Writing the dismembered nation: The aesthetics of horror in Iraqi narratives of war
Bahoora, Haytham. 2015. The Arab Studies Journal 23, no. 1: 184-208.
Bahoora presents a discussion of three Iraqi novels (Luay Hamza Abbas’s Closing His Eyes, Hassan Blasim’s The Reality and the Record, and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad) written during and after the Arab Spring. He discusses the use of horror in synthesizing trauma and violence in fiction, the use of a monster as metaphor for a political or military agenda, and analyzes the way madness and the subconscious synthesize the proximity to war and violence.