A friend of a friend asked me recently what my book None Shall Sleep is about.
I said, ‘Well, it’s about two teenagers recruited by the FBI to interview incarcerated juvenile serial killers, who get drawn into the hunt for an active serial killer.’
My friend’s friend said, ‘Ah, so it’s a thriller then?’ and I said yes. And then he chuckled strangely—hyuck hyuck hyuck, as one of Stephen King’s characters might have chuckled—and said, ‘I guess it won’t be hugely popular then, I mean, who wants to read a thriller in the middle of a pandemic?’
Well, Brad, it’s interesting you say that.
Because there have been a few shifts in reading habits since the start of the coronavirus crisis, and one of them has been the surge in popularity for thrillers and horror fiction, including books about plague and pandemic. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel is back on the bestseller list (as it should be, it’s a wonderful book). Fiction in the Mystery, Crime & Thriller categories have had a little sales explosion—up by about 200%. Horror fiction, too, has had a nice little surge.
But why? Why do we like to read scary stories when everything around us is scary?
There are loads of pop theories (and some legitimate psychological ones too) about why we read scary stories, but most of them boil down to, ‘People like to read scary stories because it’s cathartic.’ Fear is a primal human emotion, and apparently if we build up too much of it inside ourselves, it can short-circuit our batteries. We need our pulses to pound for a while, at a safe, manageable level, and then once we’ve expelled some of that fear we can go about our daily lives as normal.
Or something like that.
I mean, sure, I would certainly buy that—if we were not already living in a constant low-grade state of pulse-pounding adrenalized terror. Scary stories are a way of inoculating ourselves against fear when our lives are safe, right? But in the current moment, our lives are not particularly safe. Going down to the supermarket is scary. Meeting up with friends is scary. Basically, everything outside your door is scary. So why do we want to bring more scary into our safe spaces by reading scary stories?
To answer this question, we have to turn to a different theory, which is that scary stories teach us resilience. As Ruthanna Emrys writes, ‘As terrifying as the world becomes, we still turn to imagined terrors to make sense of it.’ Scary stories teach us how to live with being afraid. Author Cavan Scott says that scary stories help kids learn how to deal with the real world, providing ‘a way to acknowledge that life isn’t always easy, and it’s okay to be scared’. In the context of living and reading during a time of pandemic, this makes sense.
It’s also the reason why I wrote None Shall Sleep for teenagers. There are plenty of scary stories for adults, and even quite a few for younger readers, but not as many books with teenage protagonists confronting horror. Even Carrie—the ultimate teen-prom fear-fest—is aimed at an adult audience. But teenagers are dealing with scary things all the time. Body horror, financial stress, emotional anxiety, and now a covid-affected future—you name it, teenagers are dealing with it.
With None Shall Sleep, I wanted to give teenagers something that centered their experience and allowed them to confront the Bad Thing and feel terror and then deal with it. My protagonist, Emma Lewis, has already survived one serial killer, and is now confronted by another. She uses a range of strategies to cope, not least her sheer stubborn will to survive.
In a way, None Shall Sleep is supposed to give teenage readers comfort. You can get through this. You are strong enough to deal with this. You have been in far worse situations and survived. It’s the litany Emma uses to support herself, and to overcome.
In a way, it is the litany we all need to hear—that we can cope. We will cope. We will survive this. And once we get through to the other side, we will remember that everything is not okay, but everything is okay for now.
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