I can’t stand roller coasters, but I guess I have a similar craving for experiencing fear and suffering from a safe position, because I have been reading books that make me writhe with anxiety. Right now I’m reading The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins. The only people in danger are creations of Collins’s imagination, but I’m gripping my seat and occasionally yelping “Oh no!” and “Don’t do that!”
Is this bad for my blood pressure, do you think, or is vicarious terror good for us?
Sermons in Stones 
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June 13, 2014 at 11:08 am
joannevalentinesimson
I am curious to understand why mild-mannered people like reading thrillers. I don’t like them and don’t read them, although I don’t mind roller coasters. I’ll go on a thriller ride if my grandson wants to go.
When I was working, the nicest, sweetest secretary in the office loved Stephen King books. And my mother, a totally non-aggressive introvert, read nothing but murder mysteries toward the end of her life.
Help me understand why you like to read about others being subjected to horror beyond their control.
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June 14, 2014 at 11:52 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Joanne, I can’t read or watch horror so I may not be the best person to ask. I don’t even read thrillers, for the most part. I love mysteries, most of which are about murder (though someone, somewhere, must have made a list of great mysteries in which nobody dies), but the point of reading them is to enjoy the puzzle, not to read about the characters’ experience of horror, which is seldom shown and even more seldom dwelt upon. That doesn’t resolve the moral question you seem to be posing. Being entertained by a puzzle that just happens to use fictional murder for its props is different than being entertained by reading about murder, but not necessarily better.
I suppose the short answer to your question is that I read books to broaden my understanding beyond what I’ve experienced. Fear is a part of that. The book that had me hopping in my seat in agony before The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins) was Atonement (Ian McEwan). That was also fiction but the terrors portrayed in it aren’t; they’re straight out of World War II and any war. Sometimes writers seem to be portraying violence from a pornographic motive; we’re supposed to revel in it even as we cringe. At others, they are forcing us to gaze at something horrific that we need to know about in order to grasp what other people have endured. Both Collins and McEwan have done the latter for me without ever condoning violence or making it enjoyable (so far–the jury’s still out on Collins, since I haven’t finished it).
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June 15, 2014 at 10:56 am
joannevalentinesimson
“forcing us to gaze at something horrific that we need to know about in order to grasp what other people have endured.” This is probably the operative idea in a sane “enjoyment” of realistic horror. One is not reveling in horror and gore for its own sake (a sort of violence porn), but rather trying to understand it from both the point of view of the victim and the perpetrator.
I sometimes read books that portray the horrors of Nazi and Russian (and now North Korean) concentration camps, and I don’t quite understand why I am drawn to them, but I always feel an almost crushing empathy while I’m reading one, as well as an urge to do something – like try to make sure it doesn’t happen here, now. Perhaps even closer to home is the whole issue of sex slavery throughout the globe, which does, indeed, exist in the U.S. I have a hard time reading much about that, although I have read “Half the Sky” by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn.
Thanks for your long, considered answer.
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