Everyone at Halloween knows to be on the lookout for ghosts, ghouls and assorted graveyard habitués, but there’s another kind of bogey that can undercut your spooky fun and spoil all the parts of the year. This isn’t Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster, but rather what I call the Deadly Associative, a different brand of vampire that will poison your blood every bit as much if you let it.
We have a tendency, now more than ever, to use a name as a stand-in to represent this whole big thing that we’re not going to experience because we’ll just cite that name instead.
Take, for example, Edgar Allan Poe. If someone brings up classic horror fiction, his is the name you think of, right? You know to go with Poe.
But have you ever actually read Poe? These days, the answer to that question is likely “No.” At the same time, we act like we know about this writer and his merit. We don’t scrutinize or evaluate or so much as check out what the deal is. It’s like it’s enough that we have the same readymade answer that everyone else does.
The funny thing about Poe — and this sounds like Halloween sacrilege — is that he isn’t what people assume he is as a writer. His prose is grandiloquent, with marathon sentences full of words that few people know and fewer still ever use. The association, though, remains in place. Poe got his title when he got it — like the Beatles got theirs, or Taylor Swift, or Caitlin Clark — and it’s as if our brains then get tossed out the farmhouse window to be devoured by zombies “Night of the Living Dead”-style, except those zombies are also us.
Poe is considered America’s classic horror king by people who have never read him, ironically enough, but it’s actually not hard to defeat the associative bloodsucker. You don’t need garlic, a cross or holy water, but rather a little curiosity and the good sense to help yourself out — in life matters as well as those of the Halloween variety — and peek under the bed to see what else might be found there.
If you want some outstanding horror by the person I’d tout as this country’s most accessible classic terror master, check out the ghost stories and weird fiction of Ambrose Bierce. Poe died in October 1849. Bierce was born in 1842, so they didn’t miss being contemporaries by much. Poe had his mysterious death, the cause of which remains unknown, but Bierce’s was even stranger. In October 1913, he went from Washington, D.C., to Mexico, where he joined Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army as an observer, never to be heard from again.
Find yourself a copy of Bierce’s short story, “The Boarded Window,” and have a fantastic, spot-hitting Halloween treat. You’ll be blown away that it dates from 1891, and you can read it in 10 minutes, after which point you’re going to want to share it with someone.
The tale is about a man in the wilderness whose wife has just died. He lives in a remote spot and will bury her near his cabin, but only after he prepares the body with respect and reverence. As he’s doing so, taking great care, he falls asleep late at night. Something enters the house through the open window, which is bad enough. But what the man discovers afterward may be worse.
The best ghost and horror stories leave some wiggle room. They may not involve the supernatural at all. We think they do, but there’s a loophole. Technically, the thing that happened could have an earthly explanation.
That doubt fosters frisson. We don’t know for sure, and is there anything that scares us more than the unknown? Death, perhaps. But isn’t that the ultimate unknown?
I arrived at college thinking I’d have all these professors who’d know how wonderful Ambrose Bierce was, and none of them had heard of him. They knew Poe and Lovecraft. But letting the big bad associative monster hold you back and expecting anything awesome to land in your lap is like not going out trick or treating and thinking some candy might magically manifest itself inside your pillowcase.
If you aren’t having a gander and going around, you’re exposing your neck to the worst form of vampire, because it limits what we’ll know and where we get to. Slay that sucker and venture beyond undead status. There’s nothing like knowing and feeling something personally and genuinely. Including the best kinds of scares, which is what Halloween is all about.
Colin Fleming (www.colinfleminglit.com) is the author of eight books. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone, among other publications.
