weird fiction

spooky szn

I’m a millennial white woman, so it should not surprise you in the slightest to find out I was plugged into Taylor Swift’s latest album, Midnights, this weekend. folklore and evermore have been my personality for the last two years, we’re just going to have to accept that I am a product of my time. But this isn’t really about Midnights, though I am going to request that you watch at least the first 45 seconds of her music video for “Anti-Hero.” I’ll wait.

Thank you for indulging me. Why I wanted you to watch that was specifically for the hilarious ghosts wearing patterned sheets. I laughed out loud the first time I watched the video, at several parts (“Cats don’t even like the beach!”) but first at the ghosts. They’re my kind of ghosts. They’re not scary, they’re ridiculous.

October is considered to be the spookiest of months, and while I’m not going to get into the fact that November is actually the spookiest month here, Halloween does give October an edge on paper. October is when all the really good horror movies come out, when the spookiest of stories are celebrated, when the haunted mazes and houses are set up, when we all wear the most delightfully spooky clothing (I personally am wearing my adult glow-in-the-dark skeleton pyjamas as I write this). People glory in the macabre this time of year.

And I…don’t like being scared.

I don’t think I’d ever watched a horror movie until I was 15. Instinctively, I knew this wasn’t going to work for me, not at all. I had, of course, read some kid collections of scary stories growing up because my mom loves a) a good deal and b) ordering random packages of books from the Scholastic book order. They terrified me. As an adult, I know now I was an unusually anxious child, and I’m sure this was part of not wanting to be scared: horror was something I couldn’t anticipate, designed to make me jump and scream, and I was already pretty terrified of regular life. I didn’t need to make my entertainment scary. In many respects, I still live my life like this, excluding any horror entertainment or anything I think will kick my anxiety into overdrive and draw on my very active imagination.

But at 15, when I was visiting cousins, my older cousin suggested we rent some movies (I know! What an adorable time). She was 19 at the time, so to her sister, also 15, and I, she was someone to listen to, and when she suggested we watch Signs, because it was really good, we agreed.

My 19 year old cousin spent the movie laughing as my other cousin and I spent the entire time clutching one another. I had nightmares for weeks.

No, horror wasn’t for me. I knew that.

Naturally, I agreed to go see Saw IV in theatres when it came out in the fall of 2009 with a boy I kind of maybe liked. Fool! Again, I was scared out of my own skin, and we fizzled out before we even began, so were the nightmares worth it again? No.

In my twenties, I stayed firm. No scary movies, I avoided scary stories after a sunny afternoon where I read some H.P. Lovecraft and became too scared to get off the bed I was lying on, in broad daylight. I didn’t read ghost stories, I avoided legends, and after a trip to a haunted house and corn maze in the first year of library school, I stayed the hell away from those too. I was a proud chicken, and declared my total lack of interest in anything I deemed too spooky.

Last year, I started dipping my toes into ghost stories again.

What changed? I’d read a number of articles about how A Christmas Carol was really one of the great ghost stories, and in fact Christmas was the true spooky season. I love A Christmas Carol. I reread it every December. I have three different renditions of it on DVD (1951 with Alastair Sim, the 2009 animated version, and the true classic, the Muppets version). This was the push I needed to come back to spookiness. I’d taken a class on Gothic literature in undergrad, which I loved: this was my spooky canon! Creepy and unsettling, not gory and full of jump scares! I like creeping, unsettling dread, not screaming for my life.

Imbued with this new knowledge, I’ve been visiting ghost stories with an eye for my favourite kinds. I read a collection of Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, which really set the stage for a year of ghostly readings. I fell completely in love with The British Library collections of weird fiction, and in particular, their many Christmas volumes, which reinforced my spooky love affair with that particular holiday season. I’ve been going back and seeking out the Gothic classics, like Daphne du Maurier’s body of work, because she knows about creating creeping dread.

In this spooky renaissance, I actually looked forward to October this year, and have been taking great joy in Halloween, something I’ve been ambivalent at best about for many years. I’ve found my home in weird fiction, a subgenre described as “fiction that utilizes aspects of fantasy, horror, and supernatural fiction.”

But one thing I’ve been slow to acknowledge in my year of gobbling up ghost stories is that it’s very likely my new fixation on it is both a form of escape, and also perhaps an extension of how the worst thing already happened. I already lived a horror story, why would I be scared of some fictional words on a page? The stories can’t be as bad as what already happened, and I need somewhere to channel those unresolved feelings, letting them go through ghost stories. I’m not the first to do this; a lot of ghost stories and spooky myths have been based off the ills (or perceived ills of the world). Gothic fiction had a great surge in the era after World War I. We’re doomed to repeat history, and I’m following a well-trod path.

I ordered Damnable Tales: A Folk Horror Anthology and it’s patiently waiting on my shelf for Halloween, when I plan to delve into it with great relish. Probably dressed in my skeleton pyjamas. And knowing that I’m working out my own ghost story in the process.