Newspapers and magazines were the print sources which introduced Halloween to Americans outside of the Irish immigrant community in the years following the Civil War. Industrialisation and improved printing technologies made magazines and newspapers more readily available in greater number throughout the country, both of which were bought and read by women.

From a modest beginning, when the medium was founded eight years ago, we established a tradition in which each monthly issue opened with an editorial. To begin with, these editorials were always written by myself but, after a while, we decided to abandon the idea because although editorials were appropriate in a newspaper, they were less appropriate in a medium such as ours.

Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work, from isolated computers to a symbiotic globe-spanning network of connected computers it suddenly allows us to distribute comprehensive copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost.

Once it became a prominent genre, particular filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, George Romero and David Lynch became famous for their crafting of suspenseful plotlines and disturbing concepts.

Given its popularity, visibility and complexity, the scholarly attention to heavy metal studies needs no justification. Like other popular music cultures, heavy metal is a contested and controversial marker of both cultural resistance and sub-cultural conformity, offering a resource that enables individualised identity-formation and collective practices of association, consumption and commodification that are now global in character and complexity. At the same time, when compared to research on punk, electronic music and other scenes, the study of heavy metal was slow to get going, with substantial studies not appearing until the 1990s.

In her study ‘Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject’ (2003), Elena Gomel looks precisely at the narrative influence on violent behaviour and examines the way popular culture constructs violent subjectivity (for instance, in serial killers or perpetrators of genocide). She also claims that being a killer is the end result of social construction, just like being a woman or a man, and looks at modes in which narrative representation contributes to our capability of committing violent acts and resistance to them.

When German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer asserted that there are “two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake”, he pinpointed the critical problem that presents itself before scholars, critics, teachers and students of literature who attempt to discern which, out of a myriad of published texts, are the ones worth reading and teaching.