Beautifully Disturbed

There’s something seriously wrong with people who enjoy horror. Think about it. We spend our lives trying to avoid pain, suffering, danger, and death. We lock our doors, teach our children not to talk to strangers, and generally make every effort to remain among the living. Then, when we have a little free time, we curl up on the couch and watch some poor bastard get dismembered by a chainsaw-wielding maniac.

For entertainment.

I’m one of those people. I love horror, especially when it gets weird. My oldest son and I have a shared appreciation for the stuff. Give me a haunted house, an ancient curse, a creature that shouldn’t exist, or some seemingly innocent object with a deeply unpleasant secret, and you’ve got my attention. Throw in a little dark humor, and I’m probably having a wonderful time.

But my fascination goes beyond the monsters and the mayhem. What interests me most is how horror manages to make the grotesque appealing, the impossible believable, and the utterly reprehensible strangely sympathetic. There’s an art to making people willingly experience something they’d spend the rest of their lives trying to forget if it actually happened to them.

Consider the vampire. It’s a walking corpse that survives by drinking human blood. In virtually any other context, we’d call that a public health emergency. Yet, generations of readers have found vampires romantic, tragic, even downright sexy. Somewhere along the way, a bloodsucking parasite became the sort of fellow people fantasize about bringing home to meet their parents.

That’s fascinating. Also, a little concerning. And vampires are just the beginning.

Beautifully Disturbed is my opportunity to explore the peculiar relationship we have with horror and the macabre. We’ll poke around in folklore, literature, film, television, and whatever unpleasant things the human imagination has managed to dream up. There will be monsters, madness, body horror, and supernatural phenomena, along with subjects that tend to bring dinner conversations to an abrupt halt.

I’m particularly interested in the places where horror intersects with ordinary human experiences. It’s something I’ve explored in my own short fiction, because everyday life provides more than enough material for a good nightmare. Grief can become a ghost story.

Not everything we discuss will be fictional, either. History, psychology, superstition, and cultural traditions have supplied storytellers with disturbing material for centuries. Sometimes the things people genuinely believed are considerably stranger than anything a novelist could invent.

I don’t intend to spend every installment explaining why something is frightening. Sometimes we’ll celebrate a particularly inventive monster, examine a bizarre legend, or consider an uncomfortable question that doesn’t have a satisfying answer. And occasionally, we’ll laugh at things we probably shouldn’t. Horror doesn’t always have to be solemn. Sometimes something truly disturbing deserves a horrified gasp. Other times, it deserves an enthusiastic, “Oh, that’s fucked up!”

Both are perfectly acceptable around here.

Welcome to Beautifully Disturbed. I can’t promise you’ll always like what we find, but I suspect you’ll have a hell of a time finding out.

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Featured Image: Man on ladder organizing specimens in natural history archive – maliknabeelnicemalik