In the introduction to The Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult — an anthology of classic horror stories that deal in one way or another with the named subjects — Lon Milo DuQuette, who also edited the book, relates his boyhood experience of awakening for the first time to both a love of richly written literature and a state of self-awareness, a sense of himself as a conscious being experiencing both the world and himself. He credits this experience, which began during his ninth year on a stiflingly hot and humid Nebraska morning in July 1957 and then continued to unspool for the rest of that summer, with laying the foundation for his later life as a writer.
It’s a truly absorbing account, and it also contains some of DuQuette’s fascinating reflections on the nature and importance of horror fiction. Here’s a key excerpt in which DuQuette links horror fiction to science fiction and then spirals out from there to consider a dazzling array of epochal developments in human knowledge and culture, including the very evolution of human consciousness (or intelligence, as he puts it):
That summer with Poe and my newly awakened love for the written word would eventually have profound effects upon my life, the most obvious being my eventual career as a writer. Writing is not only what I do for a living, it is my art, my joy, my voice, my meditation, my prayer, my confession, my declaration of independence, my act of worship, my song of self-awareness. My profession, however, has taken many years to evolve and develop. My 1957 boyhood love affair with horror had more immediate and dramatic consequences. Put simply — I woke up.
Poe’s narrative voice clearly revealed to me that I possessed my own narrative voice. That hot summer morning, my consciousness instantly expanded. I no longer just passively saw or heard or smelled or felt the things around me. I woke up and became consciously aware that I was seeing and hearing and smelling and feeling the things around me. I became at once the observer and the observed of my own movie, and like the voice-over narration in a film-noir detective story, I began to tell myself the bedtime story of my own existence, and the narration continues to this moment.
Thank you, Edgar Allan Poe. Thank you, horror literature.
The genre of classic horror has also changed the world. It can be argued that horror is the mother of science fiction — and that science fiction has molded the future and touched the consciousness of countless millions of fans who now have given themselves permission to dream like gods. In its way, horror is the grandmother of theoretical mathematics, quantum physics, and the mutation of intelligence in this corner of the galaxy.
Source: “Horror Takes Its Time,” introduction to The Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult, ed. Lon Milo DuQuette
The entirety of this introduction is (or may be, depending on the fickle whims of online algorithms) readable in Amazon’s or Google’s book previews. It includes not just the personal account excerpted above but DuQuette’s deep dives into the respective significances of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Robert W. Chambers, and Aleister Crowley for the field of horror fiction, along with much of additional interest.
I credit my most significant awakening to Fox Mulder in X Files – his desire to investigate things. Like characters in Lovecraft stories. Or like the Arkham Horror board games series from Fantasy Flight Games. Then much later as an adult I read Rudolf Otto and he talks about the tremendous fascinating mystery. I think all those have parallels to a real human desire, integral to religious ecstasy and transcendent consciousness. Which is why I balk so much at secrecy in religion and admire evangelism