Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

– FRANCIS BACON

“Of Death”

Fear. For almost twenty years as a fiction writer, I’ve focused on terror as my main subject. I’ve always believed, as Sartre in Nausea, that real life is so fundamentally boring that we need adventure fiction to help soothe our ennui, to take us out of the doldrums of actuality. The paradox, of course, is that if we ever truly experienced a “thriller,” we would find it so terrifying we would wish with all the power of our being to be returned to the safe but depressing boredom of reality.

T. S. Eliot puts it this way in “Sweeney Agonistes”:

“I’ll carry you off

To a cannibal isle…

Nothing to eat but the fruit as it grows…

Nothing at all but three things.”

“What things?”

“Birth, and copulation, and death.”

“I’d be bored.”

Bored? I don’t think so. Not me any longer. For I have seen real life at its starkest. I’ve learned that copulation and birth have an unavoidable consequence: death. Despite what I used to think (and what Sartre thought), I know this much-that real life, whatever else it might be, isn’t boring.

Because recently I was overwhelmed by a massive dose of my subject matter. I came face-to-face with terror, and now I have trouble writing thrillers. Having encountered death, I find that to write about it using the conventions of a thriller makes me feel I’m holding back, leaving out death’s grisly secret. And yet to include that secret would be to negate the distracting purpose of a thriller.