Playing With Perception in Horror Fiction

What is perception? Perception is information that precedes meaning. Perception is sensation not yet made sense of; food that is tasted but not swallowed, un-digested. Perception sits between self and other, inside and outside, me and not me. It’s how we internalize what’s outside of us, creating the boundaries of our bodies in our own minds through a process of crossing them over and over again.

All literature plays with perception. The author mentions an apple and the reader creates the apple in their mind. The author’s apple and the reader’s apple are the same apple and different apples. The author describes a character feeling the sun on their face and the reader imagines heat pressing against their own cheeks. The heat that the reader conjures is not quite their own heat, but a heat created between their mind and the author’s. The words on the page behave like skin on a body, which can act as both a barrier and a gate, a sensing boundary that mediates between the mind of the author and the mind of the reader, both joining and separating.

Horror writing has a special relationship with perception. While all genres of literature use perception as a tool for creating a sense of place, invoking emotion, building the symbolic language of the text, horror—due to its dealings in fear—has a special relationship to perception in and of itself. Feeling afraid is, above all, a sensory experience. It is pre-internalized, pre-meaning, pre-affect. You draw your fingers away from the hot pan before you are even aware of touching it. To scare someone with words, you must keep them right at the edge of perception, their nerves tingling, while holding the ability to make meaning out of these experiences just beyond their reach.

In my horror novella, Root Rot, I was interested in playing around with this special relationship between horror and perception. This led to three important decisions around point of view in the story. The first was my decision to write in first person. Writing in first person brings a visceral immediacy to storytelling that I like in general, but particularly in horror. First person brings the story into the body of a character, which creates a certain uncomfortable vulnerability in the reader that’s fertile ground for terror.

The second decision was to write from a child’s point of view. Children also have a special relationship with perception in that they possess full perceptive capacities—they can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell just as well as (or sometimes better than) adults can—but they are still developing their cognitive and affective capacities and their sense of themselves. This is part of what makes being a child so terrifying and overwhelming, this lag between perception and meaning, the constant confusion and feeling of “being done to,” the way in which thoughts and feelings often catch up to an experience later, changing it after it’s already happened.

By choosing to write from a child’s point of view, I am forcing my readers to think with, and at the same pace, as my characters. The reading experience is a process of making sense of the sometimes overwhelming sensory perceptions presented in the story without the help of guidance from within the writing about how to feel or what to think. This is of course not the only way perception can be used to create or amplify horror. There is, for instance, the horror and dread of watching something terrible unfold in front of you and being unable to stop it. There is the existential horror found in characters experiencing their own bodies unraveling or witnessing the unraveling of other human bodies. However, this is the type of horror that’s most interesting to me: the horror of perceiving something without knowing what it is that you’re perceiving or what it means to you. A sense of overwhelm that turns into a sense of threat. An amplification of the everyday horror we experience while trying to make sense of the world around us.

The third decision I made to play with perception was my decision to write from a collective perspective, the “we” of the children. By doing this, I am attempting to create porousness in the skin of the writing, to further dissolve boundaries between readers and character, self and other. Who is “we”? Is it the children? The readers? Some omniscient being outside of them? All? Some? Something else? Existing both as part of and outside of the “we,” the readers become part of the sensing organ of the book itself, part of one large body.

The author is included in this “we” as well and this, to me, is what’s most exciting about the writing process. When I write, it’s like I’m perceiving in reverse, “un-thinking,” taking the images and sensations that spin together to create my thoughts, dreams, and experience of the world, and unwinding them into their composite sensory parts on the page, which readers can then pick up and spin into their own fantasies and feelings. In doing this, the reader and author make meaning of the text in tandem, creating the horror together between us.