Everybody Wants to Ruin the World

From the Introduction to Your Own Dark Shadow: A Selection of Lost Irish Horror Stories

by Jack Fennell

Here’s a true story about a time I was haunted.

I get sleep paralysis every so often. It’s a misfiring of the mechanism that prevents you from ‘acting out’ your dreams, and one school of thought used to link it to the ‘mammalian diving reflex’; whatever the cause, the effect is that you’re wide awake but unable to move a muscle, and your panicking brain populates the darkness with all kinds of horrifying beings as it tries to figure out what’s going on. A lot of sufferers see ‘shadow people’ looming over them or creeping towards them, malevolent and sometimes sadistically gleeful. I count myself very lucky that my own hallucinations aren’t visual; tactile and auditory ones are no picnic either, though.

I moved house a few years ago, into a place that had lain empty for around thirty years. The new neighbours were curious and mad for chat, so I took to quipping, ‘Well sure, we’ll let you know if it turns out to be haunted, anyway.’

In my memory, what happened next happened that very night. I was lying in bed and I had a sleep-paralysis episode. This one was very different from anything I’d experienced before.

I was conscious that I was lying on my side, and could not move. However, my internal sense of equilibrium was telling me that I was standing upright, stretched to my full height. What I was seeing did not match what I was physically feeling. For a moment I had an insight into what it would feel like to be Schrödinger’s cat, existing in two contradictory states at once.

And then, I felt something run a sharp fingernail up my spine, as slowly as you are reading this sentence; slowly enough, I thought, to make a point. That point was crystal clear to me.

Though I didn’t hear anything speak, I absolutely got the message:

Mind what you mock. Don’t push your luck.

The paralysis and the feeling of being ‘superimposed’ ended there, with a snap. I haven’t experienced anything like it since.

I know that my memory of the sequence of events isn’t reliable, especially given the thousands of hours I’ve spent feeding my subconscious on horror stories, good and bad. I can rationalise with the best of them, yes sirree, so I know that there was nothing there. However, part of my mind insists I also know the obvious truth: that a spirit of some kind overheard me cracking jokes about hauntings, and decided to teach me a lesson about being flippant.

The plots of ghost stories twist and turn just as much as those of any other genre, but they travel in straight lines emotionally, taking the shortest route and hitting their targets in half the time it takes a rational explanation to come trundling around the mountain. Hence, the close correspondence between reporting and fiction when it comes to ghosts. It just makes sense that a protective ghost would intervene to scare some sense into a domineering guardian, as in Anna Maria Hall’s ‘The Dark Lady’; it makes sense that a tormented romantic genius would prefer the fantasy of a departed lover’s return over the unnerving reality, as in Clotilde Graves’s ‘A Vanished Hand’. In this book, there’s even an example of a ghost story that became ‘real’ – the entity in Mildred Darby’s ‘The House of Horror’ has become a horrible fixture of the most haunted castle in Ireland since the story’s original publication.

Weirdly, even when supernatural elements are present, horror tales ‘feel’ real. When one looks at how we tell scary stories, it becomes clear that there isn’t a lot of daylight between supposedly ‘true’ stories and fictional ones; in particular, ghost stories seem to be the point where fiction, folklore, mysticism and eye-witness testimony converge. This may in part explain why Ireland is particularly good at preserving its creepy literary heritage.

Unlike other projects, the challenge with this anthology wasn’t that the material was lacking. Quite the opposite, in fact: between the inherent gruesomeness of fairy lore, the legacy of the Ascendancy Gothic, and the ever-present traces of a violent history, Ireland is smothered in macabre stories; even British and American writers of Gothic fiction got in on the act occasionally, passing original work off as ‘Irish folktales’ at the invitation of editors such as Thomas Crofton Croker.1 Neither was it a struggle to find stories that were less well-known – after all, with a supply as plentiful as ours, you’re going to find a rake of underappreciated gems in the mix. However, this abundance of material raises an age-old question: why does it exist at all?

The Sinister Urge

Being scared isn’t a pleasant experience, so why do people deliberately seek it out? There are a number of theories as to why people like horror as a genre of entertainment.

There’s the ‘evolutionary psychology’ approach, which attempts to tie our consumption of spooky stuff to our primordial ancestors’ struggle to survive: we can’t help but respond to scary images, the argument goes, because our diminutive shrew-like forebears were constantly on the lookout for things that might eat them. Of course, attributing horror fandom to persistent traces of primordial behaviour doesn’t actually explain why we enjoy it.

A (slightly) more plausible theory along similar lines compares horror to the euphoria of survival, arguing that it’s not the frightening stuff we seek out, but its aftermath – the jump-scare with the killer clown or whatever emulates the ancient experience of being ambushed by a predator, and when we leave the cinema, we feel the same afterglow of relief and joy at having escaped.

Theorists of a more Freudian stripe might suggest that a sadomasochistic impulse is at play, and that the state of terror paradoxically promises a release from everyday anxiety via a kind of ego-death – suggesting, in short, that the experience of being a monster’s prey leaves little room for the existential dread that has become the background radiation of modern life. That kind of primal fear is certainly in evidence in this anthology, in Henry de Vere Stacpoole’s ‘The Middle Bedroom’, May Crommelin’s ‘The Lamparagua’, and Eimar O’Duffy’s ‘My Friend Trenchard’.

This is probably the main reason why horror has long been criticised as a regressive genre. After all, fear is a favourite tool of authoritarians and populists: frighten people enough, and you can convince them to do whatever you want. If fear is the paradigm of authoritarianism, the argument goes, it follows that fiction partaking of the same paradigm must be authoritarian in character, and for proof of this, we need only look at the genre’s conventions – its irrationality, its supernatural flourishes, its gory punishment of non-conformist and minority characters, which is thankfully becoming less common. Similar sentiments inform the recurring moral panics around the genre, particularly its presumed effects on children.2

At first blush, the kind of escapism that horror offers us is also somewhat troubling. I prefer the sensation of being ‘haunted’ to the horror of knowing that there are probably microplastics in my blood and bone marrow. I prefer reading about monsters to contemplating ecological collapse, and I prefer reading scary fiction to reading about state-sanctioned barbarities inflicted on defenceless civilians. Horror is distinct among the ‘estranged’ genres in that its potential for escapism is morally weighted: unlike the escapism of fantasy or science fiction, to retreat from real-world horrors into make-believe horror-worlds (whose tropes and images are largely borrowed from the real thing) seems uniquely abhorrent.

Again, two contradictory states are superimposed: fans of this stuff enjoy it, and yet for the most part aren’t amoral monsters.

The question of why people like it, then, must be a little more complex.

I maintain that the ‘weird sister’ genres (science fiction, fantasy and horror) are related via their approaches to history, and how we think it should work. Sci-fi pretends to be history: it shows us marvellous things and insists that they’re happening in our world, either right now or in the future, via some means that can be accounted for with the scientific method (however vaguely it may be described). Fantasy ignores history: it shows us worlds separate from ours, where our history doesn’t matter and causality isn’t limited by our standards of what is physically possible; even in fantasy stories notionally set in our world, history is impugned, since it fails to account for the magic that drives the plot. Part of the appeal of sci-fi is the idea that our world is changeable (hopefully for the better, but dystopian or apocalyptic tales have their value too); fantasy, in turn, draws us in with the promise that the world we know can be escaped, either by leaving it altogether or by finding cracks in the totalising systems that define it.

To round this pattern off, I argue that horror ends history. By that, I mean that it disrupts causality: something horrible – what Julia Kristeva terms ‘the abject’3 – erupts into the world, and regular life cannot continue until the intrusion is dealt with or runs its course. Obviously, there’s a bit of overlap with the other genres, since no genre is really ‘pure’ and closed unto itself, but this is what I think is central to horror fandom. We enjoy it because we want to see the world broken down; business-as-usual blown up; the daily grind ground to a halt. Not so much ‘same shit, different day’ as ‘very different shit, right now, whether you like it or not’.

Feminist science-fiction author, critic and self-professed ‘horror-story freak’ Joanna Russ, when asked to explain her appreciation for the genre, responded (after a couple of years’ consideration) that the familiar tropes and figures of horror ‘validate perceptions that need validating … if you feel lonely, persecuted, a misfit, and in terror, you aren’t crazy. You’re right.’ As Russ puts it, every worthwhile horror story is ‘an expression of something real about the world, a description of life the reader truly believed in, or at least suspected was true’.4 War, famine, pestilence and atrocity – our own Great Hunger, the War of Independence, the Civil War and the Troubles, to take a handful of examples – are easily folded into the historical record by people observing from a distance, but on those directly affected, these things have a surreal and time-fracturing impact, often lasting for generations. The important thing to bear in mind is that these kinds of disruptions have happened the world over: there is no land with a smooth, unbroken history, and thus, there’s no such thing as a land without horror.

This doesn’t mean that one is a simplistic reflection of the other, however, or that fiction is equal to the task of representing real-life horror at all. The critic Noël Carroll draws a careful distinction between what he terms ‘natural horror’ (awful stuff that happens in real life) and ‘art-horror’, the intended emotional effect of the genre.5  The poet Jessica Traynor, in an essay about the power and resonance of nightmares, remarks that, ‘When I think about [a recurring childhood nightmare] the thing that strikes me is that I’ve spent so long trying to put language on it, that the version of it I tell myself has been infected with that language,’ underlining that even the experience of a bad dream exceeds accurate representation. Writing in response to news coverage of the Tel al-Sultan massacre in Rafah on May 26, 2024, she asks,

‘What do nightmares teach us? That we haven’t yet understood what we need to understand. And that we’re right to be afraid.’ While she notes that her significant nightmares ‘hint at some evil worming its way towards the surface of reality’, she reiterates that there are no supernatural menaces in the world, ‘just selfish, petty, frightened, greedy individuals who manage to amplify their failures in a manner that causes mass destruction’.6

If the trajectory of human history returns us time and again to this kind of awfulness, it’s only natural that we would harbour a desire to derail it.

There is, perhaps, a parallel to be drawn here with the occultists, witches and aspiring mages of J. H. K.’s ‘Dhirro Dheerlha’, Micheál mac Liammóir’s ‘Aonghus Ó Cruadhlaoich’, Katharine Tynan’s ‘The Death Spancel’ and Tomás Bairéad’s ‘The Third Woman’: magic is, among other things, about trying to contain or direct a transcendent power with mortal language, and the darker it is, the more its reach exceeds its grasp, to bloodcurdling effect.

The title of this anthology is taken from a line in ‘Dhirro Dheerlha’, in which an unidentified spirit promises Earl Garrett eldritch powers and lays out the conditions of their use: ‘See you your own dark shadow in the waters – mine you cannot see.’ The darkness in the stories collected here evokes the dark side of human nature, of course, but to delve beyond the obvious and get more specific, I would argue that our shadow is our history-disrupting urge: we seek such stories out because each of us wants to break the world open, one way or another.

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