Thrill  

"Miss Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror was reviewed by Professor Edith J. Morley, who deplored tliat it did not examine “the motive of terror in art and literature with a view to determining the aesthetic effect and value of the thrill ”." --The Gothic Flame (1957) by Devendra Varma

"There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish to offend or to disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the severity and majesty of Truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill, for example, with the most intense of "pleasurable pain" over the accounts of the Passage of the Beresina, of the Earthquake at Lisbon, of the Plague at London, of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or of the stifling of the hundred and twenty-three prisoners in the Black Hole at Calcutta. But in these accounts it is the fact—it is the reality—it is the history which excites. As inventions, we should regard them with simple abhorrence."--"The Premature Burial " (1844) by E. A. Poe