Conclusions

It is believed, that the horror fiction has always existed. Horror stories appeared in people’s folklore with the very first oral myths and fairy tales. The mysterious element in a tale served as a horrifying factor, as fear of unknown has always been the strongest human fear. With the advent of Christianity, demonology area has taken a prominent place in development of horror fiction. Moreover demonic creatures appeared as the personification of a comprehensive horror and carnival-comic life at the same time. These contradictions can be seen in the works of Gogol, Dante and other writers. Since the novel “Monk”, written by Lewis M., horror literature gains a new level with some new features. However, the founder of the genre of Gothic novel is considered to be Horace Walpole with his “Castle of Otranto”. In the 18^th century Gothic novel genre becomes extremely popular, its goal was to scare a reader and make him/her experience the ambiguous feelings.

Modern horror novel is somewhat different from the Gothic one. Unusual and odd events do not occur somewhere in a horrible castle anymore, everything happens, on the contrary, in a usual environment, on the background of everyday routine life, so the reader can represent him/herself with protagonists. Everything depends on the protagonist, most of the works written in the third person and writing style is simple. There are the following types of horror novel: horror novels about appearance change and supernatural events; supernatural horror novels; gothic novels; horror novels with a house as a scene; ghost stories; multiple personality, mind and body possession by other forms of life novels with the invasion of insects and reptiles in human body ; the vampires and werewolves horror novels.

There are a lot of figures of speech in horror fiction, as in any other literary genre, used to achieve a particular communicative effect. There can be distinguished two major groups of figures of speech in the English language: semasiological and syntactical expressive means and stylistic devices.

Analyzing horror tales of Nancy Holder and Neil Gaiman, we can denote some common characteristic features of these works. They are not bound to the facts, dates and places. There is lack of any specific data about the time and place of events, that only adds some mystery to the story. Style of writing is simple, neutral lexicon is used as well as and high-flown vocabulary (archaic and poetic words, terminology).

In the stories “Bloody Gothic” and “Baby Cakes” syntactical stylistic means are the most viewed: with the help of inversion a certain pretentiousness of whimsical events is achieved; repetition and parallel constructions aggravate the atmosphere. Parcellation and rhetorical questions also present in the stories.

Epithets are especially popular among semasiological stylistic devices, they have both negative and positive connotations to emphasize the contrast “good-evil” and create an overall mood of the story. Metaphors can also be often found.

Nevertheless, semasiological figures of speech are the least represented in the horror tales. However, we can often find a comparison and gradation, which also make unusual associations and keep a reader in suspense.

In general, we can say that the choice of certain expressive means and/or stylistic devices depends on writer’s individual style, his/her social and aesthetic position and, of course, the environment in which the character is.

I hope my research will be helpful for future investigations in horror fiction area, especially regarding the comparison of figures of speech in source and target languages. These materials can also be used while distinguishing the main features of the modern horror stories.