It's Thursday and that is traditionally the day that I host the #HorrorForLibraries Giveaway. Today I am pairing this feature of the humans behind the Pitt Horror Studies Collection with 2 excellent nonfiction ARCs of books about Horror. Both are must adds to your libraries.
The first is Scared By the Bible by Brandon Grafius. Because this one is from a small press and you need to do a little work to add it to your collection, I want to share a little bit more about this book. So many of the authors I interview trace their connection to Horror to the Bible. Grafius takes a deep dive into the straight up horror stories that are in this seminal text. It is broken up into sections-- "Reading Horror (and the Bible), Horror and the Self, Horror and the World, The book connects the stories within the Bible and the stories we humans have created since, things that have become ubiquitous in our culture no matter your religion. Please go out of your way to add this one. It will have many readers. Click here for more praise of this book which came out earlier this month.
The second is When We Spoke to the Dead: How Ghosts Gave American Woman Their Voice by Ilise S. Carter. This one is from Sourcebooks. You may have missed it, but you can fix that easily because you can get it from Ingram. Click here for more praise of this book which came out last month.
Two books for 2 winners. I will draw them in the order above as described in the rules below. Speaking of, here are your details on how to enter:
- You need to be affiliated with an American Library. My rationale behind that is that I will be encouraging you to read these books and share them with patrons. While many of them are advanced reader copies that you cannot add to your collections, if you get the chance to read them, my hope is that you will consider ordering a copy for your library and give away the ARC away as a prize or pass it on to a fellow staff member.
- If you are interested in being included in any giveaway at any time, you must email me at zombiegrl75 [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line "#HorrorForLibraries." In the body of the email all you have to say is that you want to be entered and the name of your library.
- Each entry will be considered for EVERY giveaway. Meaning you enter once, and you are entered until you win. I will randomly draw a winner on Fridays sometime after 5pm central. But only entries received by 5pm each week will be considered for that week. I use Random.org and have a member of my family witness the "draw"based off your number in the Google Sheet.
- If you win, you are ineligible to win again for 4 weeks; you will have to re-enter after that time to be considered [I have a list of who has won, when, and what title]. However, if you do not win, you carry over into the next week. There is NO NEED to reenter.
Good luck!
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Today I am featuring Gray O'Reilly, a queer and trans writer and researcher. They graduated with a degree in Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where they now work as a library resource sharing specialist. They have collaborated with the Horror Studies Working Group, an academic organization based at the University dedicated to the study of the horror genre, and the George A. Romero Foundation. They are currently working on a novel.
Here is O'Reilly on why they love horror.
Why I Love Horror by Gray O’Reilly
My memories are like white fog, opaque and formless, hiding faceless figures with contorted limbs that occasionally come lurching out of the mist to grab me. This is one of them:
I’m twelve years old and it’s the weekend. I’m in my room, sitting cross-legged on my bed with a clear blue PlayStation 2 controller in my hands as my mother packs and organizes boxes in my closet. I’m playing Silent Hill 2, Konami’s once-divisive-now-beloved survival horror masterpiece, and after an entire summer vacation's worth of blood, sweat, and questionable puzzle-solving, I’ve finally reached the end. I watch James Sunderland, the game’s taciturn but likeable protagonist, raise his hunting rifle and take aim at the monster that serves as Silent Hill 2’s final boss: the desiccated body of a woman fused to the frame of a bed, an unholy fusion of decaying flesh and rusty metal that wears the face of James’ deceased wife Mary. Her skin is sallow and caked dark with grime resembling bodily fluids; it could be anything from old blood to dried vomit. Mary, as we have come to learn over hours of playtime, was terminally ill so it makes sense for the creature to take this form for James, who was Mary’s caregiver at the end of her life. He no longer remembers Mary for who she was, only her disease.
Growing up with two chronically ill parents, sickness loomed over my house like a black cloud, impossible to escape and more terrifying than any masked killer or supernatural threat. I would have nightmares about them dying, as I still do now. Sometimes I would return from school or wake up from a nap to find my mom splayed out on the couch, dazed and disoriented from low blood sugar to the point of delirium. My dad, a nurse who worked exclusively at night and always came home exhausted, seemed to be allergic to anything that wasn’t fast food or cigarettes; he had already undergone open heart surgery by the time I was in sixth grade and he was in his early thirties, the age I am now as I write this. With my grandparents, I was even more fixated on death, with the specter of breast cancer that ran rampant on my grandmother’s side and hid in the shadows of their apartment like the seventh member of our family. My grandfather told me stories that made me laugh so hard it hurt, and even then, all I could think about was the day he'd finally leave me: when, when, when, when, when? Over and over again. This unimaginable grief, suffocating me.
On the screen, the rain batters James as he runs, winded, while I try to help him line up his shots, waiting for the right opening in the monster’s attacks, the right moment to strike back. Fortunately, the next bullet is the last: the monster lets loose a warped, warbling cry as she falls out of the air, her bulky frame toppling over when she hits the ground. Confined to the bed, “Mary” tosses and turns fitfully, murmuring James’ name, her eyes closed. It almost looks like she’s having a nightmare.
It turns out that last attack was enough to put the monster out of commission but not enough to actually kill her. “Mary” will writhe and twist on the ground indefinitely until the player delivers one final fatal attack. The game won’t do it for you—you have to make the choice yourself.
I listen to the monster moan for a few more seconds as my mom continues to fold my old baby clothes behind me: James, James, James, James. Over and over again, like a broken record. Then James pulls the trigger. The world fades to black.
The infamous twist at the end of Silent Hill 2’s third act is the stuff of legend in the horror gaming world. It turns out that Mary’s illness wasn’t what killed her: James, who we haven’t known to be anything but a clumsy yet well-meaning everyman over the hours we've spent bonding with him, euthanized her. Gradually, we learn that both the Sunderlands suffered terribly as they struggled to come to terms with her imminent death. Mary, in the throes of immense physical pain and suicidal depression, would frequently lash out at James, verbally abusing him. Over the span of a few short years, the once-loving relationship eroded into a husk of its former self, until James smothers Mary in her sleep with her own pillow. Repressing the memory of her murder, he flees to Silent Hill, a resort town the two had once vacationed at in happier times, where he falls victim to the town's latent supernatural energy as it latches onto his subconscious and molds itself into a personal hell tailored around his trauma. Thusly, the monsters he's been fighting all this time aren't monsters at all: they're physical manifestations of his guilty mind, created to simultaneously punish James for his crime and guide him towards accepting the truth of Mary's death.
Mary's slow, lingering death was not the first time I learned about the painful truth of living with a terminally ill loved one through media, but it was the first time such a depiction made me feel something more than profound despair. I fully credit that to the game's ending; or rather, endings—Silent Hill 2 has six of them but they all follow the same general structure. After delivering the fatal blow, the scene transitions into a sickroom bathed in dusky light, a place sitting on the border between life and death, between reality and dreams. It's here where James can reunite with Mary—or at least his memory of her—and finally process her death. "Please, do something for me," Mary's apparition tells James. She reaches underneath the blankets and passes him a white envelope: a letter, written on her deathbed. "Go on with your life."
The full contents of that letter are shared with the player over the game’s final scene, narrated by Mary herself. Despite being the one dying, Mary apologizes to James for her disease, for the burden of caring for her, for the absolute unfairness of it all. Her voice cracks on each word, her breath trembling as she struggles to keep herself from crying, and it becomes apparent that this letter is for her as much as it is for James. A revelation filled with love and forgiveness, not just for her husband, but for herself as well. “I can’t tell you to remember me, but I can’t bear for you to forget me.” The words of a dying woman, reaching across time and space. “You’ve given me so much and I haven’t been able to return a single thing. That’s why I want you to live for yourself now. Do what’s best for you, James.” The letter trails off—so does Mary’s voice. Like James, our time with her has come to an end, cut short before it could even begin.
The themes of repressed shame, self-hatred, and punishment that make up Silent Hill 2’s story appeal to me because they remind me so much of the way the world treats people who don’t fit the narrative of a perfect victim. I see so much of my relationship with my grandparents as it progressed towards the end of their lives in Mary’s deterioration: the slow transformation of a loved one into a stranger you struggle to recognize is something I’m all too familiar with. When James grapples with the paradox of simultaneously resenting and loving Mary, hoping against hope that her doctors can find a way to save her while privately wishing for an end to the pain, hers and his, I remember the last time I saw my grandfather alive. How frail he looked swaddled in a cocoon of hospital blankets and IV tubes—a cocoon of pain and loneliness, Mary had said in her letter. The way he looked at me only a few months before the fatal fall that put him in the ER, uncomprehending and distant yet faintly sad and horribly aware of it all. How I hated that there was nothing I could do to bring back the fire that once filled his eyes, how it frustrated me beyond words, as if the reason why the synapses in his decaying mind were misfiring was because of something I had personally done, how I began to hate both him and myself for feeling these things. How it repeated again, with my grandmother, less than five years after he passed away.
Growing up, I had always been attracted to darkness, eagerly consuming all things horror regardless of the medium. In a way, it felt like training. I was learning to live with the fear that kept me up at night, vaccinating myself against the monsters that resided in the depths of the fog, just out of the corner of my eye. Imaginary monsters allowed me to reckon with real ones—loneliness, guilt, sickness, the inevitability of death—and, eventually, learn to live with them. Through fiction, I found a way to make sense of it all.
Eventually, I could even learn to live for myself.
The last line of dialogue in Silent Hill 2 is both a confession and a declaration of love. Right before the credits roll, the dam finally breaks in Mary’s voice. “James,” she whispers, full of quiet longing and sorrow. “You made me happy.” Once twelve-year-old-me heard it, I began to cry. Much to my mother’s confusion (I distinctly remember her turning around mid-folding to look at the television screen and ask, bewildered, “What the hell did I let you play?”) I couldn’t stop. It was like I had looked into the future. For a brief moment I saw myself marking the passage of a new year with a memory of a past I could never return to, giving myself permission to feel that loss by reaching through the fog and allowing it to embrace me. You made me happy.
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