Stand behind a door and say ‘Boo!’ and you may startle a few. But if you were to tell them a backstory about a young man who never left his room and went mad before strangling himself to death. If you were to then guide them into the room, slowly, they will imagine the rest and scare themselves silly. Horror, as I’ve come to believe, is all about the power of suggestion. It makes us uncomfortable at times and compels us to delve into our own darkness.

          Why do people want to indulge in horror films or horror literature? Why do I like the genre so much? I’ve often thought about this. The eight-year-old me was just fond of jump scares. But as I grew up and started reading more, and more important, as I started writing, I realized it was not just about enjoying the jump scares as much as it was about exploring our deepest, darkest questions. We bury our guilt, the anxieties, the sins, and the fears deep inside us, down in the dark somewhere, and try to look tough. Horror is the opportunity to discuss them through metaphors and bring them out into the light. It lets us look those fears in the face, quite literally, and helps us overcome them. Well, most of the time, if not always.

          Horror is different for different people. The supernatural may not scare everyone. My father didn’t flinch even once while watching a popular Hindi horror film. But he got scared when my little brother, who was four years old then, fell off a gate and hurt his head. The sight of blood on the floor made it even worse. My brother was all right an hour later. It was nothing that a tubful of ice cream couldn’t cure. Until then, however, I had refused to believe that anything could scare my father, the defender of my universe, the brave, the know-all. What I saw on his face that day was pure horror.

          In Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Night, a mother waits for her oldest son to return home. The boy is out playing with his friends. It’s nearly midnight and he should have returned home, but he hasn’t. The mother is anxious, worried, her thoughts are running wild. She decides to go to the ravine and search for him. Her youngest son tags along. When the son finally returns at half-past twelve, she is relieved. She scolds him for coming back so late and the three of them walk back home. There were no wraiths walking along the edge of the ravine, no apparitions emerging from the dark. Even if there were, they wouldn’t have scared her as much as the thought of her son never returning.

          A similar idea is explored at length in Paul Tremblay’s Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. A delectable blend of crime and supernatural horror, it’s a story of a missing child. Tommy and his friends regularly hang out at a nearby state park until one day, Tommy doesn’t return home – every parent’s worst nightmare. A desperate search for the missing boy ensues. We follow Tommy’s mother, Elizabeth, as she goes through her grief. No one in the little town is prepared for the strange events that follow: shadowy figures lurk outside the houses in the night, journal pages mysteriously appear at Elizabeth’s house, and more. But what’s scarier than the shadowy figures and such is the unrelenting grief that Elizabeth goes through. Not knowing what happened to one’s child is more horrible than death itself. She begins to imagine the worst and along with her, we imagine the worst, too. Is it really her grief or is there really some supernatural element at play? The lines between the supernatural and reality are blurred. Tremblay is at his best here.

          Stephen King’s Pet Sematary wouldn’t have been scary if not for the emotional struggles of parents over losing their child. Again, it’s the reaction of the father – just like Elizabeth’s reaction to her missing child in Disappearance at Devil’s Rock – to the loss of his child that scares us, more than the floating heads in the cemetery and the dead cat coming back to life. His actions, although wrong and dangerous, are justified. We understand his reasons.

          John Langan’s Fisherman is a wonderfully written melancholy story about loss and grief. Abe and Dan are widowers who find solace in a shared hobby of fishing. And when Dutchman’s Creek offers something more than just fine fishing, something too fantastical to be true, one of them is tempted to take it up. Regardless of the dangerous choice he makes in the end, it is understandable.

          The easiest thing in the world is pitying someone who’s in trouble and saying we are ‘sorry to know’ and moving on. Empathising with them is hard, almost impossible without experiencing the pain ourselves. All good literature makes us more human. All good horror literature helps us understand the tribulations of the withering soul, the mechanics of evil, and mainly, the repercussions of not reacting when it’s necessary. Being empathetic is still hard, but we are almost there.

          Jack Ketchum’s Girl Next Door explores this in excruciating detail. The novel asks more questions than it answers. What starts off as a pre-teen puppy love soon dives into an unimaginable tale of humiliation and innocence lost. 14-year-old Meg Laughlin and her younger sister are sent to live with their aunt and her three sons after the death of their parents. Meg makes friends with the boy next door, David Moran. It doesn’t take much time before Ruth Chandler, the aunt, to begin resenting the sisters and subjecting them to acts that no human should endure, let alone kids. Meg is held captive in the basement and Ruth, along with her sons and the neighbourhood kids who are the same age as Meg, tortures her. By the time David finally decides to help her, it’s already too late.

          “There are things you know you'll die before telling, things you know you should have died before ever having seen. I watched and saw.”

          It’s not hard to understand why Ketchum decided to tell the story in first-person. As we read, we become accomplices in the atrocities inflicted on the girl. We are right there, in the basement, looking on helplessly as things take an ugly turn. We see what evil is capable of. We see how far humans can go to hurt another person. Just when we think it’s over and nothing can get worse, it will. It’s as if Ketchum is pointing a finger at us and asking: ‘Do you have the guts to know what she went through? What would you do if you were in David Moran’s place? Would you just stand there and think you are good as long as you are not putting your hand on the girl? What’s the breaking point for you to stand up and decide to help?’

          Sometimes, there is no other horror than the nature of the bystander effect.

          Ketchum’s writing is arsenic, to the point, without any unnecessary frills. He never lets style take over the matter. It takes incredible talent to strip your writing of all things purple and stick to the main story, to say what you have to say in plain and simple language. The beauty of his writing shines in the background whereas the unfolding of monstrosity takes place on the main stage. It succeeds in making the readers feel guilty. ‘You think you know about pain?’ reads the first line of the novel. One may never truly understand the pain of unfortunate souls like Meg in the novel or Nirbhaya, the Delhi gang-rape victim, but books, mainly horror literature, help us get close to understanding their pain.

          In Ania Ahlborn’s Brother, Michael Morrow is an unwilling participant in his family’s twisted hobby. He is adopted by the Morrows and is subjected to emotional and physical abuse since his childhood. He feels he owes his family for giving him food and shelter and helps them whenever they need him to clean up their mess. He has accepted his place in the family and functions on auto-pilot mode. He carries the weight of his family’s sins, especially of his brother, Rebel, who takes perverse pleasure in hurting people. He tries to protect his sister from the same abuse he has endured all his life but to no avail. He is at the mercy of his momma the ring-leader and his brother, and can’t get away from their grip. In the end, when his brother plays a despicable trick on him, Michael has only one option: to fight back.

          The reader is put in Michael Morrow’s shoes and the questions rise again: How much is too much? What will it take to shatter that bystander effect you’ve been nurturing your whole life and stand up for what is right?

          Horror doesn’t always go bump in the night. Sometimes it just sits around and waits, and when we are most vulnerable, it sneaks up on us and envelops us. Sometimes, ignoring the horror around us is the most perverse type of horror there is.

          The world we live in has always been filled with terrors, and horror literature helps us confront them. If we don’t, we will forever be encapsulated by everything dark. The pleasure of enjoying horror is all about reacting to this truth from a safe distance. In the end, we all face the same monsters: anxieties, social stigma, the unknown, the future, rejections, uncertainty, failures. When these monsters get more powerful, we lose the most important feeling that every human should have in abundance: empathy.

          “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,” said H P Lovecraft. And when we do not know what our fate has in store for us in the future, our mind naturally meanders into unknown territory and scares itself by imagining the worst possible scenario.

          Horror genre extols one important virtue, one quality that’s the most important of all for us to lead a fulfilling life: bravery. We need an ample amount of it for whatever right we may want to do in our lives.

          Then again, what’s life without a few scares?