I’m gonna be real honest – I don’t do horror.
Because I can’t.
Call me a wuss – I’m fine with that. I call it having too vivid of an imagination. The things that I read and watch tend to show up in my dreams – probably because of the way I consume things, thinking about how they are constructed and how they are choosing to tell the story and a whole string of ‘what ifs.’ It’s no surprise, then, that as I continue to process it throughout the day, my subconscious needs to find ways to file it all away while I’m sleeping. Enter: dreams.
So if the thing I’m reading is gory or scary, so are my dreams. Which means I don’t sleep well.
There is a part of me that wishes it could read and watch horror because of how excited folks who consume it get when they talk about it. But the rest of me points at all the other books out in the world that are there for the reading – and I can’t help but wonder if my subconscious did me a favor by cutting out this particular genre.
(In September, one of my book clubs read a series of essays where people talk about why the horror genre was so important to them, and each essay was based around a particular movie that means a lot to them. I had seen maybe two? People were shocked that I hadn’t even seen Jaws – I mean, who hasn’t? Well. I hadn’t. <–and no, that’s not a typo. After I stated that I was ok never seeing any of the movies talked about in that collection, and that I would be skipping our October meeting when we were set to read an actual horror novel, my friend and I opted to head to the drive in near us. It’s their 75th season, and they were opting to show a couple throw backs – ET (which her boys had yet to see) and, yep, Jaws. Happy to say I managed to sit through it, but also happy to never see it again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Ami Maxine 