Doug Goodman

Not for the first time, last night I got really jealous of my daughter because of the kinds of electives she can choose.  She will be going into high school next year, so Mrs. Badass and I were reviewing my daughter's coursework.  We also started looking at high school classes in general.  Some of the electives she can choose to take included a half-semester study of Shakespeare or Horror or Science Fiction/Fantasy Literature.  Makes you want to go back to high school, doesn't it?  Horror Lit has to be the coolest class at Clear Falls High School, hands down.  There is no way it can't be.  Right from the point where you enter the classroom, it will be cooler because the Horror Lit teacher will have the best classroom decorations.  Can you imagine?  Instead of that wavey border that seems to be en mode with teachers everywhere, the Horror Lit teacher uses a border with bloody blades and axes and every weapon ever used in a Stephen King book.  Instead of busts of Shakespeare, the Horror Lit teacher could just have fake heads hanging from the ceiling.  And instead of posters inspiring kids to read or stay off drugs, the Horror Lit teach (cause he's too cool to be a teacher) would have posters of Freddy and Jason.  (Okay, not technically literature, but still horror.)  The possibilities are endless!

Maybe your high school sucked and you didn't get to take interesting classes.  I went to Lubbock High School, the coolest high school on the planet because on Fridays you got to take cool classes like Star Trek movies and Meditation.  I can personally attest to Star Trek Movies as being much more interesting than Algebra I or US Government.  A class like Horror Lit would fit right in at LHS (obviously it would have to be a full-time classroom and not just for Fridays). 

This all got me thinking, though.  Maybe it's time to be a teacher.  I am generally against it, but if I was in charge of Horror Lit, nobody would ever want to take another class.  You would begin with Poe (duh!) and read The Pit and the Pendulum, The Casque of Amontillado, and The Murders of the Rue Morgue.  Dracula (double-duh!).  How you teach a Horror Lit class and not include Lovecraft is beyond me.  The Dunwich Horror, The Thing on the Doorstep, and The Mountains of Madness.  Richard Mattheson and I am Legend.  Probably the biggest decision is which Stephen King book to read.  I know that critically it is a no-brainer.  You read The Stand.  But I think in recent years, The Shining is starting to become more appreciated for its deconstruction of a modern family and for being the ultimate "haunted house" ghost story despite being located in a hotel).  Of course, I have always been partial to Carrie, and it might fit in better with the rest of the collection.

Think of how you can present the texts to students.  You can talk about the roles of women in Horror from Nina Harker in Dracula to Ruth in I am Legend to Carrie or Wendy Torrance in The Shining.  Another thing that would be cool to talk about is narrative.  Carrie, Lovecraft, and Bram Stoker's Dracula all use the same kind of journalistic narrative.  You can even compare that to modern horror cinema with its shaky cams and "found footage" movement.  Other possble topics are how tension is built, or the use of "gore," which is more of a late-twentieth century thing.

I can already hear a high school kid in the back room complaining that this course has no zombies.  Come to the front, son, and listen to the teach.  There is only so much schedule in a half-semester class.  I already have three books on the list (although I am Legend and Carrie are short books).  I don't have room for zombie books.  But I am the coolest teacher ever, so I think I have a solution.  I am going to steal something from my old World Lit teacher, who made everybody in the class at one point in the semester give an oral presentation on some topic.  (Mine was Metallica, which I could talk about for at least 2-3 hours.)  For the Horror Lit class, the only stipulation would be that it has to be related to horror.  So the student who wants to disect World War Z or the Walking Dead?  Be my guest.  See, I'm the coolest teacher in the world, homie!  Four shizzles out of five.

Okay, so now that I have described the absolute coolest class in the world, my question to you is - how would you teach a Horror Lit class and what would you assign for the reading list?  Or what class would you teach instead?