Fearful Places

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

Revelation 12:9

I gave in yesterday, I admit, and put down Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels to start reading Peter Straub's chilling Dragon Floating. My July issue of Locus magazine, the one with the sundering gaze of Peter Straub on the front cover, still lies agape in front of the computer to his full two-page interview "Fearful Places." This interview I remember fondly since Straub offers one of the most simple, if somewhat psychoanalytical stories of his own writing:

In my work, both the supernatural and more 'mainstream' forms of horror come from the same set of circumstances. In one case, these experiental sources are treated unconsciously, and they are mediated by the imagery that is open to you when you want to write what is called 'horror.' (78)

I had this massive book, the Modern Library Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, and I carried it around as though it were the Bible. It spoke to me. It presented horrific, ghastly, unnatural, moonlit events brightened by lightning bolts, with a soundtrack of crumbling castles and dying monks! It was a landscape where I felt immediately at home. (79)

Based on Dragon Floating I've noticed that Straub's writing, compared to his counterpart Stephen King's, psychologically terrorizes and explodes the reader's deeper tensions surreptitiously from deep down within the untapped unconscious. Balefully, he tricks his readers into drawing intimately close to the characters themselves based on an entirely vulnerable, and often sinister, sympathy (or fear) constructed like a Golden Calf in the author's devilish imagination. Then slowly, after he has with entirely false mortal fear lighted and discharged some neurotic transformations in the reader's mind, the most dangerous (spiritual or psychological) issue is left to fester undisturbed (allegorically) beneath the whole plot in the unquestioning reader's mind.

This 'Paranoid Vision,' as I conceive in my own mind, epitomised in horror, terrorizes the reader with imagined, sadistic supernatural or human horrors threatening the wishful, spiritual promise of catharsis in this world. The latent promise in this psychological 'quest' for readers and victims alike is a traumatic realization of our own delusional ('blind' or constructed) understanding of the world, and hopefully a faint hankering for something spiritual, or psychologically alleviating, in a world full of idols.