How I Coped With 2020 With Horror Novels
By: Caleb Clark
Tags: Personal Essay, Books, Personal, Horror, Reading

Reading in the dark kept me in the light

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Horror novels have been a staple of my reading diet ever since I read Misery by Stephen King in college. Ever since then, I have read 5–7 horror novels a year. Those have largely been Stephen King and Joe Hill, but I’ve also read Paul Tremblay, H.P. Lovecraft (oof, the racism, though), and Ania Ahlborn.

However, in 2019 I decided to take a break. My personal life was tumultuous, and I recently developed some pretty severe anxiety over it. I used to love dreary, painful, and emotionally distressing fiction more than anything in the world. But suddenly the material I came to love was doing more harm than good. I was losing sleep. I wasn’t eating well. My relationships were starting to fray.

So, in an effort to do damage control, I stopped reading horror cold turkey.

Now, stopping this didn’t magically make my life better, but I believed it helped me maintain a better mental state, especially when I replaced King with Star Wars novels.

However, in the summer of this year, I decided to pick up Doctor Sleep, mostly because I was dying to watch the movie and I hadn’t picked it up before my hiatus.

I don’t want to spoil the entire book, but I do want to talk about the last scene. In Doctor Sleep — which is a sequel to The Shining — Dan Torrance is struggling with alcohol and drugs, just like his father decades ago. You know, before he tried to murder Danny.

The book itself is about soul-sucking vampires, but the internal struggle centers on Dan overcoming his demons and trying to put his life together enough to be a surrogate parent to a gifted child like him.

A moment of release

At the end of the book, Dan is an AA meeting, and he reveals a moment of his life that still haunts him (again, no spoilers here), and the final moment is Dan coming to terms with the mistakes he has made and and feeling relieved when the other AA members still accept him. It was a moment of redemption and personal forgiveness.

At this moment — sitting in my office at two in the morning — I closed the book, turned in my chair, and cried. I cried and cried and cried. Partly because the book was elegant and beautiful, but mainly because it cut into me in a way I wasn’t expecting. The book cracked open a part of me that was dying to get out, and Dan giving permitting himself to open up allowed me to as well.

“There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.” — Doctor Sleep, Stephen King

I wasn’t just crying for his tragedy and addiction. I was crying for my own shortcomings, my own failures. I was letting out my misery and frustration and mistakes and letting it flow in a way I hadn’t for as long as I could remember. I couldn’t remember the last time I cried ever, and now suddenly everything I had pent up over the years was coming out.

I continued to cry, unleashing my feelings about the shit year of 2020, COVID-19, the economic and environmental problems my kids will inherit. All of it. It all came out at once, right at the end of Doctor Sleep.

When I decided to run away from horror in 2019, I wasn’t trying to protect myself from the macabre. I was shielding myself from my own feelings.

Ever since then, I’ve read four more horror novels: A Head Full of Ghosts, In the Valley of the Sun, The Only Good Indians, and The Boatman’s Daughter. Each one allowed me to channel my anxiety and stress about the world into a medium that perfectly understands those feelings.

Aversion to mystery

I was speaking with a friend the other day about Stephen King and the numerous reasons they weren’t a fan. One of the critiques they had was King’s leaning into the unknown. He felt King just explained away plot holes as the “mystery.” It seemed lazy, cheap, and worst of all it was bad writing.

To a traditional novel, maybe. But the air of mystery — the purposeful unknowing of the threat — is a staple of the genre.

Part of that may come down to the way people think or their life experiences. Binary thinkers may not want to accept a threat that isn’t fully comprehensible or adequately explained.

But to the horror reader, there is something profoundly human in the mysterious. There is so much about life and existence that will never be fully understood. A book that leans into that unknown reminds us that we are not alone in a world that seems perpetually incomprehensible. All the more important in a year like 2020.

“We’re from where we’re from,” she says back. “Scars are part of the deal, aren’t they?” — The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones

Being in isolation for so long has been tough. For one, it has made it difficult to see friends, especially since I’m separated from most of them by geography. That’s left me with my thoughts in my free time. When my wife and kids go to sleep, I usually stay up. And in these lonely moments of the night, I often find myself looking back with regrets and shame. The things I shouldn’t have said or done, the words that needed saying but weren’t, it has all been coming back to haunt me.

“Memories, monsters, they are in our blood, and theirs are the faces we find staring back at us in broken mirrors.” — In The Valley of the Sun — Andy Davidson

Horror novels — more than comedies, thrillers, and other light reading — have made 2020 bearable. It’s helped me to not only cope with but accept my mistakes and the state of the world and life as a whole. Horror, for all its grisly features and grotesque monstrosities, has made me more human than I have ever been.

So if you find yourself struggling to get by or if you’re running away from something internally, you may need a little King in your life.

Horror, in its way, can comfort and uplift you. At the very least, it will remind you that you aren’t alone.

That’s what I needed, more than anything this year.