Today I have a brand new Why I Love Horror essay by Tim McGregor, author of one of my favorite books of 2024, Eynhallow. Click here for that star review from Booklist. It also received a star in Library Journal and the review was written by Jeremiah Paddock, the featured Why I Love Horror essayist on Wednesday.
Click here to visit his website and learn more about McGregor and his books. I have reviewed many and loved them all.
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WHAT'S NOT TO LOVE ABOUT HORROR?
Tim McGregor
Here’s a tough question to answer. Why do you love horror? Oh, man. It's like being asked why one likes chocolate. Or oxygen.
It is not, however, an unfamiliar question. I'm willing to bet every horror fan has been asked this at some time or other, and often with a hint of suspicion and derision. I remember being asked this a lot when I was kid, mostly by relatives on my dad's side of the family who were all staunch, spooky Catholics. One aunt even used to be a nun! I do have a vague memory of trying to answer that question back then, partly because I was annoyed at being made to justify my love for the genre. My response was something to the effect that we've had all this talk about God and the bible and maybe it was time for the flip side of that. Something new, something different. I don't remember their reaction to this, but I can't imagine it going over well.
But here's the kicker—they were into it too. They all read The Exorcist when it was a monster bestseller, they all went to see Rosemary's Baby and Jaws in the theatres. Flowers in the Attic? They traded that chunky paperback with the keyhole cover back and forth. I remember late night gossipy stories about the Manson family and devil worshipers in daycares and the horror of Jonestown. They were all over that stuff, relishing the gruesome details of both real and fictional horror as they sat around the campfire, blitzed out of their gourds.
Hypocrites. I guess they were just alarmed at seeing that same lurid interest from a kid. Do you know how many rosaries I was given back then? Like, holy shit. In our family, it was traditional for at least one person from each generation to enter the clergy. It was like a cheat code for the rest of them to avoid going to Hell. Somewhere around the age of twelve, I was convinced (and terrified) that they were all conspiring to shove me into the seminary. Partly because of my weird interest in horror, but also because they needed their next sacrificial lamb to chuck into the priesthood to guarantee their own salvation.
I learned later that this wasn't the case. The reason I was given all those damn rosaries and other Catholic tchotchkes was that, out of all the grandkids, I was the oldest male with the family surname. Meaning...the patriarch of my particular generation. How's that for a laugh? I was officially part of the patriarchy!
Can I blame some of my love for horror on Catholicism? Maybe. Baby Catholics are told to love an emaciated dead guy nailed to a tree. Just look at the anguish on that dude's face, the blood dripping from those thorns. You're told this dead guy loves you and you need to love him back. Sure, okay. While the crux of faith is belief in the resurrection, the real focal point of the religion is a corpse in Technicolor gore. The Stations of the Cross that depict Jesus' last hours are little more than a snuff film. And the Catholic church is so very Goth, isn't it? All the candles, rosaries, chalices, and creepy statuary. Nuns who float instead of walk.
But not every horror fan is Catholic, so that kind of blows that theory out of the water. In my case, maybe it just laid the groundwork.
Is horror a comfort? It certainly can be an escape from reality when one is needed, but the same can be said about so many genres. There is more to it than that and I think most horror fans sense this from an early age. There is a darker truth inherent in all those monsters and ghosts, something that couldn't be said aloud but only hinted at. Truths that other genres, with their square-jawed heroes and return-to-order endings, would never touch. And when a monster kid evolves into a horror reader, that allure only grows deeper. The darker truth that endings are not always happy, and the good guys don't always win. Hell, sometimes the good guys are revealed to be deluded bad guys! Order does not always triumph over chaos. At best, order can patch a temporary hole over the chaos and hope for the best. Rumbling just under that threadbare patch is the roiling abyss waiting to swallow us whole. It's patient, it doesn't mind waiting because someone will stumble in and, curious, will remove the patch.
Along with that dark truth comes the inherent danger in horror. No one is safe in a horror story, and morality is often a joke. Even in the comic books of my youth, there was no safety in horror. Terrible things happened to undeserving characters and truly loathsome characters sometimes got away with murder. In other genres like mystery and crime, fantasy and science fiction, there was always a return to order at the end, no matter how dire the plot turned. But not our genre. Horror allowed for a nasty ending or a cruel turn of events. The protagonists in horror stories may survive, but they end up deeply scarred by the end. We watch as a character that we've come to love get ripped to shreds because they opened the wrong door. And that feels truer than anything. Horror rips the mask away to show the world in all its brutality where other genres simply reinforce mainstream cultural narratives.
Does horror appeal to the cynic in all of us? To that kid in the playground who realizes that something is off about this whole situation. The arbitrary cruelty and chaos playing out and ignored by the adults who simply want to maintain the status quo. Someone—I don't remember who—once said that all comedians are frustrated optimists. Their art shines in the distance between the myth they were told and the ugly truth they see every day. I think horror fans and creators occupy that same territory. We smell the lie we've been told and, oh man, does it stink. Is no one else going to call it out? No? Okay, I'll do it.
Cracking open a horror story, you meet someone else who smells a rat and relates that through their particular story. That Stephen King fella or that Clive Barker dude. That kind-looking lady in the horn-rimmed glasses named Jackson. They felt that disconnect and they tell us their truths through their stories where other entertainments sell us their catastrophically simple morality plays about good and evil.
While we're talking about genre and disconnect from reality, here's something to consider; the enduring popularity of cop/detective entertainment. We've had almost a century of books, movies and TV about cops solving crime and catching bad guys when we all know that something is truly rotten in policing. Something evil happens when a person dons a uniform that grants them power over others. We see it play out on the nightly news. Biased cops railroad innocent people and slam people of color into the sidewalk with impunity. A falling acorn triggers tragedy. And yet the popularity of cop shows just carries on. I can't watch it anymore. I understand that it's probably comfort entertainment to a lot of people, but I just can't get past the disconnect between the fiction that is served up about cops and the cold brutality of policing today. At the time of this writing, yet another Law & Order spin-off has popped up, this one based in my hometown. Good grief. It's like a drug that we numb ourselves with. I think I laughed the first time I saw the term “copaganda.” I don't anymore.
Liars prosper and cheaters win. Good people are ground into hamburger simply because they got in someone's way. Innocents are bulldozed because someone, in a bid to accrue power for themselves, has targeted those people as outsiders and directed hatred towards them.
This is the world we live in, and the horror genre exists because of it. Other genres may offer escape from this reality, but horror seems to revel in it. It peels back the curtain and says “hey, doesn't this seem a little fucked up to you?”
Podcaster Neil McRobert often reminds us that horror is a broad church, and I think it is that versatility that makes the horror genre the perfect vehicle to examine both our problematic nature and our troubled past.
Tananarive Due's The Reformatory is probably the best example of this in recent memory. While it is a ghost story, it's also an unflinching look at the brutal segregation of the Jim Crow era. The ghosts speak the awful truth while the protagonists navigate this dangerous system where a wrong look could get a person of color tossed into a cruel carceral system. A difficult read at times, but a necessary one, graced by utterly humane characterizations of the human spirit abiding through pain.
Similarly, Alma Katsu's The Fervor explores the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two, an often-neglected aspect of both US (and Canadian) history. Injustice, brutality and racial bigotry are explored and exposed through the lens of the horror genre as yokai haunt the internment camp and a mysterious disease turns people violent. The supernatural horror drives the action, but the real horror is the vicious racism shown throughout this wartime period. The jingoistic, bigoted discourse exposed in the book is especially poignant after seeing its resurgence through the COVID pandemic and stoked by a certain orange turnip in the oval office.
There's a great discussion between these two authors when Katsu was a guest on Due's Lifewriting podcast. They talk in depth about the responsibility of writing historical horror and using the genre to shine a lot on events purposely brushed under the rug by a society that refuses to deal with its own past. It's especially telling when Due reveals that writing the supernatural elements of The Reformatory was often a relief from writing the true horrors of Florida in the Jim Crow era.
That's what exciting to me, the wide open, no holds barred, approach of the genre. Nothing is too sacred to be examined, no ideology too sacrosanct to be questioned or set on fire. As readers, we get to experience the white-hot rage of Gretchen Felker-Martin's Manhunt or to see Stephen Graham Jones re-examine the slasher genre in his Indian Lake trilogy. We get to see Chuck Tingle expose the cruelty of religious homophobia in Camp Damascus or squirm in the extreme horror of Paula D. Ashe's short fiction. To let our minds be eaten by Alison Rumfitt's Brainwyrms or rot in the brutalist future of Andrew F. Sullivan's The Marigold.
Rocks are being overturned everywhere by the horror genre to expose the creepy crawlies, shining a light on the cruel world we've inherited and failed to improve. Its wavering light reveals the foundation that our world is built on—a mass grave, the great bone pile of human history. Examining the past, questioning it, is one of the things the horror genre does best. Sure, literary fiction does it all the time, but if we're talking about how the past haunts our present, well, horror is uniquely qualified for that.
At the time of this writing, I am polishing a novel about the Satanic Panic, showing how it plays out in a small community in 1990. That whole phenomena is baffling and fascinating, but part of the appeal of this subject is its current resurgence. The same paranoid fears are being used today by conservative forces to cause disruption, sow hate, and accrue power. History repeats, as they say. Why? Because some fuck-knuckle always thinks he can make himself taller by standing on someone's neck.
If you were to slot human history into a genre, which one would it be? Sure, there are tales of heroism and bravery, of progress and enlightenment, but the one constant throughout human history is the bloodshed. From the moment our species dropped from the trees, our history is one of exploitation and subjugation. And yes, the winners get to write the history, but not forever. Sooner or later, the other side of that empire building mythology emerges and tells the story of those who were ground into dust at the bloodstained hands of their colonizers and oppressors.
As horror readers, we are currently spoiled for choice in what has been called a horror renaissance. While that is certainly true, I do hope that the narrative around the genre itself, the common perception of it, will shift a little because of this bounty of amazingly diverse horror fiction. Can we please please please move past the idea that horror is a boom-or-bust genre? In both books and film, the traditional mindset is that horror is hot or it's not. I used to run into this all the time as a flailing screenwriter pitching horror projects to producers. They'd argue that horror may be hot at the moment, but it won't be three years from now when the film might be done. Or that horror was dead and wouldn't be popular for another five years or so. God, that infuriated me. I've heard Brian Keene trying to prepare us for when the bubble will inevitably burst—and I'm taking heed, because he's lived through it a few times—but I can't help hope he's wrong this time. What I want is that the genre will stabilize in the public perception and horror will now be seen as solid as mystery/thriller or romance or science fiction. It might be fun to be the underdog for a while, but it's time to change that. Our beloved genre has earned it.
Toronto
June 2024
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