The doll wore a frilly pastel pink dress that clashed with its malevolent spirit, yet it did not wish to be unclothed. The ugly plastic doll loathed the ugly plastic parasol attached by twine to its left wrist, but since it was fueled by hatred for this tacky accessory, it refused to let me remove it. The year: 1987. My age: eight. The doll, enthroned atop the cover of my combo stereo system, rendered the turntable unusable. It required of me a daily lip sync recital of Weird Al Yankovic’s entire cassette album Dare to Be Stupid, even the songs I didn’t really care for: “I Want a New Duck” and “Hooked on Polkas.” I performed for it, sleep-deprived, with jerky, puppet-like dance steps and tears in my eyes. I couldn’t tell anyone about its true nature—certainly not my protective mother who always took me seriously and would have tried to put an immediate stop to its reign of terror—or else it would hurt (maybe even kill!) the ones I loved.
This creepy-ass spawn of Satan was bestowed upon me by a neighbor lady in our small Alabama town shortly after my mom, my brother, and I moved there from Munich, Germany. My parents decided to live apart that year, my dad staying behind in Germany while the rest of us moved to Alabama. I was an Army brat, feebly shy. Every move was cause for high anxiety, but this move to another country, away from my dad, my first time living off-base and my entry into the rural south Bible belt, was a whole other level of disquiet. I was the outsider in a small Alabama town where all the other kids had been born and raised. To my peers, outsiders were weirdos. I pronounced words incorrectly, lacking their deep drawl. I failed to attend school in the correct third-grade uniform: frosted blue jeans, sparkly T-shirt, and Keds. I’d landed on an alien planet with no idea how to fit in. My classmates spent recess clapping out “Miss Mary Mack” at an impossible tempo while I hunched in a dark corner, chewing my fingernails.
I have a theory that many horror aficionados were anxious, scaredy-cat kids like me. An informal poll of my friends backs this up. Since you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you enjoy horror. Tell me: were you an anxious child? A sensitive one? One who knew there was something terrifying waiting just outside your line of sight? When you stared at, say, a coat hanging on your door in your dark room at night, did it move? Shift? Was it concealing a form that would surely harm you the moment you took your eyes off it? Did your heart race? Did your breathing turn to a rasp? Did it eclipse everything else in your life, at least momentarily, making you forget yourself, the world, and your own lack of power?
Horror provides a way to process our troubles and make sense of the world around us. As small children, maybe we can’t tolerate the fear and dread, but as we grow, many of us begin to seek out the big feelings the genre can evoke. From the smaller concerns of children to the atrocities of the world around us, horror gives us a lens through which to peek at the nearly unbearable. Things aren’t okay, yet we must go on. In hindsight, I can recognize that it was probably easier for me to focus my big feelings on a paranormal doll rather than on my deep unhappiness and my first taste of outcast status that year in Alabama. By the time I was in middle school, I was dipping my toe into scary waters, sneaking out with my best friend while we lit candles and paced the dirt road I lived on, chanting Metallica lyrics, afraid yet thrilled. By high school, when a friend’s mom introduced me to Stephen King and The Exorcist movie, I was hooked.
Having spent six years of my childhood in Germany, I’m fascinated by the bizarre phenomenon of post-World War II German witch trials (excellently captured in the nonfiction book A Demon-Haunted Land by Monica Black). Germans, grappling with the aftermath of the Holocaust and the ways in which they as individuals may have been complicit, lived in an atmosphere of disorientation. Fake news abounded. It was difficult to tell what was real, and this difficulty led to distrust and demonization. The human condition appears to lean towards the horrible, and the horror genre gives us a way to live with that reality. Horror can trigger raw emotion, cutting through the intellectual and getting to the visceral. In this way, it can entertain. It can provide escape. Whether you feel elated or wrung out after experiencing a horror story, you feel something.
My years of horror fandom have inevitably bled into my writing practice. My debut novel, Sister Creatures, features a protagonist named Tess, a deeply flawed woman who is also a horror aficionado. Though I didn’t plan it this way (I don’t tend to write with much of a plan in place), her horror genre obsession enriches the book. I found it impossible to write a horror-fan protagonist without adding horror elements to the novel—a doppelgänger, sinister triplets, scary cult members who try to snatch a child in the woods. Writing Sister Creatures also allowed me to explore the ways in which the horror genre can help people process their often small and bewildering lives, eventually leading them to a place of greater stability. Engaging with horror helps Tess process her unsatisfying marriage, her anxieties of motherhood, her lack of self-control, and her bad behavior. This engagement with her problems, rather than simply ignoring them, allows for the sense of hope that readers will feel when they’re done with my book.
At the end of our uneasy year in small-town Alabama, my dad joined us from Germany. Our family reunited, we were preparing to move together to Louisiana, a place where I lived happily for the next decade (though I was still scared of so many things). As we were packing up boxes for the U-Haul, I pulled my mom aside and found the courage to tell her about the possessed doll. My mom didn’t hesitate. Keeping the doll between just the two of us (the male members in our family may not have treated the situation with the required seriousness), we dismembered its plastic body, cut its clothing and accessories to pieces, and drove the abomination to the dump with all the other junk that wouldn’t accompany us to our new lives. But like any source of evil, I don’t believe we truly destroyed it, but rather we unleashed it upon the world.
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