Here be Monsters - Horror 100

Helena Dahlgren

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Sweden

Helena Dahlgren presents HERE BE MONSTERS; 

Two questions that horror enthusiasts get asked a lot:

»Do you ever scare yourself? »

»Why do you read about such gruesome stuff when the world is gruesome enough? »

 

I will attempt to answer those questions, and more, in this book

More than anything else, I want to give you a hundred (more than a hundred, actually) delightfully horrific tips. I want to make your flesh crawl; I want to make your blood freeze pleasurably. I want to talk to you about one of the great loves of my life, the horror genre.

 

What is it about horror that has kept us spellbound for centuries, regardless of what’s going on in the world? How has horror helped me in life? What does my taste for the macabre say about me? And what is the greatest work of horror of all time?

 

My Horror 100, a literary and popcultural autobiography, sprawls from 1818 to 2015, from Gothic to gore. Penny dreadfuls line up with impeccable taste, Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones frolic with scream queens and I think it is safe to say that somewhere, in a red-curtained room where there is always music in the air, a certain little man from another place will dance again.

A hundred horrifically magic memories grabbing my hand, dragging me back out into those deep, dark woods.

Want to join me?

Helena

 

279 pages, non fiction 

 

Reviews

 

Helena Dahlgren’s new book ”Here Be Monsters – horror 100" is an indispensable guide to the weirdest things you can read, see or listen to.

Dagens Nyheter/Fredrik Strage

 

Best Book of the Month (June 2016) .

The favorite; Helena Dahlgren's " Here be Monsters – Horror 100” . I will read this book many times.  Obsession at it's best! All details and tips has loaded my reading list for a long time to come.

Böcker & Sånt

 

To be guided by The Princess of Darkness,  Helena Dahlgren,  into the eerie world is like stepping into a large and filled to the brim museum with a really well-informed and engaged guide. Helena Dahlgren’s disinct voice and ability to entertain wakes the lust to read more. Betyg 4+ av 5 

/Johannas deckarhörna

 

 

The text is an exciting and diverse mixture with a certain fondness for the Gothic, Victorian and Anglophile . Here room is given for both the mainstream and more obscure, ancient and modern through the pages, which means that all readers will be able to pick a bunch of unexpected and previously unknown raisins from the book. /…/ The interest in the horror genre is associated for many with adolescence but it’s alternately beautiful and terrifying with the horror culture is there throughout life and deserves to be taken seriously. This is something ”Here be Monsters” gives strong evidence of.

Dagens bok/ Björn Schagerström

 

 

Another good question Dahlgren brings up concerns the conditions for the horror stories, that perhaps only those who are safe and confident enough are able to treat themselves and indulge in terror, in the same way the rich people could be careless with money: ’Is my lifelong horror craze a sign of how damn privileged I am? What a nice and sheltered life I live? So after all horror lives next door to (Astrid Lindgren’s) peaceful Bullerby?’ These are the book's best moments, when Dahlgren share personal memories, but does something structurally of them, leading them to the larger discussion of how we consume terror./…/

It has become a very accessible book, it is suitable as a reference book on the bookshelf. Plenty of tips on reading horror, performed in exactly the good mood that results from havint entered the world of horror. It is enthusiastic without being uncritical, but also educational and fun .

Bernur/Howsoftthisprisonis