By need for horror
checked them out between dispatching cabs) with such longing – what happened when the priest bathed in that etherial light entered the house? It would be another five years before I managed to sneak into a late night screening and found out. Walking home I kept thinking: could the devil exist? By that age, however, I was becoming more aware of the evil that men do, with or without the influence of Old Nick.
If I was to describe one of the most genuinely frightening reading experiences of my life, it would be in 1986, when I was 14 and deep into my relationship with horror, and my best friend Dave passed on a copy of
by Thomas Harris. The loan coincided with a weekend when I was home alone during the day. The precision of Harris’s prose made the book feel like non-fiction and the idea of the Tooth Fairy creeping into homes at night to butcher families invoked a feeling of genuine dread at the setting of the sun.
Harris’s villains were not giant rats, killer clowns or vampires but ordinary men twisted into monsters by a combination of the brains with which they were born and a disturbed upbringing. It is hard to imagine today when the sins of serial killers have saturated popular culture, but back then they were a genuinely disturbing novelty. We later learned that the reality was not the malevolent genius of Dr Hannibal Lecter in the movie Silence of the Lambs but the evil banality of real-life serial killer Fred West.
The other question is how far should horror be allowed to go and when does it become too horrific to bear? Two of the most disturbing and sickening novels I’ve read were by the American novelist, Jack Ketchum – OffSeason, which is about a group of tourists trapped in the woods of Maine and preyed upon by hillbilly cannibals and The Girl Next Door, which chronicles the fate of an orphaned girl taken in by sadistic relatives, based on a true story with the author toning down what actually happened. I thought of Jack Ketchum when I read Emma Donoghue’s novel, Room, which was inspired by the case of Josef Fritzl who kept his daughter in a secret basement for 24 years, raped her hundreds of times and fathered seven children, born and raised in a concrete dungeon.
When the news broke everyone pondered the horrors she had endured, but Donoghue’s book, which made a child the narrator not the daughter, softened the blows and hinted at the horrors incomprehensible to a child who knows no other world. Did the case deserve the Jack Ketchum treatment? Could we have coped? I doubt I could, but then shouldn’t horror sometimes do its job instead of just being entertaining?
I think there is a security in self-induced fear, a delicious frisson that can be enjoyable and addictive. So if you are looking to be scared this weekend, but are short on time, then I’d recommend reading one of three short stories. For old-fashioned ghost train scares it’s hard to see past ramsay Campbell’s The Companion. For a darker, more violently disturbing read, then pick up Clive Barker’s Books of Blood and specifically the short story, Dread, in which an insane student exploits his friends’ worst fears in a laboratory experiment. Last, and perhaps best is Shirley Jackson’s short story, The Lotter y. When published on 26 June, 1948, the ten-page story about a macabre ritual designed to produce a good harvest (“lottery in June, corn be heavy soon”) for a small mid-western town resulted in more complaints to The New Yorker than any other published work.
Or alternatively, indulge in a touch of nostalgia for a time when jeans were flared, kids rode choppers and the rattling of the bin triggered a sickly fear that the rodents were on the rise.
THErE have been two events this week so disturbing that if our minds were medieval we might consider them portents of the end of days. Or at least there were just two that I know of.
In Chile, in the central Concepcion province, beaches have been turned a lurid reddish pink by thousands of prawns that have apparently abandoned the seas. The video footage is not just a little upsetting, and it is unclear what has driven them there. researchers are merely speculating whether it is pollution, disease or a poisoned food source which has caused the multitude of langoustines to beach themselves to die while waving their little claws in the air.
But in China it is, perhaps, even scarier. In a story that has been getting worse over the last week, residents have been shocked to find dead pigs floating in the Huangpu river, the main source of drinking water for Shanghai. At the last count, the number of carcases removed from the river has reached 16,000. And that’s just the ones they have managed to pull out with a crook.
residents have accused the government of trying to cover up a major scandal. Where the pigs have even come from is unclear, although fingers are pointing to farmers upriver in Zhejiang province. There has been a recent crackdown on trading in diseased pigs, according to reports. Whereas it used to be that not-fitfor-consumption animals were often sold to gangs that embraced a “don’t ask, won’t tell” food safety policy, rules have been enforced against the practice. So instead farmers have been dumping their poorly pigs in the river, rather than burning or burying them. That’s the going theory at any rate.
Numbers that sometimes emerge from the country of 1.3 billion souls tend to overwhelm us low-populationdensity westerners. So where 16,000 pigs floating down the Firth of Forth would be a massive drama, overall, the Chinese seem pretty phlegmatic about the porcine crisis. It has even given lease to examples of deadpan Chinese gallows humour, as Shanghai bloggers joke about how their taps can produce pork soup.
It helps that Chinese authorities tend to clamp down on the population and any civil unrest in which they might indulge. In the case of the flotilla of dead porkers, intelligent Chinese commentators have pointed out that while the government is not so hot at managing or investigating social health disasters, it does know how to use control to keep millions from rioting in the streets.
This is not, I don’t think, because Chinese authorities don’t care. They too have families and friends who risk being affected by contaminated water, or poisonous baby food. In fact they seem to try very hard indeed to root out criminals that represent a danger to the public.
I recall a recent trip to Hong Kong where I took to reading the wonderful South China Morning Post over breakfast. Its business section ran typical stories about successful companies in mainland China, until you read to the bottom to find a jolting report on how the company’s previous management teams had been put to death for fraud. Imagine if we did that to our failed captains of industry, rather than just forcing them to retire or, in the most egregious examples, stripping them of their gongs.
The trouble is, there seems very little we can do to prevent disaster – wether it is a beach blanketed with dying prawns, or a massive viral outbreak killing thousands of animals which in turn end up polluting the water supply.
It makes me feel the same as I did when I was eight years old. That was about the age I was when I first read about the extinction of species, which was the first thing I learned in a classroom that caused me abject despair. I don’t recall exactly what triggered the sorrow. Perhaps it was the story of Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island tortoise, a species thought to have been long gone except for just the one discovered in 1971. Sadly he passed away last year.
It seemed to me that humans were making a terrible hash of their management of the Earth. In fact, I still think that way.