WHY IN TIMES LIKE THESE, WE LIKE STORIES THAT DISTURB US

Lately, pandemic winter has been hitting especially hard. In New York City, where I live, COVID variants are on the rise, and the weather has been unremittingly frigid and snowy. Morale is at an all-time low. People who are able to work from home are hunkered down, waiting for the worst to pass. Seemingly everyone I know is seeking comfort in their screens and books, and yet comfort material can mean different things to different people.

I’ve always been partial to art that disturbed me, but when COVID-19 upended life as I knew it last year, I found I could hardly stomach anything else. Nothing light or escapist— no televised baking competitions or Sex and the City reruns for me. Confections of any type only seemed to make me feel worse. Instead, I binged Micaela Coel’s series I May Destroy You, a troubling study of sexual assault that refuses easy answers or comfort; I devoured Tom O’Neill’s Chaos, a deeply unsettling deep dive into the Manson Family murders. Even now, I still find myself hungry for stories about the darker side of humanity. I’ve reread Ian McEwan’s grimmest novellas of incest and murder; I’ve spent late nights watching films like Se7en, even when I know I have to get up early the next morning.

image | Sara J. Winston

Much ink has been spilled over why so many people seem inexorably drawn to stories that frighten and repulse. The popularity of disturbing literature has been attributed to morbid fascination, the search for an adrenaline rush, an unseemly and fetishistic propensity for rubber-necking. Seen in a more forgiving light, the desire for darkness has been explained and excused as a form of self-improvement for the reader. Some argue it functions as exposure therapy for trauma, a way to explore our fears safely and experience the nightmares we hope to otherwise never experience, an exercise in imaginative thinking that will help us battle our own challenges and have greater empathy for others.

Supposedly, this is how we learn more about ourselves. Conventional wisdom holds that reading makes us better people because it develops our sense of empathy— at the very least, it’s supposed to be entertaining and enjoyable. An escape from reality, whether we learn something or not.

But while it’s true that disturbing stories can be their own form of escapism, that’s not necessarily why we should read them. Some literature is just hard to read, its content hard to face. It should be. We don’t read Lolita because we want to identify and empathize with Humbert Humbert; we don’t read Native Son to feel good about ourselves or the carceral state.

It is true that some literature simply caters to a reader’s desire to see some part of their lives reflected back at them—in fact, some stories do that quite well. But literature should challenge us, should sometimes make us uncomfortable, without any promise of redemption, edification, or healing. It should find, test, and surpass the limits of our empathy. I wrote my novel A Good Man because I wanted to unsettle and implicate my readers, and because I wanted to face head-on the questions of why someone would want to read such a dark story. In a way, it was a kind of experiment as to how far I could go while keeping my reader with me, even if they could tell there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

Right now optimism feels false. We do have real fear in our lives, some of us for the first time. Despite repeated appeals to personal responsibility, events are largely beyond the control of individuals; the future is uncertain, if not outright dystopian. We’re not sure if there’s anything that can be learned from the senseless, unforgivable waste of life and bottomless grief of the last year, but we do know that retreating from reality feels insufficient and impotent.

And so I’ll stick to reading what disturbs me. Have these books made me feel any better? No. Am I glad I’ve read them? Yes. That’s because art doesn’t need a social function; it doesn’t need to provide comfort. And sometimes, especially in deeply disturbing times, it shouldn’t.