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Who’s afraid of Can lit?
When I was ten years old, my best friend lived across the street from a haunted mansion. We knew it was haunted, because the house was rambling, deserted and dark. We knew it was haunted because we heard hushed conversations and whispers from adults, but we were shushed when we asked to know more.
When I was ten years old, my best friend lived across the street from a haunted mansion. We knew it was haunted, because the house was rambling, deserted and dark. We knew it was haunted because we heard hushed conversations and whispers from adults, but we were shushed when we asked to know more. We knew it was haunted, because we already knew the secret about what happened when we said Bloody Mary three times into a dark mirror at midnight, and we knew the power that came from “light as a feather, stiff as a board.”When I was ten years old, I thought that fear was fun. Back then, fear was limited to fictional stories of things that went bump in the night; the thrill of the first drop of a roller coaster; and the satisfaction of screaming at the end of a scary story told across a campfire. Scaring yourself was thrilling — an adrenaline rush that reminded you that, of course, magic did exist and that the fantastic was only a street away, lurking in the darkened windows of a deserted mansion across the street and behind every mirror at the witching hour.
But as I get older, I find myself getting more afraid, about everything, all of the time — my fears of ghosts and ghouls replaced with more mundane terrors. I’m afraid of making the wrong choices, and I’m afraid of what will become of the world and what we’re doing to the environment. I’m afraid of getting older, I’m afraid of student loans, and I’m afraid that my sushi addiction will someday give me mercury poisoning. But still, I love Halloween, because to me, it is the time of year when anything is possible, and when stories come alive as much as the colour of October foliage.Fear is an important part of literature — one that’s not limited to horror, murder, witches and ghouls. (Although, who doesn’t love a traditional Halloween read?) The best books scare and challenge you in a way that you don’t necessarily understand. Being afraid isn’t just a cheap thrill anymore, it can be a call to action and an invitation to change the way you live your life.Fears can manifest in a book like New Tab by Guillaume Morissette, a novel that follows a year in the life of a twenty-six-year-old video game designer as he tries to wade through his disillusionment and ennuis to get out of a job he hates, and a life he never really wanted. The book deals directly with the all-too-real fears of twenty-somethings: getting trapped in a job you hate, extreme social anxiety, and the spectre of a utility bill that seems to mysteriously grow and grow.
Some of us are afraid of love — finding it, keeping it, and the devastating repercussions of losing it. Fear of Fighting, with words by Stacey May Fowles and pictures by Marlena Zube, follows Marnie, a broken-hearted young woman who is fighting to find meaning in a lonely, urban landscape. Fear of Fighting is a book that forces you to face your fears of running into your ex with their new lover; and the fear of falling in love with the wrong person and being forced to find yourself again after it’s over.
Swarm by Lauren Carter posits a terrifying future — a future that I often obsess about instead of sleeping at two and three o’clock in the morning. The novel chronicles a not-too-distant future, in which oil has disappears and an oil-dependent civilization decays and dies. The dystopian world, uncannily close to our own, illustrates the fear that zombies or witches won’t be our civilization’s undoing; but rather, we will be our own enemy, and the bringers of our own destruction.
I still love Halloween because it means something different to me now. Yes, it will always mean candy, pumpkins, and an annual screening of Hocus Pocus — but it also means celebrating fear as a transformative force, a galvanizing thrill that leads us to taking actions to change our lives, ourselves and the world. Really scary books are the ones that force you to quit your humdrum job; take a chance on love, or have the strength to leave a relationship that’s just not right; and to take actions to make sure a dystopian of the future remains science fiction. So here’s to scaring yourself, and here’s to witches, ghouls, and bumps in the night. BOO.
