An always delightful literary device, the motif of harmful sensation is present in what are some of my favorite stories. The basic idea is that an object can have an effect on a person simply by virtue of being seen or heard or touched. Usually that effect is one you'd rather not have had.
Some examples:
The Zahir by Jorge Luis Borges
Medusa, in the Myth of Perseus
'The Funniest Joke in the World' sketch by Monty Python
Folk tales are full of these sorts of things: the evil eye, the danger of looking directly at a god, the once popular idea that anyone who read all of The Thousand and One Nights would go mad.
One of the great exemplars of this small but charming genre is The King in Yellow, by Robert Chambers, which I have just finished reading. It is a book of loosely connected short stories all featuring (either in passing or in the forefront of the narrative) a fictional book called, surprisingly enough, The King in Yellow. Anyone who happens to read this insidious book either goes slowly mad or dies soon after.
The stories were all written in the late 1890s and one can tell. They have a kind of Victorian quaintness and perhaps even stiffness about them that is a dead giveaway. Chambers wrote scores of sappy romance stories when he wasn't penning horror tales and that influence is also keenly felt. Still, they go down easy, are creepy enough, and were terribly influential on H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen and guys like that, so they have plenty to recommend them.
I haven't put much thought into a review of the book, but it is easy to at least say the following two things about it:
Anyone who is a fan of classic horror stories would get a kick out of these.
The King in Yellow isn't high literature, but it made for a really pleasant snack of a read and I don't regret the afternoon spent on it.
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