I write to unsettle people, not to comfort them. Today a reader taught me those two things are considerably less opposed than I assumed.
A reader at today’s book signing told me, with a specific, genuine emotional weight that caught me completely off guard, that my last novel helped her through the genuine grief of losing her mother the previous year, a reaction I have to admit I had never once considered as a plausible response to a book I wrote specifically to unsettle and frighten readers, and one that has left me spending the rest of today genuinely rethinking some basic assumptions I have apparently been carrying about what horror fiction actually does for the people who read it.
She explained, standing there at my signing table with a line of other readers waiting patiently behind her, that the novel’s central antagonist, a genuinely malevolent presence I built specifically to represent an entirely abstract, impersonal kind of dread, had become, for her, a way of actually processing and externalizing her own grief, giving a concrete, fictional shape to an amorphous, overwhelming feeling that she had struggled to properly process through more conventional grief resources, therapy and grief literature specifically aimed at addressing loss directly, in a way this considerably more oblique, fictional confrontation with dread apparently managed to reach for her instead.
I think I have always understood, in a fairly abstract, theoretical way, that horror fiction serves some genuine psychological function beyond simple entertainment, a well-documented critical and academic tradition around exactly this question that I have read plenty of over the years without ever quite feeling it land this directly, this personally, in an actual conversation with an actual reader describing exactly how my own specific book functioned for her during a genuinely difficult period of her own life.
What strikes me, reflecting on this conversation properly tonight, is how completely this reader’s experience diverges from my own actual writing intention, which was never, at any point during the drafting process, aimed at producing anything resembling comfort or grief processing. I wrote that antagonist specifically to be unsettling, dreadful, genuinely difficult to sit with, and yet apparently, for at least this one reader, that same unsettling dreadfulness became something closer to a companion, a way of holding a feeling too big and too abstract to hold directly on its own.
I think this touches on something genuinely important about how fiction actually works once it leaves an author’s hands, a gap between intended effect and actual, lived reader experience that I have understood abstractly for years but rarely confronted this directly and this personally. I did not write that book to help anyone through grief. And yet, for this one reader, it apparently did exactly that, a function entirely separate from and considerably more meaningful than whatever narrower, purely frightening effect I originally set out to achieve.
I thanked her, genuinely, for sharing something this personal in what is usually a fairly brief, transactional interaction at a signing table, and told her honestly that her specific account has already changed how I think about the actual, lived function of the genre I have spent my entire career working in. She smiled, mentioned she has already pre-ordered my next book, and moved along to let the next reader in line have her own moment with me, an entirely ordinary signing interaction that has left me thinking, hours later, more deeply about my own work’s actual purpose than months of more deliberate, structured reflection usually manages.
I am going to carry this conversation with me into my current manuscript, not in any way that changes the actual content or intention of what I am writing, since I still believe genuinely unsettling, difficult material is exactly what this genre exists to provide. But I think I am going to hold, somewhat more consciously than before, a real awareness that whatever I am building might end up serving some reader in a way I never intended or predicted, a specific, humbling possibility today’s conversation has made considerably more vivid and considerably more real than it ever felt to me in the abstract before.
I have been thinking, all evening, about how many other readers over the years have probably had some version of this same experience without ever telling me directly, quiet, private uses for my books that never made it into a review or a public comment, entirely invisible to me as the author unless a reader happens to find herself standing at exactly the right signing table on exactly the right afternoon to actually say it out loud. That thought carries a genuine, specific weight I am still sitting with tonight, a reminder of how much of any book’s actual, lived impact simply happens beyond an author’s ever knowing about it at all.
I think I want to start asking readers, gently, at future signings, whether any of my books have meant something to them beyond the fairly ordinary transaction of being frightened and entertained, not to fish for more of exactly today’s specific kind of story, but because I suspect there is real, genuine value in actually staying open to hearing it when it arrives, rather than defaulting to the brief, transactional signing-table interaction that usually leaves considerably less room for a reader to share something this personal.
More from this author at Paige Shiver, prat.uk.