I’ve never been much of a fan of horror. I tend to avoid scary movies and spooky books,
because I never could understand why someone would choose to terrify
themselves. I’ve never enjoyed the
feeling of wide-awake dread, that breathless waiting for something to leap out
of the darkness, the trembling weakness that comes through the body in
anticipation of violence. Maybe some people
do like those sensations, and if so, great. More for them.
But
I’m learning that there are many different kinds of horror, because there are
many different kinds of fear. Danger
comes in all shapes and sizes, particularly now in our safe, apparently
civilized world. And some fears, while
less striking than the bloody-thing-jumping-out-of-the-shadows kind, are more
real and more familiar to me.
This
is on my mind because I am currently reading through my Christmas books, one of
which was a gift from my roommate. She
knows that I love “Welcome to Night Vale”, the creepy-wonderful podcast by
Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink. Night
Vale, by the way, is a very mild kind of creepy—I wouldn’t even class it as
horror, myself, more bizarre humor with a side of sharp satire. But Joseph Fink also has a book out now
unrelated to Night Vale called Alice Isn’t
Dead, which is the book that my roommate found and the story that inspired
this post. It is about a woman who,
after seeing her dead wife staring at her from a news report, drops everything
and goes off to search for her in an eighteen-wheeler. On the road, in the places where many people pass
and no one stays, Keisha finds something that can truly be called horrible. Allow me to share the passage that made me
want to write this afternoon.
At around four in the morning she heard haphazard, arrhythmic clapping. Adrenaline seized through her, but she stood and with shaking legs left her bedroom. She crept down the stairs. Slap slap came the sound. There was a flickering in her living room. Slap slap. The TV was on and muted, showing a local weather-woman describing a hurricane that would never come anywhere near the area Keisha lived. Against this weather report, Keisha saw a blurred reflection. A strange bent shape, swinging loosely back and forth. Slap slap. She smelled tilled earth, and she smelled her own sweat, and she smelled cleaning chemicals and the sharp funk of a gas station bathroom.
“WOOP,” the shape said. “WOOOOOP.” Slap slap. Slap slap.
She leaned around the living room door with as little of herself visible as possible. A Thistle Man, not the one she had first met, and not the one she had followed to the town, and not the one from her neighbors’ deck, but another one still. He was bent horribly backward, like his spine was broken, and he was loosely swinging his arms back and forth in a circle so that they slapped his chest and back. Slap slap. Slap. He gurgled. “WOOOP!” he shouted. “WOOOOOOOOOP!” (Fink, 91-92)
First of all, I have to say
how beautifully this is written, even this strange and disturbing
description. Well done, Mr. Fink. And what talent he has with the detail, revealing
the creature slowly, its strangeness coming one chilling element at a time. But that isn’t what brought me to the keyboard. I am here, as ever, to figure out what is
going on in my head: in this case, why this image will not leave my head. It is not particularly scary. Small spoiler: this weird monster does
nothing any more dangerous than this. Keisha
runs back to her bedroom, and he doesn’t follow, and the next day he is
gone. And yet it is frightening to
me. Out of all the terrible things that
these Thistle Men do in the book, this is the image that keeps coming back, the
monster entertaining itself in a darkened house.
To
me, this is horror on a deeper level, and one that I can appreciate. Anyone can jump out of a dark shadow and
scare someone—I’ve done it myself, more than once. There is no artistry in that. But that slapping, swinging monster is chilling
on a deeper level because there is a mystery to him. We don’t know why he is doing this. It’s never explained, at least not at the
point in the book I’ve reached so far. I
don’t think it will be explained, either; it is just a strangeness, something
included to make clear just how not human
these creatures are. And that is the
kind of horror that this book is built upon—the mystery, and the unexplained,
and the things that are very not human,
and yet very real and very clever and very dangerous. Fink reaches into the dark corners of the world
with this story, dragging out grimy things like what you find in the sink drain
or that corner behind the stove that never gets cleaned. He brings those things to light, where they do
not belong, and it is terrifying.
This
book, and books like it, are an exploration of the darkness that lives in the
world. We like to pretend we don’t have
the dark, but it is there, like those apps you can’t uninstall from your
phone. There is darkness in the world,
and there is darkness in every human soul, and try as we might, we can’t always
know what is hiding there. That is why
strange stories like these are scary, but also why it is important. Because every story about things hiding in
the dark needs someone who goes after them, who asks questions, who tries to
find out what they are and how to defeat them.
We need to be able to look into the shadows, despite the horror they
raise, and accept the realities that live there. True horror stories are practice for looking
into the dark and dealing with what is there, and something tells me that we will
need that practice.
