Normally, I put my blog topics out to vote for my patrons. But I went rogue this month to write about something that has been…well…haunting me. I hope you’ll forgive me this particularly self-indulgent deep dive into one of my very favorite subgenres of horror.
But first…
I have been a little checked out of the community lately, and I apologize for that. While I work on figuring out a better system for keeping abreast of things in an increasingly fractured social media landscape, here are a few highlights I DID see!
For a limited time only, pre-order Chuck Tingle’s upcoming horror novel Camp Damascus and submit a receipt to get a free bandana: https://read.macmillan.com/promo/campdamascuspreordercampaign
Speaking of pre-orders, Charlene Elsby has this positively magnificent-looking book coming out, touted as “De Sade and Nabokov write splatterpunk” - https://www.clashbooks.com/new-products-2/charlene-elsby-violent-faculties-preorder
Apex publishing is donating 10% of its June profits to LGBTQ causes, so now is the time to fill your shopping carts: https://www.apexbookcompany.com/blogs/frontpage/happy-pride-month-from-apex
Because That’s Where Your Heart Is, an anthology including yours truly along 16 other unusual love stories, is now available in paperback and hardcover: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C6P4WSY1
Speaking of anthologies, have you ordered your copy yet of No Trouble At All, a collection of polite horrors? No? What are you doing? Go do that. Politely. https://www.cursedmorselspress.com/product/no-trouble-at-all-paperback-pre-order-releases-in-june-/14
Got some news I missed? Shout it out in a comment!
March’s book club theme was “a book in translation” and somehow despite my chosen book being quite slender, I’m still slogging my way through it. The book in question is Masks by Fumiko Enchi and it’s not bad at all! I’m enjoying it. My routine has just gotten thrown really, really sideways and I’m still trying to figure it out.
The June book club theme is “Non-Western Fantasy” and for that I’m listening to Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. That’s also taking me a hot minute because it’s an 18-hour audio book, but I’m working on it! I’m quite enjoying it so far, and the narration is adding to the experience.
Anyway. I hope my reading comes back from the war. What are you reading lately? Have you hit a summer slump or does your reading take off this time of year?
There’s been a definite uptick over the last few years in horror films dealing explicitly with grief and trauma. From The Babadook to Hereditary to The Night House to Smile — just to name a handful — death-as-backstory seems to be the key that unlocks so-called Elevated Horror. On the one hand, this trend has its detractors, and I’ve seen people express their fatigue with grief-centered horror. On the other hand, I love this particular subgenre more than just about anything, so I will hold onto it with a deathless grip.
More importantly, though, I don’t think grief-as-horror is a new trend. I think it’s been there right from the beginning, baked in not just to the horror genre, but to humanity.
Mourning as a Way to Appease the Dead
Pretty much every culture has had its ghost stories. In many cases, the ceremonies for laying the dead to rest have been invented in part to appease the spirits of the dead and keep them from terrorizing the living. There’s a 3500-year-old Babylonian tablet with explicit instructions for exorcising a ghost back to the underworld. Ancient Greece had elaborate rituals for mourning, including women whose sole duty was lamentation, in order to appease the soul of the dead. “Ghost Sickness,” a belief of the Navajo (and similar expressions from other tribes) that the restless spirits of the dead can make living mourners ill, has symptoms recognized by modern psychologists. In Vietnam, mourners must take care not to cry too much in case their sadness prevents the soul of the departed from lingering.
And on, and on.
It seems to me that one of the things that defines us as human is our knowledge of our own mortality. We all are going to die, and we know that we will die, but we don’t know what happens after. We’re aware that we have a consciousness, and a sense of self. It’s not exactly a surprise that we would be preoccupied as a species with wondering what happens to that consciousness of the people we love when they die. We know their body has stopped working. We can see that much. But where did the rest of them go? We can make a guess, but we can’t know for certain…and that has nestled in at the root of spiritual beliefs since before humans could write things down.
But here’s another piece of the puzzle, I think.
There are so many experiences of grief that are universal, or nearly so. When someone close to you dies, you may experience some or all of the following:
Physical symptoms like headaches, tiredness, muscle pain, etc.
Brain fog, distraction, slipping/missed time, sleep disruption
Dreaming about the person, often talking to them like they’re alive
Hearing their voice or seeing them from the corner of your eye, catching a whiff of their scent
Feeling an ongoing sense of connection or presence
Looking for signs of them, like in the rustle of papers
In modern language, we might explain all of this as “processing the emotions of grief” and “coming to terms with the reality of loss.”
But what is that if not a haunting?
The Ghosts We Carry With Us
When an evening of good company has gone on into the night, it’s common for conversation to tend toward ghost stories. At least, that’s been my experience. Given an environment of good food and darkness, we’re just as likely as our cave-dwelling ancestors to huddle around a fire (real or figurative) and start sharing our intimate, unexplained experiences.
Something I’ve learned is that even people who don’t generally believe in ghosts and the supernatural do still often have a story of the way a death has touched them that they can’t quite explain. Nearly everyone who’s lost someone has some kind of story to share on the matter.
You hear about how hospital lights dim and an odd silence drifts over the ward when a patient dies. You hear how someone dreamt about a grandparent they haven’t seen in a long time, only to wake up and learn they’ve died. You hear about the curtains fluttering in a windless room.
And those are just the small things, of course. There are bigger pieces, the ones we call trauma — the flashbacks, the persistent memories, the terror and helplessness that can seize a body and alter its perceptions at unexpected moments long after a terrible event.
I’m not here to decide whether these stories are supernatural or psychological, or to draw up the boundary line between those concepts. I’m frankly less interested in their explanation than in their universality. Whatever underpins these experiences — be it the persistence of a spirit after death, or the mind tricks of a mind suffering the ordeal of grief — they’re real enough for the people who have them.
Unfinished Business and Complex Grief
Losing a loved one always sucks. But sometimes simple grief gets ugly and twisted. When your relationship was conflicted — when you have unresolved issues between you — when they were taken suddenly and unexpectedly. When you didn’t have time to prepare. When they had unfinished business.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the recipe for complex grief (which is an emotional gauntlet that can take months or years to resolve, if it ever does) just so happens to be the same as the most broadly accepted rules for making a ghost.
After all…happy, satisfied spirits move along to another world, right? It’s the ones with unfinished business, the ones seeking vengeance, the ones who died unjustly and traumatically, who linger and torment the living.
But is it really the dead with the unfinished business?
Or is it the people they’ve left behind?
Hauntings as Memory of Injustice
Let me tell you a horror story.
Once upon a time there was a person who moved to a new home. Many unusual, unsettling things happened — odd sounds, objects moving on their own, strange odors, nightmares. The house’s new resident tried to find out what happened, and uncovers a terrible tragedy. Someone has suffered a terrible injustice, but their story was silenced and their body was hidden and disrespected. Now the stranger who uncovered their story could bring it to light, bring justice to the person responsible, so the ghost could at last be at peace.
That’s the plot of the 1999 film Stir of Echoes. And Edith Wharton’s 1902 story “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell.” And Toni Morrison’s 1987 Beloved. And Shakespeare’s 1599 play Hamlet. And of Aeschylus’s 458 BCE tragedy Oresteia.
To name a few.
Tell me again that ghost stories are not about grief. About reconciliation. About justice. About mourning gone wrong, when the dead are not properly respected.
Tell me again that ghost stories are not about grief, and trauma, and what happens when we allow bad things to fester in the dark rather than bringing them to light.
It’s been right there from the very beginning, and it will remain long after we’re all gone (and our stories, we hope, are being told and remembered, so that we may be at peace).