Confronting and Assuaging Pandemic Anxieties Through Horror Media in Christina Henry’s The Girl in Red
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people read fiction as a leisure activity.Surveys from Canada, China, India, and the US suggest that a considerable number of readers even increased the number of books they read compared with before the coronavirus outbreak (Parikh et al. 2020, 2).While some readers preferred "delightful, lighthearted, and frothy feel-good good books" (Nicolaou 2020), others confronted their fears by resorting to novels whose plots feature fictional pandemics, such as Emily St. John Mandel's postapocalyptic tale Station Eleven (2014) and Stephen King's horror novel The Stand (1978).In line with scholars who have linked consuming media associated with the horror genre to a greater degree of resilience when it comes to coping with the challenging circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic (Scrivner et al. 2021, 5-6), this chapter argues that reading horror fiction holds a particular appeal during uncertain times-a potential that is also self-referentially addressed in horror texts, as my analysis will show.Building on the work of Xavier Aldana Reyes, who considers horror fiction "a form of cathartic entertainment" that "channels social fears" and shows "how we should respond to and manage them" (2016,(10)(11)(12), I analyze Christina Henry's 2019 novel The Girl in Red to illustrate how readers might find solace and inspiration through consuming horror fiction during moments of crisis.I argue that The Girl in Red presents its readers with two different ways of coping with existential crises: while it starts with an individualistic approach exemplified through its employment of the common horror film trope of the Final Girl, the novel moves toward a more communitycentered approach in its second half.Reading the novel after the 2020 outbreak invites readers to see parallels between the novel's pandemic and COVID-19, providing them with a specific narrative framework within which to position their own experiences.This contribution accordingly focuses on how the novel imagines responses to a pandemic and its aftermath.Through selected close readings of The Girl in Red, I show how the novel first celebrates the empowering qualities that the Final Girl trope offers for protagonist Red before exposing the limitations of 1In this chapter, I use the term 'postapocalyptic' as a pragmatic shorthand to describe a place where public order has collapsed.In particular in the US context, "Black and Indigenous Studies posit the notion that colonization and imperialism constitute an unrecognized apocalypse through genocide, slavery, and the compulsory displacement of an indigenous population" (Montgomery 2021, 7).In The Girl in Red, the postapocalyptic setting is marked by an escalation of racist and misogynist violence.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".