Curiosity for the horrible is widespread in various parts of the world and the genre circulates through various mediums: literature, film and television. Resembling what Andreas Hedberg states regarding crime fiction, Stephen King presents the horror genre as extremely adaptable and useful in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre, which suggests an outline for a theory of horror. Like Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch and Theo D'haen, the editors of Crime Fiction as World Literature, I will take as a point of departure world literature in relation to society, but based on horror in Quebec literature, which contains a fascination for the disturbing and the horrifying. Just as Nilsson, Damrosch and D'haen have noted regarding crime fiction, horror lends itself to voicing social criticism and places emphasis on political issues. I endeavour to demonstrate that horror can serve to criticize global capitalism based on two Quebec novels, both set in a devastated single-industry mining town: Mort-Terrain (2014) by Biz and Qu'il est bon de se noyer (2016) by Cassie Berard. Due to its global nature, horror is one of the ways to link Quebec literature to world literature. After presenting horror as a social genre, I will analyze three horror motifs directly connected to the consequences of the capitalist system represented by the mine: the abandoned (or almost) town, the series of accidents (or murders) and the apocalypse.
