Why we love horror stories and what it says about us

I have yet to drive past the scene of an accident or crime without instinctively slowing down and rubbernecking until it's out of sight. Sure, it's a morbid fascination to have and yet I suspect I am not alone in my curiosity, judging by the way a pile-up invariably creates a traffic snafu. Let's just come out and admit it, there is something about the macabre that holds our complete, undivided attention, snaps us to alertness, and mesmerises us.

So why does our ever-so-human brain hook on to the horrific and not easily let go? Violent video games, serial killer legends, TV disaster footage and street fights grab our attention as though our mind were trained precisely for that purpose. Which it was to some extent. After all, the long and chequered human history of evolution owes a lot to the speed of our inherited fight or flight responses. The reflexes that we experience when exposed to danger: heightened pulse, increase in heart rate, quickening of breath and hyper alertness are all aids to survival.

What they also are is a wake-up call; no matter how tiredly or indifferently, or casually we come to other experiences, to experience horror is to be reminded that we are fully alive, in a way that is at least borderline, and for some, outright pleasurable. The horrific is a sort of scratching board for the mind, an evolutionary chew toy that takes us into a realm of dark playfulness.

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For to be spooked is human enough, yet, to be spooked just right feels divine. The adrenalin rush that comes with confronting the terrors of the night is unparalleled. Which perhaps explains why reading Bram Stoker's Dracula as a child in an empty room in my grandparents' creaky, wooden three-story house felt like both a rite of passage I had to make my way through, and a heady, invigorating high. One good dose of the thrills and chills that came from confronting the old Count and I was sold.

Quick on its heels came Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and then the uncanny, eerie world of Edgar Allan Poe who turned the short story universe into a kind of video game arcade of terrorising tiny tales. And yet, none of these writers really dipped their hands into the blood and entrails of rotting corpses. Those like Shirley Jackson with The Haunting of Hill House, on the contrary, relied on understatement, allowing my mind to fall into the gaps between expectation and reality and come out screaming with worse fears than could be articulated by a stranger.

The sophisticated writer of a horror novel can make you reach deep inside even by merely suggesting an absence of normality. What you pull out then is something sort of tailor-made, a personal fear factor that is terrifying like a custom-made coffin. Fear builds with anticipation. It can be endemic to the fictional world like with Justice Cronin's gruesome end-of-the-world scenario in his The Passage series, or a lonely subjective apprehension like with Stephen King's The Shining.

But each time we experience horror in all its glory we experience a blooming catharsis of emotions. Horror allows for a bleed-out of toxic repressions, and also for at least a time, a vanquishing of the painful ambivalences that real life seems to dish out. To put it simply, in the words of Stephen King, we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. I certainly did when I wrote I SEE YOU, my coming-of-age supernatural novel. 17-year-old Alia's struggle to comprehend what things mean, how they work and why the chips fall the way they do allowed me for a time to make sense of the world around me, to create monsters I could name.

There is no easy fix to most of the problems the world around us is mired in. Yet, for one brief spine-chilling moment, when lost in the pages of a horror novel it seems redemption enough to know which way to run, even if it's only in the opposite direction from the thing that threatens us.