Why the macabre?

Why the Macabre?

People ask me, often in a hushed tone. As though evil doesn’t breathe down the back of our necks on a day to day basis. Perhaps addressing it directly brings uneasiness: your writing is so dark, how do you think of these things? The question, I won’t lie, haunted me. I write the best and worst parts of the human condition. How do I not know why? The why…how do I explain I did not choose the macabre so much as recognize it? It’s a language I spoke organically, its presence echoing within the walls of a house I can’t quite enter, yet consumes me. 

Why was eight-year-old me obsessed with Freddy Krueger, Scream, and the dead that refuse to let go of life? Was it because they were less scary than my reality? Seeing veritable monsters made my darkness more bearable? Are some souls just drawn to the dark? Underneath the adrenaline, something closer to fascination than fear. There was something in those stories that felt more honest than what passed for comfort in the daylight hours. The particular honesty you can’t evade, the kind that lives in fiction, ‌presses. What fears have grown in your subconscious that you're afraid to confront? What do you owe the version of yourself you have buried just to forget the past?

Horror, when it is done with intention, is an excavation. It is not about the monster under the bed. It is about what the monster represents, what it costs to look at it directly. Some feelings do not have a polite name, such as grief that turns into blind rage. Or love that unravels into obsession, loyalty curdling into something else. Gothic horror explores human problems without flinching. I believe that darkness in fiction is not the opposite of hope. It is the honest prerequisite for it as you cannot write your way to the light without being willing to describe exactly how dark the room actually is. So when people ask me why the macabre, this is the truest answer I have: I think stories that refuse to look away are doing something more generous than stories that look away for you. 

When handled with care, darkness is its own kind of sanctuary. Let me say plainly: being drawn to the dark does not make you dark. I am, by most accounts, an embarrassingly upbeat person. Slightly immature, a person who gets unreasonably excited about things that do not warrant that level of appreciation. The macabre and the joyful are not opposite creatures but humans who have achieved balance. My readers are among the most empathetic, curious, and attuned to the texture of the world around them. Some people naturally look closer and ask harder questions in order to find meaning in the places others walk past.

I am proud to write for them.