tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37410885.post5199387479238930630..comments2023-07-30T05:57:48.256-04:00Comments on Gospel of the Living Dead: Literary HorrorKPaffenrothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02323273575993522455noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37410885.post-68189311622160947862009-10-06T17:16:53.515-04:002009-10-06T17:16:53.515-04:00Thanks for the intelligent (and very apt) choices....Thanks for the intelligent (and very apt) choices. I've always felt that Euripides makes Stephen King look like Beatrix Potter.<br /><br />I've long argued that 'Medea' and 'The Bacchae' are essential masterpieces of the genre, but how many horror fans read the classics?<br /><br />Euripides achieves a broad, and very rich, range of emotional effects in both of these, but the horror element - overwhelming in those gruesome messenger speeches, and in the distressingly inexorable buildup to the fatal - is very aggressively presented. <br /><br />I tend to think that he was deliberately pushing the envelope, finding ways to subvert and circumvent the no-violence-on-stage rule with his penchants for graphic descriptions and dragging the bloody remains out before the audience for a final lament.<br /><br />I reread a number of those plays recently - these two and 'The Trojan Women' shook me up as much as, if not more than, the first time I read them. Awe, dread, lumps in the throat and chest, tears... I am <i>rarely</i> affected as deeply by anything, and it actually came as a surprise.<br /><br />But then, families wiped out from within by blind rage, the futile destruction and personal agony wrought by war, and religious fanaticism touching off civic madness and chaos are still parts of day to day life in 21st century America, aren't they?Gryphonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13089349567470720426noreply@blogger.com