My name is Christopher Hall, and I am a college teacher in Canada. I was born and raised near Pembroke, Ontario in the Ottawa Valley. I completed my Ph. D. in English at the University of Toronto, after receiving my Master’s there, and prior to that a Bachelor’s in English and History at McGill University. My thesis was written on Pope’s An Essay on Man. My academic interests include 18 th century literature, poetry in particular, speculative fiction and satire. I live in Ottawa with my springer spaniel, Mason. Email: chall65 [at] hotmail.com
by Christopher Hall Despite writing my doctoral thesis on Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man, a work most notorious for its poorly optimized optimism, I am something of a natural pessimist. Pessimism is at the right moments a potent tool for clarity (as is, even I have to admit, optimism, though not surprisingly I think…
by Christopher Hall “In 2025, during an event to celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term, the richest man in the world gave a Nazi salute to the crowd.” This is a sentence which, circa 2005, would have made for a rather overblown introduction for a YA dystopian novel. But here we…
by Christopher Hall Comic horror’s fundamental lesson is that the world is not what it looks like. This thought is given particularly sharp expression in John Langan’s The Fisherman: ‘When I look at things – when I look at people – I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mâché…