Why I Like Horror That Takes Out the Garbage

I have a private test for a scary story, and it is this: does anyone in it ever take out the garbage?

It sounds flippant and it is not. Most horror exists in a strange weightless world where the characters have no chores, no jobs that matter, no laundry, no relatives who need collecting from the airport, no bins to put out on the Tuesday. They exist only to be frightened. Their entire function is to walk toward the noise, and the moment the noise stops being a threat, they evaporate, because the story has no other use for a person than as something for the monster to menace. And I have come to distrust that world, deeply, because it is not the world where fear actually happens to human beings. Fear happens to people who still, even in the middle of the worst thing, have to deal with the bins.

The dread I trust — the dread I try to write — is the kind that has to take out the garbage afterward. The kind that arrives on an ordinary Tuesday and does not have the decency to cancel the Tuesday. Because that is what the real terrors are like. Grief does not clear your schedule; you plan a funeral and answer emails in the same afternoon. Terrible news arrives and then you still have to feed the children, and there is something more frightening in that — in the way catastrophe has to share the day with the mundane — than in any amount of atmosphere. The truest horror I know is not the scream in the empty house. It is the person who has just received the phone call, standing at the counter, mechanically finishing the sandwich they were making when it rang, because the hands don’t know what else to do.

The mundane is not the opposite of dread; it is the container

The mistake the weightless kind of horror makes is treating the ordinary and the frightening as opposites — as if you have to clear away all the boring domestic furniture to make room for the scare. It is exactly backwards. The ordinary is not the enemy of dread. It is the container that gives dread its shape and its terrible weight.

A monster in a haunted castle is just a monster in its natural habitat; it belongs there, we expect it, and expected things cannot frighten us. But a wrongness in a kitchen — a wrongness that has to coexist with the kettle and the school lunches and the bin day — that is a wrongness that has broken into the one place we thought was safe, and it brings the whole force of the violation with it. You do not fear the graveyard. You have always known the graveyard was frightening; you brought the right expectations. You fear the thing that follows you home from the graveyard and is still there on Monday morning while you are looking for your other shoe. The horror that keeps its chores is the horror that has entered your actual life, and that is the only kind that can actually reach you, because your actual life is where you actually are.

This is also, not incidentally, how you make a reader believe the impossible. A story that is all atmosphere from the first line has spent its credibility before anything happens; the reader knows they are in a horror story and has braced accordingly. But a story that spends its first pages on the genuinely, specifically ordinary — the exact brand of the coffee, the argument about whose turn it was, the small logistics of a life — has done something valuable: it has convinced the reader that this is a real place, governed by real rules, where garbage must be taken out and milk goes off. And then, when the wrong thing arrives into that carefully-built ordinariness, it inherits all of it. It becomes as real as the coffee. You believe the ghost because you already believed the bins.

The dignity of it

There is one more thing, and it is not a technical point, it is close to a moral one, so I will end on it.

Horror that takes out the garbage respects its people. The weightless kind does not; its characters are disposable by design, meat for the plot, and you can feel the contempt in it even when it is well made — the sense that these are not people so much as positions for a person to briefly occupy before being frightened out of the frame. But a story that lets its characters have chores, jobs, tired mornings, and relatives is a story that thinks they are worth keeping alive on the page as full human beings, which means that when something threatens them it actually costs something, because there was a real person there to lose. The dread and the dignity are the same move. You make the reader care by making the characters ordinary, and you can only frighten the reader to the exact degree that the reader cares, which means the whole terrifying power of the thing rests, in the end, on somebody in the story having, off-page, an ordinary life full of the small dull business of being alive.

So I will keep writing the horror that has to do the dishes. Not because I am squeamish about the big frights — I like a good one — but because I have noticed that the frights that stayed with me, the ones I could not put down at the door, were always the ones that came home with the character and were still there in the morning, in the kitchen, while the ordinary Tuesday went on around them, refusing, the way the real ones always do, to let anyone off for the day.