"When things appear to be falling apart, supernatural horror stories provide their authors and readers with a masochistic, but relatively safe means of fantasizing the worst"--Jack Sullivan
Originally my plan for the new school-year was to use this blog to channel my way through the bigger issues in society: war, politics, education...etc. but little things keep getting in the way. Quarter-life crises and salsa dancing and crazy missions and ghost stories. It occurs to me that these things are just as important to me as the bigger issues, maybe even more so because they are happening to me, right here and now. After all, this thing was created for me to write, so I might as well write about what I want.
This semester I am taking a class on supernatural literature as part of my writing major. I was never big into ghost stories before, mainly because they just didn't scare me. I can watch "scary" movies and end up feeling more amazed than anything that so many people can believe in spirits and demons and zombies when there is obviously more evil to be seen right here in human nature. Why make movies about the end of the world or fabricated terrorist attacks when there are genocides, kidnappings, drug wars and terrorism right here on the news? Not a thousand miles from your television? As a society we seem to love this masochism--we eat it up with breakfast and watch it slipping through the corners of our periphery throughout the day. We can't get enough of it.
During the past week I finally came to an understanding about this phenomenon. Over Thanksgiving break we were assigned to read a novel by Hilary Mantel called "Beyond Black," a chilling modern ghost story about a woman who was molested, abused, and ignored throughout her childhood. Her severe psychological trauma is relived again and again in the form of several spirits who haunt her adult life, mocking her and bringing up the past each day and preventing her from healing. There was so much that was disturbing in this book--her broken family dynamics, a significant lack of pity or compassion from anyone in the story, the fact that the devil himself is her biological father--that I found myself torn between revulsion and fascination, as my professor says any good horror literature ought to make the reader become. I watched Alision, the main character, suffer again and again and couldn't put the book down or turn away from it without knowing what the ending would be.
What was more frustrating to me than this sick fascination was the fact that I was scared. Really and truly terrified by a ghost story that ought to be discardable fiction.
In the story Alison is bombarded by hosts of the dead every single day. Sometimes it's just a hand or foot. A voice. A thought. An unanswered question. And then sometimes its a mob of spirits pulling her, twisting her insides and driving her crazy. I started to think I was hearing things, seeing things in between readings. I heard a tapping at my window late at night and sat up in bed, my heart pounding. Was it Bob Fox trying to get in? Was it MacArthur leering outside with his one eyeball? On the bus-ride from Idaho Falls to Boise I kept seeing flashes of faces in the fields as we whizzed past, gaping mouths in the sky and fingers reaching up from the dirty road. I thought I smelled Morris in the corners of the airport, reeking of decaying flesh and cigar abuse. I even believed I saw my own future as I watched a happy family exit a mini-van at the gas station in Mountain Home, the mother, father, and little children appearing suspiciously like my boyfriend and I in looks, body language and attitude.
Was it just that I was so absorbed in my readings that I was prepared to believe in the supernatural, no matter how farfetched it seemed? Or was it that I was emotionally exhausted from the various misfortunes that had gone on in the week and was looking for the masochistic confirmation that I had a right to be discouraged, like Alison had the right to be traumatized?
Or was I just delirious from too many nights of not enough sleep?
I think to an extent all of these things were true. I read the book at just the right time to be affected by its darker themes, with just enough going on in my life to feel like it was mirroring the story. Do I really believe in the supernatural now or expect to be scared by ghost stories from now on? ...Probably not. But I do believe that there is a place for supernatural fiction in society, especially the modern society where reality is frightening enough that creating a little scary fiction can be entertaining and even preferable. An escape from realities that can't be so easily closed and placed back on the shelf.
