The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siecle Culture of Decadence (review)

The perception that the horror fiction of the Victorian fin de siecle expresses its authors' anxieties about such scientific preoccupations as devolution and entropy has lost its freshness. It is by now a pedagogical commonplace to pair Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) with Max Nordau's Degeneration (1895), or to address the cultural angst arising from the suspicion that the idea of a benevolent and competent God might have to be replaced with that of a mindless Nature liable to dissolution and decay. The fundamental premise of Susan Navarette's The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence, then, is unlikely to excite readers.