Terrestrial Horror or the Marriage between Horror Fiction and Cli-Fi: What the Language of Horror can Teach us about Climate Change

Abstract

This paper focuses on the dystopian camp of climate fiction and its affinities with another fiction genre: horror. During cli-fi’s rise, horror has enjoyed a resurgence of popular interest and sustained and reinvigorated scholarly interest in the past few years. While horror and dystopian cli-fi have different roots and conceptual underpinnings, there are points of contact between the genres, when the horrible in horror fiction spawns from environmental collapse or when the climatic in cli-fi drives what horrifies. My central claim is that these contact points, the overlap between cli-fi and horror fiction, become critical research nodes for developing the necessary societal, cultural, and intellectual framework for living in a destroyed world. I suggest a label for the crossover between cli-fi and horror fiction: terrestrial horror. Analyzing multiple texts within this subgenre renders visible the societal, cultural, and intellectual changes necessary for the kinds of posthumanism needed in a destroyed world.