Schemata of Philippine Literary Horror in the Seek Ye Whore Anthology of Yvette Tan

Short story as a literary form is used as an effective tool to portray fictional scenarios that evoke a diverse range of emotions and reactions from readers. Among the various literary genres is horror, aesthetically designed to conjure an atmosphere of fear and dread to the consumers of literature. Compared to its cinematic and television counterparts, literary horror channels its scares through words. Therefore, how fear as a reader’s reaction is produced through a short story deserves proper attention, particularly in terms of the linguistic styles employed to accomplish this aim. This study contributes to this intellectual curiosity through the cognitive stylistic analysis of the horror anthology “Seek Ye Whore” by Palanca award-winning Filipino author Yvette Tan. The study revealed (1) that the pattern of language use observed in the text was organized around the schemata associated with established horror subgenres; (2) that these schemata-oriented patterns of language use were organized to elicit an atmosphere of fear and dread through stylistic strategies such as contradictions and misalignments of schemata, detailed description of scenarios, characters, and other narrative elements as a literary stand-in for the disturbing imagery portrayed in horror visual media, and the stylistic portrayal of the “unknown” to create a sense of uneasiness and discomfort among the readers; and (3) that linguistic references to Filipino cultural phenomena were used to “localize” the context and their horror closer to the Filipino reader, thereby amplifying the fear and dread as Filipino readers strongly relate to the narrative.