Be Afraid ... Be Very Afraid
Halloween has come and gone, but it’s left me with some things to think about. Mostly, to be honest, I’ve been thinking about fear.
And not just because of the calendar; because of literature.
Like every year, 2022 has brought us a significant number of new entries in the horror genre: The Hollow Kind (Andy Davidson), Jackal (Erin Adams), Motherthing (Ainslie Hogarth), Lute (Jennifer Thorne), Malice House (Megan Shepherd), The Witch in the Well (Camilla Bruce). Some of these authors’ names will fade away; one or two might take their places with the greats of the genre, Lovecraft and King and Straub and Stoker; Rice and Shelley and Jackson and Poe.
I get it; horror may not be your cup of tea. But let me ask you—do you enjoy roller-coasters? How about exploring creepy abandoned places? There is a need in all of us to dip our toes, however tentatively, into the ocean of our fear.
We have a curious relationship with scary stories. We call them “thrillers” because we don’t only feel fear—we get excited, too. When we’re frightened, our brains release dopamine that increases pleasure—or activates the body for action. But no one really wants to be in a scary situation, do they? So instead we try to find ways to get that dopamine rush vicariously, through stories.
Feeling afraid in a fictional setting through a scary story allows us explore our fear from a safe distance. Our minds find the fictional experience exciting, and we get a “rush” of excitement as we pretend to get in and out of danger—not unlike what happens with that rollercoaster ride I mentioned a moment ago.
There’s no escaping fear: it’s hardwired into us, and that’s a very good thing. It’s how our species has survived centuries of living near scary things; we’d have long ago been served up for dinner if we hadn’t known to be afraid of saber-toothed tigers. Fear continues to serve us: it enables us to hear the footsteps behind us in the night, to ease up on the gas pedal when we’re driving too fast, to step away from the edge of a cliff. And we’re always relieved when what we far doesn’t come to pass: our breathing goes back to normal, that strange metallic taste of adrenaline dissipates, and we thank our lucky stars.
So isn’t it odd that, even though we avoid actual circumstances that are scary, we then turn around and choose to pick up a Stephen King novel. Wait, what? Why on earth would we seek out something our emotional selves tell us is dangerous?
Here’s the thing: You can’t control the shadowy person who may have followed you from the bus stop; you can’t control the environment your children go out and live in every day. But Stephen King? That, you can control. You can always close the book. You can always go back to the safety of your own everyday life in the moment.
Stories give us a place to put our fears. Stories that frighten us or unsettle us give us the means to explore the things that scare us… but only as far as our imaginations and our experiences allow. They keep us safe while letting us imagine we’re in peril.
The reason? Stories are never about what they’re about: they always allow the space for us to bring our own emotions and experience—and, here, fears—into the mix. They allow our fears to nestle in with the characters’ lives, and we can be there beside them though anything—until we’ve had enough, close the book, breathe a sigh of relief. We awaken from the dream and reassure ourselves that it wasn’t real.
As author Ruthanna Emrys has written for NPR,
Horror as a genre is built around one truth: that the world is full of fearful things. But the best horror tells us more. It tells us how to live with being afraid. It tells us how to distinguish real evil from harmless shadows. It tells us how to fight back. It tells us that we can fight the worst evils, whether or not we all survive them — and how to be worthy of having our tales told afterward.
Every “scary” story offers us a choice: we can use it to explore our fears or not. There’s never any obligation: in literature, the choice is always there. We can choose to close the book…. But if we don’t, we learn from the experience. We learn that terrible thing are survivable. We learn that the forest doesn’t go on forever. As G.K. Chesterton has written about another level of horror stories, "fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
There’s another advantage. A study on horror fans during the Covid pandemic found that people who enjoyed watching scary films were more psychologically resilient than non-horror fans. I’m not sure exactly what that tells us, but it does indicate that reading is good for you… in all sorts of ways!