During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the, autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. Thus Edgar Allan Poe opened his story of the fall of the House of Usher in 1839. In this beautifully crafted sentence he captured so much that is essential to the horror story: darkness, ominous solitude, foreboding calm, apprehension and uncertainty, and a deep feeling of melancholy that could soon turn to fear.
Many kinds of fiction are self-explanatory: mysteries, Westerns, love stories, spy thrillers, and science fiction define themselves by the terms used to name them. The horror story is less easily defined, perhaps because other types of fiction so often use the trappings of terror to enhance their plots. Charles Dickens used the vehicle of an old-fashioned ghost story to tell A Christmas Carol, but that book is not a honor story. Nor does a Grimm brothers fairy tale such as Hansen and Grate with its child-devouring witch, belong to the genrE.
The nature of the horror story is. best indicated by the title of the 1980s television series Tales from the Dark SidE.Human beings have always acknowledged that there is evil in the world and a dark side to human nature that cannot be explained except perhaps in religious terms. This evil may be imagined as having an almost unlimited power to inspire anxiety, fear, dread, and terror in addition to doing actual physical and mental harm.
In the tale of horror quite ordinary people are confronted by something unknown and fearful, which can be neither understood nor explained in reasonable terms. It is the emphasis on the unreasonable that lies at the heart of horror stories. This kind of literature arose in the 18th century at the start of a movement called Romanticism. The movement was a reaction against a rational, orderly world in which humanity was basically good and everything could be explained scientifically. The literary type that inspired the horror story is Gothic fiction, tales of evil, often set in sinister medieval surroundings. This original kind of horror fiction has persisted to the present.
In his novel, Edgar Allen Poe _______.
A.integrated the description of beauty into his horror story
B.used a lot of typical descriptions of horror stories
C.was universally considered as the father of horror story
D.combined a touch of sadness in his description of horror