True Horror

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.