'The best horror stories,' writes Charles Moore, 'are the ones where the monstrous, frightening thing never quite takes a clear shape.'
And somehow you know that he's talking about The Turn of the Screw and a couple of M.R. James stories. Because people who make that argument always are; they're never talking about H.P. Lovecraft. Which is why it's such an irritating thing to say. It's also not true: the monstrous takes a very definite shape indeed in a great deal of the best horror fiction.
The rest of the article, incidentally, is yet another moan about the 1960s, the decade that some on the right view as the source of all that's wrong in the world. (Just as some on the left view Thatcherism.) How many more of these do we actually need?
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