Amy’s Reading Room: The Horror!
Growing up, horror wasn’t really my favorite genre — I never read Stephen King, never went to see scary movies, and clearly recall barely managing to watch through interlaced fingers the gruesome antics of Freddy Krueger, Jason, Michael Myers, et al. The only reason I watched horror was to avoid the ridicule of my braver peers… or maybe to keep myself awake during “rock-a-thon” band fundraisers. Mostly, it was the gore that got to me. I hated all the gore.
Over the years, however, my tastes have changed. I still don’t appreciate gore (well, gratuitous gore, anyway). I don’t like watching human beings, with souls and personalities and loves, turned into meat for entertainment (even if the “turning into meat” part is all special effects). But chilling settings, the evocation of that sense of dread that a really well-written/ well-filmed/ well-acted horror story has? That has intrigued me more and more.
In the 1990s I started watching The X-Files, and I fell in love with the way its truly great scary stories pulled me in: “Ice,” “Home,” “Squeeze” and “Tooms”… I could easily name at least a dozen more episodes that really stuck with me. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Hush” has almost no dialogue and is one of the creepiest things ever filmed. It terrifies me — and I love it. More recently, episodes like “Asylum,” “Malleus Maleficarum,” and “My Bloody Valentine”of the show Supernatural (which, granted, does not skimp on the gore) have been added to my personal list of horror gems. I sat with interlaced fingers through films like The Ring, Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and Apollo 18, but managed to enjoy them all the same. Appreciation for a well-done scare was an acquired taste for me, I suppose.
Having dipped a toe into the waters of horror, I became interested in the why of it — why do people like horror? What do they get out of it? I began reading books and articles about horror, eventually working my way to Stephen King’s 1981 non-fiction book Danse Macabre. In this book, which was inspired by a college course he taught, the book is a collection of essays about the nature of horror fiction. While I’ve never quite become a fan of King’s fiction, his breezy, witty non-fiction writing style is always entertaining to me.
In this book, King reviews a few horror titles, including the film adaptation of his own book Carrie. Among these reviews — which are primarily about how the creator of the work invokes its horror — is a review of Peter Straub’s 1979 novel Ghost Story. Although I had never read a book by Straub, I was intrigued by King’s description and I set out to read this book.
It was the scariest thing I’d ever read.
Honestly, I had to stop reading it for a while before I went back to finish it. I can’t really give any details as why it was so terrifying without giving away the story (there’s a pretty thorough synopsis on the book’s Wikipedia entry, if you’re interested. Beware spoilers). But I learned that Peter Straub is a master of stirring up a sense of absolute dread, that unequivocal knowledge that your doom lies just ahead, just around the corner… or on the next page. It was an amazing read, once I managed to brave my way through it.
Perhaps this was only my personal experience. Your mileage may vary, of course.
But I have to say that Peter Straub is an excellent writer. He is able to inject humor in a horror novel without taking away from the horror. That is something special — and something certain writers of The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Supernatural already know. (Freddy Krueger would probably insist on making comment here about his own special brand of horror/humor. I won’t argue with him. He has metal-clawed gloves.) Straub’s humor is in his turn of phrase, the way he has his characters respond to the world around them. It makes the characters real. Their reactions make sense to the reader, and the reader can more readily identify with them. In turn, this makes the horror more real, because we sympathize with the characters experiencing that horror.
Since surviving Ghost Story, I’ve read one other Straub novel, the recently published A Dark Matter. While not as downright terrifying as his earlier work, A Dark Matter, I think, succeeded more fully in bonding me to its many characters. The prose was beautifully written, each character’s voice unique and appropriate to his or her situation. The horror of that book was mitigated by an overall impression of hope. The characters endured horrors, yes, but mostly they emerged intact, with grace.
I’m currently working on the Straub story In the Night Room. I’ve only just started it, but I’m already amused by the text, and especially by the meta-text. Straub’s playing with levels of fiction and reality that I’ve encountered in only a few places: Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels, the Buffy episodes “Superstar” and “Normal Again,” and the episodes “Hollywood Babylon,” “Ghostfacers,” “The Monster at the End of this Book,” “The Real Ghostbusters,” and “The French Mistake” of Supernatural (that show loves its meta-text). I don’t know where Straub’s going with this. But I like it. Even if it’s scary.
I’ll just read through interlaced fingers.
