Retail bookstores stock 40,000 or more distinct titles, most of which are of scant interest to any individual customer [77]. There is always too much too read [68; 89]. In the store, a few titles of current interest might be displayed in windows or on tables. A few others might be recommended by clerks, especially when they assist frequent customers whose interests and taste they know [18; 36]. It often makes good sense for the bookseller to shelve related titles together: a customer interested in one historical treatise might be tempted to purchase several. The challenge of adapting this simple observation to the domain of fiction has been a central problem in modern literary culture.

Between the wars, a number of editors discovered (or created) magazine audiences eager for stories of various specific kinds. Fifty-six stories and four novels about the career of Sherlock Holmes led the way, and inspired waves of emulation and response [22; 31]. American magazine publishers courted niche markets for science fiction [44], for horror, for tales of the American frontier, for superhero comics, and for stories of romance. Booksellers (and pharmacies that sold magazines) soon learned to collect titles in each category in their own rack. Cinema faced a related problem: even if one went to the movies every week, there was still too much to see [50]. To decide, one might ask a friend, consult a critic, or you could simply get tickets for the sort of movie you liked best — a screwball romance, perhaps, or an action-packed Western. Categories help audiences use analogy to identify work they might want to pursue. (In this paper, we use the term “category fiction” rather than “genre fiction,” because “genre” has a different meaning in literary criticism.)

These categories accreted an array of shared surface features. Science fiction often had space ships, “aliens,” and blasters. Mystery featured detectives, stolid cops, and picaresque witnesses. These are seldom essential, and writers can dispense with them when convenient. What sets each category apart is not this superficial apparatus, but a shared story framework that addresses a core problem. The Western may have gunfights and cactus, or it may not; it always concerns the tension between the individual, the community immediately surrounding him, and the march of progress. Westerns have been notably popular in postwar Germany [38] and the Balkans [71]. Postwar intellectual anxieties led some to dismiss category fiction as hackwork or child's play [44] [64]. Indeed, many thoughtful people misunderstand the nature of these categories and the stories they tell.

A generation of literary hypertext has shown us that hypertext narrative is sometimes hard to write [12]. It was observed from the beginning that hypertext resists closure [47]. This fact complicates slingshot endings like those of O. Henry or Guy de Maupassant: if the sting of the tale lies at its end, the reader must reach that end, and in hypertext this can be difficult to assure. Similarly, stories like Parsifal that depend on the observation of significant vistas in a specific sequence are possible [8] but difficult to contrive hypertextually [67]. Some story frameworks seem constantly to fight either agency or responsiveness [61]: let a sane and sensible person like yourself into Romeo and Juliet or Some Like It Hot, and the action is bound to collapse [6].

Why do people tell and retell these category fictions, if they share the same framework? Why, having read one Sherlock Holmes story, do we wish to read another? Each story is, in some sense, much like the next. We begin in Baker Street, where we learn that something is amiss. By the story's end, all will be explained and the world will, once more, make sense. Yet, many people do want to read more of these stories [31] — so much so that even the abundance of the Conan Doyle canon does not satisfy us [21; 51]. We seek out Holmes-like stories by other hands — Dorothy Sayers, Georges Simenon, Agatha Christie, Laurie King. We find as well myriad retellings of these stories which argue against Holmes within the same narrative framework. Sam Spade (Hammett) and Philip Marlowe (Chandler) are Americans who understand crime — who inhabit crime — as Sherlock never did. Upfield's detective “Bony” is Holmes but an aboriginal Australian, Paretsky's V. I. Warshawsky is Holmes but a woman, Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January is a freedman. Why do these variation on a theme not bore us? Indeed, few of us feel an urgent need to solve mysterious murders or to locate stolen jewels; what makes these stories interest us? And, if we have little practical use for the arts of murder, what can horror, with its ghosts and specters, its vampires and synthetic monsters, conceivably offer us?

Fictions offer people a worked argument, a way to reason about our confrontation with existence [87]. Our own problems are specific, wrapped in perplexing detail. Category fiction can abstract away confounding, confusing circumstances and personalities.

Alienation — the sense that when we are at work we are not at home and that when we do find ourselves at home we are not getting work done — is perhaps the defining quality of modernity [23]. Everyone has problems: category fiction provides metaphoric explorations in which problems are identified and, at least in part, set right. Fiction avoids arguing about your immediate situation. It does not tell you what to do: you would not listen. Instead, it shows another situation, like yours but also unlike. These differences and distinctions are the essence of category fiction. We know (in part) where we are going, but we also want to see how we get there and how things go en route.

In addition, the familiarity of the story framework reassures the anxious reader that the world is not wholly disordered, that its hostility may in time be ameliorated. Events have logic, even in the presence of gods and magic [60]. There is a certain pleasure in seeing once more that things turn out as we remembered them, and the interplay of our memory of the story (perhaps in a different telling, or perhaps our memory of other stories) with the story as it unfolds yet again provides its own pleasures. People enjoy new tellings of even the most familiar stories — the Haggadah, the Mass, the False Knight On The Road. Liturgy, too, has its comforts.

The underlying issue that horror addresses is the understanding, inchoate since the 18th Century, that we inhabit a planet which might be imperiled, wounded, or murdered [25]. Perhaps we ourselves are the destined assassin.

Horror need not concern gore and monsters. It's A Wonderful Life! is horror. So are The Cat In The Hat [65] and Little Red Riding Hood [30] [12]. “Heart Of Darkness” ((Conrad 1898)) is horror. So, I think, is Paradise Lost.

The horror story posits that the world is not, in fact, what we think it is. It begins with a hero who sees the world as we do. But there is some small anomaly, a sighting of something odd, something that demands investigation. The story proceeds through four stages: [26]

Sighting. A flaw in reality is seen.

Thickening. In trying to understand or explain the flaw, more evidence accumulates that things are seldom what they seem.

Revel. We look on the world as it is, unmasked, the naked face of God or his absence. This truth is maddening, or incomprehensible, or sickens us.

Aftermath. We return to the world, and try to live as best we may.

Janet Murray, in Hamlet On The Holodeck, postulated that interactive literature has four common characteristics: that it is procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial. [ 69] As appealing as this list appears, these properties are not, in fact, particularly prevalent in literary hypertext. However, they are notably useful to horror. The horror story depends on identification, without which there is no terror and no story. The revelation of the world as it is, and the discovery of this new dispensation, is necessarily encyclopedic. World-building always is. Indeed, a good deal of formal experimentation in horror involves the search for ways to incorporate encyclopedic information without relying on a prophet or Librarian to carry buckets of exposition. Carrie revived the epistolary novel for this purpose [ 52]. (So did Frankenstein. [ 78]) The spatial propensities of horror are equally clear: if the world we know is a sham, a fog of amnesia, or a deception, we may need to travel to the heart of darkness, or descend to the world below, to see the world as it truly is.

Each schematic stage of the horror tale is typically encountered in sequence, which might seem a problem for interactive hypertextuality. Yet this difficulty is easily addressed, even within a sculptural hypertext [14; 43], through gating or gauntlets. Moreover, while leakage between sections could create continuity problems in the mystery story, in horror such leakage explains itself. Sighting, after all, is merely our first experience of Thickening: if some Sighting turns up in Thickening, it's just a bit more thickening. If some thickening turns up in Revel, well, in Revel everything is topsy-turvy. And should Revel leak into Aftermath, that is only to be expected.

Let us consider in turn each component of the horror story with regard to the affordances and difficulties that hypertextuality offers.

3.1 Sighting.

3.2 Thickening.

3.3 Revel

3.4 Aftermath

In considering the suitability of hypertext to a class of tasks, it often proves instructive to compose a specific hypertext intended for a specific task [66]. If we wish to explore approaches to pedagogical hypertexts, it makes sense to write a specific hypertext that addresses a specific instructional mission [19; 33; 53]. This exercise need not yield an ideal document, or one demonstrably superior to all other approaches; the point is to identify in what ways the lines of the problem are supported by the inclinations of the medium, and in what manner the medium finds itself at cross-purposes with what we believe we want to do. To appreciate the nature of watercolor, it helps to pick up a brush and to apply paint to paper. You may learn a good deal about painting without yourself producing a work of any great merit [75]. In this example, a creator of horror films and an editor of hypertexts collaborate to craft a modest horror hypertext, a yarn along the lines of “The Last Feast Of Harlequin” [58] or “Stone Animals” [59].

It goes without saying that this story is entirely fictitious.

4.1 Sighting

4.2 Thickening

4.3 Revel

4.4 Aftermath

Throughout the early stages of composition, it seemed striking how naturally some familiar tropes of horror appeared in what is, after all, a far from fantastic setting. We wanted to send our heroine to sort through someone's belongings: what could be more natural than to do this as a favor? And if it were a favor, who might ask it, and why would they ask? Though at each step we chose what seemed the least horrific and less supernatural choice — we might, after all, have sent May to clean out the house where her dead mother had gone to live with May's wicked stepfather. Nevertheless, we found ourselves in the service of a Sleeping Beauty. We did not plan all the river crossings for effect: if you live in Cambridge, that's where the hospitals are, and in New England, the Connecticut River marks a real cultural and political boundary that's hard to miss. Similarly, the observatories, rooftops and basements, the distant (abnormal) galaxies and the occluded, empty sky that broods over the failed college were not taken from the shelf of horror paraphernalia — at least not deliberately. The astronomical frame allowed us to us establish our heroine's feminism quickly and without (much) rancor, and we simply asked ourselves what campus places a recently-graduated astrophysicist might want to revisit before the real-estate developers demolish it all.

5.1 Hypertext And Horror: Eye Of Newt And Toe Of Frog

5.2 Multivalence Is Not A Vice

5.3 Links Of Darkness

5.4 It Speaks!

The development of the World Wide Web may itself be considered a horror story. Of course, that story may be told in different ways. Here, I sketch one such telling.

The origins of the Web are conventionally ascribed to Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and then Tim Berners-Lee [4]. This is not wrong, but we may readily see that all this work rests on subtle ideas and noble concepts that emerged from the disasters of the short 20th Century [10]. Among these, we might include [64]:

Linguistics — natural and computational — and identification of the capacities and limitations of abstract computation, the foundations of Computer Science, and of markup;

Existentialism — itself a response to Occupation — and its insistence on the central importance of individual action;

Structuralism and its conviction that both the natural and the social world can be understood through structural forces;

Rejection of simulacra and simulated experience and the quest for authenticity;

Critical Theory and its investigation into the nature and place of meaning.

These concerns pervade the design and the early rhetoric of the Web: its reliance on loosely linked but independent servers exempt from any central control or authority, its emphasis on equal access and individual expression, its embrace of emphatic performative authenticity [82], its neat balance of POST and GET.

Yet from its beginning, something was not quite right. The Web is not concerned (as Xanadu was [70]) with referential integrity, and from its earliest days, critics worried about dead links — and about duplicitous servers that might deliver some valuable information today, but switch to a pernicious advertisement tomorrow. This initial sighting of malaise seemed innocuous for a time; servers could be duplicitous, but why would any server wish to lie? (“Misery made me a fiend.”). PageRank, domain squatters, and ad networks supplied a way to monetize links, and soon whole swaths of the World Wide Web became link farms and webs of deceit [15].

For a brief time, it seemed possible that some sort of crowd-sourced structural map might provide a reliable guide, helping people find the good parts while avoiding spam and deception. Yahoo! tried to outline the Web, Cool Site Of The Day identified great leaps forward in design, and the WikiWikiWeb tried to make a social web everyone could write [56]. Thickening progressed, however, as people discovered that control of the guidebook was itself profitable and powerful. Jilted lovers, corporations, and even governmental agencies waged PR wars on the pages of Wikipedia [46] [2; 81]. The early promise of a read/write Web collapsed as “the social network that everyone hated” [88] discovered the immense profitability of misinforming fanatics and fools, in the guise of serving them photos of their grandchildren. By focusing on efficient warehousing and delivery systems, Amazon has placed itself in a position to collect a tax on books, films, musical recordings, games, groceries, and petaflops worldwide. Hypertext research turned away from its early concerns with systems, structures, and rhetorics, focusing ever more tightly on providing automatic surveillance tools that might reduce labor costs for Facebook and Twitter, or might make social networks more useful tools for autocratic regimes and criminal conspiracies.

Today, we find ourselves deeply in Revel. The planetary fire burns unabated, the death toll from our current epidemic approaches six million, European cities are bombed daily. The few surviving wikis are inundated by vandals. Email has been rendered marginal through spam and deceit. Cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes bid against online bookies for Super Bowl ads. Once, pundits confidently predicted that the net would route around outages: today, police forces monitor social media in order to compile lists of dissidents, and totalitarian states routinely suppress Internet access when doing so serves the regime.

We don't know what the Aftermath will be.

Publishing — which is to say, the problem of matching readers with work they want to read — remains a central problem of our literary world [11]. 20th-Century publishers found in category fiction a convenient means through which readers could identify literary work that addressed problems that interested them. In particular, three separate categories — science fiction, fantasy, and horror — address the growing perception that the planet we inhabit is itself the protagonist of a long tale, one whose outcome is doubtful [26].

Rhyming schemes and chord patterns constrain what may happen next while not determining what happens now; we know where this sonata or this blues song will wind up, but may be delighted to see how we get there. Similarly, stories often use familiar frameworks to achieve their effects. No story, moreover, is isolated; we always compare a new story to stories we know, and the echoes of those old stories inevitably resonate with the new. This resonance is especially intense among devotees of category fiction, who are among the most extensive of literary consumers [44].

Other frameworks may share related advantages. The Western story — currently somewhat eclipsed in the U.S., pace Star Wars — is one example. This category assembles several distinct frameworks to explore a core conflict: personal responsibility versus responsibilities to family and to community [38]. Representing community remains a challenge for hypertext as it does for computer games, but that obstacle need not be insuperable.

As we would expect, hypertext fits some frameworks easily, while others prove more difficult. In particular, hypertext is bound to be challenged by story frameworks that depend on precise coincidence in space, time and temperament. Much attention has focused on frameworks, such as tragedy, that a possess cultural cachet or patronage [41], or on intellectual properties that promise a mass audience. It might prove more useful to examine story frameworks that are naturally anachronic, that welcome ambiguity and transgression, and in which closure has always been a suspect quality. In horror, only the grave of the planet is fully closed. And even then, you never know.[86]

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3511095.3531270