Creative Curation Vol. 4: Haunting

and curious choices in writing and reading

Photo by Riccardo Pelati on Unsplash

Since All Hallow’s Eve is fast approaching, I thought it might be fun to offer a curation on the theme of haunting. No, not the ghostly kind. I’m not a fan of horror, though I don’t mind delving into high strangeness.

In fact, as I recently divulged to a friend, I’ve been bingeing on the Haunted Cosmos podcast, where a couple of guys talk about all kinds of strange happenings as they “investigate a world that isn’t just stuff.” Topics range from dragons to faeries, bigfoot to giants, ghosts, and the Bermuda Triangle. (It’s especially fun listening to an eerie episode while cleaning an empty school with lots of doors open to dark spaces.)

Haunting Youth

But you can get your fill of ghostly and creepy things anywhere at this time of year, so the haunting I’m talking about here is more the stuff that stays with you, starting with a quote from a post by Sierra Madison:

“I can only pen the past as a metaphor, a mistranslated scripture long abandoned by its worshippers. Now it haunts me like a kindred ghost, tugging on the train of my dress, looming over my shoulder, tracing its delicate fingertips down my spine. A once delighted presence converted into an unbearable absence—one I must retreat from.”

Sierra writes about fears she faced surrounding the idea of adulthood. To be honest, I had a difficult time resonating with the post at first. For me, those years of early adulthood flew past. I moved to India at 16, got engaged at 19, married at 21, became a mother within two weeks of my 22^nd birthday, and by the time I was 26, I was parenting three young children. (Motherhood leaves little time for introspection or dealing with one’s own fears.)

But while reading her post I realized, we live in a different time now. With the pervasiveness of social media and constant connection-that-make-us-feel-more-disconnected, fear and anxiety make sense. Also, there is more to be afraid of than 20 years ago. (Have I really been adulting for over two decades?)

The global pandemic showed how quickly society can fall to a screeching halt. Wars and riots and a problematic, overhyped, and angry political environment leaves much to be anxious and troubled about. This young woman’s post feels more personal, though. The anxieties not so much larger societal issues but simply a fear of losing that child part of her.

You can read Sierra’s whole post here: the past is full of stories that have already ended

Haunting Childhood Movies

Yara and Gillian at Story Has It shared a post about movie scenes that haunted them as children. What I found interesting about the post is that these scenes weren’t from “horror movies” (except for the last one). The scenes mentioned are mostly from movies made for kids—like Pinocchio and The Neverending Story.  

I remember being horrified by the morphing of little boys into donkeys in the movie Pinocchio—because while the boy made of wood survives and has a happy ending, the other boys are all sent off to lifelong slavery as donkeys. What about them? I wondered. (They were the redshirts of my childhood long before I watched a Star Trek episode.)  

The comments offer more scenes from “children’s movies” that haunted viewers—like The Land before Time when Little Foot’s mom dies, or Dumbo when he’s separated from his mom. (What young child wouldn’t be traumatized by the image of being separated from a parent?)

I have my own experience of being haunted by a scene from a movie as a young child. It was an early cartoon version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

But I won’t get into that now, as I plan to do some writing about the Narnia series here on Limning the Ordinary next year.

Haunting Stories

While I don’t watch or read the horror genre, being a highly sensitive person and also someone who just doesn’t want to open my mind to wanton, graphic “yucky stuff”, there are some books or stories that have haunted me long after the reading. Not always in a bad way.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road had that effect on me. A hellish, apocalyptic landscape where a father with his boy is carrying the fire, symbolically, in a world that has turned to ice. It is not an easy read, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning book has become a modern classic. There is a movie, also, with Viggo Mortenson playing the man, but I don’t think I could watch it. The book was harrowing enough, but deeply meaningful at the same time.

Photo by Jens Herrndorff on Unsplash

Years ago, as a young adult, I read The Green Mile. It’s the only Stephen King novel I’ve read to date (not being a fan of the horror genre, as I mentioned). I read it after watching the movie at a friend’s house. The movie had a couple of scenes that horrified me (namely, the electric chair scene; if you’ve seen the movie, you couldn’t have forgotten that scene).

Though it’s been nearly 25 years since I read the book, I remember it being a haunting but well-written story. Not haunting in a creepy way, but a poignant way. There are aspects of the book that didn’t make it into the movie, which added depth to the story overall.  

Photo by M. R. on Unsplash

The Book of Sorrows is the second book in a trilogy by Walter Wangerin Jr. I’d heard this author mentioned several times by writers I respect. I loved the poignancy of his “children’s” book Potter: Come Fly to the First of the Earth.

Walter Wangerin has a unique writing style and I also enjoyed various nonfiction works of his, such as Beate Not the Poore Desk, a book on the writing life, and Wounds Are Where Light Enters—a collection of nonfiction stories.

The first book in the trilogy is The Book of the Dun Cow: which tells of “a time when … animals could speak, when Chauntecleer the Rooster ruled over a … peaceful kingdom. What the animals did not know was that they were the Keepers of Wyrm, monster of evil long imprisoned beneath the earth ... and Wyrm, sub terra, was breaking free.”

The final book, Peace at the Last, didn’t come out until three decades after the first book was published.

But back to the second book—The Book of Sorrows (also titled Lamentations). Yeah, I know, the title should have warned me. I am amazed at how devastated and haunted I felt (and still feel!) by some of the scenes in that story.

Walter Wangerin’s fiction is superb. He writes well, but in an intentionally emotive manner. Sometimes I felt like he could have left certain things unshown, undescribed. It didn’t fall in the category of horror, but some scenes haunt me still—revealing the power of a writer to shine a light on darkness and describe it in stark detail.

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

While that might be a choice some writers make, and they do it well, that’s not something I tend to do in my writing. As an HSP, I can be deeply affected by things I watch, hear, and see—so I’m sensitive to the potential effect of my writing on readers. A writer who isn’t highly sensitive, though, might feel they need to use graphic descriptions to highlight their meaning.

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I’m curious what you as a writer, or reader, feel about this. When it comes to writing (or reading) difficult or graphic scenes—do you delve into it? Do you prefer a direct light shone on the event? Or do you tend to turn the lens away, perhaps describe the shadows or use metaphor to portray the scene?

I feel like we know enough horror and darkness to be able to fill in the blanks and don’t need every detail spelled out. There is enough to haunt us from our own experiences and memories without the need to search for more. (Except, of course, when it comes to bingeing podcasts about high strangeness and unexplained phenomena … just for fun.) 😊

What scenes from books or movies have haunted you over the years? What haunts are you revisiting at this time of October-tide?