Beyond the Familiar: Cultural and Religious Horror in the select Novels of Neil D’Silva

Abstract

This article explores the crossways of religious and cultural horror in contemporary Indian horror fiction. Investigating how author Neil D’Silva used year old cultural, religious and ritual belief system to evoke fear among the readers. The combination of horror with Indian cultural and religious belief systems portrays a specific space where familiar becomes fear and sacred becomes sinister. The author often uses mythology, folklore, and religious customs to create a sense of fear which reflects with readers on personal and collective level. This transformation of normal and customary supernatural events into something that is more social in nature as well as acknowledging them, is what this attempt communicates. From this perspective, the article analyses how these horror stories respond to contemporary social concerns like caste, gender, and religious rivalries through horror as an examination tool for social tensions. Today’s Indian horror writing breaks the barriers of culture and religion to provide insightful opinions about how tradition intersects with modernity, as well as what is sacred and what is not thereby enlarging its parameters in the literary field of India. With this research, one can better appreciate global horror literature since it emphasizes on what makes Indian writers’ work special when it comes to this category.
.