“When does it get to the scary part?”
Sometimes you have to wade through the seemingly boring exposition.
After reading John Langan’s The Fisherman, I told my husband Dan, “Oh, you’d like this one!” and recommended that he read it. Aside from being a chilling horror novel of epic proportions, the story takes place in and around the Hudson Valley, not far from where we live.
A few pages into the book Dan asks me, “Does horror as a genre always need the first part to be all exposition and build up? Cause that’s not scary. Do you know anything that is scary right away?”
First, I explain, there’s not that much buildup in this novel. It has to establish the main character’s situation, which is that he is devastated by the death of his wife. This fact becomes crucial later in the book, it’s not just for the sake of “fridging” aka the trope of giving a male protagonist a dead wife to move the plot forward.
As far as things that are scary right away, I said, Adam Neville is really great at being frightening in the opening pages. Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Hex kicks off on an extremely creepy note, and a lot of horror short stories (especially Stephen King’s Night Shift) get super scary real quick.
This has happened before when I’ve been excited to share a book with Dan and he’s described it as a “snooze fest.” But, he’s also possibly the most impatient person I’ve ever known—this is a guy who thought The Descent was taking too long to get to the monsters. So I tell him to push through and stick with the novel, because it gets really good.
Then Dan says, “Maybe you can add this to your horror/sobriety comparison. The beginning of horror books is when you’re drinking and unhappy, then once the book gets good, that’s when you’re sober.”
I tell him I like this analogy, so I’ll run with it. Except in this case, the beginning of the scary book is the beginning of recovery.
Before I quit drinking, I had always thought getting sober would be like an 80s movie montage. My “rock bottom” was the third act low-point—the part in the film where the main character loses everything—but then they turn it all round and get their shit together. CUT TO:
My recovery montage! I’m jogging, cause I care about my health. I’m in an office – I have a job! My hair looks really good! I’m talking to a cute guy, his hair looks really good! Now I’m booking acting gigs and getting that sweet, sweet external validation!
But it wasn’t like that. It was more just me walking around lower Manhattan, smoking, working low-paying temp jobs. Seeing weird movies with my friends. Reading a ton of books. It was not very exciting. There was no meet cute, I was still wearing the same clothes, and there was no agent seeing me on stage and saying “You’ve got the goods!”
There was no montage—no massive, dramatic changes in a short amount of time—because recovery (and life) don’t work that way. It was actually just a lot of really small changes that built up over a long period of time.
When do you get to the GOOD PART? The SCARY PART???
Well, I suppose you could call all of this “the exposition” part of recovery, and if you’re in this part and you’re bored, dude, I get it. It can be boring. For one, there’s the inevitable feeling of FOMO when you’re not drinking, and two, if you’ve gotten really used to the near-constant mental health crises that comes with addiction then it’s going to seem a bit boring. But, like any good scary novel, you need to have some exposition.
And seriously—those small gradual changes really do matter. In less than a month I’ll be ten years sober, and those early days didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, but they were. Maybe it wasn’t montage worthy, but I was starting to build a sense of self-worth and an identity that existed beyond crazy and fuckup. The “good part” is a lot easier to see when I look back on the past 10 years of my recovery, I actually did do a lot of really cool stuff, and I plan on doing more in the next 10 years.
So if you’re just cracking open the juicy horror novel that is your recovery, I assure you that the “scary part” is closer than you think.