all…

With an increasing heart rate, breathing is quickening, muscles are tensing,you realize you are scared. A well written story provides this scary experience for their readers. With twist turns at any point in the story, authors write the unexpected to keep readers interested and catch them off guard. The characters in the stories connect the reader to their emotions. Readers experience the strange events that affect the character as if they happened to them. Different writing styles transform the…

For many years, authors have been writing scary novels such as The Shining, It, and The Turn of the Screw. These novels all tell a bone-shuddering story and leave readers cautiously checking under their bed and sleeping with a few lights on. Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House does this as well as making readers question their own mental strength. A good expression for a variety of emotions and characters, this novel leaves the audience hanging onto every word. Jackson utilizes…

I was in the forest, training while plotting my next attack. My plan was to assassinate the king of Bridgeport. A few months ago he slaughtered all of the young children I was going to train, he even burnt down their dormitories. Taking something from the world’s greatest assassin would come at a cost, a life for a life to put it simply. My question was, how do I do it? His kingdom was surrounded by an impenetrable wall, with guards everywhere covered in head to toe with diamond armour. I would…

Mankind has always had a fascination with monsters. That has lead people around the world to create on their imagination, creatures with strange and abnormal characteristics. The different kinds of monsters that can be found in the world says a lot about which culture created it, and can be seen as a reflection of some characteristics of the culture. Even though the belief in monsters has been lost in the evolution of time and modern monsters are not even similar as how they used to be, it is…

What’s going on under the sea? There are many fan made speculations of the show “SpongeBob square pants” but the main one we will be looking at is the seven deadly sins and how each main character in the show correlates to each individual sin and the thought through meaning behind why each character is based on a sin from the seven deadly sins and which character hold which sin using examples from the show as well as research to help us understand more about the semiotics of a story. But First,…

Horror is a genre of films and literature which stimulates negative emotional reactions of its viewers and readers respectively. The reactions would primarily be fear, shock, terror, anger and pure agony. “The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the…