As part of my best of Why I Love Horror essays past, I wanted to highlight some library workers as well as authors and since I am at the ILA Conference right now, I thought today was a great day to do just that. Please enjoy an essay from LJ reviewer and library worker Jeremiah Paddock that originally ran in 2021.
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Why I Love Horror
By Jeremiah Paddock
It all started with Clive Barker, a gift from my grandfather. Although I know that The Thief of Always is considered to be dark fantasy and not really horror, it sure scared the heck out of 10 year old me. I remember reading this and thinking, “I WANT MORE!” I LIKED being scared! Before this I had been a science fiction guy (and I still somewhat am to this day), and Clive Barker was a bolt out of the blue. The nice little library in my small town had a few horror books, but I didn’t really know what to look for and felt like it was taboo somehow to ask, especially for Clive Barker!
I was friendly with the sole worker at the tiny used bookstore in town on main street and decided to ask him for some advice. I remember buying the collected Stephen King Bachman books and a Fountains of Wayne compact disc on the same day and going home and just listening to the album on repeat while burrowing into King’s tome. What a revelation. Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man all in one book! Looking back, The Long Walk still gives me goosebumps. What a terrifying dystopian world. It made me realize just how sheltered I was that I hadn’t even imagined a world like this before.
Now I had two authors to look for and read.The small town library DID have Cujo and I gobbled it up and was horrified. I was a kid! I was scared of rabies! And most of all I was terrified of my parents ending up like the two adult characters. But somehow it was all perfect. It somehow eased my fears and made me feel a little better. It was cathartic. As cathartic as putting on Nirvana or Pearl Jam and jumping around my room until I fell over from exhaustion. I had never been this affected by literature before.
I knew I had to hide this. Growing up in a strict Christian household any content I consumed was carefully curated. My father frequently vetoed library books, music, comic books, and movies that he thought were not edifying to God. This was definitely a roadblock to my blooming horror fixation, but it was not insurmountable.
I started first with old films. While the aforementioned teeny tiny local library did not have many horror books that I could slip past my father’s censorship, they did have some old movies that were for some reason acceptable. The original version of The Thing by Christian Nyby, which was based on a John W. Campbell story, or Nosferatu. These movies got me through some lean literary times. But it wasn’t the same.
At the time we lived in North Carolina and I had grandparents in Arkansas and New Mexico. We had flown to Arkansas to visit the grandparents on my mother’s side and were going to drive to New Mexico to see my paternal grandparents. We had eaten dinner at Cracker Barrel and were planning to drive late into the night.
At the time Cracker Barrel had a deal where you could rent audiobooks at one Cracker Barrel and return them to another. My parents assumed we would be sleeping and checked out Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I was delighted. Vampires!
We set off and as I feigned sleep I listened to the terrifying tale, watching the bats circle the roadside lights and imagining one of them were a vampire as well. I was supposed to be asleep, but here I was listening to this fantastic tale of horror and also putting one over on my parents! The sheer rebellious glee can not be described. So my obsession with vampires started.
When we got home from our trip we stopped by a dusty used bookstore in the slightly larger North Carolina town where we went to a monolithic megachurch. I wandered the shelves and came to a spinner rack devoted specifically to horror. What a thrill! And staring at me was the magnificent and eye capturing cover by Bob Eggleton of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope. I knew I had to have it. I didn’t even care what it was about. It was horror, vampires, cheap, and massive. Perfect for someone who wanted, no, NEEDED horror.
I carefully snuck the forbidden fruit up to the register with some science fiction books as cover and checked out before my family did using my allowance. No one raised an eyebrow. Looking back at it perhaps they should have, as Necroscope was probably too mature for a ten or eleven year old and it was about to blow my mind. It would also have me hooked on horror for life.
Brian Lumley became an obsession. Every Sunday I begged to go to the old bookstore. Reading was good for me, I argued. I think my father was just happy I wasn’t spending all of my money on comic books anymore. Batman and the X-Men had been pushed aside for a new obsession. And that horror spinner rack, packed with yellowed old paperbacks became my new holy grail.
Reading horror in secret eventually turned into reading horror in the open as my family disintegrated around me as a teenager. There was an affair (callback to Cujo). No one censored me anymore and I could read whatever I wanted. You would think it would have lost some of its rebellious charm, but it still hasn’t, even to this day. Every time I pick up a new horror book, or download one to my kindle I get a little tingle, a frisson of excitement and a feeling of breaking some taboo.
I went from vampires to zombies, zombies to splatterpunk, splatterpunk to body horror, all while retaining a love for all the books that had come before. I’m just as happy reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as I am a new weirdly militant zombie book, or Ghoul by Brian Keene. I love it all. Each and every one.
Reading horror lets me let go. It lets me feel feelings that sometimes aren’t socially acceptable, and it always lets me know that whatever is happening in my life it could ALWAYS be worse. That tingle of excitement that hasn’t left me makes me want to move, to be more a part of life, to revel and dance with these characters in such horrible situations. I love horror because it makes me feel more alive.
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Jeremiah Paddock is a Library Assistant at the City of St. Petersburg [FL] Public Library. He loves Horror of all types, but especially body horror and zombies. He does cataloging for mostly children's books while regarding coworkers with tales of dread and gore from whatever he is reading at the moment.
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