Finding Humor Inside the Horror
Growing up, my bedtime stories were just that: stories told to me before I went to bed. In no way, shape, or form were they suitable or encouraging for sleep.
(3 Tips for Writing Cosmic Horror That Goes Beyond.)
At night, my grandmother might tell us the tale of Lord Krishna dancing on the head of a fierce serpent king. Or my mother would tell us about the manannggal, a monster who appeared as a beautiful woman by day only to sever herself at night so that her torso could fly about the sky slurping down entrails.
These stories often finished in the same way: “Welp. Anyway. It’s late. GOODNIGHT.”
And there I would lie, petrified, imagining a snake coiling around my ankle or the window creaking open to admit the blood-slicked tongue of a monster. It is a wonder I ever slept.
When I was little, there were few words that struck as much terror in the hearts of me and my siblings as the sentence: “Can you grab [assorted food item] from the basement?” Immediately, the three of us would point at each other.
You do it!
No, you! I went last time!
She was asking you! Not me.
You see, we knew the basement was haunted. By what—or who—it was hard to say. Sometimes it was a battalion of undead centipedes. Other times we shushed one another, convinced we heard a little girl’s giggle in the dark.
In the end, the three of us would venture to the basement together. We’d tremble at the landing, staring down the roughly carpeted steps into that camphor-scented gloam. Down the stairs we went, clutching the banister for as long as we could, hitting one light switch, then two, then crossing the tiled floor to the basement fridge or pantry where whatever our mother wanted us to retrieve was waiting for us. The moment the item was snatched, we would all race up the stairs. Sometimes on all fours.
As the oldest sibling, it was my duty to protect my brother and sister.
So, when I reached the top of the stairs first, I took it upon myself to allow the runner-up to cross to the other side before slamming the door in the straggler’s face, turning off the light and making spooky “wOoOoOoOooOo!” sounds on the other side of the door while the unlucky sibling shrieked and howled and wept.
Childhood is a scary place. Perhaps I scared my siblings because I was scared. Perhaps I was just a monster.
Often, my siblings and I sit around talking about our antics with varying degrees of horror. A few years back, once we had all solidly entered our 20s or, for me, teetered into our 30s, conversation turned to the basement of our old house. The peculiar smell of it. The corpses of insects lining the windowsill. How loud we were and how fast we would run up the stairs to avoid the entity that lived in the basement.
My brother—or maybe it was my sister, goodness I can’t remember, I am disintegrating by the day—commented: “Now I feel bad for the ghost.”
Imagine going about your day, patiently haunting and skulking about, and here come these shrieking children disrupting your unholy quiet and ruining your evening of eldritch horrors. THE NERVE.
This is the sort of sideways humor that I have always loved as a reader and a writer. Humor is a sly and vital thing, particularly when it comes to telling stories. Connoisseurs of children’s literature know that children’s fiction courageously engages with calamities of all kinds. As such, the gravest mistake we can make as authors is to condescend, thus belittling a child’s wisdom, and wrest away their ability to engage with darkness.
But telling the truth doesn’t require a display of guts, gore, and other grotesqueries. To me, this is where the union of horror and humor proves essential, and it is ultimately what allowed me to tackle a story that I have danced around writing for years.
I am often asked (yes, mother, I am referring to you) why it has taken me so long to write a book that exclusively celebrates Filipino folklore and mythology. After all, I’ve written eight novels that drink from the roots of Hindu myths and explore my father’s heritage, so what was holding me back? In a word: colonialism.
The era of the British Raj lasted roughly 90 years. During that time, ancient Sanskrit works were translated and preserved. Christian missionaries came, but the Hindu faith continued. In contrast, the Spanish domination of the Philippines lasted more than 300 years.
Catholicism profoundly changed the spiritual terrain of the Philippines. Native religious practices were banned. Shamans were persecuted. Stories were forgotten. I might know the names of the pre-archipelagic deities of the Philippines, but the record of stories is, at best, incomplete and, at worse, intentionally erased. What I know with true familiarity are the tales of ghosts. I know superstitions. I know the names of monsters.
I balked at the idea of turning this into a middle-grade story. How could I avoid this legacy of pain? What would I do with this inheritance of monsters? No matter where I turned, I couldn’t avoid them. Therein lay my answer. I could not avoid the ghosts and monsters. And so, I didn’t.
But what if, rather than shrieking up and down the basement staircase where The Entity of My Childhood lived, I considered what it might be like to be them? This is the perspective that informed the writing of The Spirit Glass.
Corazon’s world is rampant with ghosts. Every Sunday, she has dinner with the ghosts of her parents. Every weekend, she and her aunt sell enchantments and potions to the unearthly denizens of the Filipino Otherworld. There are ghosts from the 1521 Battle of Mactan. There are ghosts who sell sorbetes with flavors like “Schadenfreude” and “Discovering Forgotten Candy That’s Not Too Stale In Your Pocket.” There are ghosts who lived during the era of Spanish colonization, carrying wounds so deep they have chased them into the afterlife.
Check out Roshani Chokshi’s The Spirit Glass here:
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Corazon’s world has the monsters my mother told me about too. There is the capre, the giant who smokes cigars and lives in the balete tree, only this time he is a librarian. There is the fearsome manannggal too. Just like in my mother’s stories, the manannggal is a flying, severed torso who wants to slurp out your organs and hides her legs in a grove of banana trees. But she also suffers from arthritis! And she can’t trust what people eat these days and it’s affecting her cholesterol! Times are tough! Life is hard for everyone!
If there is anything I hope readers take away from the story, it is a lesson in multitudes. That which scares us does not exist in a single dimension. Things can possess more than one aspect. They can be fearsome and funny; sad and sweet; horrific and hopeful. Life is a wilderness of unknowns and, yes, this is frightening. But if we choose to look at it more than one way, then perhaps those events which are painful can, with time, become something else: precious.