Popular Culture Review 30.2
somehow offended his superiors�and has been sent away from an unnamed larger city and to Villefranche ( a dead zone where cellphone-contact with the outside world is nearly impossible ) as a form of professional chastisement . However , the passage is more applicable to Laurene , who , like Dante ’ s character in Inferno , is journeying into a netherworld of growing darkness . Seemingly locked in this dark world , and twenty years after her kidnapping , Laurene is still searching for a way out of a personal hell consisting of recurring and unbidden memories of her three nights of terror and , just as significantly , her regular and seemingly unending exposure to the corpses of murder and suicide victims .
The graphic depiction of these victims , their deaths almost always a form of punishment , reveals an aesthetic that combines the grotesque with the abject to emphasize that Villefranche is indeed a version of Dante ’ s Hell . According to Julia Kristeva , the abject involves
[ a ] massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness , which , as familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life , now harries me as radically separate , loathsome now harries me as radically separate , loathsome . Not me . Not that . A “ something ” I do not recognize as a thing . A weight of meaninglessness , about which there is nothing insignificant , and which crushes me . On the edge of non-existence and hallucination , of a reality that , if I recognize it , annihilates me . ( 2 )
Jerrold E . Hogle adds that the presence of the abject represents “ the return of the repressed familiar in ‘ the uncanny ’” ( 7 ). For its part , the grotesque magnifies the horror of the
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