Letting Go, Arms Open: Horror Stories and the Reason for the Season

 "This is not an artistically rounded-off ghost story, and nothing is explained in it, and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened. But that is no reason why it should not be told. You must have noticed that all the real ghost stories you have ever come close to, are like this in these respects --no explanation, no logical coherence. Here is the story...."

"The Portent of the Shadow," by E. Nesbit (published 1905)

 Since I turned, say, ten and was too old to trick or treat anymore, and since my best friend Scot and I gave up throwing our own spook houses at….lemme guess….thirteen, I think my favorite Halloween activity has been handing out candy. Nothing else quite gets to the heart of the matter. I have some friends who watch trick or treaters from the window of a local haunt; that’s probably very similar.

Me, a lover of horror movies and fiction of all kinds can’t even pick out a movie. Sure, I roll the classics on the TV, but that’s just background music. Almost every horror movie director since George Romero has “Night of the Living Dead” playing on TVs in their films as a shortcut that captures fragments of a sensibility, a feel.  

At this precise moment each year, no particular story can get at the whole of what brings so many of us together. This contemplation of the thin line between life and death connects the cultures of ancient Celtics, Romans, Persians, Aztecs and Pacific Islanders. It's a sensibility many stories reach for but few maintain for long. It’s about a feeling not far removed from the feeling of Christmas Eve, rooted in ancient winter solstice celebrations. It makes sense that many of our ghost story traditions began on that colder night at the end of the year.

Some aspect of that quiet connection between worlds is what I’ve often chased when I write stories, and it started with the family ghost stories. After all, the first storyteller who had me on the edge of my seat was my grandmother. She was my Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson long before she read them to me.

This is all on my mind because, recently, I’ve been seriously trying to sell one of my novels to a publisher. Agents ask interesting questions. I’m learning how the business works. But what I want to sell doesn’t have a whole lot to do with business, and when I’m asked what genre I write none of the answers seem adequate.

Here’s the honest truth: when I’m asked to pick a genre for my fiction, and the pull-down tab says “literary” or “commercial” or “horror” or “magic realism” or “offbeat/quirky” or “contemporary” or “multicultural” or “fantasy” or “mystery” or “thriller” or “speculative,” I want to say “all of the above.” None of it seems adequate. I spend most of my time writing about multicultural and contemporary social and political issues, and those dialogues are filled with fantasy, mystery, speculation, suspense, and horror. All of that’s in my fiction and most fiction that interests me. I would love to reach a large audience (i.e. commercial), but my aims are no lesser than whatever anyone regards as “literary.” 

I’ve never stuck to one genre in my reading or my writing, but I do know my default reading for pleasure comes under the banner “horror.” Now, if only anyone agreed what that meant.... Here’s my crack at a definition for what I mean, strongly suggested by the Edith Nesbit quote above. 

My childhood play

Ghost story is my favorite term for horror, but to the extent that it’s about real-life horror, it’s also fantasy. It is a magic realism, a surrealism. I remember H.G. Wells (who gave us "The Invisible Man" and "War of the Worlds") once writing that fantasy was 98% reality. That makes sense to me. We must believe in the "real" world of the story to be awe-struck by the fantastic in that world, to feel the thin line between the worlds in the fiction and the thin line between those worlds and ours. 

That said, the unreality is crucial. Horror strives for the unreal to strike us deeper. It's unreal in a way I think allows it to engage us precisely at the subconscious levels where we might otherwise defend ourselves. If the monster tried to be real, we'd fight, explain it away or say it's unconvincing. This unreality is part of why I think horror prose is more unsettling than any movie—the realistic pretense relies entirely on the reader working with the writer to create worlds. The writer and the reader are playing make believe together. 

Many of my favorite artists are sensitive to their audience (arguably, to a fault) because they care so much about the art being more than a spectacle, instead being a dance with the audience. In the case of horror, that dance attacks your reason, your certainty, your security.

It's asking you to let go of a framework of thinking, hoping you'll find another, but meanwhile it leaves you teetering at the precipice, open, unsure. 

Personally, I think that open, unsure pause is a good way to approach whatever you do—whether it’s writing about music or listening to your loved ones. That’s a piece of what my grandma taught me when she told those old stories, and it’s a torch I carry. Halloween night, when I see kids running and jumping and screaming from house to house in anonymity compounded by darkness, they remind me of what made the night so thrilling when I was their age. I get a sort of contact high. 

Of course, there’s a thrill just opening that door. You never really know who or what’s waiting on the other side.

The beautiful grands