“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” – H.P. Lovecraft

My family went camping together a lot when I was younger, and my dad always loved to scare the kids with campfire stories. You probably would know many of them – a young couple parks their car in the woods, ignoring a radio broadcast about an escaped murderer with a hook for a hand. As the night progresses, they hear a scraping sound on the car door. One of them is urged to check it out – and finds a rusty metal hook stuck to their door.

This story probably appears predictable and rote, but elements of it fascinate me. Nearly every element lacks concrete detail, but this is the only reason the story is successful. Think about how it would be different if we were told they were in Black Hill Forest in Wyoming or the teens were Chris the jock and Susie the academic or if the radio broadcast described the killer as “five foot ten, dark hair, blue eyes.” (And really, you’d hope a news warning would contain at least a little information like that!) The story ends abruptly – how would it be different if we see the kids get murdered, or find out later that they were?

Scary stories operate in negative spaces, creating a blank canvass for its audience to project their deepest fears onto. One of the reasons bad horror movies fail is because they spend too long showing or explaining the monster – they end up leaving the audience with something much tamer than the nightmare they came up with. The really scary stories, though, don’t unmask their villains. They leave the horror unexplained, a Gregorian knot that we cannot cut through.

King’s tale of the witches is a good scary story because it fits these criteria. It sketches rather than describes – the witch’s contest, the witch of unknown origin or gender, the story that contains all the evil in the world – and invites the reader to fill in the negative spaces. The tension of what the story contains is never resolved, which means it contains everything you fear it does, and more.

This story reminded me of a few great “weird fiction” stories. They are all about the dangers of learning forbidden knowledge, and they all draw horror from unknowable, unexplained sources. In Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, Antarctic explorers come across an ancient alien city and discover the secret origin of humanity. They also learn the city has been taken over by an unspeakable evil, which they catch a glimpse of as they are leaving. What they see is terrifying, driving one of the explorers mad, but when the reader expects the monster to be described, we read: “The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness…” There are no answers or resolutions to be found here. Looking for them will drive you insane.

Robert Chamber’s short story collection The King in Yellow also features an object of unknowable terror. The second act of the titular play is told to contain the eldritch secrets of the universe, but will drive any reader insane. We never have the chance to read it ourselves, of course, but the premise demands speculation. A character named Hildred reads the first act and then attempts to burn the book, but his eyes fall on the next page. “If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it.” The temptation of solving the unsolvable riddle is too much to resist – he snatches it from the flames, reading and rereading it to himself. At the end of the story, we are told he has died in an asylum.

King writes that we are “fearful of enigmas,” (25) and the endurance of scary stories proves him right. As Chamberlin says, stories are how we make sense of the world – so it follows that, when faced with a story that we can’t make sense of, we feel the need to figure it out. We might tell the protagonist not to open the door in a horror movie, but we want them to – we keep watching, because we need to solve the riddle of what’s on the other side. I think it’s part of human nature that given the choice, most of us would ask to hear the witch’s story, or open Pandora’s box, or read The King in Yellow, or look back at the Mountains of Madness. We can’t imagine anything scarier than not knowing – though of course, as these stories warn us, there’s plenty of scarier things out there anyway.

With this in mind, here’s a new campfire story for you:

A long time ago, there was a city walled off from the rest of the world. The city did not know crime or sickness, and any issues between its citizens had quick and happy resolutions.

In this city lived a curious man named Mark. Mark was always asking questions: “Why is the city walled off from the rest of the world?” “This is the world. There is nothing outside. We have everything we need here,” said the townspeople.

But Mark found a rusted iron gate built into the wall. “How can that be true if there’s a gate here?” he asked. “That gate has never been opened. There is nothing outside. We have everything we need here,” said the townspeople.

Frustrated, Mark found his friend Meg and asked her to help him plan an expedition. “There must be something out there,” said Mark, “and I will find it.” Meg agreed to help him prepare. Soon Mark set off, carrying notebooks to record what he learned and draw what he saw, and enough supplies to last him for weeks.

Months later, the rusted iron gate opened again. A man with an unkempt beard and sunken eyes slipped through, quickly and carefully closing the gate behind him. He made his way to Meg’s house.

Meg couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw the man. “Mark? Where were you? You were supposed to be back months ago!”

“I got lost,” Mark replied. “I was trying to find my way back.”

“Where are your notebooks? I need to hear all about it!”

“I stopped recording things after the first few days. I destroyed my notebooks soon after.”

“Mark, what did you see?”

Mark did not answer, but looked at Meg with an expression that clearly meant, “I will take that secret to my grave.” Meg was confounded, not understanding why Mark would withhold what he had learned, or what he could have seen that would have made him do so. And although she had never heard the word or felt the feeling before, Meg knew she had been betrayed.

“I can’t believe you would keep secrets from me!” She ran out the door and began to rally the townspeople. “Mark went outside, but he won’t tell us what he found! Let’s see what he thinks is so special about beyond the gate.” She threw the gate open and went outside. The townspeople, their curiosity newly aroused, followed closely.

Outside of the city, Meg found herself in the middle of a large library. Bookshelves were stacked to the clouds, and labyrinthine corridors stretched out in all directions, as far as the eye could see. Awestruck, Meg approached a shelf and opened a book.

As the first words wormed their way into her brain, Meg realized in horror what the books contained. She turned around to warn the townspeople, but they had already made their way into the library, and were already starting to read. One by one, their faces contorted in expressions of terror, and they dropped their books to the ground.

The citizens of the town never discussed what they learned that day. But it was no help, and their pristine city began to crumble anyway. That’s the truth about stories, of course: once you tell one, it can never be put back.

References

Chambers, Robert. “The King in Yellow.” Project Gutenberg. July 6, 2003. Accessed May 27, 2015. <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8492/8492-h/8492-h.htm>

Lovecraft, H.P. “At the Mountains of Madness.” Project Gutenberg. April 2015. Accessed May 27, 2015. <http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600031h.html>