The Horrible Things That Truly Exist in Our World
There is enough real suffering in the world, so I keep wondering why we spend so much effort inventing more of it. I study psychology, and over the years I have listened to and read about things that happened to people, some recent, some from long ago, that are hard to repeat. A tragedy leaves a residue. The specific details of what took place stay lodged in the minds of the people who lived through them or had to clean up afterward. If what actually happens is already this bad, sometimes worse than anything a writer could dream up, why manufacture more cruelty for a movie screen or a video game?
Human sacrifice runs through history, and it still turns up in cases of satanic ritual abuse. Children are born, never recorded anywhere, and vanish. I think too about the simple fact of how people die. Is there terror in the final moments before someone is gone? And then there is everything that comes next. Somebody has to find the body, somebody has to deal with what remains, and that experience marks them. None of this is the pretend scare of a haunted house set up for Halloween. This is frequently where post-traumatic stress begins, the kind that forces a person to relive the worst moments of their life again and again.