It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

Product Information

His creative and critical work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books , Chicago Review of Books , Harvard Review , Colorado Review , Electric Literature , and elsewhere. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. His creative and pop culture writing appears in Bomb, Vice, Backstage, PopMatters, Southeast Review, and North American Review, among other publications. It Came from the Closet collects twenty-five takes on twenty-five horror films that make us cringe, crack up, turn away and turn back again—each piece lavishly queer in its intelligence, vulnerability, and wit. I often start books that include any sort of academic media review assuming that I may put them down due to boredom.

Though there is not a unique definition universally agreed upon, because what might be horrific to some people, might not be to others, it seems that the themes explored in this genre are widely appealing to the queer community. Whip-smart, honest, and hilarious… gore aficionados and reads-the-Wiki-plot-summary scaredy-cats alike will find something haunting to love within its pages. I was exposed to queerness from birth as my mom got with her then-girlfriend the April after I was born.Horror, the anthology argues, while often full of misogyny and anti-trans, homophobic tropes, is also uniquely subversive and queer. I will say, I skipped the essays for the movies I hadn't seen yet, but I really loved many of the essays I did read (around half). It felt extremely intrusive to be given details about an adoptive child that apparently the child himself hasn't been made privy to and therefore cannot possibly have given consent for it to be shared with the world at large. What an intelligent, articulate, and culturally relevant anthology of essays by queer people reflecting on queerness in/and horror films. Her work has been optioned for TV, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine.

Some discuss how certain tropes and characters were purposely or accidentally coded as queer and many other sorts of analysis. like there’s really so much you can say along the lines of “the monster was demonized/had to be hidden…AND SO WAS/DID I” even if you’re saying it in different ways. His writing has also been listed as notable in The Best American Essays , and he is an active member of the National Book Critics Circle. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.The insight from these memoirs is wide; in addition to tackling on queer subjects as: being gay or lesbian in a religious household, growing up trans and dealing with gender issues, how bisexual visibility and queerbaiting seem to go hand in hand; there is also discussions about class, race, disability, abuse, fertility treatments, proving once more that we can’t analyze these matters in an isolated environment, everything is connected, and the only way to deal with it is voicing our experiences. if you’re looking for a diverse theorization about queer appreciation for the horror (film) genre, look no further! All of these essays are so articulate and intelligent and offer some beautiful and heartbreaking perspectives on queerness in horror films. Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world. His creative and pop culture writing appears in BOMB, VICE, Backstage, PopMatters, Southeast Review, North American Review, Narrative Northeast, VIA: Voices in Italian-Americana, among others.

Doyle on In My Skin, Addie Tsai on Dead Ringers, and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror.

An impressively diverse array of queer voices contributes their opinions on how and why particular horror movies made a personal and indelible impression on them. She is also the author of two novels, three story collections, two chapbooks, a short memoir, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, and several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists. Kirsty Logan’s latest book is Now She is Witch (Harvill Secker, 2023), a queer medieval witch revenge quest. Readers that do not know any or very few of the movies being discussed will likely struggle, because this is an unabashed passion project that never feels the need to explain itself.