Varieties of The Fantastic in Fiction

This weeks reading were interesting to say the least. The most interesting and chaotic one to me is “Dangerous Laughter”. During the boredom of the summer kids are forced to make up their own fun and this leads to them doing a lot of weird stuff. The idea of having laughing competitions is normal and innocent fun but I thought it was strange for kids to come up with “laugh parlors” for some people to feed into their laughing obsessions. Like how do you even come up with that? The character ,Clara, was the main part of the story I thought about even after reading it. Clara started of as a shy girl who didn’t talk much and barely even moved and during the course of the story she becomes the queen of laughter but slowly she gets addicted to these parties and parlors. This leads me to believe that this laughter let her get out all of the the emotions she had never said or expressed and while this is a good thing its never good to do anything excessively. With great pleasure there can also be great pain. When she brought all of the kids to her attic and started laughing the narrator said “no one would forgive her for this” this line struck me because he probably thought that she had brought them there to endure and feel all of the emotions that she was letting out by laughing and this is kind of like “trauma dumping” but he stayed until he couldn’t take it anymore.