Finding the "cauld grue"

I had a recommendation from a reader to devote one day a week to my other passion besides science and critical thinking -- fiction.  I thought it was an interesting idea, so we'll give a try to Fiction Fridays.  I'm planning some book reviews, excerpts, essays, and so on -- let me know if you like it!

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Most of my books are about the supernatural, and some of them are intended to be downright terrifying.  Along the way I've been influenced by many superlative writers of scary fiction, so I thought I'd start Fiction Friday with a few recommendations for some of my favorite Tales of the Supernatural.  I'll be curious to see what my readers think -- and to hear what your favorites are.  Always looking for new stories to read...

I have fairly definite opinions about reading material (okay, to be truthful, I have fairly definite opinions about most things, as long-time readers of Skeptophilia know all too well).   To me, a good horror story is one that is evocative, in which there is a subtle touch – the imagination, I find, is far more powerful than the written word in creating frightening imagery.  As Stephen King pointed out in his wonderful analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, it's often as scary to leave the door closed and let the readers spend the rest of their lives speculating about what was behind it than it is to actually open the door and reveal the monster (and take the chance they'll say, "Is that all it was?").

This is why gruesome stories really don't do much for me.  A story about a murderer with a chainsaw might disgust me, it might incite me to check to see if my doors are securely locked, but it doesn't give me that thrill of fear up the backbone that is what I'm looking for in a good spooky story, what the Scots call "the cauld grue."  Sheer human perversity doesn't fill the bill; there has to be some sort of supernatural element, to me, for a story to really cross the line into the terrifying.  Reading about homicidal maniacs simply is neither very appealing nor very scary (however scary actually meeting one would be).

All this is rather funny, because I don't actually believe in the supernatural, and I obviously do believe in the existence of homicidal maniacs.  The fact that something that doesn't exist can scare me far worse than something dangerous that does exist is probably just evidence that I'm not as highly evolved in the logic department as I often claim to be.

In any case, if you're curious, here are my top ten choices for the scariest stories of all time.  Let's hear what you think -- if you agree, disagree, or if you were prompted to find and read any of these.  Could make for an interesting discussion!

These are in no particular order, and there are no spoilers -- just a brief idea of what the plot is.

"What Was It?" by FitzJames O'Brien.  A house is haunted by a real, corporeal creature that also happens to be invisible.  And insane.

"The Dunwich Horror" by H. P. Lovecraft.  This is one of the most eerily atmospheric stories I've ever read, about an old man obsessed with recovering ancient lost magical lore, who should have left well enough alone.  Set in the wooded hills of northern Massachusetts, it is serious nightmare fuel, and one of Lovecraft's best.

"The Mirror" by Haruki Murakami, from his collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.  If I had to vote for the single best-crafted short story I've ever read, this would be a strong contender.   A group of friends gets together for an evening of drinking and chatting, and someone notices that the host's apartment has no mirrors, and asks why.  Reluctantly, he explains.  You'll see why he was reluctant...

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The Shining by Stephen King.  Combines haunting with the familiar horror fiction trope of "we're all stuck here and can't get away," in absolutely masterful fashion.  Skip the movie and read the book.  You'll never look at a bathtub, or an old-fashioned elevator, or a long hotel hallway the same way again.

"Oh, Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad" by M. R. James.  A regrettably little-known story which is one of the flat-out scariest things I've ever read.  A British tourist finds an antique whistle half-buried in the sand on the beach, and blows it.  He shouldn't have.

"The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs.  Embodies the old saying "Be careful what you wish for, you may get it," and is the classic example of -- literally, in this case -- not opening the door.

"Afterward" by Edith Wharton.  If this story doesn't scare the absolute shit out of you, you're made of stone.  A story about... a retroactive haunting?

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson.  Not a supernatural thriller, as per my original description (so sue me).  But still a classic of horror fiction.

"August Heat" by William Fryer Harvey.  What if you happened upon a stranger, a maker of marble monuments, and he was making a headstone -- with your name, and today's date, on it?

"Ligeia" by Edgar Allan Poe.  One of the earliest stories of possession.

So, those are my top ten.  Agree?  Disagree?  Any additional that you would recommend?  What stories have chilled your blood, that would be appropriate to sit in front of the fire with, late at night, when no one is awake in the house but you?

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In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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Preparing for the worst

I'm about halfway through the first draft of my current work-in-progress, a novel called In the Midst of Lions about a perfectly ordinary upper-middle-class guy who gets caught up in the fall of civilization.  By this point in the novel, order has pretty much collapsed, and he's in the ruins of downtown Seattle trying to find his way across the city and to a two-kilometer-long bridge and east into the mountains for safety (at least comparatively speaking).  He's taken some children under his wing, and in the harrowing scene I just wrote, is trying to get them away from a murderous warlord and his gang -- he himself barely escaped with his life after being captured and brutally beaten by them.

I hasten to interject at this point that In the Midst of Lions was in no way inspired by 2020.  I came up with idea decades ago -- in fact, I'd written a rough draft of the story back in the 1980s when I was an undergraduate.  (The current version bears little resemblance to the original, although the central idea is the same.)  I'd thought of returning to it many times, but always pushed it aside for other projects.  Then, late in 2019 -- pre-pandemic, and pre-Trump-breaking-the-Seventh-Seal-of-the-Apocalypse -- I decided to give it a go, and I'm quite pleased with the result, as dark as it is.

(If you're curious, the title comes from Psalm 56 -- "Have pity on me, O God, have pity on me... for I lie prostrate in the midst of lions that devour men.")

The reason this comes up is because of a paper in the journal Personality and Individual Differences that came out this week, and which looked at the correlation between people's ability to cope psychologically with the pandemic and governmental chaos, and their appreciation of zombie movies.  Entitled, "Pandemic Practice: Horror Fans and Morbidly Curious Individuals Are More Psychologically Resilient During the COVID-19 Pandemic," by Colton Scrivner of the University of Chicago, John Johnson of Pennsylvania State University, and Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen and Mathias Clasen of Aarhus University, the paper looks at how reading books or watching movies about civilization collapsing and people being killed in nasty ways might have prepared us for 2020.

The authors write;

One explanation for why people engage in frightening fictional experiences is that these experiences can act as simulations of actual experiences from which individuals can gather information and model possible worlds.  Conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study tested whether past and current engagement with thematically relevant media fictions, including horror and pandemic films, was associated with greater preparedness for and psychological resilience toward the pandemic.  Since morbid curiosity has previously been associated with horror media use during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also tested whether trait morbid curiosity was associated with pandemic preparedness and psychological resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic.  We found that fans of horror films exhibited greater resilience during the pandemic and that fans of “prepper” genres (alien-invasion, apocalyptic, and zombie films) exhibited both greater resilience and preparedness.  We also found that trait morbid curiosity was associated with positive resilience and interest in pandemic films during the pandemic.  Taken together, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that exposure to frightening fictions allow audiences to practice effective coping strategies that can be beneficial in real-world situations.

You have to wonder if it works the other way, though.  Maybe living through 2020 has blunted our appreciation for horror movies.  "Okay, maybe being eaten by the living dead is horrible, but do y'all remember what happened last November?" 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons iluvrhinestones from seattle, oceania, upload by Herrick, Zombies 79201360, CC BY-SA 2.0]

"I'm not sure that watching such movies now would be helpful for our current situation," study co-author John Johnson said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "However, my understanding of pandemics and other life-challenging events is that similar future challenges are absolutely inevitable.  The past is often forgotten too easily.  Who remembered the Spanish flu epidemic until scientists brought up that piece of history during COVID-19?  This reinforces my belief that consuming stories from books, films and maybe even video games is not just an idle pastime, but a way for us to imagine simulated realities that help prepare us for future challenges."

So we writers of scary fiction are performing a public service.  Just getting people ready for how much worse it could get, or (conversely) getting them to think, "Things are bad now, but at least I'm not being vivisected by aliens."  Now, I gotta get to work on my novel.  The last thing that happened is that the main character just saw some graffiti spray-painted on a wall, left for him by the one of the warlord's evil henchmen, saying, "You'd better run, because if I see you again, you're a dead man."

I mean, getting my readers to prepare for a catastrophe is one thing, but leaving a nice guy in that situation is just cruel.

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As a biologist, I've usually thought of myself as immune to being grossed out.  But I have to admit I was a little shocked to find out that the human microbiome -- the collection of bacteria and fungi that live in and on us -- outnumber actual human cells by a factor of ten.

You read that right: if you counted up all the cells in and on the surface of your body, for every one human cell with human DNA, there'd be ten cells of microorganisms, coming from over a thousand different species.

And that's in healthy humans.  This idea that "bacteria = bad" is profoundly wrong; not only do a lot of bacteria perform useful functions, producing products like yogurt, cheese, and the familiar flavor and aroma of chocolate, they directly contribute to good health.  Anyone who has been on an antibiotic long-term knows that wiping out the beneficial bacteria in your gut can lead to some pretty unpleasant side effects; most current treatments for bacterial infections kill the good guys along with the bad, leading to an imbalance in your microbiome that can persist for months afterward.

In The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life, microbiologist Rodney Dietert shows how a lot of debilitating diseases, from asthma to allergies to irritable bowel syndrome to the inflammation that is at the root of heart disease, might be attributable to disturbances in the body's microbiome.  His contention is that restoring the normal microbiome should be the first line of treatment for these diseases, not the medications that often throw the microbiome further out of whack.

His book is fascinating and controversial, but his reasoning (and the experimental research he draws upon) is stellar.  If you're interested in health-related topics, you should read The Human Superorganism.  You'll never look at your own body the same way again.

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