What scares you?

Darkness. Mirrors. Silence. Windows.

Those things which conceal. And reveal.

When you stare out into the darkness, are you really afraid of what the darkness might hide? Or that at some moment, something, somewhere will look back at you? That for a fleeting instance, you will see those baleful orange eyes, pinpricks staring from the inky blackness at...into...you.

The mirror shows us ourselves, but how many times do you glance at a looking-glass from the corner of your eye and see....something that shouldn't be there? Something that can't be there. Something that your rational mind knows isn't there.

Silence confounds and reveals. In deep silence you can hear every twig, every rustle, every creeking board in the hall, every fingernail scraping against the window. Do we want to hear it all? And what about the footfalls behind you? The softsteps of a silent walker creeping up on you even as you read this?

Windows, they let in the light. They let out the light. They are a way of escape, a means of experience, and the way into which every manner of killer crawls. Is there anything more frightening than an open window that you know was shut? And while the window lets in the light, does it also let in the darkness?

Eyes...are the windows to the soul, they say. So into our eyes creeps the darkness. And from our eyes. Every looked into someone eyes and seen a dead stare? Or into the night and seen those eerie green cat eyes looking back? Do you ever wonder if when you look into the mirror, those eyes you see are also looking back at you?

So why do we feel these things? Why do eyes in the dark scare us? Why does the dark itself promise not just fear, or terror, but unmitigable horror? Have we stumbled such a short distance from the savannah that we still huddle around our stick of flame, hoping the great predators will pass us by in the night?

Power

Some stories make us laugh. Some stories make us cry. Some make us angry. Some make us frustrated. Important stories touch us in some way, evoking emotion in our heart. I've read stories that have had that kind of power before, but none has impacted me in the same way that Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian has. The power in that story to inspire dread, horror, and a sense of utter futility defies description.

I can't even put a finger on how the author accomplishes that power. The story isn't that different from a dozen other westerns, even if it's told in a unique way with a different point of view. Usually, when a book sucks me in, the characters to most of the work: I become emotionally involved because I relate to the people I'm reading about. Not Blood Meridian though, I can't think of characters that could be more alien. I don't feel empathy for them. But the plot still drives into my heart like a spear thrust.

The story is almost hypnotic, drawing you further and further into madness, and at the end, I felt like I was staring the devil in the eyes. It was an uncomfortable feeling. That slow revelation of dread and insanity works well. It isn't so bad at first...and it gets worse...and worse...and then, by the end, I put the book down without comment. I haven't been able to read sense then. It shook me. I still turn it all over in my head, trying to make sense out of what McCarthy was saying with Blood Meridian.

What story was he trying to tell, and what moral lurks in layers of peeled madness? I haven't riddled it out yet. I'm just now beginning to be able to reflect on the how he accomplished that emotional power. I'm not quite ready to understand the why yet.

What makes horror?

Our protagonist flees from twisted, corrupted evil spirits that drive him from his home. He is hounded day and night by shadows on the road behind him, and uncertainty on the road ahead. Nor are his friends safe, one is attacked by a malevolent spirit possessing an old, rotten tree. Others are taken into the tombs of the damned, tormented and brought to the very brink of death. When it seems our hero may have escaped the grasp of his pursuers, they strike, and wound him in such a way that he is corrupted, damaged, and slowly, inexorably, becoming like them: a tortured soul enslaved to dark powers.

A horror story? Of course, most readers will recognize the plot summary of the first half of the Fellowship of the Ring, book one in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Nazgul are some of the creepiest, spookiest, and scariest villains in literature, but despite this, they don't push LoTR cross genre into horror. Later, Tolkien's characters will be hounded through a black cavern by a demon, stumble through bogs filled with the faces of the dead, and force an undead army to serve them. And then there's the giant spiders, man-flesh eating orcs, and the soul corrupting ring, but at no point would this novel be considered horror. It doesn't feel like horror or read like horror.

Why not? I don't really know. The overt elements are there, but for some reason, I've never read a fantasy novel that crossed into the horror genre. I think it would be a very interesting read if someone wrote one, and there may be one out there I've missed, but in general, fantasy seems to kill the scary part.

I think it's the needed juxtaposition of the world we recognize with the terrible that is needed to produce horror. Lift a Nazgul up from Middle Earth and drop him in the midst of modern day New York, and I think you have a horror novel. Place the Dead Marshes in South Georgia, or the Paths of the Dead in Colorado, and you have the workings of a scary story.

I'm still thinking on it though. Maybe there's more to it than just that. I'm just not sure.