When you tell people that you are an author, the inevitable first question is always, “Well, what do you write?” To which I nonchalantly answer, “horror.” I love seeing the reactions. Usually, it is either shock with an awkward stumbling or fascination. In any case, the reaction generally provides a pretty solid gauge on how the remainder of our interaction on the subject will play out.
If the questioner remains interested, the follow up question is naturally, “Why horror?” Especially if we start discussing The Waning. Everyone seems to have a strong reaction to that book, one way or another. Most people can get behind zombies and the apocalypse like in Savages with how mainstream those themes have become. Not everyone can take captivity and seemingly endless (and some might say, pointless) torture, however. I have family members who could not even finish The Waning; it was too “dark.”
It is not an easy question to answer: why horror? With most things, you can get away with the canned response that you just like it. With horror, however, being so centered around darkness, pain, suffering, and all undesirable facets of life, people have a harder time understanding why someone would be drawn to it, would willing sign up to be disturbed. A common assumption is that you are damanged, broken in some way. Being not just a voyeur but a creator of such content makes you all the more suspect.
For multiple reasons, I have been ruminating on my own attraction to pain, damage, and even horror as well as introspecting on the patterns of my own mind. It is an easy assumption to correlate a comfort and enjoyment of negative things with damage or defect. Even just in my own personal instance, the preference seems innate rather than acquired. Cultivated, perhaps, yet it seems to have been a part of me as long as I can remember.
I have always felt the allure of horror. It resonated with my mind, spoke to something inside me. A darkness, maybe. Even in the youngest, happiest, most sheltered parts of my childhood, I found myself drawn to things like Halloween, fascinated by all the morbidity that surrounded them. Innocuous though the start, it grew into something else. A symptom of something deeper. I was always fixated and intrigued by pain, my own and that of others.
As a young child, I remember feeling so much. It was a perpetual and unmanageable swell of emotions, constant and unrelenting. I experienced the most intense happiness and infatuations, yet more than that, I had a well of pain and unhappiness. I felt such strong dark and negative feelings without seeming cause. And, in an attempt to figure myself out, I remember trying to find excuses for how I felt, trying to classify my emotions into the boxes I understood. Boxes, I would learn, that would never fit me.
Yet, as I grew older, it became more clear that the darkness was in me, not infecting from outside circumstance but inherent. The pain inflicted by external stimuli, though traumatic at times, never seemed to be as black or as consuming as the kind that blossomed from my center. Instead, I sought out excuses for how I felt; I manufactured circumstance to confirm what originated somewhere beneath and behind my consciousness. It took a lot of time and severing endless strings of denial to make peace with that part of me, to identify myself as the culprit under all the layers I created.
I lost my mind, dissolved into the darkness in my teenaged years. When I think back to the way the pain devoured and distorted my mind in those darkest days, I do not know how I made it to the other side. I do not know how I functioned. I do not know how I graduated high school early, how I held down jobs, how I kept my parents at bay, how I maintained any kind of interpersonal relationships, how I went to college. I cannot remember either. Every fragment and remnant of that period in my mind is a flicker in a blur of so many substances and unchecked moods.
I was a mess. Yet, in that mess, I was pure. I was honest. I was unrefined. And because of that, I am still irresitably drawn to that darkness. And anything that speaks to that caged and sedated part of me.
Like horror.
I am not saying one needs to be damaged and defective to enjoy horror. Nor am I saying that is the reason I respond to it on such an instinctual level. Horror, for me, is an outlet to part of myself. It confronts realities in our world and in our culture (and myself) that may not be pleasant but remain just as real. Personally, I enjoy the experience of that confrontation.
I can write a version of myself on the page who does not have her shit together, who relents to her broken mind, who is so inescapably damaged. I can empathize with a character on the screen in their worst and most tormented hour. I can toy with the darkness inside of me, letting my fingers play in the edge of the flame, without burning down my entire life.
I enjoy the flirtation with the dangerous part of me, my undesirable yet pervasive center. It is like having an affair behind the back of my sanity. Exciting and wild.
Horror speaks to me in the language my base self understands. I am attracted to the pain the same way I used to actively seek my own, whether through self-destructive behavior or abject self-mutilation. All that is still inside of me, and my indulgence of horror is my safe, neutered way to still interact with it.
Ultimately, despite all my therapy and self-examination and understanding, I do not know why the darkness comforts me, why the pain seems native. I do not like that I find a grotesque familiarity in suffering. Could it be the damage of deformed neurotransmitters? Could it be the absense of adequate neurochemicals? Is it some association forged in experience that tumbled out of my memory? Is it something wrong with me, or is it simply me?
I spend a disproportionate amount of my life in depression. Not because my life is unsatisfactory but because that is half of the symptomology of my brain. Perhaps my affinity for horror is merely an adaptation to this. It does substantially decrease the burden to feel at home in my own sadness; it does help to surrender and wrap myself up in the black rather than fight or resist it. Maybe it’s my survival mechanism that I never knew I would need until bipolar blossomed across the wrinkles of my mind.
Regardless of causality and circumstance, independant of reasoning, I accepted myself long ago. I have embraced and actively cultivate all of these tendancies and preferences bubbling inside my head. I find joy in the darkest places and experience the breadth of a full spectrum of emotions. I live in extremes, for the better and worse.
I am not sure if this post is ultimately about horror or bipolar or just some rambling about weird musings I have had lately. I know I’ve written about my attraction to horror before and our cultural attraction to it. To keep the answer simple, I write horror to get it out of my brain. For whatever reason, it breeds between my cells, and I express it. I feel better letting it out and indulging in it. It is just who I am.
Christina Bergling
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Savages
Two survivors search the ruins of America for the last strain of humanity. Marcus believes they are still human; Parker knows her own darkness. Until one discovery changes everything.
Available now on Amazon!
savagesnovella.com
The Waning
Beatrix woke up in a cage. Can she survive long enough to escape, or will he succeed at breaking her down into a possession?
Fiery Pen 