Horror Reanimated… the home of Bloody Books

How the twilight breached my mind by JD’L

September 29th, 2008

The first time I experienced deep psychological fear I was eight.

Some older kid was telling ghost stories – dismembered hands that strangled children and objects which moved around on their own. The tales were innocuous but they were too much for my tender little soul. I wept, horrified and inconsolable, and spent the next few weeks utterly terrified. Before that, I’d never really felt the power of the supernatural.

At the time, I was reading like crazy – mainly innocent children’s books by authors like Enid Blyton. I was working my way up through ‘reading skill’ levels marked on the books’ spines with colour-coding. This wholesome education came to a swift end one winter holiday. My dad took me into a bookshop for the first time, something that became a habit for us and which has had a deep effect on me. We were in Switzerland and the English language section of the book shop was barely the size of a kiosk. There on the shelf, though, I saw a book with a great cover – a massive blue whale deep under the surface of the ocean. The book was called ‘Leviathan’. I didn’t know even know what the word meant. I bought the book – with my father’s blessing. In a few sittings my ‘reading skill’ shot through the roof and my innocence ended.

Leviathan was the tale of an oceanographer who wanted to prevent whaling. He and a team of friends hired mercenaries to train them in the use of weapons with the aim of hijacking a huge Russian whaling vessel. When they boarded the target ship, however, the crew put up a fight they weren’t expecting. The book was overflowing with sex and bloody violence and I was happily harpooned. It was the way the people died that got me. Shot in the brains, mangled by propellers or dismembered with razor sharp whaling hooks. Utterly dreadful. Irresistibly fascinating.

Next came anthologies of short horror and then, when I turned nine or ten, the early works of James Hebert such as The Rats and The Fog. After that there was no turning back. Guy N. Smith, Graham Masterton, Stephen King quickly followed, as did the grandfathers of horror like Poe. And coupled with this basically gory, lurid fixation came an interest in the occult, the paranormal and anything other-worldly. What a twisted boy I became.

These days, I find myself fairly inured and untroubled by horror generally. Horror is a kind of dark fun for me now. It’s very rare that something comes along and disturbs me the way those ghost stories did all those years ago. And if it does, it’s usually only for a few moments.

Maybe I’ll talk about the things that did get past the armour in another post.

Meanwhile, I hope to see more people coming clean about how they caught the horror bug…

Entry Filed under: The Infection Spreads