Today I welcome Alma Katsu, author of The Hunger and The Deep [titles link to my reviews]. I asked Katsu to participate because her horror books have resonated with library patrons, especially ones who don't think they like horror. I asked her to come here to explain to all of you why she thinks people love horror using herself and her books as examples.
Why I Love Horror: A Spoonful of Horror Makes the Medicine Go Down
by Alma Katsu
Horror stories are about fear. We read them in order to feel that familiar touch of ice on our spines, to make the hairs stand up on our forearms and the back of our necks. But more so, we read them (or watch them) in order to experience fear in a controlled enviroment. We can enjoy the story because we control it. We can always close the book or turn off the television or close the laptop if it gets overwhelming. And because usually—though not always—by the end of the story, the villain or monster has been identified, the evil stopped (if only for the moment).
Why do we crave such stories? Most of us don’t want to experience unmitigated fear in real life—to have a child go missing or a maniac pounding on the door. There are people who won’t even read about such things. Many adults have told me they don’t read horror because they don’t want to invite those kinds of thoughts into their heads. I know literary agents who, after becoming parents themselves, stopped reading manuscripts that had children in peril.
But stories that evoke feelings of fear—horror, as well as murder mysteries and true crime—are obviously enjoyed by lots and lots of readers. Reading these types of stories is a way to conront our fear and safely satisfy our curiosity. Stories pose a question to the reader: what would you do in this situation, to form a hypothesis of what is happening and continue to the end of the story to see if he or she is correct.
Horror lets us explore the more lurid questions in life in a safe way. This “what if” is the basis of the novels I write, which marry a historical event with the supernatural. What if there was something supernatural in what happened to the Donner Party, the infamous wagon party that reportedly resorted to cannibalism to survive after becoming trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains—the premise of my novel The Hunger. What if the sinking of the Titanic and its sister ship the Britannic were more than just uncanny coincidence—the set-up for The Deep.
On one hand, adding horror to two such historical events might seem unnecessary. Aren’t these tragic events horrific enough? Do we really need to embellish them?
Let’s take the story of the Donner Party. There’s much more to it than most people know, certainly more than is typically taught in school. Most people think of this as a story about cannibalism, and because it’s about cannibalism, it’s easy for the public to turn away. To opt out.
But the real story of the Donner Party is about what forces drive individuals to such drastic measures. What tempts them to make such dangerous (some might say foolhardy) choices as to leave the safety of their homes to plunge into unknown territory so grossly underprepared and uninformed? To trust their lives to a man who knew nothing about pioneering? Who chose to believe a charlatan with political aspirations and swallow his claims of a miracle passage through the wilderness? Who were lied to by a merchant who valued his livelihood over their lives?
The members of the Donner Party trusted liars, thieves, and egomaniacs and ending up paying with their dignity—and their lives.
Suddenly, history isn’t just academic.
Then there’s the Titanic, more widely known than the Donner Party and perhaps exponentially more tragic. Here, too, people assume they know the story, and assume that all the marrow of the tragedy has already been out of its bones. Could there possibly be anything left to learn from the Titanic?
The answer is an emphatic yes.
Similar to the Donner Party, there are pressing contemporary themes with the Titanic. The most prominent issues of its day were women’s rights—American or English women would not get the right to vote for years—and income and class disparity. This was the era that gave us the term “robber baron”, after all. The gulf between the rich and poor was huge and widening. What better metaphor for these social ills than RMS Titanic, a collosal glittering tribute to wealth and privilege—and doomed to sink, wasting so many lives, rich ahd poor?
I was particularly pleased to be able to explore women’s stories with The Deep, such issues not regularly associated with the Titanic. All women of the day found their lives constrained and controlled by their lack of legal representation, from the poorest stewardess (main character Annie Hebbley) to Madeline Astor, second wife to the richest man in America, J.J. Astor. The Deep is mostly a story about women and allowed me to explore the horrors of a life without freedom, no matter how gilded that life may be.
Horror can be a stealth means of education. A spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.
But that’s the point of all storytelling, isn’t it? To present a new way to tell a familiar story, one that bears repeating for each generation, retelling in a way that, albeit, connects a little better with some people than others.
And if the sugar that helps this medicine go down is horror—a delightful coating of dread and suspense—where’s the harm? Readers have told me that my novels have prompted them to dive into non-fiction, exploring the history of these events to learn which parts were real and which were made up.
Horror can make us think—and not turn away from—the bad things that happen in life, even things that are so horrific as to be (almost) unimaginable. Horror stories can take us on a safely guided tour through the valley of death, can help us understand why people do terrible things to each other (because make no mistake, the monster behind all horror stories in real life is man). Horror is an indispensible tool in the quest for human understanding.
Alma Katsu writes novels that combine history and horror. Her latest are The Deep, a reimagining of the sinking of the Titanic, and The Hunger, a reimagining of the story of the Donner Party with a horror twist. The Hunger made NPR’s list of the 100 Best Horror Stories, was nominated for a Stoker and Locus Award for best horror novel, and recently won Spain’s Kelvin 505 award for Best Novel. It also won the 2018 Western Heritage Award for Best Novel.
Ms. Katsu lives outside of Washington DC with her husband, musician Bruce Katsu. She is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Program and Brandeis University, where she studied with novelist John Irving. She also is an alumni of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
Prior to publication of her first novel, Ms. Katsu had a long career in intelligence, working for several US agencies and a think tank. Her first spy novel, Red Widow, will be published spring 2021.
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