why i like horror

i published the following as a note on facebook. i tagged a few of you, with whom i'm facebook friends. but for the rest of you who i'm not facebook friends with, it's certainly a propos of what we talk about here on the blog.

you like how i'm walking around saying "we" after i completely bailed on everything Thon related after october?

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i was talking with my friend Molly about a story by HP Lovecraft called the Silver Key. i wound up buying her a Best of... book on amazon. after she got her copy in the mail, she sent me a message saying that she was excited to read it -- she's only had a few forays into horror.

but she also wanted to be prepared for the experience, so she asked me two questions to help get her in the proper mindframe to read the book.

one of the questions is why i liked horror as a genre so much. i've been asked the question before and always think i give a weak answer, so this was an excuse to finally try to give a codified response to the question.

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i think there's actually two questions on the table. the first is why i recommended the book to you, and the second is why i like horror as a genre.

it's worth pointing out that the specific story that gave me the impetus to send you the book isn't even a horror story.

it's called "the silver key." it's about a man named randolph carter -- who actually appears in several lovecraft stories. he once indulged himself in an intricate world of dreams. he tolerated the rigors of the "real" world as an interlude to time spent in the world of kingdoms inside his sleeping mind.

it's not just that he liked dreaming. it's that he tended his dreams like a crop -- every night he'd fall asleep knowing exactly to which grand place he'd be going, and also what, down to the minutest detail, made that place majestic and breathtaking. the only life that mattered to him at all lay in the magical land of his dreams. the rest of the world was colorless in comparison.

but he lost his way and got pulled down by the gravity of what other people tell him he has to take seriously. he has become conditioned to try to find wonder in the mundane devices of reality.

it doesn't work for him, and one day he decides to go back to his world of dreams.

there's a sequel to this story entitled "through the gates of the silver key", and in it you get to actually follow randolph carter when he returns to his dreamworld.

...anyway, i hope that suffices as an answer, because recommending lovecraft as a whole is a little complex a task. his writing can be unwieldy. he's a man who reaches for as many details as he can, and his sentences all contain a lot of information, but it's all good and all very telling.

that scary thing that hides behind the door (metaphorically) in all stories in the genre gets its greatest strength in the buildup -- all that time you spent walking furtively, inching your hand closer to the doorknob. the momentum comes in everything that happens before you open the door and see what's behind. when the buildup crests, there's often this moment in which you think, "oh. that's it? that's not as bad as i thought." in lovecraft's case, a lot of the time it's *worse* than you thought, either because it's more gruesome, or because it's got implications of something much larger and more completely horrifying than you'd predicted.

his beings come from other worlds through holes in the bottom of the ocean, across the stars on meteors, or through windows to other dimensions.

the problem of explaining how any of these beings or these places is different from (and better than) any other horror or fantasy story is that, the success (or failure -- not everyone who's a fan of horror likes Lovecraft, for the same reason that not everyone who likes fantasy stories likes Tolkien) of the writing is all in the details. lovecraft's writing is dense and at times has an incredibly high yield when it comes to imagery.

"Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about "the moving colours down there." Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of the brother who had been his greatest playmate."

i say imagery, but that's not exactly the word i'm looking for. you'll notice he glosses over certain details, so at times you're not sure what something looks like, you just know it's really, really bad. you don't get the image, but you get the squeamishness.

some people don't like lovecraft, because his writing gets so knotted and his descriptions are so sensational, but if you get into it, he can take you to chilling places in your mind, where the bottom of the world opens up beneath you and there's nothing below, for light-aeons.

quoth stephen king: "now that time has given us some perspective on his work, i think it is beyond doubt thatH.P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the 20th century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale."

as for horror on the whole...

my mom read lots of stephen king when i was younger. i bring this up just because i think horror is in my blood. i don't think my mom being a fan specifically was what got me into it -- it wasn't like i was mimicking reading "the shining" when i was in my infantile years. so my guess is it must have been movies that did it. something passive. something that just happened to me before i could do anything about it.

i think i was 6 when i was left alone in the TV room and saw the shining for the first time. it got in my head and made me sick with dread. but the dread was alluring. i may not have been able to NOT obsess over the haunting images in the movie, but the point is, i didn't want to NOT obsess about it. i liked the fear. i liked the dread. the fear and the dread were, in their own way, delicious.

i had lots of nightmares when i was a kid, as you may imagine considering what acceptable 6 year old TV fare was in my household. i probably had some good dreams as well, but the only ones i can remember are bad ones. there's this one from when i was maybe 4 that sticks in my head, of looking up at the sky from the window of our TV room and seeing a luminescent image of dracula staring down on all of us from the stars. i couldn't hope to articulate why my young mind found such a thing so scary, but it stuck with me for days -- i still remember it and this was coming up on 30 years ago.

as far back as i can remember, ghost stories were always my favorite. i owned several collections of good ones throughout grade school, and i remember a few of the stories well enough to tell them at a campfire, if i'm in storytelling mode.

this may be me copping out a bit, but it's hard to explain something that's been there for as long as you have memories. my whole life, i've found things i'm afraid of to have a certain intoxicating quality.

usually here i'd say something like, "i like horror because i know i'm physically safe while reading it or watching it, so i can let my mind go into a dark place. i can remind myself of terror without having to stake my life to it."

but that's a weak-sauce explanation.

horror is an emotional thing, and you can explain emotions till you're blue in the face, but we only ever understand each other's through metaphor.

in my case, i've always found a scary story makes a marvelous plaything. it's the bad car accident on the other side of the freeway you slow down to look at. you could just drive by, but you have to see the wreckage, at least for a split second, because it's so weird, and because it's so bad. it's the morlocks working the underground machines for the dainty eloi on the surface. it's a reminder that there are dark spaces in structures, where all the real work of the universe actually happens. when i read something scary -- i mean, like the sentence in a story in which the fear of the story is most fully alive -- i stop and reread it again and again, savoring its awfulness.

i'm not going to sit here and tell you that scary stuff helps me to realize the beauty in the world, because it doesn't work that way for me. i'm not watching movies for Horrorthon and then going outside and saying, "that movie made me really dig how red this flower is." because i'm usually too preoccupied with thinking, "*damn* that was scary."

fear has its own flavor. it's like bourbon. some people can really savor the different aspects of the flavor. some people just drink it to get hammered and hate the taste -- but everyone who drinks it gets drunk.

there's two kinds of people who claim to not like horror. there are people who don't like it because it's too scary -- those people are on the same spectrum as the people who like it; both are exhilarated by it, it's just that one feels exhilarated and thrilled, and the other feels exhilarated and uncomfortable.

the other kind of person who doesn't like horror claims not to like it because it's silly. and even here, there's one last dichotomy. some people just haven't seen *good* horror yet, and think of horror in the context of inane shit like the Friday the 13th remake. there's hope for these people -- with the right teacher and the right example, and under just the right mood, any of these people can be brought to remark, "man that was way scary, and i totally loved it."

i find it hard to say anything about the remaining people, who don't care for horror because they think it's a dumb genre from top to bottom, in book or film. i do believe that horror is the dark reflection of wonder. it stretches as far in the opposite direction and can strike us every bit as deeply. people who (i think) willfully would shun the entire concept of a genre devoted to taking us into the dark place miss this point. horror may not give us any better appreciation of the wondrous, but usually people who have no respect for what a good horror writer is capable of, are probably correspondingly numb to the heights of wonder as well.

there's richness to be found here, and its flavor is exotic. what's not to love?