The Humanities Review

Issue date: 6/1/08 Section: Spring 2008

The world out there is scary. For me, evil villains are a lot easier to understand than the nightly news. Monsters aren't psychologically misunderstood-they're BAD! We don't care that the Wicked Witch of the West used to be nice, and maybe her sisters will miss her when she's gone; we just want her punished. More to the point, we want her exterminated for the good of the society she has injured. But in life, people are rarely malicious, and even when they do bad things, they pull a Kissinger and deny it. We aren't privy to their motivations, so we can never be sure whether inflicting harm was their primary goal, or the collateral effect of other intentions. Besides, most suffering doesn't stem from cruelty, anyway. Its sources are greed, indifference, and, most gallingly, incompetence. Thus, we judge our villains less harshly in life than in art. They get off with a tap on the wrist, a fine, a suspended sentence. Our instincts decry their misdeeds, but conscience-human sympathy-makes cowards of us all.

All genres have their intended effects. In mysteries, readers are asked to analyze. They solve puzzles. In science fiction, they imagine new, and occasionally better, worlds. But in horror, readers are asked to feel. That is why, when they put the book on the nightstand and turn out the light, they imagine that the creaking floor might actually be the ghost from the novel, bursting through the fictitious world, and into their bedrooms. They are the Gepettos of the novels they read, and in feeling, they give Pinocchio flesh.

In some ways this explains the very personal connection readers often make with speculative fiction, particularly adolescents. Their open-wounds-for-hearts find an outlet into which to bleed, and they can be as dramatic as they want, for once. They also get to be in charge. It isn't the bloody parts they remember (movies render gore better anyway); it's that moment of recognition, when a character learns what is at stake, and why. Our heroes must take up arms against a horrific threat in order to save their parents, their homes, their towns, the world, and of course, themselves. In Morrison's Beloved, shy Denver screws her courage to its sticking place, and asks the townspeople to help save her mother from a vengeful ghost. In King's It, Stan Uris realizes that he must return to his hometown and the tortured child he once was in order to save the lives of hundreds of children to come. Stan chooses the less heroic option and slits his wrists. He'd rather die than go home again. Without exception, these characters are so saturated with dread that their thoughts on the page begin to read like screams. In feeling for them, we readers scream, too. We're not scared of the monsters anymore. Death is inevitable, after all. But in horror fiction, there is a fate worse than death: We could lose our courage.

Continued...

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