In his study The Fantastic in Literature, Eric Rabkin points out that fantastic often depends on what he calls structural ambiguity, that is, on coexistence of two or more textual elements, each of which legitimately be taken as having either of two meanings, depending on perspective with which one looks at that part (218). All texts, whether they are fantastic or not, force reader to make initial decision as to proper interpretation of one of these elements. This first interpretive choice will then channel and determine all subsequent decisions whenever another element is added until entire text comes together as a coherent whole. This concept of reading process implies that no element in itself carries a stable, unalterable meaning. Instead, single elements interact with each other to create contexts whose complexity increases with every new element added. Their composite meaning remains in a state of calculated ambiguity or relative indeterminacy as long as text does not intervene by imposing some gesture of closure upon it. According to Rabkin, fantasy does not operate all that differently. However, it does require a more radical process of revising or expanding reader's initial assumption. Fantasy operates within same hermeneutics of reading as realist modes of discourse, yet, unlike its counterparts, it emphasizes gaps, disruptions, and gray areas of transition that exist between successive elements of interpretive sequence. In other words, fantasy claims freedom to add subsequent elements that do not necessarily reaffirm first interpretive choice. It aims at derailing safe or predictable interpretive sequence. It is, to quote Rabkin, the consideration of fantastic (217) that characterizes fantastic as a calculated aesthetic effect on one hand, and as a consistent and recognizable genre on other. Although fantastic tends to foreground discontinuities of reading, it is equally concerned with coherence, stability, and reconciliation of conflicts. This intrinsic bipolarity manifests itself as a challenge to readers' own sense of ontological stability. Thus, to assess relative degree of fantastic in any given text means to examine how thoroughly text disrupts expectations that readers have about ontological coherence and predictability, in fiction as well as world around them. Readers want to know whether they are entering a world in which animals can speak, in which science has made time-travel possible, in which historical figures mingle freely with fictional ones, or in which narrator can violate suspension of disbelief at will by addressing reader directly or stepping outside of narrative. Once ontological rules governing text are established, they create a complex and, at times, heterogeneous frame of reference. It allows readers to define nature of world they are in until next reversal occurs. The more ontological reversals and reformulations, more fantastic text. Among all efforts to define fantastic in its most fundamental terms, Rabkin's approach is particularly useful in discussing one of its varieties, genre of horror fiction, and its specific problems. At first glance, his definition captures what other critics in pursuit of fantastic, most prominently among them Tzvetan Todorov, have described as unsettling moment when fantastic erupts into mundane. In The Fantastic, Todorov quotes a number of critics, among them Vladimir Solovyov, M.R. James, Louis Vax, and Roger Callois, who agree that fantastic is based on fictional premise that two incompatible spheres--the predictable, mundane world of everyday life and non-rational world of fantastic--exist separately from each other. With this ontological topography as a given, fantasy is generated whenever line of separation is being crossed in one direction or other; Callois talks about an irruption of inadmissible within changeless everyday reality; Castex about a brutal intrusion, and Todorov himself about fearful or awed hesitation of characters and readers at moment when they realize that line has been crossed (26). …