Intro from Donner Parties and Other Anti-Social Gatherings
I wonder if most people remember what they were afraid of as a kid. I do. My parents didn’t go out of their way to protect me from most scary things like books or movies but at the same time I wasn’t scared of predictable, conventional stuff. There doesn’t seem to be a way to predict which events or images will leave permanent scars on children so trying to protect them from fear usually doesn’t work.
I was afraid of odd things. I was afraid of cutting the underside of my toes on the edge at the top of the landing leading out the backdoor of the house I grew up in. For some reason that edge seemed especially sharp. We didn’t go to church much but I was scared of being visited by a broken and bloodied Jesus, fresh from the crucifixion. I had a nightlight of Pluto, Mickey Mouse’s dog, and many nights I lay awake with a terror that the glowing cartoon dog was growing bigger and more feral until it was big enough to fill the whole room, with a snarling and dripping snout, nosing at me hidden under the covers.
I was afraid of talking to people I didn’t know. I didn’t even like talking to people I did know. Still don’t, really. I was afraid to be noticed by bullies or ghosts and so I worked to make myself invisible. I had a tendency to cover my face, with hoodies, scarves, under blankets. I even wondered if maybe I had been born with a caul, since having some barrier between my face and the world felt so comfortable. I was a little bit scared of just about everything and so I felt afraid almost all of the time. This was normal for me. A normal that I began to seek out.
By the time I was eight or nine I had a growing understanding of what specifically scared me and I went looking for more of it. I scoured the school library for books on ghosts–not stories but the real ghost books–and checked them out over and over. I remember one still, pages of photographs that had caught “REAL ghosts on film!!” There was a photo negative of a family packing up their station wagon for a road trip. Mother and kids were posed in front of the car, grandmother already sitting straight-spined in the backseat, looking right at the camera. But she only appeared in the negative, not the finished photo. She had died the year before. Even if it was made up, the idea sent a shiver of dread through my body.
Another book had written accounts of ghost sightings and interactions accompanied by cartoonish illustrations. One story from the early 1900s mentioned a man staying alone in a big empty house. In the night he would wake up because of pressure on his chest and we saw a horrid ghostly face hovering above his own. When he made eye contact with the apparition, icy and invisible hands seized him by the throat and choked him nearly to death. In the illustration the ghost’s face was blue, sticking out its tongue in a not-especially-menacing fashion, and blue disembodied hands floating in the air. Evidently the illustrator had a hard time conveying the invisible part. Despite this inherent goofiness, the story terrified me and I would lie awake with my head fully under the covers, certain that there was a face floating just above me. As long as my face stayed behind the mask of the blanket, maybe I would make it through the night. I asked my mother repeatedly if I had been born with a caul. She was always disgusted by the question and refused to answer.
But come morning, despite having spent the night nearly unable to breathe under the covers, I would wake up wanting more. I don’t think I comprehended that what I liked was horror–I didn’t seek it out in that kind of knowing way yet–but I chased the feeling of being scared. Even when I was so scared that it affected other parts of my life.
Well into my twenties I still couldn’t fall asleep without the TV on. Even today, fighting through occasional insomnia, I’ll pull the covers over my head and make a mental note to try and wake up before my wife so she doesn’t notice. But despite all that, fear relieved, and still relieves, pressure in other areas. Without that release I probably wouldn’t have ever slept at all.
It could be argued that I was just anxious, maybe to the point of a disorder. I was always imagining the worst case scenario of any given situation. I didn’t like to talk to people because my mind flooded with the worst possible thing the other person could say or do to me, which would sometimes happen anyway. I was a very small kid and got picked. I would avoid with great effort even the briefest interactions, like talking to cashiers or other kids’ parents. I was awkward, as well as puny. Horror provided a kind of outlet for those feelings of awkwardness and especially for the anger at being bullied.
There is usually some kind of comeuppance in horror. The worst behaved characters meet a grisly end. Hannibal Lecter only eats the rude. Ghosts ultimately get their murderers (or their descendants). More importantly to the anxious little boy I once was, what sets horror apart is its willingness to fully embrace the worst case scenario. Every horror story is essentially the worst possible way that scenario could play out. For someone normally brushed off with, “Oh you’re just being silly,” horror provides a rebuttal. Sometimes, the worst thing is exactly what happens. You’d best be prepared. Horror whispers back, “See! I was right. That’s why I run up the stairs at full speed after flicking the lights off.” And usually, it’s the awkward and overcautious characters who make it through to the end.
Over time, my taste in horror became more refined. Not that the horror I sought out was better in quality but only that I better understood the types of horror that had a stronger effect on me. Vampires and werewolves have lost whatever hold they may have had on me. There are too many zombies. I find serial killers oddly fascinating though not viscerally scary. Demographically speaking, I’m much more likely to be a serial killer rather than the victim of one. I prefer the slow build to the shiny splash of gore. I still have a special affinity, if not continued dread, for ghosts, which is the sub-genre that is the most concerned with comeuppance and righting past wrongs.
There are, to be fair, real problems and logistical issues with horror as a genre, just as there are with any other. Despite being the best descriptor available, the word “horror” doesn’t reveal much about genre or categorization. It describes a mood, an effect, rather than any details of format or convention and there are a number of expected conventions and tropes. At the same time, horror is welcoming of virtually anything that elicits that desired effect. Just like any other literary genre there are shining examples as well as abysmally bad ones.
I mentioned earlier those examples of imprinting moments from my childhood and early exposure to horror to illustrate a counterpoint to what I think is a false assumption about horror fans and especially creators and artists who work in the genre: that we are not in it for the scares. That instead we are so desensitized to everything horrific that we simply enjoy a voyeuristic cruelty, basking in depraved glee at stories and images from which normal, well-adjusted people would turn away in disgust. This simply isn’t true.
I only have my personal experience to draw on, I suppose, but I am keenly susceptible to all of horror’s many tricks. I turn on all the lights when I’m alone in a room, check all the corners and cupboards and cabinets and closets before going to sleep. I jump at scary movies. I also deeply enjoy that feeling and keep returning to it.
What might be perceived as desensitization I would argue is familiarity. And yes, there is a distinction. As with any creative form, it becomes harder to enjoy something if it’s derivative, too predictable, or too close to something we’ve seen before. When horror leans on the same tired tropes over and over (oh, he goes mad at the end of the journal? Surprise! The ghost is really the spirit of the spurned aunt they made live in the attic? Who could have guessed?), the result is frustration or disappointment rather than fear. If a work of horror fails to get a reaction for a horror fan, it’s just not all that good, not some faulty emotion on the part of the audience.
This familiarity does not mean that horror fans do not experience the emotions that horror is meant to evoke. The power in horror lies in the reader’s sensitivity. The whole point is to be horrified by the content, to be unsettled by it. Horror is an art form centered on empathy, not depravity.
Horror has always gotten a raw deal, always been derided. Even during the peak moment of horror as a popular form of entertainment–the 70s and 80s horror boom–it was never regarded as good art but rather as acceptable trash, a guilty pleasure. I’d like to say that the tide is turning but there is still resistance.
There continues today an avoidance of the bare term “horror” and prominent works in the genre are often stamped with new terms, coined just for them, to keep them unsullied and away from the reek of the dreaded H word: post-horror, art-horror, elevated-horror, psychological thriller, dark fantastic. Ultimately these allude to the same thing and the coded signifier remains unchanged. These are all Horror, if you were to ask me.
At some point, seeking horror out simply wasn’t enough. It no longer scratched that itch, at least not on its own. So I began writing it myself. It wasn’t a conscious choice, more of a compulsion which I think is true of any artist. The darker thoughts in my head were no longer fully exorcised by books, or movies, or outside sources, though I continued to devour and love them as I still do. To get my head clear and closer to that of a normal and well-adjusted person, the dark parts had to come out on their own, out onto the page. So here we are.
Despite a continuing urge in critical and popular circles to shy away from the genre as a legitimate or–God forbid–important art form, horror has always been present and has always helped to move literature along to new heights. One of the earliest novels written in English, Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, is an out-and-out horror story. Two pillars of the western canon, Dracula and Frankenstein, could not be better examples of horror literature but I’ve never seen them identified as such on high school and university syllabi. Beloved by Toni Morrison is a blend of real-world and supernatural horrors, complete with a haunted house and a ghost. The bible, all religious texts really, are teeming with the horrific. Yet there is still this squeamishness around horror. Artists who work in the genre know this social reaction well, in polite conversation with “normal,” “well-adjusted” people, say at a work party or a holiday event hosted by in-laws:
“What kind of stuff do you write?”
“Horror.”
“Oh.” Raised eyebrow, a pinched-lip smile, maybe a nervous chuckle. “Good for you. I can’t stand that stuff.”
This leads me then into a pretty obvious question: Why? Given all this negativity, why horror? First of all, why the hell not? Any argument against horror tends to skew overly simplistic, failing to completely consider the genre’s conventions, its questions, its possibilities. There isn’t really a good argument against horror since it all boils down to accepting the given premise that horror itself is fundamentally bad and should be avoided. The genre is not so easily pigeon-holed.
Horror is usually assumed to be a moral negative but this is flawed reasoning. Just as philosophical pessimism argues against the given and often default conclusion that life itself is inherently good–despite any and all suffering or individual experience–and thus should be preserved at all costs, so too does horror literature begin by examining a version of the world where all is not well. The opening agreement between the work and the audience in horror is that things are not as they should be. Bad things are happening. In reality, it is this kind of world where we all must live our lives.
The classic horror story, the tale of a monstrous evil whether an entity or a mode of thought, is often a surprisingly conservative affair, making the ultra-conservative stance opposed to horror all the more flummoxing. The classic set up begins with an idyllic normal, the happiness inherent in a good, usually Christian, heterosexual life. For example, the coming promise of a proper marriage as Jonathan Harker ventures into the scary wilderness of NOT-England to make his fortune. Love letters fly between himself and his creamy-skinned betrothed Mina, who waits ever patiently for her love to return. Until the beautiful idyll is shattered by the arrival of the monstrous Dracula, a creature of horrid and yet alluring appearance who comes from “over-there” and consumes anyone who is not striving hard enough for the good Christian family life that Jonathan and Mina are pursuing. Eventually the purity of our heroes is tested, upheld, and the monster is vanquished, rewarding the pure of heart with a return to the status quo. The monster–the aberration–must be destroyed so that we may return to the established normal which is always assumed to be inherently, even divinely, GOOD.
Modern horror, thankfully, no longer seeks a return to the status quo. There are counter examples of course but in most modern horror, the status quo is the monster. The genre has been gloriously taken up by the marginalized voices of society, embraced by those who are not content to sit back on the given premise that life as it is now is inherently good. For them, for most of us, all is NOT well. And horror is the lens through which we may convince some of you holdouts of how the world actually functions.
What I have collected here I do not present to you as shining examples of horror as it should be. I don’t believe these stories I’ve written and included here are the best that the genre has to offer. I haven’t mastered anything. I mean, I like them. But I include them here not as examples of success (material rewards thus far would suggest that they are not entirely successful) but rather as examples of how I understand horror to work.
These are the eventual result of my neverending compulsion to get such thoughts out of my head. Even so, I do hope they offer some enjoyment. If you’re so inclined, consider the other essays at each section break. I’ll dive a little deeper into the things that are not well and the horror lens that might make those problems clearer. If you’ve read this far, I think you might be ready to see through the dark lens, if only for a while. To see the darker parts of the world around us reflected back and to ponder over those ideas.
Not voyeuristically. Not cynically. But empathetically. With eyes open. Come. Let’s be pessimists together.