Book Review: It Came from the Closet

 

Image: the fantastic cover of this book is a illustration of a gravestone with a rainbow behind it and a black sky. In front of the gravestone is a limp wristed pink hand reaching out of the ground. On the gravestone it says it came from the closet in large black letters and queer reflections on horror in smaller letters. Across the bottom and small pink letters it says edited by Joe vallese.

I didn't know exactly what to expect from It Came from the Closet. I often start books that include any sort of academic media review assuming that I may put them down due to boredom. Sometimes media analysis, especially if I haven't seen or read the media, is so incredibly dull to me and just not my thing. This collection is very different than those sorts of texts. There are a couple essays in it that push past the line of pretentious academia enough to be mildly annoying. But, most of these stories couch their analysis in fantastic storytelling of personal experiences of the authors. 

There is a wide diversity of contributors to this book from varying gender and sexuality labels and upbringings. They are well written and the storytelling aspect of it makes this sort of analysis so much more accessible and entertaining to read.

I was basically raised on horror movies and books. It was one of the few things that I connected with my dad on when I got to see him. I recall having a variety of reactions to them from fear to outright laughter. When Army of Darkness came out, having seen the first two Evil Dead movies, we went in ready to laugh and had the whole theater chuckling with us by the end. I also recall The People Under the Stairs with its racist and misogynistic story lines involving child abuse terrifying my 9 year old self to a level that I wouldn't open my eyes until the lights were back on. I saw things that were just fine and others that I believe I was too young for.

I hadn't really thought much about how my queer and transness related to these sorts of media until reading this text. It makes a lot of sense. A lot of the entries sort of grappled with the way monstrosity and terror are used in media and how they can relate to being seen that way themselves. Others discuss how horror allowed them to escape from the real horrors of life, something I can definitely relate to. There's something comforting about watching something that's not real and knowing that it's not. Even in my nightmares, the ones that involve things like zombies and vampires are not nearly as scary as the ones involving social ostracism and abuse. Some discuss how certain tropes and characters were purposely or accidentally coded as queer and many other sorts of analysis.

All in all I think this book really bridges a gap between a queer memoir storytelling and academic media analysis making the topics accessible to a wider audience. But, all of that aside, I truly just enjoyed this book and the voices within. It was a fun read, whatever it is.

This was also posted to my Goodreads.