The Comfort of Horror
The news feels heavy. So why reach for horror and dystopian stories? Because sometimes they make the dark feel bearable, even steady.
The news feels heavy these days. Wars, politics, climate, cruelty. Some mornings it’s all too much. You’d think I’d want something light to read, something to take the edge off.
But no. I keep reaching for horror, for dystopia, for the end of the world.
I think it’s because stories give the darkness edges. In real life it sprawls, no beginning or end. In a book it has a shape. You can turn the page. You can close the cover. Even if it ends badly, at least it ends.
Jack Torrance in The Shining, Stephen King:
“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
There’s something in that, bleak as it sounds.
And the monsters in stories follow rules. Vampires need an invitation. Zombies move at a certain pace. Even dystopias have a cause, and eventually, an ending. Life isn’t like that. It’s just noise and uncertainty.
I even find it in my own writing…
“It wasn’t that the silence was safe - it was that the silence meant the worst had already happened.”
Horror gives you boundaries, even when they’re terrifying ones.
Does anyone love to imagine? I do it constantly. Whole scenes, whole worlds, before breakfast. Apparently it’s a very neurodiverse thing, but I’ve always done it.
Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll:
“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
I love that about myself.
My head is crowded with impossible things. Maybe that’s why horror feels so natural. I don’t go looking for more fear, it’s more that I already imagine the scenario. Stories just let me give the reigns to someone else and to finally set them down.
Sometimes it feels easier to sit with other people’s invented disasters than my own. When life has unravelled (grief, infertility, anxiety) I’ve turned to books where the characters suffer far more.
Kirsten in Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel:
“Survival is insufficient.”
Even in a ruined world, her characters cling to art, to memory, to love. To humanity.
Eleanor Vance in The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson:
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
And maybe that’s why we need these stories. To make the dark more bearable.
So yes, the world feels heavy, and yes, I still read horror.
Because it makes me braver and because it makes me steadier.
Join me on Goodreads, let’s share books….
