I am willing to accept that there are wide differences between individuals. That much is obvious. But what is becoming weird to me is when I seem to fall into an extreme.

I seem to fall into a lot of them. Worryingly so. But this isn’t the blog post to bring up all the ways in which my life is a shambles.

Instead I was thinking about the horror genre. I have been going through reddit for years now, plucking out the occasional book recommendations. On more than one occasion someone mentions how good such-and-such a horror book is. I am always intrigued, and thus put the book into my reading pile. When a few months down the line I get around to reading it, the book is always a massive disappointment.

Every single fucking time.

It has at this point gotten a little old, and I am finally starting to wise up to it. Horror pretty much never effects. I have given Tracy Harris her full credit over on my other blog, but it is all worth repeating here. Tracy Harris is the first person I ever heard quip about horror not being able to affect her, pretty much beginning at the point when she had real problems in her life. The thought of a murder on the loose is a whole lot more abstract that your mortgage, which you’ll be able to pay off sometime in the next 50 years, if and only if everything goes well. For me it is even worse. I am far, far too poor to even ever have a mortgage. I don’t know how I am supposed to be scared at the idea of reading a play called The King in Yellow, and the madness reading it would bring on, when frankly every day I have to look on over the likelihood that I will die alone, probably one day chocking on some hastily eaten food in my one bedroom apartment, and that I should consider myself fortunate if there is a cat to eat my corpse when I am gone.

Please, bring on the madness.

Frankly, if I were to gaze upon some eldritch horror and contemplate my insignificance in the universe, at least I can have said to have done something with my Friday night. Ho-hum.

Ok, but again this isn’t just meant to be a moaning blog post. The issue is that I keep going back to these damn books. I did read The King in Yellow, Carrie, It, The Dark Net, and The Troop. The best of the whole lot was Harlan Ellison’s “I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream“, and even that I read as if it were a sci-fi story, more than a horror story. These stories seem to have some pull on me. It might be exactly because I do read them as if they were si-fi stories, where at some point there is always some explanation of what is going on. If the visceral elements of the story don’t bother you, you are often just left with weak explanations that don’t really scratch much of an itch.

I think I have learned my lesson. I think I will stop soon.