Episode 135: On 'The Secret Life of Puppets,' with Victoria Nelson
Victoria Nelson saw it first: Popular culture teems with occult ideas, vestiges of bygone belief, fragments of ancient magic disguised as common entertainment. Her 2001 work The Secret Life of Puppets is in many ways the ur-text of weird studies, so prescient and probing it is even more relevant now than it was when it first appeared. In episode 128, Phil and JF discussed Nelson's wonderful first novel Neighbor George (2021). In this episode, Nelson joins the hosts of Weird Studies to talk about the vision that drove her to write Secret Life along with its equally insightful follow-up, Gothicka.
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SHOW NOTES
\n\nVictoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets, Gothicka, Neighbor George
\n\nM. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories
\nTzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
\nSigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
\nCarol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
\nBruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
\nStephenie Meyer, Twilight series
\nWilliam P. Young, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity _
\nAgainst Everyone with Conner Habib, episodes 202 & 203
\nJames R. Lewis, _The Gods Have Landed
\nAnne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
\nHonor\xe9 de Balzac, "S\xe9raph\xeeta"
\nL. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology
Special Guest: Victoria Nelson.