Over the Top

 

Terry here: It’s Halloween week. The question: Do you read horror? Have you written any? Why or why are you not a fan? Here’s a Halloween scene.

Bet you can’t guess where it is. It’s Athens! We were there for three weeks, and the last day, October 11, we went to a lively part of Athens where there were a lot of outdoor cafes and a general air of merriment. Here, we ran into a street decorated for Halloween that surpassed anything I’ve seen in other cities. 

 When we were in Florence, years ago, around Halloween, we saw the same thing—a plethora of Halloween decorations—ghosts, cats, bats, spooky faces, cobwebs, witches, etc. 

Until then I had thought Halloween was strictly an American event (I can’t call it a holiday because holiday is a shortening of the words “holy day,” and unless you’re a Satan worshiper, it’s isn’t really holy. (Not that many of our holidays are religious, but they are holy in the sense that they convey a sense of importance. “President’s Day” for example is a way to honor the memory of men--of course it’s always been men--who led the U.S., and whose memory we hold dear.) 

 But I digress. When my son was small, I loved Halloween, and thought it was a great event for little kids. But gradually over the years I’ve seen it morph into a chance for adults to dress up in costume, maybe allowing themselves to try out an alter-ego. But those events don’t have the same sense of surprise and delight that I see in children at Halloween. 

 Sense of surprise? Yep. I remember the first time I finally was able to convince our son that he should go up to our neighbor’s door and yell “trick or treat” and that nothing bad would happen. When they threw candy into his bag, he turned around with utter delight on his face and yelled, “It worked!” 

The funny thing is that he didn’t like going to the street one over from ours, where most every home was decorated to the hilt. It overwhelmed him. It was intense. Children cried and hung back, the sense of fun taken over by overwrought decorations--competition among neighbors to outdo each other. It was an adult event that had lost its sense of cheerful fun. 

As for the element of “horror,” I don’t really enjoy reading horror. If Halloween is about tricksters and alter-egos, the few horror books and stories I’ve read seem to have something else entirely at work—a sense of unseen malevolence that lies just outside our real world. It’s about manifesting the evil that lives in some humans and making it palpable. (Think The House of Leaves--a truly spooky book) 

Horro is about taking the worst of people’s behavior and rendering it larger-than life. It always seems to have a sense of vengeance associated with it. “Treat me badly, and I will lay waste to you and your loved ones. I will terrify you, torment you, tear you limb from limb.” Sometimes the “being” wielding such hatred often looks like an ordinary person until something triggers their fury. (Think Carrie). But there are also “beings” that lie just outside our ability to see them who direct unseen horrors onto unsuspecting people. 

It doesn’t take a genius to see that this is an attempt to explain the unexplainable—to explain misery that is visited on people that they don’t seem to deserve. Or who deserve some kind of retribution, but the retribution is beyond cruel. 

 You could argue that children’s Halloween hints at this with its ghosts and witches and costumes that manifest “other,” but horror lies at the far end of that spectrum. 

 Not only do I not read much horror, but I also don't write it. As a crime writer, I get enough sense of malevolence from acts of real people in everyday life. That said, I’ve recently read a book that turned out to be in the horror category, and it haunts me because of the intense fury manifested in it. It was very well-written, so I had no quarrel with the writing; just the intensity of its villain. There was that sense that something lies just outside our real world, and it’s something that wants revenge, that it takes ordinary anger and twists it into the unrecognizable and makes it into something no human could actually do. As far as I'm concerned, horror has nothing to do with Halloween. 

 So…Happy Halloween everyone!