The Intimacy of Fear

Imagine a Victorian house. Try to visualize this place in great detail. See the sweep of its porch and the pitch of its roof. Hold onto that image — we’ll come back to it in a moment.

I spend a lot of time thinking about fear. Digging for the quintessence not just of the things that scare me, but the things that scare other people. What makes us afraid? What sets us gnawing at our fingernails? What escalates this to the point where we’re compelled to check under our beds for intruders? Where we’re kept sleepless through the night? How are these gradations of fright different?

Everyone’s idea of horror is a bit different.

For you, terror might be bared fangs silhouetted against a full moon, the da-dum da-dum of an unseen beast cruising the shallows, or the twang of banjo from a palisade of trees.

It’s a personal thing that tweaks our adrenaline and slips beneath our skin. The dialect of the horror that speaks to us depends as much on our unique triggers as our upbringing. One generation traumatized itself by sneaking too young into creature features while another stayed up too late playing graphic videogames.

Me, I love Michael Meyers style killers, paranormal tales, and pretty much any bump-in-the-night thriller. I’m a total sucker for this brand of fun.

But supernatural beasties, sci-fi nightmares, and indestructible psycho-killers are only horror as defined by entertainment conventions. As a reader, I find myself more interested in a broader definition of the word. One unbound by bookstore shelves and Netflix tabs.

Most simply, horror is an intense feeling of fear.

Reading the latest chiller or watching an entrails-spackled slasher flick is like riding a rollercoaster: a snaky trek punctuated by stomach-plummeting thrills and ascending dread. But whether its scenes are stalked by werewolves or prowled by Japanese wraiths, how long does this fright stay with you? For me, the kick of the experience fades soon after turning the last page or exiting the theater.

Something about the offerings we categorize as horror allows us to confine them within the contexts of their consumption. I’ve stared wide-eyed at the television while watching The Walking Dead and missed subway stops riveted by the pages by a vampire novel, but — delightful though they are — these don’t tend to haunt me in a lasting way. I don’t plan exit routes from public places in anticipation of a zombie invasion. My apartment doesn’t bristle with stakes in preparation for a one-on-one with the undead.

This is because the usual horror fare depends upon irrational fears, and these are easily boxed and set aside. This is one reason why I like them so much. For a few hours, the usual miscellany of job, family, and financial anxieties are swept aside in a wash of fresh blood. It’s a fantastic diversion. Literally fantastic, and because of that few of its frights endure for long. That’s because these serve as proxies for the real terrors we have. The true fears that don’t dissolve in the light of morning.

So, if you don’t spend your days and nights fixated on cinema fiends and paperback monsters then it begs the question: what are you really afraid of?

I’d suggested that everyone’s idea of horror is different, but once we cut away the flash and gore and get to the heart of the word’s meaning, is that really true? I find that the most compelling varieties of fear are those at once personal and universal. For this reason, the books that that give me the most lasting frights are those usually classified as psychological thrillers. These novels are often populated with regular people in ordinary places dealing with circumstances that bring them right up to — but not beyond — the edge of reality.

Even when I think about what I love best about some of our most iconic works of traditional horror, it’s their grounded, character-driven elements and not their supernatural flourishes that stick out to me.

Take Stephen King’s The Shining. A celebrated, gothic-style tale drenched in the rich atmosphere and blood-soaked history of the Overlook Hotel. The Overlook is replete with scares, but its service as a domestic pressure-cooker is what makes the book a favorite. King’s portrait of a family pushed beyond the edge disturbs me more that the hotel’s demon topiaries and ghostly staff. A wife terrorized, a son hunted, a father falling to madness. Of The Shining’s legions of readers, none have had their vices tickled by phantom bartenders, but most have families. I think anyone with a family can imagine the Torrance’s implosion. This relatability at the heart of The Shining is what keeps the terror of its story with us long after shelving the physical book. Once the exhilaration ebbs, a shard of this snowbound family remains lodged inside us because we recognize them in ourselves.

This intimate bond between narrative and reader is something that all authors strive for. Modern life is a war of demands on our attention, and every set of eyeballs is a battleground. This is a fight in which books in particular appear vastly outmatched. Compared to most competing media, the traditional novel seems very antique indeed. Consider film, which at its best is a fully-packaged vision complete with talented actors, painstakingly constructed sets, and an evocatively calibrated soundtrack. The camera itself directs the viewer’s gaze with every tilt and pan, meticulously controlling every pixel they are privy to. A film is more real than written fiction in that everyone who watches it sees the same thing.

Not so for a novel. Because to fully exist, a book requires a reader. At first glance this might seem like a weakness, but it is in fact the novel’s special strength.

This is especially true for any book that plays on the strings of fear.

In What We See When We Read, Peter Mendelsohn articulates an intriguing perspective on the unique nature of the author-reader-novel relationship. Most succinctly, that reading is a constant act of co-creation between the author and the reader. Mendelsohn’s book helped me to appreciate the unique intimacy and potency of reading in an entirely new way. Looking at books through this lens reveals the reader’s own imagination as a delicious ingredient in impactful horror.

Remember when I asked you to picture a Victorian house?

I didn’t mention a color, but the house in your mind almost certainly has painted paneling. Perhaps its paint is fresh and gleaming, or maybe it’s dramatically weathered. Your version may have ornate trim or even gingerbread flairs. Could be that your grandmother or cousins lived in a house very close to this description and that’s the home you’re picturing. In this case, more that picturing it, you may be also be feeling it. Ask a friend to do this and they’ll likely describe an entirely different place to you. To me, the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of a Victorian is Norman Bates’s creepy home from Psycho.

See how important the reader is?

The author raises the scaffolding, but the reader constructs much of their own fiction from the raw materials of their own, unique experiences. By extending this concept to the province of character, you start to see how insidiously psychological suspense thrillers can get into our head.

Two of the most successful recent psychological thrillers are Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train. Much of these books’ successes are thanks to the skillful way in which their authors build their stories around a core of instantly relatable interpersonal tensions. Told in the first person, these novels gouge well past their narrators’ physical characteristics. Indeed, especially within Flynn’s sharply crafted, dual point of view structure, we get to know her characters better than they know themselves. Nick and Amy Dunne are complete people. However, if you’re like me, when you first dipped into Gone Girl, you began by projecting them onto the template of someone familiar. Someone who bonded you to the characters and gave you a stake in their futures.

So when that twist comes. Bam. You feel it. Because not only do these novels’ characters begin as people you could know, their circumstances and fears are just as familiar. In fact, you may find that the anxieties that Flynn explores echo your own all too closely.

You think your wife loves you? What if she doesn’t. You think your husband’s faithful? What if he isn’t. Part of Flynn and Hawkins’ success is that they take these universal fears and extend them deep into nightmare territories. If readers can picture themselves in a character’s position in chapter one, this same character’s crisis in chapter thirty will resonate all the more for them. Better than sympathy, their predicament evokes empathy.

The novel’s concept and execution is the bait, but this conjuring of intimacy is the hook. This is what keeps us staring at the ceiling deep into the night.

Both Gone Girl and Girl on the Train are categorized as psychological suspense, but the freight their authors traffic in is unmistakably fear. Consider books like these as you gear up for Halloween or when you’re in the mood for a lasting scare. Their pages don’t hold ghosts, cannibals, or aliens, but their terror is the most distressing brand of horror: the kind we can imagine happening to ourselves.

Brendan Duffy is the author of House of Echoes.

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