Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
It was warm for October so I went for a long ride to nowhere on my motorcycle, a seven-year-old Triumph Bonneville. I turned back for home when the sky was the color of marigolds, dead leaves whisking across the road in my wake, and in the peaceful light of dusk, I had a perfectly natural thought: What if a bat hit me in the face right now? What if my visor dropped, trapping it inside my helmet, shrilling and biting? What if I went off the road and snapped my back and was left paralyzed, out of sight down the embankment, with a dying bat in my helmet, its wings shattered, its claws scrabbling, the little white staples of its teeth sinking into me?
I wasn’t kidding when I said this was a perfectly natural thought. It is. For me.
As the author of three unsettling fantasy novels and one collection of ghost stories, my business is grotesque possibilities and to quote Lt. Aldo Raine of “Inglourious Basterds,” business is a-boomin’! And not just for me. In entertainment, nothing gets you in the black faster than wading into the red.
On television, the zombies have lurched all the way to the top of the Nielsen ratings. A recent Newbery-Medal-winning novel follows the adventures of a boy who spends his entire childhood in a cemetery, where he is looked after by ghosts, ghouls and a vampire. This is after his birth parents are knifed to death in chapter one. Just a little light entertainment for the kiddies.
At the movies, modestly budgeted pictures like “Oculus,” “The Purge” and “Sinister” have been (blood) money in the bank. “Gone Girl,” a $60 million thriller with Oscar ambitions, almost suffered a humiliating upset at the box office in its opening weekend, when it nearly finished second to a bargain-basement screamer about a possessed doll, “Annabelle.”
But our preference for nightmares over daydreams is nothing new. You will recall that “Hamlet” is a ghost story, and that the hero muses about death while looking at a human skull.
I suggest to you that the compulsion to peer into the darkness, and wonder about what’s there, is a distinctly useful and adaptive trait. And as it happens, the fiction of the horrific is unusually well tuned to address the most frightening and fascinating unknowns.
It is, for example, unlikely that any of us will ever have to worry about a real life zombie apocalypse. Yet we are, in truth, wildly outnumbered by the dead, and all of us will, in due course, be joining their ever swelling ranks. The heroes of all those zombie stories, faced with diminishing resources and time, make final choices about what they need to say and do in their last hours. Someday you may well have to make the same choices, if only from a hospital bed, or the wheelchair in the retirement home.
Ghost stories consider how much any of us are able to escape the horrors of the past. History casts a long shadow on the present, and sometimes this shadow is dark indeed. Ask the folks in Ferguson, Mo., if the past is ever past.
Tales of the wolfman inevitably explore what it means to be an animal, which we are. We slaughter the living, rend the dead flesh with our teeth, and we like it. The juice in your juicy steak is not juice.
And let’s not even get started with His Infernal Majesty, who has trip-trapped on his goaty little hooves to visit every corner of the pop culture landscape. Stories of the devil are the lead-lined gloves we use to handle the radioactive material of our own ugliest, darkest compulsions — and hell but a stand-in for the bleakest corner of our souls.
The imagination is our final advantage as a species, a place to safely (and happily) explore experiences that are far from safe and far from happy. “Dracula” and “The Fly” may delight and appall in equal measure, but they also gently prepare us, helping us to think about how we would respond if faced with a terrifying seduction, or a corrupted and infected body.
The best fiction — in the genre of horror and elsewhere — eschews pat solutions for useful possibilities. This person did that and it ended horribly, so maybe don’t do that. Another person did this and made the best of things when she was confronted with a bleak situation. Perhaps her example has some merit. If the literature of the unnatural is a lamp that can guide you through your own eventual nighttime journeys, it’s still up to you to decide in which direction to strike out into the shadows.
And while the vast catalog of horrific fantasies may not be able to offer us simple answers to our biggest questions, it does occasionally remind us of small yet undeniably useful truisms: always look in the back seat before you get in the car; don’t insult hillbillies with more power tools than teeth; whatever was making that awful noise out in the woods, you can check it out in the morning. And, oh yeah — always ride with your visor down.
Joe Hill is the author of the novels “Horns” and “NOS4A2.”