Horror: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

by Thomas Tessier

The invention of the electric light bulb would, some people believed, bring an end to the idea of ghosts and monsters, and to stories about them.  Light, science and reason would sweep away the darkness, the shadowy old fears, beliefs and superstitions that had for so long been a part of human life.  It would happen in a generation or two, three at most.  Edmund Wilson was convinced that ghost and horror stories would wither away. 

But here we are today, more than 125 years after Edison, and ghosts and monsters are still very much with us, as are the stories about them.  The world has changed dramatically, but people are still...people.  One of the things we have learned is that we can illuminate the dark corners of the room, or the woods, but we still carry the fear and darkness around inside of ourselves every day of our lives.  We all do—though, some carry much more of it than others. 

And it will not always stay inside, torturing one poor soul alone at a time.  Out of the darkness still come ghosts and monsters.  The may appear in new and ever-changing shapes and forms, frequently unrecognizable at first, but they bring the same ancient plague back into our world: horror. 

One of the great powers of evil is its sheer seductiveness, and in Finishing Touches I wanted to write about how an intelligent, educated, civilized and very normal young man—a doctor—might somehow be seduced into committing acts of grotesque evil.  To become what he was not, a monster.  Would he have to be forced or tricked into the nightmare world, or would he reach the point where he entered it knowingly and willingly?  Could he escape and save himself, or was he finally where he wanted to be, where he felt he belonged?

The same kinds of questions continued to absorb me in Father Panic’s Opera Macabre.  Although it is entirely different in its location, circumstances, events and outcome, there is at the heart of the story the same kind of intensely erotic seduction and journey toward the extreme.  How can evil spring out of love and intoxicating passion, out of such wonderful but entirely ordinary human experiences?  I think of it as a ghost story, but there be monsters here as well.  Readers may well see it in different but equally valid ways.

One of the worst places to be in this world is at the intersection of History and Horror, but we’re all together on that street corner now, never knowing when the unseen and unexpected darkness will erupt violently in plain sight and engulf us.  We will always be learning how to live with it, because understanding serial killers or terrorists does not banish them from the earth.  Knowing the history of World War II did not enable anyone to prevent the genocides in Cambodia, Africa or Yugoslavia.  Psychology can help us understand the ghosts and troubled spirits that haunt each of us and seem to exert such fiendish sway in our everyday lives, but it can never completely exorcize them; they are with us for the duration: it’s personal. 

Writing and reading about it are two of the best ways we have to answer back—with honesty, laughter, love and compassion.

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