Realization and Danse Macabre

I think it goes without saying, but I enjoy fiction. There is something about getting lost in the story, falling in love with characters, and living in another world where some of the conventions of this world do not apply. I could be living in a world with hobbits, elves, dragons, telekinesis, magic, levitation, zombies, vampires, you name it. Whatever the case, I just get lost. My eyes fly over the page and I have been known to stay awake until 4am without getting tired or even know that it is 4am. 

I love non-fiction. In fact, I spend more time reading non-fiction than fiction. In reading Danse Macabre, I realized that I labor over every word of non-fiction and that it takes forever. The layout of every sentence is important to the ideas presented in a work of non-fiction. Whereas, in a fiction novel, an author could write in comfortable run-ons and fragments and you could still follow the story. 

Danse Macabre, was both wonderful and painstaking at the same time - around 10,000 minutes of reading. This is King's overview of the horror genre, written in 1980, although I read the 2010 revision.

I am also a person that loves to know what makes people tick. Stories are nice, but I prefer to know why a person decides to hack someone to bits, or turn to drugs, or alienate the people around them. In essence, this study is an ode to what makes the horror genre tick. If you are not a person that enjoys horror and you wonder why someone who spends most of their time practicing yoga and helping others to heal, then I think King answers that question. 

"We take refuge in make-believe terrors so the real ones don't overwhelm us, freezing us in place an making it impossible for us to function in our day-to-day lives. We go into the darkness of a movie theater hoping to dream badly, because the world of our normal lives looks ever so much better when the bad dream ends...Perhaps we go to the forbidden door or window willingly because we understand that a time comes when we must go whether we want to or not...and not just to look, but to be pushed through. Forever."

And this works as an explanation for me. It is not that my life is horrible but in comparison to Rick from "The Walking Dead" my life is a walk down easy street. 

The horror genre also provides an escape for the over active imagination. The mind that can dream up zombies, haunted houses, or as was the case last night, ghostly beings that take over the bodies of friends at night as we live in a home in the middle of nowhere, can find freedom in the terror on a page or movie screen where the main character lives and the "bad guy" dies. Knowing that Stephen King is an adult who sometimes turns the light on at night and snuggles up to his wife because he has woken up from a nightmare and is still afraid of the dark, makes me feel a certain kinship to him. It also dissolves the shame I once had for doing the same thing. In the overactive imagination wonderful art is produced, but there is always something lurking in the shadows.