Enjoying Fear by Orlando Bartro
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe is known throughout the world for exploring the macabre caves of the human psyche, where fear lurks like a step off a chasm.
It’s strange that people enjoy being afraid.
The enjoyment of fear is probably universal, given how many people watch horror movies and thrillers.
“I want to feel afraid tonight—let’s watch a horror movie!”
We even have a holiday devoted to horror. Of course, October is the month for Halloween, and we will enjoy the shivers and shakes of imagined terrors, presented for our paradoxical pleasure.
Poe, however, was unusual because he always lived in Halloween.
He was brave enough to seek and release his fears, and embody them in grinning hunchbacks, diseased specters, lovely maidens newly dead, and walking corpses whose eyes are being eaten by the conquering worm.
For writers, Poe is the emblem of the fearless. He was willing to say the unspeakable, despite the reactions he must have received at cocktail parties. Probably, he avoided cocktail parties. A tavern or church was more to his liking. He liked extremes, and believed that mankind could be most easily understood at the extremes, where masks might drop and show an evil leer or holy love.
And he is an encouragement not only to writers, but to to anyone willing to look at difficult realities, playacted on Halloween, just far enough away to be pleasurable.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & literary novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, available at Amazon. He is currently writing two new novels and a play.