Looking For "The Drop" in Horror Fiction

Many years ago, when I was at university, I wandered into a room where a friend was looking at a picture. I don’t remember if it was a photograph, or an illustration in a book; it’s a sufficiently long time ago that it probably wasn’t on a screen.

Anyway, I looked over his shoulder at the picture: a fancy, black, metal gate. Across the gateway’s arch, large letters spelled out “Arbeit Macht Frei”. I looked at the picture, and I laughed.

(You may already be running ahead in this story; stick with me.)

My friend asked why I was laughing.

Well, I explained. I’d always thought that sort of attitude - the mindset that built gateways for The Poor Working Class and put Improving Moral Epithets over them - was peculiar to Victorian Britain. To the nineteenth-century mill- and mine-owners who, simultaneously exploitative and paternalistic, squeezed workers dry while espousing the merits of hard work, and self-improvement. The practice of putting these slogans on doorways and arches was something I’d always found grimly amusing.

And - now - apparently it wasn’t just Britain. Even in Germany, there had been equivalent factory-owners who probably disregarded safety and paid their staff a pittance even as the gateway promised that Work Sets You Free. I imagined the owners waffling into their handlebar moustaches and congratulating themselves on the excellent opportunities they afforded the local labourers. See, if you just work a little harder for a little less money, your opportunities will be endless! If you die poor, it is because you didn’t work hard enough!

My friend - whose Jewish father had fled Europe in the late 1930s, and whose aunts and cousins had not and had died in concentration camps - said to me: you do know that this is the gateway to Auschwitz?

No, I had not known.

“Arbeit Macht Frei” wasn’t another piece of Victorian-era hypocrisy. It wasn’t the pompous moralising I’d assumed. It was a sick joke, a lie to give hope to the doomed people for whom no amount of hard work would ever, ever make a difference.

I don’t remember what I said, or how I reacted. I do remember how I felt: a sudden, sickening drop as everything changed. But, of course, nothing had changed; nothing except my own viewpoint.

I don’t imagine I will ever write a story set in a concentration camp; I don’t know enough, and I don’t feel the stories are mine to tell. But that moment, that drop, is something I’ve been looking for in horror fiction ever since. The pinpoint sentence when a single piece of information causes everything to become different.

When the shadows resolve into a shape. When you find the killer’s plans and realise they are in your own handwriting. When you realise the calls are coming from inside the house.

It might be a twist ending, a single set-piece in which the entire world comes crashing down. It might be a series of tiny reveals throughout the story, a building, unsettling feeling of uncertainty. Both play into the big fear: that thing you know? that you’re certain of? it’s not true. The world is not how you think it is.

Those instants of realisation will always, to me, be the essence of good horror writing.

Luxurious Reading

During this pandemic, a big source of joy has been things arriving via the postal service. I’m lucky to have many lovely friends who have sent letters, cards, or the Christmas gifts they couldn’t give me in person (because “in person” was illegal). I’ve also had entirely unexpected parcels - books that people had finished that they thought I might like to read; a shiny new 1000-piece jigsaw; a selection of unusual-flavour biscuits. On one occasion, I received a box that contained an empty gin bottle and half a red cabbage, which just goes to show you need to be careful what you say late at night around someone with easy access to a franking machine.

A few weeks ago, I unwrapped a copy of Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea. I had completely forgotten the Zoom call in which someone offered it round a group of people. (In the spirit of fair reporting, I feel I should mention that the someone was actually the same someone who posted me the cabbage. Her parcels are not always deranged - and besides, I was really pleased about the cabbage.)

Anyway, the book arrived with instructions on who it was to be sent to next once I’d finished it, which made sure it didn’t just go to join the giant to-be-read pile. I’d had a busy week, and the weather was somewhat unfriendly, so I spent most of the weekend under a blanket with The Starless Sea.

I liked it. I loved parts of it. But do you know what it reminded me of, more than anything else?

The sex-and-shopping novels that dominated bestseller lists through the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Stick with me, here.

Judith Krantz is usually credited with inventing the sex-and-shopping novel (also known by the utterly unlovely term “bonkbuster”) when she published Scruples in 1978. Many authors - Shirley Conran, Jilly Cooper, Jackie Collins - picked up the baton and ran with it, and the world was inundated with doorstep-thick novels. The settings varied, the plots varied, but they were all underpinned by two things: frequent sex scenes, described in detail, and a lot of high-end, wordly goods. The characters moved in a world where five-star hotels, designer clothes, and gourmet meals were commonplace; brand names were bandied about freely, and the whole atmosphere was one of continuous, decadent luxury.

Now, before someone notifies Morgenstern’s lawyers, I should clarify: The Starless Sea doesn’t contain much in the way of designer shopping malls, and absolutely no red-carpet events. Some of the characters do hang out in a cocktail bar which is considerably more upmarket than I would have been able to afford as a graduate student, but that is to some extent explained. No one has very much sex with anyone (or at least not on-page).

However, the sex-and-shopping novel was never about the detail, or even about the plot, it was about the wish-fulfilment. You can read it, and pretend you are living this beautiful, glittering, glamorous and incredibly expensive life. You can enjoy, vicariously, the bubbles of the champagne, the swoosh of the silk sheets, and the touch of this chapter’s generically handsome gentleman.

And The Starless Sea provides exactly the same experience… for the sort of person who loves spending a weekend under a blanket with a novel. If your wishes were shaped not by the yuppie hustle of 1980’s materialism but by a love of reading and mystery, if you would take Narnia over Hollywood any day, if a magical library is more appealing than the Met Ball, then this book is right here for you.

The Harbour - an area in which the central character spends a lot of his time - is strange, and quirky, and fabulous in all senses of the word. It creates the same luxury vibe - so long as your idea of luxury is an infinite supply of books, words, puzzles piled on mysteries, intriguing strangers, impossible worlds and cake-on-demand. Oh, and cats. Lots of cats.

And the book does it really, really well. I spent my weekend cocooned in the lovely, baffling embrace of The Starless Sea and enjoyed every minute of it. Some books you read for the story, and some you read for the sheer experience. I was, to be honest, a little disappointed by some aspects of the plot and the metaphysics. But the lush, easy escapism of the Harbour was an absolute joy and I was deeply disappointed to reach the end.

I would read it again for the fun of it. Except, of course, I have to post it on to the next person.