| Case in point, I once read where a Lovecraftian “scholar” speculated that Lovecraft was frightened of sex and women, so his great Cthulhu was merely a metaphorical representation of the female vagina. No, I didn’t make that up. Let me just say that I’ve seen a few vaginas in my time, but I can’t remember one with tentacles. Maybe it’s just me… But I digress. Beyond strangers and the bogeyman (the red king of them all), there are other and sometimes worse fears. The fear of being alone. Of being abandoned by friends, by lovers, by husbands and wives. And, worse, by our children. Because when they leave us, they take away part of ourselves and make us accept our own fleeting mortality. Of course, there are also fears born of ignorance and intolerance. I won’t even attempt to catalog bigotry here. But as children (and even as adults) we seem to have an innate fear or apprehension when it concerns people different from ourselves. We’ve already discussed tall people (giants), but what about the little people? Our race seems to view small individuals with suspicion. We brand them as freaks, call them “weasely” or “elfish” and, quite often, much worse names than that. Horror writers have not ignored this. Notice how Martians are “little green men”, perhaps implying that they are subhuman, repugnant. Gerald Kersh made good use of our deep-set prejudice and revulsion to little folk in “Men Without Bones.” Read it. It strikes a chord. Again, scientists have tried to understand this impulse. Like giants, one theory has it that our little people aversion may in fact be inspired by racial memories of a Paleolithic race of pygmies long extinct. This memory has been ingrained onto our subconscious minds and, hence, our imagination. My guess is, if that’s true, we must not have liked them very much. In fact, we must have hated them. Robert E. Howard made excellent use of this theory in his tales “People of the Dark” and “The Children of the Night.” The last two fears we’ll discuss (the biggies) are pain and death. They are inexorably intertwined, of course, for one often leads to the other and the former makes us look the latter straight in the face and, ultimately, all roads lead here. The fear of pain is natural and instinctive. It works in the belly and the head. The first time a child touches a hot burner or pokes himself with a shard of glass, he or she understands it perfectly. Lesson learned. As adults, however, we learn to be connoisseurs of agony and discomfort. We imagine being cut, stabbed, bludgeoned, burned, hacked, hanged, and shot. We know the agonies of dentistry, of surgery, of car accidents, of beatings. We know of cancers and amputations and tortures beyond name. Pain is the secondary language of horror fiction. Because everything the monsters, boogeymen, and strangers do to us hurts. They have claws and fangs and razor blades and knives and axes and, God, the things they can do to us with them. Flesh and blood. We are all intricately sculpted from it. We suffer as it suffers, lust as it lusts. It holds us prisoner in a biological sheath. When it dies, we die; when it surrenders to disease, rot, and ultimately dust, we are vomited into the arms of blackness. It holds the flower of creation in bondage. We know of, without a doubt, only one true god: Pain. He is the supreme realist in a world of flesh, bone, and nerve endings. Only pain can attempt ownership of us alongside the creator of human clay, can aspire to conquer the insect dance of skin. And pain loves flesh and blood. And pain brings us to death or, at least, a bit closer. Churches. Funeral homes. Morgues. Cemeteries. Mausoleums. It’s on every frontier of our culture. It’s in books and movies. On TV, the radio, the internet. The greatest fear of them all. It’s in the seasons. Even summer dies and becomes autumn. It’s what our religion is really about. We celebrate it with ghosts, skeletons, and skull-faced pumpkins on Halloween. On Easter, Christians celebrate the one man to have returned from it (without scaring the hell out of everyone in the process). We put our dead in boxes and bury them in the ground or burn them so we don’t have to look at them or our own rotting futures. Entire occupations have been created to halt its advance or, when that fails, to find out why it happened and when, and to dispose of the remains so we don’t have to. |