Laura van den Berg

From Jill Radsken's Harvard Gazette Q&A with Laura van den Berg about her latest novel, The Third Hotel:

GAZETTE: When did your interest in horror films develop?

VAN DEN BERG: I started watching in college. There were all these slasher films — the “Scream” movies, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” — and this, to my mind, was around the time when the “final girl” trope — the last female character alive to confront the killer — entered into the popular lexicon. Being scared by a movie offers a safe catharsis, because the terror is confined to the screen. It’s an adrenalin spike, and when I come back down, I feel a bit more leveled. And the best horror has a way of distilling really potent human questions, by using extreme dislocations of reality to explore human questions that are fundamental and central: instability around trust and intimacy; the idea that your secrets will undo you; our inability to reckon with history and the cost of that looking away; the peculiar doors that transformative experiences, from grief to parenthood to trauma, might swing open. As a writer who naturally veers toward the strange and the disorienting, the genre...[read on]

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--Marshal Zeringue