My parents—good Protestants that they are—often ask me, “Why horror? Why can’t you write nice things?” To which I generally reply, “Have you read the newspaper lately?”
Because there is nothing in the world of fiction that compares to the daily atrocities humanity inflicts upon itself, or to the seemingly chaotic and certainly uncaring universe that wields an ugly axe of natural disaster, disease and death. Want a truly frightening read? Try Modern Times: History from the Twenties to the Nineties by Paul Johnson, a galling account of our modern world that will leave you yearning for the comforts of Stephen King.
Genre fiction—namely, horror and noir fiction—embrace the dark side of life through fantasy and a grim, fatalistic pessimism. Horror fiction tends to veil true horror in a guise of metaphor. As cartoonish as they can be, zombies, vampires or supernatural monsters bent on inflicting death and chaos are merely masks over the true horrors of life. Noir fiction plots its way through corruption, politics and murder. Sometimes it’s just fun, a way of stripping power from death, but, when done well, both have a unique way of imposing judgement against the world as it is.
But what of “literary” works? What of the great novel or short story? What of the modern literary canon, as fraught as that classification can be? Are these critically acclaimed works, at their base, any different from genre fictions that embrace horror, both real and imagined?
I have my doubts. Literary fiction, while often embracing a wider range of human emotion and experience, is built on a foundation of suffering, despair and the prospect of each individual’s approaching death. Death—and the forms it takes—is the ultimate human fear. The knowledge of our mortality is the basis upon which we experience life and is therefore the basis for literary fiction as it plumbs the lives of characters at odds with a larger, unknowable world. Whether overt or subtle, literary fiction’s confrontation with mortality can be downright depressing in its fatalistic horror.
Sounds nice, huh?
Cormac McCarthy is largely considered one of the literary giants of our time, and his work veers deeply into the horrific. His novels like Blood Meridian, Child of God and The Road could be rebranded as horror fiction and his work, as a whole, is brutal and bloody. In his novel, The Crossing—part of his much-acclaimed Border Trilogy—a Mexican general leans into a rebel prisoner as if to kiss him, only to place his mouth over the prisoner’s eye and suck out his eyeball. I’ve read plenty of horror fiction but that one left my jaw open as I sat reading it in an airport; not to mention the brutal knife fights scattered throughout the rest of the trilogy.
Apropos of our current times, Albert Camus’ The Plague walks us through a period of disease and death in a city quarantined from the rest of civilization. The body count piles up faster than anything in horror fiction outside other apocalyptic pandemic scenarios. Camus does so with little emotion, reflective of how such mass death tends to blur into a banal reckoning of numbers—something we see even today and is, in itself, a horror. Joyce Carol Oates, one of the preeminent writers of our time, wrote the story of a burgeoning serial killer in her novel Zombie, based on real-life serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. To be sure, Oates received a Bram Stoker Award for the novel, but it shows how a literary icon can delve into horror genre. George Orwell’s 1984 is essentially dystopian fiction mixed with elements of horror, as is Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale; both works might be getting a bit too real.
Added to the list of national horrors are novels dealing with the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States. We need not look to the fantastical for true horror, we can look at both history and the present. The subjugation of human beings is not something for which we need H.P. Lovecraft’s inter-dimensional elder gods (a whole other subject tied up in racial undertones); rather, we have the works of authors who have captured this horror in their novels, some of which are the finest books written by any canonical standard.
And, of course, there is the ever-present war novel. Many of the finest literary novels and short stories are buttressed by the mass death and horrific absurdity of war. Whether the trench warfare of All Quiet on the Western Front, the bombing of Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five or the personal weight of Vietnam in The Things They Carried, humanity’s ever-present mass slaughters are the also basis for some of its greatest literary achievements
Themes of overt horror and death in modern literary works is one thing, but it is the more subtle horror of life that pervades many more works of literary fiction; something that can be even more impactful, causing us to confront our mortality through the everyday tragedies of life. Guilt, remorse, unfulfilled longing and age are inescapable parts of the human experience, ones that lend themselves to a deep-seated fear. One of the true horrors of life is there is no do-over; our decisions—whether good or bad—stay with us, entrap us and, at the end, the life we’ve chosen is the one we ultimately die with; that can be horrifying in its implications.
Take, for instance, Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Age of Innocence. Sounds nice, right? A love story combined with some humorous satire of wealthy New York Society in the 1870s; sounds like some fun summer reading on the beach. It’s not. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing work, but it’s also devastating. Not because anything horrific happens, but because of the despair and regret of a life not lived. The ending is one drenched in mortality as Archer, nearing the end of his life, cannot face what could have been—perhaps, what should have been.
Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim is pervaded by guilt and remorse. That guilt—like a ghost—comes in the night, in a spooky, nearly silent rupturing of the hull of his ship. It is not dramatic in execution but terrifying in its silence. Jim abandons ship with the rest of the crew, leaving the passengers to die and is forever haunted by his cowardly actions, antithetical to his own self-image. He is forced to confront what he truly is, and that can be terrifying for anyone. It leads the narrator to pose a haunting question: “How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat? It is an enterprise you rush into while you dream, and are glad to make your escape with wet hair and every limb shaking.”
In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories of the Century, John Updike laments that the stories contained in the collection are, on the whole, not nice. The final story of the collection—Annie Proulx’s “Half-Skinned Steer—leaves us with a bleak and horrifying image: a ghostly steer, stripped of half its skin, wandering the frozen plains of Wyoming, turning its angry red eyes of curse upon the main character. “I would have liked to finish this volume with a choice less dark, with an image less cruel and baleful than that of a half-skinned steer, but the American experience, story after story insisted, has been brutal and hard,” Updike wrote. Sometimes that brutality is overt, violent and outwardly horrific; other times it is a more subtle terror, one built on our eventual confrontation with death—the very thing that truly undergirds our life experience.
If literature were a house forever being built and reconstructed, it would be a haunted one. As Shirley Jackson wrote, “No live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” Literary fiction, in its attempt to confront reality, is built on a foundation of insanity, meaninglessness, brutality and death. Authors of genre fiction are essentially writing in the basement of that haunted house. They are not the worse for it; they are engaged with the same horrors as writers included in the literary canon and sometimes transcend the genre, creating work that is both horrifying and deeply meaningful. There are no hard boundaries in classifying literature, or course, and people should read widely. But just because it isn’t labeled a horror novel, doesn’t mean it isn’t a novel of horrors.
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