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Month of Horrors 2012
“I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.”
–H.P. Lovecraft
There is something primal about fear. Primal in the sense of evoking a kind of bodily lurch in what is animal in ourselves, as primal as lust and wonder, and in that sense almost amoral. While the Science Fiction genre is tied to the mundane world as it is or as we think it likely to become, and Fantasy is tied to the world as we would like to imagine it to be, Horror is the only one of the three that goes for the gut. In fact, it is one of a few genres that have as their main purpose to inflame a certain emotion. Romance incites lust, Comic fiction incites hilarity, and Horror incites fear. That someone would intentionally seek out literature that incites lust or hilarity is not difficult to understand, but why fear? What do people get out of empathizing with the helpless teenager who is being stalked by a serial killer, or with the man contemplating the starry sky after learning that what he thought to be endless beauty was in fact an endlessly dark terror?
It is this element of empathy with the frightened protagonist that I think distinguishes the modern Horror tale from pre-modern tales of ghosts, monsters, and the undead. Earlier stories like that of the Three Living and Three Dead were morality tales meant to engender a holy fear unto repentance—a far cry from The Walking Dead. Fairy tales were sometimes written to scare little children, but not adults. Pagan myths about monsters read almost more like curiosities than exercises in fright. Science Fiction and Fantasy are both more intellectual: one playing with the rules of the world as it is, the other wondering what it would be like if the rules were otherwise. Horror is all about emotion, and if the reader never feels scared while reading something of this genre, it is perceived to be a failure of the form.
So why do we bother with fictional fear? Isn’t the real world scary enough? Well, yes and no. There are many things to be frightened about in the world, perhaps even more so than in earlier, less technological ages, but the world we live in is oddly sanitized. Fears that high-level government and economic leaders are acting together against the common good are dismissed as nutty conspiracy theories. Fears that our loved ones will be hurt by what seem to be the increasingly evil people that populate our societies are contained in the therapist’s office. Fears about the afterlife are shrugged off by socially polite agnosticism. Fears about death are minimized by painkillers, euthanasia, sentimental funerals, and an avoidance of cemeteries. (Have you ever just visited a cemetery for the sake of the experience? People think you’re a goth nut on the hunt for poetic inspiration.) We repress our natural fears, but they cannot be denied forever. Horror novels and films are as socially acceptable a conduit as any for allowing oneself to truly feel fear.
The need for a Horror genre, or something like it, is very Freudian. It serves a psychological need that could perhaps be best sated by living a better kind of life, but which can be bandaged by slasher movies in a tight fix. The best Horror writers understand this need and exploit it without exploiting their readers (unlike Romance writers, who all exploit their readers). I expect we have our fair share of exploitive and “gross-out” Horror fiction on WWEnd, but unfortunately we’re still so ignorant about the genre around here that we honestly couldn’t tell which novel is which.
The purpose of Month of Horrors is to explore this genre a little more, to feel out its architecture and boundaries. Scott Lazerus did us a great service back in April by exploring the roots of the Gothic sub-genre. Rico will be writing about the origins and influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as October goes on. I will be reviewing whatever books I can get my hands on and finish before the month is out.
And of course we hope to feature your Horror novel reviews throughout the month, so get busy writing!
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