The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

Introduction

HORROR STORIES: A NIGHTMARE SCENARIO

Extracted from the forthcoming book, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: On the Horror of Life and the Art of Horror.

For a horror story to be effective, it must both reflect and deform the world we know, the place in which we eat and fight and procreate. This means that it must not intrude on the sacred ground already being worked by established institutions of faith, which at some point inevitably deviate into the unknowable in order to comfort their audience rather than distress them. Should it follow this craven path, the horror story would lose its greatest value—the power to convey truths that have currency with respect to our evolving trepidations rather than perpetuating some primitive lore of the remote past. A literary law that only the greatest writers in the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, have followed in their writings maybe stated as follows: No horror tale shall take advantage of its readers by playing upon their religious beliefs. This is an easy and a vile game that only the lowest form of scribe would perpetrate on those who already have their heads filled with all kinds of fears conditioned into them since they were children in the hands of an angry god. Fortunately, we find that a model for creating horror has been provided for us that has nothing to do with preachers and pulpits and the puppetry of doctrinal compliance. This model is given to us in the form of nightmares, which conform to no orthodoxies except those of our developing fears. No bad dream ever ended with its dreamer finding salvation from his mind’s hell. Such finales are always invented after the fact by storytellers with a redemptive agenda.

As necessity dictates to most of us that we must be conscious of death, disease, damage, and derangement, however reluctantly and infrequently we submit to this knowledge, it also forces us to leave that world on a regular timetable and enter another one where we face horrors beyond the natural, warped realities that are produced simply because our brains have shifted to a different mode of activity and that by the reckoning of our wide-awake selves can only be described as lunatic. An equally apt term would be “supernatural,” since there obtains a tradition of symbolically equating states of mental abnormality with bizarre incidents in the “real” world, as elaborated by Sigmund Freud in his famous essay “The Uncanny” (1919). This is the basis for the longtime association between the supernatural and horror fiction. When we take a ghost from our dreams and place it in the context of waking consciousness, if only in the pages of a ghost story, we have chosen, as though freely and of our own will, to engage in the metaphysics of the mistake. The point of this act is a tangle of motives we cannot begin to unravel any better than all the other actions in which we engage on this earth. The only thing that is certain is that we do this because we are driven to do it. But such speculation is distracting us from our concern of the moment, which is the plot of a supernatural horror story and its source in the nightmare.

It is usually a long and twisted road between the nightmare and a horror story.

As far as offering a writer some useful storyline, nightmares are notorious for generating plots that are either wearyingly simple, and therefore unaffecting outside the confines of the dream, or too complicated to sort out for any kind of sense. Of course, the same might be said of our waking existence. On the one hand, its course tends to present a few basic routines that have no interest in themselves once we strip them down to their bare bones. But we must go through these motions if the show is to go on. We eat because we are hungry and will die if we fail to heed that hunger. We work because we need to provide ourselves with food as well as shelter from the elements. We sleep because we are tired and need to recharge ourselves so that we can work, which in turn enables us to feed and shelter ourselves. But these routines, and the kind of sense behind them, are not sufficient fodder for fiction and would make for painful reading.

On the other hand, things can get so involved and mysterious in our lives that we are hard pressed to determine what is happening or why. One day we are just punching the clock at the biological factory, and the next day we find ourselves embroiled in the strangest situation because we saw a pretty face or got wind of some words that set off a conflagration of rage that may last only a matter of hours or could drag on for years. At first we may take a stab at explanations, but ultimately we are at a loss to name the mechanism of our initial impulse, to follow its developments and counter-developments, and to know what happened in the end. This is one of the reasons we engage in such activities as reading fiction in the first place: we are unsatisfied or frustrated by the both the basic tedium and the inconclusive, strung-along complexity of our lives. They lack something we desire—meaning … or, in other words, a plot. No other creature in this world requires anything in the way of meaning, but we appear to be burdened with this desire. This is why the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe regarded human beings as a mistake in the world of nature. We have a desire that can never be satisfied, a need that is not natural, or at least one that is not found elsewhere in nature’s kingdom. Nevertheless, we will persist in chasing the impossible and ultimately die trying. This is the tragedy of human existence that Zapffe concluded we do our best to cover up in order to tolerate an existence that holds terrors for us at every turn. Hence, we make up narratives that are rich with meaning, conspiring among ourselves to tell lies in order to create the coherence that both our waking and dreaming lives withhold from us. Thus, there are the mythologies, the religions, and even scientific scenarios that open with a big bang, continue until some characters come along, and then end in entropy. At this stage in history, it may seem unnecessary and more than a little trite to go over this ground upon which so many have trod before us. But we are here concerned with fictional plots— specifically, with plotting a course between the nightmare and the horror story. If we have again wandered off the topic, this should be no surprise. Indeed, we may profit from wandering a bit further.

Part of our inheritance as conscious organisms—creatures who are aware of being alive and know about the inescapability of death— is that we are subject to having nightmares. Every move we make in our lives entails risk. What we risk each time we lie down to sleep is that our minds will drift off like a balloon into a sky freaked with clouds and shadows and be battered about in misadventures of unimaginable madness. While our bodies are held in paralysis, unless we are sleepwalkers, our consciousness is distorted to the point of the psychotic, roaming through the backstreets of our brains… until the moment when the intensity of our horror becomes too much to allow our slumber to persist, and we are jarred back into wakefulness.

Yet if the nightmare has sufficiently shaken us, it may take some time before we are fully awake. We are alert enough to reach for the lamp and scramble from our bed, rubbing our eyes as if to wipe away the visions to which we have been victim and pressing our hands to our temples to feel our way back to the familiar ground of flesh. But the world of the nightmare has not yet been left behind. So we evacuate that room which has become a chamber of horrors and seek out some other place in our residence—somewhere that is not infected by the insanity we have just endured, somewhere that will accommodate our bodies in an upright position so that we are not prone to sink back into that insane darkness from which we are trying to emerge. Once seated, we may moan and curse in the aftermath of the frightening ordeal through which our consciousness has taken us. The residue of things we never believed we would suffer still plagues our heads with images that keep popping up in the darkness inside us and inner scenarios are played over and over like a tune we cannot rid from our thoughts.

Our bodies continue to shiver with fever of an immaterial disease and its lingering symptoms, its ravages and confusions. No longer entrapped in the dream, we are not yet fully free from its clutches. And the worst part about occupying this transitional zone, the most awful revelation that occurs in this state, is not the nightmare that has just slithered into our skull and nested there for awhile. That particular trauma is complete and the house lights are now up around us, even while we remain in a delirium that might otherwise signal some serious mental disorder, some damage to the system that functions to give us a sense that we are a real person, a normal and continuous self. The worst part of this limbo between two worlds is not the memory of the nightmare that has already passed, receding into some slime-streaked and cobwebbed cavern of memory, but the idea of all those nightmares that have yet to come in our lives and are as sure as anything to do so. In those interstitial moments between the deformations of a sick dream and a full recovery that sends our minds home from the hospital, we find the prospect of further episodes of this kind, of relapses into the frenzies of the sleeping mind, to be absolutely intolerable. How could we ever again bring ourselves to take the risk of going back to that bed and descending into dreams. What a monstrous destiny we must helplessly face, each night standing on the precipice of sleep and not knowing what waits below.

However, as previously observed, every move we make in our lives entails risk.

This statement could be truthfully extended to declare not merely risk but, based on facts and figures, the certainty of pain and grief that encompasses us like barbed wire into which, sooner or later, we will run headlong. Few of us vow not to enter an automobile because some of the most grotesque disfigurements and deaths have resulted from this decision. On the other hand, many are dissuaded from knowing the exhilaration offered by riding a motorcycle, whether or not they have heard that surgeons refer to these vehicles as “donorcycles.”

But even the most incautious among us weigh the risks, gauging what prospective harm they find acceptable in light of the rewards involved. Many believe that they have a fair choice in the matter of which doom ultimately overtakes them, and sometimes their lives indeed come to an end approximately as they envisioned. Of course, this is not exactly how they explain their predicament to themselves. They usually remain as oblivious as humanly possible to any nastiness that could waylay their life-plan. While they may have had a close brush with severe physical damage or their own demise, they usually recover from these experiences and, like those who have had a good share of nightmares in their time, eventually go back to sleep … because it is in their sleep that they are looking to die after a long and healthy life. Neither waking nightmares nor non-waking ones have given the human species any pause in its progress. It is not as if a person, once born, or a society, once formed, has ever had any appealing choice except to carry on as if everything will be all right in the short run and to think about the end of things as little as possible.

Confronting the nightmare on a daily basis and on a conscious level is just not something people are wont to do as a rule. A small number of us, however, have become devout researchers of all types of nightmares and, perhaps due to some fluke or flaw of character, wish to release our findings in the form of what have become casually known as horror stories. The following observations are drawn from my own studies in this area of human experience.

However frightening nightmares may be, plain old horror is not the entirety of their essence, nor is it that of the horror story. Of course, there must be something horrific about them, whether it is being stalked by someone through dark streets or groping your way through an ever-narrowing tunnel or finding yourself receiving a ghostly visitation as mentioned earlier. Yet the quality of a nightmare lies neither in these nor in any other hypothetical horrors as such. What makes a nightmare nightmarish is the sense that something is happening that should not be. While nightmares are the most convenient reference point for this sense of the impossible, the unthinkable, as something that is actually happening, it is not restricted to our sleeping hours.

To give a relatively common example, we might consider the plot of a traffic accident, an event that is commonly experienced as dreamlike in the beginning, as you find yourself suddenly moving along a track of time quite different from the one you knew before the accident began. You may be traveling along slippery roads and then, without warning, find yourself sliding across several lanes of oncoming traffic. You know in principle that such things can easily happen. They may even have happened to you on a prior occasion. You know that they happen to other people all the time. Nevertheless, this accident was not in your plans, which is why it is called an accident. It seems like a mistake, even if it could be explained by a cause-and-effect confluence of circumstances. It was a mistake because you had an idea of how things were supposed to be that day, as you do every day, and spinning helplessly in your car while others try to avoid a collision with you, perhaps unsuccessfully, was not part of your schedule. One moment you had a firm grip on things; the next moment you are careening toward who knows where. You are not filled with horror, not yet at least, as you spin along the pavement that is slick with rain or snow. At this point, everything is all strangeness. You have been taken to a different place from where you were, and you are no longer in control. Anything could happen now. That is the suspicion that creeps into your thoughts as a nightmare begins. Nothing is safe and nothing is off limits. All of a sudden something was set into motion that changed everything into that which was not meant to be, at least according to your deluded conception of your life and its “meaningful” trajectory. Yet these things happen, as everyone knows. They have always happened and are always happening.

But we isolate the nightmare by calling it imaginary and denying it a place in our real life; we anchor ourselves in a place far away from it, where such “realities” as God and Country rule the wavelengths; we distract ourselves from it by confining our minds to places where it is not; and we sublimate the nightmare by placing it in stories and paintings and other devisings that we may put away at will. If we neglected to do this, we would be living at all times in a world of nightmare… a world that was not meant to be and yet is so. And thus we conspire with ourselves and against ourselves to deny the most obvious facts of the nightmare—death, disease, damage, and derangement. The horror story, by obeying the terms of the nightmare, is a way that, deviously, some people use to think about the unthinkable, to face what we otherwise would not choose to look upon, and, more importantly, to control and give meaning to that which can neither be controlled nor harbors any meaning. It is a perverted mode of defending ourselves from what would demean and destroy us, from what cannot be helped and should never have been—life itself in all its inane grotesquerie. However, for all our efforts to overwrite what has been written, to remake what had been made, to change what cannot be changed, and accept what is unacceptable, we have succeeded only in making a bad situation worse. No matter how many paper monsters we face down, no matter how many nightmares we shake off, the best we can do is open the pages of Poe and recite—with a resigned and sardonic calm, if we can manage it—those words from “The Conqueror Worm” that tell us a story in which there is “much of Madness, and more of Sin And Horror the soul of the plot.”