The Nightmare Factory Read Free

rightly regarded as its own justification, and this seems to be one of the unassailable consolations of horror.
    But is it? (This won’t take long.)
    Another test case
    We are reading—in a quiet, cozy room, it goes without saying—one of M.R. James’ powerful ghost stories. It is “Count Magnus,” in which a curious scholar gains knowledge he didn’t even know was forbidden and suffers the resultant doom at the hands of the count and his betentacled companion. The story actually ends before we have a chance to witness its fabulous coup de grace, but we know that a sucked-off face is in store for our scholar. Meanwhile we sit on the sidelines (sipping a warm drink, probably) as the doomed academic meets a fate worse than any we’ll ever know. At least we think it’s worse, we hope it is…deep, deep in the subcellars of our minds we pray: “Please don’t let anything even like that happen to me! Not to me . Let it always be the other guy and I’ll read about him, even tremble for him a little. Besides, I’m having so much fun, it can’t be all that terrible. For him, that is. For me it would be unbearable. See how shaky and excitable I get just reading about it. So please let it always be the other guy.”
    But it can’t always be the other guy, for in the long run we’re all, each of us, the other guy.
    Of course in the short run it’s one of life’s minor ecstasies—an undoubted entertainment—to read about a world in which the very worst doom takes place in a restricted area we would never ever wander into and befalls somebody else. And this is the run in which all stories are read, as well as written. (If something with eyes like two runny eggs were after your carcass, would you sit down and write a story about it?) It’s another world, the short run; it’s a world where horror really is a true consolation. But it’s no compliment to Dr. James or to ourselves as readers to put too much stock in ghost stories as a consolation for our mortality, our vulnerability to real-life terrors. As consolations go, this happens to be a pretty low-grade one—demented complacency posing as beatitude.
    So our second consolation lives on borrowed time at best. And in the long-run—where no mere tale can do you much good—is delusory.
    (Perhaps the stories of H.P. Lovecraft offer a more threatening and admirable role to those of us devoted to doom. In Lovecraft’s work doom is not restricted to eccentric characters in eccentric situations. It begins there but ultimately expands to violate the safety zone of the reader (and the non-reader for that matter, though the latter remains innocent of Lovecraft’s forbidden knowledge). M.R. James’ are cautionary tales, lessons in how to stay out of spectral trouble and how nice and safe it feels to do so. But within the cosmic boundaries of Lovecraft’s universe, which many would call the universe itself, we are already in trouble, and feeling safe is out of the question for anyone with some brains and chance access to the manuscripts of Albert Wilmarth, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, or Prof. Angell’s nephew. These isolated narrators take us with them into their doom, which is the world’s. (No one ever gives a hoot what happens to Lovecraft’s characters as individuals.) If we knew what they know about the world and about our alarmingly tentative place in it, our brains would indeed reel with revelation. And if we found out what Arthur Jermyn found out about ourselves and our humble origins in a mere madness of biology, we would do as he did with a few gallons of gasoline and a merciful match. Of course Lovecraft insists on telling us things it does no good to know: things that can’t help us or protect us or even prepare us for the awful and inevitable apocalypse to come. The only comfort is to accept it, live in it, and sigh yourself into the balm of living oblivion. If you can only maintain this constant sense of doom, you may be spared the pain of foolish hopes