Literary types these days seem to feel cornered and outnumbered by “them,” people who simultaneously champion greater use of technology in learning and encourage the decreased study of literary fiction and poetry. One example of this assault on reading is the current movement of public schools toward a Common Core Standards curriculum. Lee Siegel’s recent essay (found on The New Yorker’s blog), “Should Literature Be Useful?”, notes that the Common Core promotes “non-fiction, even stressing the reading of train and bus schedules over imaginative literature.” This feels like a slap in the face to English majors everywhere. Similarly, when book-lovers hear of a movement away from physical books—for instance, the new, all-digital library in San Antonio, Texas—they are often equally shocked and feel personally affronted. I only know this because I am one of those angry, bookish folks, and I surround myself with similar people.

Increasingly, we fear that “they” are waging a war against literature, and that “they” want to replace it with learning in other, more “useful” fields. But who is “they”? Furthermore, who belongs to “us”? Maybe these distinctions are not so black and white. While many of us are up in arms about technological and political threats to literacy and literature, we can’t claim to be true Neo-Luddites. Most of us do not go into people’s homes and chop up and set fire to their computers, using their Kindles for kindling. Nor would many of us argue that the sciences are less worthy of study than are English or History.

In fact, I am currently delivering my thoughts to you via the technology of the Internet. Shenandoah is now entirely online, but this fact does not make its content any less valuable as literature. The convenience of being able to look up stories and poems on the website without having to pay for a subscription or search the library for past issues is actually a huge advantage. With novels and collections of poetry, however, I always prefer to have the actual book. It can be tedious and maddening to have to read a long text or a text that requires annotation online.

So, where the digitization of books is concerned, perhaps there is not so much to fear after all, as long as physical libraries remain in existence and do not all convert to the virtual model. But what about the discouraging state of literary study in public schools under the Common Core Standards? What about those tired arguments that the humanities are useless or irrelevant? Do you, too, fear the coming dystopia in which students are taught to read train and bus schedules at the expense of studying works of literature? Or do you think such happenings provoke more concern than they should?

I was hesitant at first to write a Halloween-related blog post because it feels a little trite. Visit almost any type of blog—food, music, film—and you’ll likely encounter a Halloween-related post. A Guide to Candy Corn Decorated Jack-O-Lanterns. Creepiest Songs of the Past Decade. 10 Classic Horror Movies You Need to Watch This Halloween. But then I went back to our blog archives and noticed that the Halloween Blog Post, as far as I can tell, has never appeared on the Snopes Blog.

So at the risk of being too conventional, I’ll venture into Season-Themed Blog Land, for the first time for the sake of considering a Halloween-appropriate genre that is typically disdained in the world of high literature: horror.

From a young age, I was exposed to horror as a genre in its various forms—particularly through books and film. As a child, I was fascinated and petrified by haunted houses, both the seasonal ones and the historic ones like the Winchester House in San Jose. For my thirteenth birthday party, my parents surprised me by renting the box at the local movie theater and inviting my friends for a showing of The Grudge 2. In high school, I carried around my dad’s collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories for months, reading and rereading stories like “The Dunwich Horror” and “Pickman’s Model.”

Now that I’m older and hopefully wiser, these things have begun to feel almost immature, for lack of a more suitable term. If I were to carry my Lovecraft collection through the English department now, I would expect a few students and professors to look askance at it, simply because works by authors who could be classified as horror writers are not usually considered “literary” or “good writing.”

That doesn’t, however, mean they aren’t worth reading or don’t have merit as works of literature. Sometimes, you just want to read a scary story, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s stylistically inventive or particularly sharp in its diction. The primary qualification for a good horror story is that it be structured in such a way that it is appropriately frightening. Constructing a story in this way requires skill, and writers of horror vary in their degrees of ability.

But what if you are, say, a student of literature who wants to read horror with complex metaphors, classical allusions, big words, and all the other trappings of “literary” literature? Where do you turn for a more scholarly version of the Stephen King stories that you drag along to the beach?

I’m not sure that I have read any works of fiction that fit neatly into the horror genre while still being considered “literary,” but I also have not looked very hard for a book that matches this description. Perhaps as fiction becomes more sophisticated, horror elements become subtler, with fewer garish frights and more original plotlines. Maybe as we terror-seekers venture deeper into the academic side of literature, we just have to look a little harder to get our fear fix. The horrors we encounter become less fantastic and more real—Addie’s rotting corpse in As I Lay Dying, or more abstract monsters like the specter of racism in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Are there any horror novels that you find are particularly well written? Do you have any favorite books or poems that have strong elements of horror? I’d love to know. –Isabella Martin