Stories Are for Those Late Hours in the Night

My favorite scary book is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. I first read it after Mr. Gaiman was generous enough to donate an autographed copy to a benefit that I was organizing (no, I didn't read the autographed one--I bought the ebook on my Nook). It's a Newbery medal-winning retelling of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book set in a graveyard and it is incredible. When you first encounter the man Jack and his dripping blade in the beginning, you know you're in for a creepy treat. In true Gaiman style, the fear is broken up by well-timed (and clever) laughs but it's never far off. Nobody Owens is a wonderful hero and just how I imagine a cemetery Mowgli would be. For a spine-tingling Halloween, I highly recommend The Graveyard Book.

Stories are meant to transport us from our real lives. If we are willing and the story is strong enough, for a few hundred pages we are elsewhere, being somebody else, doing something more interesting than what we're stuck with day-to-day. It's truly a beautiful thing, the interaction between a book and its reader. If it weren't for stories, many of us would be leading "lives of quiet desperation" without knowing what to call them. In one of my favorite books, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien explores the qualities of truth, war, and writing. (I also noticed, when looking for the link, that there's a CliffsNotes and a SparkNotes version of this book. I feel sick. O'Brien is a truly masterful writer and I can't imagine really understanding TTTC without his language. That's a topic for another day, though.)

I especially enjoy the concept of story-truth that O'Brien introduces in this novel. In stories, the important factor is not factual truth but the feelings of the situation. A successful storytelling makes the reader or listener feel the emotions of the characters or the situation. O'Brien's argument is that it is story-truth that is important and it is through stories that we can start to understand life and to understand ourselves. He writes, "What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at, I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again." We can achieve these things through telling a story the way it's meant to be told, with an emotional truth that the facts can't cloud over or line up into neat columns.

And to bring things full-circle, it's story-truth that makes scary stories so frightening. The villain may be a ghost or a member of a murderous secret society or a man possessed by the rage of a hotel or some one or thing equally as unlikely. And yet there's something sinister, emotionally crippled, cold, calculating, and ultimately distressingly familiar about this character that tells you: I am. Maybe not in this particular form, but I exist. You've seen me on television, in the eyes of people on the street, and you fear me. If there wasn't a familiar quality in Jack Torrance, Elspeth Noblin, or the man Jack (a little shout-out to the two of you who responded last time!), we wouldn't be afraid because we simply wouldn't be able to suspend our disbelief.


Bridget

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"Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are."

-The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien