The Nature of Fear, by Laurel Fuller
Today I am handing over my blog to horror writer/fan Laurel Fuller! I really enjoyed her piece on fear. If you want to find out about Laura and her work, you can check out her blog at: http://glitter-n-gore.livejournal.com/
It has come to my attention recently that I'm afraid of cockroaches. Well, cockroaches or water bugs. To be honest I can't tell the difference. All I know is they're both huge, they bite, they fly, and they're very hard to kill. You can't just stomp them because they reinflate like balloon animals. If you do the humane thing and put them outside, chances are they'll multiply and invade the house. And once you see one, even if you chase it at point-blank range with a can of Raid, then cut it in half, burn the pieces, and flush it, you'll likely see another one in about two or three weeks–just when you've about forgotten the first one. And when that happens, you will start to see them everywhere, even when they aren't around.
These are my personal reasons for not being fond of roaches. I'm highlighting them this way because I don't think the above paragraph is particularly scary, nor is it meant to be. It's expository and a little tongue-in-cheek, and maybe a handful of you reading this will be able to relate to what I'm talking about, but that's not how horror fiction works.
Fear is a very personal and subjective emotion. When you ask someone what scares them most, not everyone will say "cockroaches." For someone else, it might be clowns. For another, flying in airplanes. Heights. The dark. Crowded places. It's also a completely irrational emotion, so explaining to someone that there's nothing really dangerous about clowns, or airplanes, or what have you is typically not going to make it better. It's not the logical part of your brain that reacts when you're frightened of something. It goes deeper than that. In its purest form, fear turns us all into children, trapped in a huge, complicated and alien world where nothing makes sense and everything is monstrous.
With that in mind, let me tell you about the exact moment I realized I was afraid of cockroaches (or possibly water bugs). I had just gotten home from work for the day, and my brain was buzzing with a list of tasks for the rest of the evening. I needed to change out of my work clothes, let the dogs out, check the mail, figure out what to do for dinner, etc. But the most pressing need was the bathroom, so that's where I went. The second my pants were around my ankles, a cockroach crawled out from behind the shower curtain and onto the wall not three feet away from me. I screamed. Subconsciously I must have flipped through a lightning-quick list of all the things not good about my current predicament. To start with, I was just beginning to "relax," if you will, and was caught literally with my pants down. I couldn't back away because there was nothing but a wall behind me. If I decided to move away from the toilet, I would more than likely regret it. The room was tiny, the Raid was in the kitchen and there was no one else in the house who could grab it for me. So I screamed. The thing was about an inch and a half long in reality, but it may as well have taken up the entire wall–every facet of my attention was focused on IT, the fact that IT was so close to me, and that I had no defenses in easy reach to destroy IT. I could already see the wings buzzing and feel those tiny insect legs clicking over my flesh. So I screamed.
Can you feel my panic yet?
The trick here isn't to make everyone who reads this afraid of cockroaches, but to make them feel what I felt in the bathroom that day. That is the challenge of the horror writer, to pour raw emotion into words in such a way that those reading it will be pulled into the experience of the characters, no matter what they're individually afraid of. What we try to do is take a specific incident and make it universal. It's not going to work on everyone, but that is the goal, and that is the challenge.
One of the biggest misconceptions that people have about horror is that it's all blood and guts. It's not–fear and revulsion are very different animals. But I can see why some draw that comparison, because they have similar effects. When horror is done right, it commands every facet of your attention. I was completely focused on that damn bug on the wall that day. If you witness an act of extreme violence or bloodshed, the same thing happens–it commands your attention, and you can't look away. But it's hard to keep that up throughout an entire story, an entire novel. For the horror writer, it's all part of the challenge. How do I cook up a sense of dread that grabs hold and keeps squeezing?
I don't know if I have an answer to that yet. As a newcomer to the horror genre on the whole, and a still struggling and unpublished writer, I can only hope that I'm learning and passing one or two things on. One thing I've experimented with is spotlighting the feared thing early on, starting with a shock, then pulling back and leaving the reader to wonder when it will come back. I told you at the beginning that I don't like cockroaches, and that they always come back. Then I gave you more detail about the one that made me scream. I don't know if he had any buddies or not. All I know is that I keep looking at a stain on the carpet and imagining I see it moving out of the corner of my eye. I can smell the dampness in the air tonight, which I know is just the kind of air IT likes. I see that the sliding door to the back porch is slightly open to let some fresh air in, and I'd like to get up and close it but I don't want to let my feet touch the floor, in case that smudge on the carpet turns out not to be a smudge.
That is fear, that is dread–uncertainty injected into a perfectly ordinary setting. I've been in that bathroom, and in this bedroom, a thousand times. They are comfortable familiar places, only now they're tainted and no longer quite safe, all because I know IT might come back.
Can you feel my panic yet?
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