How Can You Justify a Course Like That?

Like what? We learned not to call it HoLit, because then people had an even different impression. The argument came down to two prongs (similar to a pitchfork). Horror is scary and fun, but definitely not literature. There are enough courses, so why offer one concentrating on horror: the things that sane people want to forget and don’t acknowledge they have.
How could we justify it? The giants of macabery had a spot (if a denigrated one) in the regular texts. Most readers have heard of Poe, and Jackson, and even Lee (Tanith, not Robert). King’s doorstop books are made into movies. We’ve seen twenty sequels to the pop horror. Ergo: if it’s popular, then it’s not necessarily a school subject. Cotton candy has no place in the cafeteria vending machines.
Some of those were laid into our arguments for offering Literature of Horror. Our main argument though, hinged on the quality of writing. Many of the masters played with ghost stories and things a bit harsher, on the side. Name a literary great, and we could offer some seamier, seedier, and more troubling examples of his writing. Not war stories, not science fiction (the Sci Fi people were worried we would trespass and made us promise never never never to use Frankenstein). In her childhood and young adulthood, Edith Wharton was terrified by ghost stories; then she began writing them. Who hasn’t heard of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”; but then Jackson made split-career-writing into her personal labyrinth of mirrors and mobs. Lots of actors move between the horror and mainstream films, though some of them are typecast in their spookier personas.