In an e-mail I received from Jennifer McIlwee Myers, an adult who has Asperger’s syndrome, she explained that: Morbid and gruesome topics become a way to deal with one’s own otherness, as well as with the constant well-founded fear of pain and rejection. Examples: An interest in ‘freaks’ provides a forum for mentally dealing with one’s own otherness; the works of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft provide an outlet for both feelings of paranoia and otherness; identifying with inevitability and dangerously misunderstood monsters (such as Frankenstein, the Wolf man, and the Phantom of the Opera)
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