The Nightmare Factory Read Free Page B

sister’s terrible fate? No. Are we happy the narrator makes a safe flight from the sinking house? Not particularly. Then why get upset about this calamity which takes place in the backwoods, miles from the nearest town and everyday human concerns?
    In this story individuals are not the issue. Everywhere in Poe’s literary universe (Lovecraft’s too) the individual is horribly and comfortably irrelevant. During the reading of “The Fall of the House of Usher” we don’t look over any character’s shoulder but have our attention distributed god-wise into every corner of a foul factory which manufactures only one product: total and inescapable doom. Whether a given proper noun escapes this doom or is caught by it is beside the point. Poe’s is a world created with built-in obsolescence, and to appreciate fully this downrunning cosmos one must take the perspective of its creator, which is all perspectives without getting sidetracked into a single one. Therefore we as readers are the House of Usher (both family and structure), we are the fungi clustering across its walls and the violent storm over its ancient head; we sink with the Ushers and get away with the narrator. In brief, we play all the roles. And the consolation in this is that we are supremely removed from the maddeningly tragic viewpoint of the human.
    Of course, when the story is over we must fall from our god’s perch and sink back into humanness, which is perhaps what the Ushers and their house are doing. This is always a problem for would-be gods! We can’t maintain for very long a godlike point of view. Wouldn’t it be great if we could; if life could be lived outside the agony of the individual? But we are always doomed and redoomed to become involved with our own lives, which is the only life there is, and godlikeness has nothing at all to do with it.
    But still, wouldn’t it be great…
    Darkness, you’ve done a lot for us
    At this point it may seem that the consolations of horror are not what we thought they were, that all this time we’ve been keeping company with illusions. Well, we have. And we’ll continue to do so, continue to seek the appalling scene which short-circuits our brain, continue to sit in our numb coziness with a book of terror on our laps like a cataleptic predator, and continue to draw smug solace, if only for the space of a story, from a world made snug and simple by absolute hopelessness and doom. These consolations are still effective, even if they don’t work as well as we would prefer them to. But they are only effective, like most things of value in art or life, as illusions . And there’s no point attributing to them powers of therapy or salvation they don’t and can’t have. There are enough disappointments in the world without adding that one.
    Perhaps, though, our illusion of consolation could be enhanced by acquiring a better sense of what we are being consoled by. What, in fact, is a horror story? And what does it do? First the latter.
    The horror story does the work of a certain kind of dream we all know. Sometimes it does this so well that even the most irrational and unlikely subject matter can infect the reader with a sense of realism beyond the realistic, a trick usually not seen outside the vaudeville of sleep. When is the last time you failed to be fooled by a nightmare, didn’t suspend disbelief because its incidents weren’t sufficiently true-to-life? The horror story is only true to dreams, especially those which involve us in mysterious ordeals, the passing of secrets, the passages of forbidden knowledge, and, in more ways than one, the spilling of guts.
    What distinguishes horror from other kinds of stories is the exclusive devotion of their practitioners, their true practitioners, to self-consciously imagining and isolating the most demonic aspects and episodes of human existence, undiminished by any consolation whatever. For here no consolation on earth is sufficient to the horrors it will