When I was a kid – undegreed, unpublished, unaware – I read books primarily for excitement. Over the years since I plowed thrill-seekingly through Graham Greene and Conrad and Tolkien and Stephen King, books (or, more precisely, the institutionalized expectations of books) have more or less yielded the field of excitement to popular forms deemed better suited to it (popcorn flicks, Guitar Hero) and fussily retreated to the production of more respectable products, of tutting reminders of history's wrongs, quiet epiphanies, sexless love stories, and musings on the past, or the nature of memory, or memory of things past, or the past's relationship to memory, or remembering the past.
It was as if, at some point as I grew up, a group e-mail was sent out from the Literary Head Office, one directing that the literature of the new century would be, above all, good. Not good in the sense of well-written necessarily, but in the way of front-row students who suck up to the teacher, of walking, never running around the pool, of dogs bred not to bite. Serious books would be those that featured good people learning good things. They would be about goodness. The characters would be likable, that is, good. (You thought Show Don't Tell was the primary writers' rule? Forget about it. Now it's Make Everybody Likable). Bad things might happen in books, but there would be consolation in the unanimous agreement about their badness, and that the good who had to nobly endure them would be even more good for doing so.
What happened to bad's fun side? Why can you go through a year's worth of prize-winners without once experiencing even the slightest shiver of fear? Shame, yes, and a good deal of sensitivity training. But leave-the-lights-on fear? The literary project seemed to have given that up along with the booze and grass and making out with the wrong people at parties.
(I'm being cheeky and provocative for the sake of argument here, of course. But, now that I mention it, what ever happened to provocation and cheekiness for the sake of argument?)
The best horror novels (no matter which bookstore shelf they find themselves on) are revelations
All I know for sure is that, in our discussion of what books can (and ought to) do, fear is an underacknowledged readerly response. I'm not talking about Halloween gotcha! scares here, but explorations of the psychology underpinning our deepest anxieties, the reason we cross the street to avoid passing certain doors. The literature of discomfort need not merely be about the generation of suspense for suspense's sake, but reveal the true proclivities and vulnerabilities of the imagination. Fear, in other words, isn't just for kids. It is an emotion that has the potential to provide insight into the human condition of a kind that the more comforting literary affects – nostalgia, sympathy, affirmation – cannot.
I'm aware that, for some readers, the real world is a frightening enough place as it is and would prefer the time they spend with books to be free of any new nasties. I'm a father, I have a mortgage – this is something I understand myself. Life is scary: Why go out of your way to make it scarier?
The answer, I think, is that fiction provides a different understanding of what and why we fear than even the gloomiest headlines. Bad news helps us list the world's symptoms (the inside looking out). But literature helps us see the ways these symptoms cohere as disease. It shines a light onto the grim facts that shape us, distort us, make us different people from those who came before (the outside reader looking into a character's heart and head).
Andrew Pyper is the author of four novels, the most recent of which, The Killing Circle, was selected a Notable Crime Novel of the Year by The New York Times. He lives in Toronto and, sometimes, in fear.
The best horror novels (no matter which bookstore shelf they find themselves on) are revelations. They show us things only nightmares can, and with a directness and urgency that makes the experience visceral. Seen in this way, McCarthy's The Road is as much a horror novel as King's The Shining or Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or McEwan's The Cement Garden or Stone's Dog Soldiers. Try to imagine any of these works with the fear subtracted from them. You wouldn't have riveting nightmares of the kind that irrevocably alter the way you see the day, but forgettable dreams that evaporate upon opening your eyes.
Thrillers thrill, ghost stories spook, chick-lit shops, historical fiction remembers: Hey, we've all got jobs to do. But beyond the superficial expectations we might place upon a novel, there lies the boundless potential for excitement, regardless of genre. And one way to do this – the most primitive way, and therefore the most effective – is through an engagement with fear. We need goodness now more than ever, but fiction isn't likely to help us broaden our understanding of it unless it confronts its opposite more frequently, more directly. It's the things that go bump inside ourselves we need a closer inspection of, not a self-congratulatory gaze upon our good sides.
