HORROR FEATURE: HOPE IN HORROR
16/8/2018
george daniel lea One would expect nihilism to have a comfortable place in horror fiction, for hopelessness and lack of salvation to be pervasive themes within the genre. Whilst that's true for certain sub-cultures, it isn't historically or even generally the case: If anything, horrific subjects are often powerfully conservative, utilised to reinforce enshrined concerns and parameters rather than call them into question. This is arguably due (in part) to the genre's mythological roots: horror fiction all too often plays with themes and subjects that have been pervasive in human mythology and oral tradition since long before the first man-thing set chisel to stone: Stories of what lurks in the dark, the perils of straying from proscribed paths, of walking the woods alone, of communion with strange and forbidden ideas or concepts...all subjects of stories that were once told by tribal elders around campfires to their young, at the edges of woods that they populated with every imagined fey-thing, changeling, demon and boggart imaginable. Even some of the most post-modern horror fiction one can find still hasn't moved on a great deal from those original tales in terms of import and emphasis: go onto Amazon right now, conduct a search for “new horror,” and you will find countless permutations of those same old stories reinforcing the same old, innately human tribal concerns and terrors. Contrastingly, those that call those presumptions and enshrined narratives into question will be generally quite rare; that which contradicts or undermines what we know or assume is all too often treated with disdadin and almost superstitious anxiety, in the manner of faithful reacting with conditioned denial to an atheist daring to question their gospels. As such, the horror of transgression, of deviance, is and has never been as powerful, as influential or as enshrined as that which reinforces, which comforts and cosssets. This might seem a peculiar statement to make of horror fiction, which tends to market itself with reference to its apparent transgressions, but, I would argue, such transgressions have a tendency to be superficial at best: matters of subject intended to shock or repel, rather than deeper import: Those stories which genuinely shudder us, which disturb us to the degree that we start to question our most beloved assumptions, tend to be few and far between. Instead, the genre finds itself saturated with familiarity; stories, subjects and mythologies that, regardless of their ostensibly horrific or disturbing natures, have the effect of comforting and reinforcing the reader who is well familiar with their particular species. One might even argue that, for horror, this is an entirely corrosive quality, in that the comforting and familiar can never truly distress or disturb in the manner that horror sustains its significance by.  Arguably the most significant (and certainly the most pervasively recognised) horror writer currently in operation, Stephen King, is a prime example of this, certainly with regards to his earliest fiction, which, despite having a Hitchcockian “behind the picket fences” quality to it, certainly with regards to preconceptions of small town USA, generally tends towards the traditional in terms of structure and emphasis: the good guys generally survive, the bad guys generally do not, the monsters, the vampires, the demons are evil innately, in the manner of Tolkien's orcs, whereas those ranged against them are innately good or at least worthy of some redemption (which they generally achieve in some form or another by story's end). This is not universally true of King's work, nor is it exclusively true of many of the stories that exhibit the quality, but it is a pervasive quality of his earliest writings and is certainly true of those that have become most canonised within culture and horror itself. These tend to be the stories that are endlessly aped by horror writers in general; those that have ensured audiences owing to their general familiarity, their comforting qualities. King's own back catalogue is an excellent example of the phenomenon in question: those works that are instantly recognisable, that have become synonymous with his name, that have been adapted into films and TV shows and various other mediums, tend to be those with a more conservative, consoling and bizarrely hopeful bent: IT, The Stand, The Shining etc; all stories that are absolute in terms of their moral divisions, that reinforce the old fairy-tale and folkloric notions that evil and good are certain, identifiable and immediate, and that the former can be defeated by clear exercise of the latter. These are the stories that fans of the man's work tend to gravitate towards and remember most fondly, whilst those that exercise greater degrees of ambiguity or even counter-culture deviance (The Mist, Desperation, Pet Sematary) tend not to be mentioned in the same breaths, and are certainly not treated with equal regard. This arguably speaks to something fundamental in us as human beings: how often do we opt for the comforting lie over the unpalatable truth? How often do we wallow in familiar delusions and miseries rather than allowing ourselves to experience potential alternatives? Our tastes in media and fiction are dictated by this fundamental drive in exactly the same manner as our life choices: it's no secret that the current state of popular cinema and TV (certainly here in the UK) sustains precisely because of it: both are predominated by familiar banality, whether that takes the form of soap operas that endlessly re-tread the same domestic storylines without ever actually commenting on anything or written-by-committee, edited-by-test-audience super hero films, all of which are basically the same stories when pared down to the bone, and offer little in the way of deviance, commentary or analysis of the ideas and images they play with. This is because audiences do not enjoy being challenged or questioned: they particularly dislike media that calls into question their assumptions or their relationships with media. As a sterling example, examine the tsunami of criticism that led to the BBC's burial of Stephen Volk's seminal 1992 Halloween prank, Ghostwatch. Ostensibly, the news media and those making complaints proclaimed to have been distressed and disturbed by the material. However, as critic Kim Newman has pointed out, this is a mask for their true complaint: in reality, what they reacted to was the fact that Ghostwatch called into question their relationship to the media they routinely consume: it lied to them, and, in doing so, demonstrated just how easy it is for media to fool us, and thereby exposed how neurotic our relationship to our media actually is. We seek out comfort and conciliation, especially in the face of escalating atrocities in waking life, a news media that is pervaded by inhumanities, abuses, incompetence and cruelty to make anything that horror fiction can record pale in comparison. This makes nihilism in fiction simultaneously easy to contrive (one simply has to spend an hour watching news broadcasts or reading newspapers to gain a lifetime's worth of material) but also incredibly difficult to market. Horror, like certain forms of fantasy and science fiction, with which it overlaps and intertwines, is perhaps one of the most fertile grounds for nihilism: stories which expose the morality of fairy tales and the lessons of mythology for the simplifications and outright deceptions they actually are: At its core, nihilism in fiction is about tearing down established meta-narratives: it's about exposing what culture conditions us to assume as either misguided, misconceived or deliberately contrived: stories that are designed to gull us into not reacting to enshrined and commonplace atrocity or into simply shrugging and assuming that things are as they are and nothing can change them. In that, the nihilism of fictional universes can provide extremely active commentary and inspiration for more deviant, transgressive creations, whether they be forms of fiction or art or even socio-political movements.  Whilst hardly a new concept at the time of his writing, H.P. Lovecraft is generally regarded as the Ur-Father of nihilism in horror, his body of work arguably unique in that it entirely does away with or undermines the traditional morality and mythological concerns of fiction up until that point: Lovecraft rejects the -largely Judeo-Christianic- morality of his forebears at the same time as he laments the loss of what he considers their simple certainties: The universe Lovecraft creates is one of metaphysical nihilism that is not, as the escalating science of his era would have it, godless, but instead consists of mysteries, states of being and operation that humanity can't conceive of or comprehend, that the merest exposure to can drive a human being mad, distort them physically, spiritually and mentally or consign them to states of disgrace that very few writers before or after have decsribed with such lurid, moribund glee. No ideology, no revelation, no morality or discovery or technology can save humanity in Lovecraft's universe: it is not an activist reality he contrives but one of universal and ineluctable victim-hood: humanity is an unhappy accident at best, the by-product of alien experimentation that was neither intended nor wanted, no wider destiny, no more illustrious fate available to us, other than to either be wiped out by cosmic phenomena we can't even comprehend or to be spiritually and physically consumed by infernal entities that operate in dimensions and states of being utterly beyond our own. There is a passive element to Lovecraft's nihilism that resonates with the man's own sense of ineluctable decay: a sickly and disturbed individual, he sustained in perpetual anxiety and ill health throughout his life, but also perceived in the world around him an ideological decay, a slow death of old certainties and parameters that he regarded as entirely negative and which informed the fiction he wrote. Interestingly, his particular form of mythological nihilism is not a call to arms or inspiration for intellectual movement: such things would have been impotent to him, doomed from the outset: he did not intend to halt or suspend the decay he perceived, merely to comment on it. As such, his characters almost universally operate in the same state of distant victimisation; they are unhappy and coincidental witnesses to the lunatic mysteries and revelations of a reality that is an expression of unfathomable insanity: they have very little agency or say in and of themselves, but are instead swept up and hurtled along by events they have no control over. Ultimately, most meet exceedingly unpleasant ends which are far more inventive than mere death or insanity: many find themselves irrevocably altered by what they have been exposed to, in mind and in body, which speaks to another form or facet of nihilism that Lovecraft obsessed over: The absolute assertion there is nothing we can do to prevent being, in his own terms, infected and altered by what we experience: whatever delusion of control we have over ourselves, whatever certainties of personality we advertise, they are all subject to transformation owing to external pressures and experience (in the case of Lovecraft, this largely derives from exposure to “forbidden” lore and alien or occult knowledge that is, by its very nature, transformative and corrupting). As such, even our most beloved certainties and preconceptions of self are things we cannot protect or sustain; we will transform, we will transgress or degrade, whether we want to or not, as a by-product of merely living. This is in stark contrast to the work of writers such as, for example, Clive Barker, who utilises similar notions of reality being in flux, of entities that operate on levels of reality beyond our comprehension, of ideas and knowledge that can and will inevitably transform us, but does so in a manner that is far more celebratory: Whereas Lovecraft is obsessed with the moribund, with disgrace, with degeneration, Barker utilises similar material and ideas to exult in the decay of tradition, in the loss of our humanity, marketing what Lovecraft would decry as transgression as transcendence. Whilst Barker expresses through his work as much in the way of lurid and grotesque horror as Lovecraft (arguably even more so), those elements are contrasted by moments of sincere beatification, revelations that would have driven Lovecraft's characters utterly insane instead leading to metamorphosis and even apotheosis. This becomes ironic, given that the two both explore the same decays and erosions and even often come to similar conclusions as a result, but from markedly different precepts:  Like Lovecraft, Barker has no faith in tradition: for him, the meta-narratives of yore exist to be lampooned and inverted for the post-moden eye, to be reinvented to suit the more ambiguous, arguably more complex condition in which humanity finds itself at the dawning of a new millennium. As such, Barker's work takes a more intimate, personal perspective on traditional notions such as apocalypse (in all of the classic connotations of that term), exploring how they affect individual states of mind and operation, how they are often far more complex in terms of their import than any over-arching agenda or intention can allow for. Whereas Lovecraft regarded humanity from a singularly divine perspective, i.e. as a phenomena and curiosity that he examined from the outside, and with no great amount of affection, Barker instead vacillates between that and a far more intimate, involved point of view: Regard any one of Lovecraft's tales, and you'll rarely find engaging and complex characters: there is little in the way of psychological examination or confession, as his work is far more distant, dry and academic: he records in the manner of a weary historian or journalist, emotionally removed from events, even when writing directly from the perspectives of particular characters. Most of his protagonists are little more than cyphers for the story; they exist to react and record and nothing more. Further, they express their experiences in extremely over-wrought, literary terms, in the manner of the British, Victorian writers Lovecraft so admired and sought to emulate. This has the effect of removing the reader from emotional reality or connection, making the events they describe cold, distant and difficult to get a grasp on: this enhances the sense of events pin-wheeling out of all control or comprehension, of a universe so vast and unknowable, we have no choice but to capitulate and surrender to its cruelties. Barker, by contrast, presents a far more intimate and connected engagement with similarly abstruse and bizarre phenomena; exposing characters that are psychologically complex, emotionally real and more determined as agents of their own destinies to comsological, metaphysical revelations, to powers and entities and states of being that are far and beyond what they can fully comprehend, but which they engage with on their own terms. This is peculiarly true in narratives such as The Great and Secret Show, Sacrament, Everville, Weaveworld etc, in which human beings, for good or ill, find themselves elevated to states of abstraction by the forces they encounter or uncover. Whilst those forces are often as ineffable and profound as those encountered within Lovecraft, they are utilised to elevate or transform humanity rather than eliminate or diminish it. Like Lovecraft, Barker utilises his fiction to diminish or undermine traditional narratives, certainly those that are pervasive within folklore or entrenched mythology, but whereas Lovecraft regards his duty as a sad and reluctant one (in the manner of Darwin lamenting his discovery of evolution by natural selection as corrosive to the creation myths he revered), Barker does not.  Rather, Barker regards that corrosion as essential and celebratory; as a liberating effect rather than one of damnation: human beings in Barker's mythologies have the potential to overcome the horror they encounter or even engage with it on such a level that they transcend any condition in which they regard it as such: they connect and engage with forms of nihilism as means of abandoning states that are decaying around them, systems that no longer serve or function and likely never did. Whereas Lovecraft bemoans his own nihilism in a manner a Catholic stereotypically might their faith, Barker promotes the abandon inherent as something worth seeking, a shamanistic journey in which the old, entrenched and traditional must necessarily be ground down and done away with, to make way for new states of operation. In between the two we have the likes of Stephen King, whose stories are generally more various and idiosyncratic in terms of their significance and import: at times, he descends into depths of metaphysical and human nihilism that likely would have shuddered even Lovecraft (The Mist, Pet Sematary), whereas in others he demonstrates a desire for redemption and a possibility for salvation that is far more in keeping with traditional narrative tendencies (IT, The Stand, The Shining). Others are even more complex and ambiguous than that, edging towards the Clive Barker extreme of the spectrum: The seminal Dark Tower series, for example, boasts a mythology that incorporates Lovecraftian nihilism but also Barkerian possibilities of transcendence and metaphysical ascension:  Roland of Gilead's quest across the multiverse that include King's various works in one, cosmos-spanning uber-mythology is one of torment and degradation, of violence and total nihilism (certainly at the beginning of the story), that includes, amongst other horrors: the deaths of children, the collapses of kingdoms, civilisations and entire worlds, disease, famine, apocalpyses, wars, genocides and a metaphysical, elemental evil that seeks the collapse of all creation, that is pure, unrestrained negativity in its most delirious and lunatic form. Yet, the tale also boasts the kind of human engagement with that metaphysics -not to mention influence upon it- that's entirely redolent of one of Barker's narratives. The Dark Tower incorporates all of the extremes and states that King has toyed with throughout his fiction, in all of their tragedy, their glory, their horror and their hideousness. It's a potent cocktail that often contrasts and contradicts itself in tone and significance, but that demonstrates how the kind of nihilism that Lovecraft wallowed in can sit side by side with the more abstruse and activist form that one finds in Barker's work. The following series of articles will examine specific works by all of these writers (no to mention many more) with an eye towards the particular forms of nihilism -or otherwise- they express, how its antithesis is never too far removed from the genre, no matter how bleak or despairing it becomes, and how nihilism, even at its most base and indulgent, might be a pathway to its own peculiar form of salvation.  BOOK REVIEW: HEART OF JET BY SHEILA SHEDD
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