I'm making a list, I decided that maybe this will help make my ideas a little clearer.
How Sanders-Self makes this story Scary:
- The family she chooses to follow, is completely normal, there is nothing special about them for this time period. They love each other and only care about their crops and maintaining their image to their neighbors.
- The spirit, or being as she calls it, remains very mysterious. Through the beginning of the haunt, we know nothing of it, and it's visits are unexpected and unnerving-it comes and then goes without warning, because it is so unpredictable that just heightens our fear. Things that we can't control or escape are things that will spook every time.
- Her attempt to make the being even scarier by giving it the ability to think like a human and control their lives is "scary" in essence, *though in the book she kind of failed, just made it cheesy*because again, it takes away any power the family has, the fact that they are defenseless and at the mercy of things we can't understand is not funny.
For many, the spirit represents the unknown, it seems to have no purpose or end in sight, so for a reader this powerlessness of a usually steady and controlled family, makes it seem so real, so much like, wow this could happen, i could see this happening to people just like me. Heightening our fear.
How it compares to the "Shining":
- Takes the unknown and integrates it with the everyday-normal, average families turning against each other and destroying themselves as a result of their powerlessness.
- The reader, for the most part, can't always see what's haunting the family, the spooky parts are unexpected-element of surprise- and therefore we feel just as surrounded and trapped in the moment as the reader.
So far as I can tell, to wrap this up, the two books are scary because they deal with the untraceable in our everyday lives, these situations and people make readers feel like this is something that could happen to you. And also because the authors have the ability of keeping the reader jumping and guessing, the minute the reader suspects what is going on the scary of the novel is lost.
Just to my central question-why do we like being scared *and how, is above* i think, just from reading these two so far its almost as if we are confronting the fears in us by reading, and generally when you live through your fears you will come out not fearing it anymore.
