Why Do We Like to Be Scared?

A 5-Author Roundtable Discussion Led by Mary Kay Andrews

Oct 30, 2024

Hosted by Mary Kay Andrews

Cross-Posted with J.T. Ellison of The Creative Edge

Ah, October. A chill is in the air. Leaves rustle under foot. It’s getting dark earlier and earlier. There are ghoulish decorations and haunted everythings all around. It’s spooky season, when we find ourselves deliberately drawn to exploring stories that chill, that thrill, that scare the pants off of us.

Why do you like to be scared?

Stephen King, the “King of Horror” himself, once told an interviewer, “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”

Part of the success of any scary story — whether it’s a thriller or suspense or horror — is the idea that even the most ordinary-seeming character, or mundane situation, could turn dark at any moment.

What scares the bejezzus out of you?

Things Stephen King has said frighten him: “spiders, elevators, closed-in places, the dark, sewers, funerals, the idea of being buried alive, cancer, heart attacks, the number 13, black cats, and walking under ladders.”

Wow, that’s a lot of stuff! What would you add to that list?

On the eve of Halloween, we thought it would be a great time to check in with five masters of the sleep-with-the-lights-on kind of books that hordes of readers everywhere are drawn to—not just now, but all year round.

So, turn off your horror movie marathon and sidle up to our virtual bonfire here at Friends & Fiction as we talk ghost stories and frights of all kinds with J.T. Ellison, Karin Slaughter, Lisa Unger, Paula Hawkins and Lucy Foley.

Why do you think people like to be scared?

Paula Hawkins: It’s a weird one. I think there’s a thrill to it, isn’t there? There's that anticipation of the jump scare that you get from watching horror movies. There’s something really fun about that.

J.T. Ellison: So, strange answer, but here you go. I think it’s because we haven’t evolved too terribly much past the caveman era. Our amygdalas are built for, and primed for, the most basic limbic reaction: fight or flight. We were created that way to keep ourselves safe from attack by saber tooth tigers. But we don’t live in a world like that anymore, where danger is imminent all the time. We don’t have to hunt down our food and run the risk of becoming prey ourselves. But we still have that biological predetermination. So we seek out ways to exercise that limbic system in a safe and relatively harm-free environment--books, movies, and the like. That way, we get to experience the emotion and the sensation, but it can’t hurt us.

Lisa Unger: For most people, the biggest stakes are the most personal. We lie awake at night afraid not for the fate of the free world, (most nights — though there’s a lot to worry about these days) but for our loved ones, our ability to survive and thrive in the face of adversity, wondering what the world has in store for us next. So I think that’s what scares people most is a loss of control, an inability to help the people we care about, to survive what the world throws at us.

Lucy Foley: I think it speaks to something primeval in us. Especially in this day and age, in which modern life can feel quite frictionless, in which we can spend hours or days existing in our minds but not our bodies, we have perhaps lost something of our connection to that animal part of ourselves. There’s a kind of catharsis in it, in feeling your heart rate spike.

Karin Slaughter: I have no idea why people liked to be scared because I fucking hate it. I’m always surprised when people are scared by my books, but I guess that’s because I know what’s going to happen and they don’t.

What draws you to writing suspense? Or thrillers. Do you differentiate?

J.T.: I do think there are differences in these genres that are important to define. For me, in most suspense novels, the reader is discovering the truths of the story at the same time as the main character. In contrast, in the thriller, the reader is several steps ahead of the main character, usually even knowing who the bad guys are from the very beginning. The thriller has heightened stakes because you must keep the readers interest, and they have to root for the hero to save the day before the wheels come off the bus entirely. In suspense, the reader is stuck in the same unsettling situation as the main character and trying to conjure a way out. And just for giggles… a mystery is like a suspense in that the reader and the main character are trying to solve the same puzzle, but the main character is ten steps ahead of the reader, and often has to share the solution at the end.

Karin: There’s a certain satisfaction in writing thrillers. I’m a big believer that every good story starts with a question that’s answered by the end, which gives the structure of thriller writing a natural advantage. To me, the most important thing isn’t the whodunnit aspect, but the whats and whys—Why did this one person think it was okay to hurt another person? What justifications did they use to get themselves to the point to commit this crime? Why did they think they could get away with it? What are they going to do if they feel like they might get caught? What gut instinct led the good guy to finding the bad guy? Those emotional components add to what Flannery O’Connor called the "mystery of character," and I’ve always felt the emotional responses of the characters are incredibly important to a satisfying denouement.

Lisa: It has been said that the first story ever told was probably a thriller. It might have been etched on a cave wall, but it was most likely the story of how the hunter hit his mark and fed the village, how the enemy was vanquished, or how spring came after a long and brutal winter. These stories are told because they remind us that good can triumph, that justice may be served, that the sun will rise. That’s what draws me to the genre.

Lucy: I don’t really differentiate. I’m not ENTIRELY sure what the difference is. Perhaps the degree of fear factor? I think I’m drawn by the reasons above, in that I enjoy scaring myself. I’m also fascinated by secrets and secret pasts and the idea of fate catching up with people and just desserts. And I LOVE a good twist as a reader so to try and give that experience to people via my own writing is a thrill.

Paula: These are the stories I’ve always been interested in. They’re the stories that I want to read. I always liked the darkest fairy tales when I was a kid. I always wanted to hear more about the worst, goriest stories. I cannot say why except that that’s what I’m drawn to.

Why do you think books that scare us are so popular?

J.T.: For me, I adore a book where the stakes are incredibly high, and the characters are deeply flawed. It’s that desire to exercise my amygdala! I think there’s also an element of there but for the grace of God go I... it’s a way to experience the emotions from a safe remove. And it’s always a blast when the writer is so skilled they can mislead you, then twist the story back in a way that is both surprising yet inevitable.

Lucy: At the risk of sounding like I’m contradicting my answer to the first question the modern world can be a very frightening place, but often in quite an abstract way, and I think experiencing fear through the written word or onscreen in a controlled manner in which we know there’ll be a conclusion and no actual consequence has an odd sort of comfort to it. Again it’s about catharsis. And I think we’re all nosey.

Karin: To me, a good thriller is cathartic. I know that the bad guys will be caught and the good guys will win. Particularly when you’re talking about violence against women, that’s not something that’s guaranteed in real life.

Lisa: These stories make us braver when the night is long and dark. That’s why readers turn to crime fiction and thrillers, to metabolize the darkness we perceive in the world.

What personally scares/frightens you?

J.T.: Spiders. Intolerance. Cruelty to animals. Thermonuclear war. Being alone in the dark. All things that are irrational to worry about because they are (mostly) out of my control, but keep me up at night.

Lucy: Other people. Slugs. The blank page.

Lisa: The totality of my personal fears can be found in the pages of my books. I write about what scares me daily, so it’s all there on the page. In fact, it’s the reason I write about it, to exorcize those demons.

Paula: Actually, so many things. I’m quite pessimistic. I can always think about the worst possible thing that can happen in any given situation. For example, I dream about escaping to a remote house somewhere—on an island, for example (like in The Blue Hour). But I know it’s a ludicrous fantasy because I would never sleep. I would just listen for the creak on the stairs all the time.

Karin: that noise in the middle of the night and you don’t know if it’s your cat or Death dragging his sickle.

Mary Kay Andrews: Thanks to our panelists for enlightening—and frightening—us.

What did you think of these replies? What scares you? And, if you like to be scared, tell us why. Do you have a favorite thriller/suspense/horror author?

Inquiring minds want to know…

About the Contributors

J.T. Ellison is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than 30 novels and the Emmy Award-winning co-host of the literary TV show A Word on Words. She also writes urban fantasy under the pen name Joss Walker. With millions of books in print, her work has won critical acclaim and prestigious awards. Her titles have been optioned for television and published in 28 countries. J.T. lives with her husband and twin kittens, one of whom is a ghost, in Nashville, where she is hard at work on her next novel. Her latest novel, A Very Bad Thing, will be published November 1, 2024 by Thomas & Mercer. Be sure to subscribe to J.T.’s popular Substack, The Creative Edge, where this conversation has been cross-published.

Lisa Unger is a NYT and internationally bestselling author. Her books are published in 32 languages, with millions of copies sold worldwide. In 2019, she received two Edgar Award nominations, an honor held by only a few writers including Agatha Christie. Her work has been named on "Best Book" lists from Today, People, GMA, EW, Amazon, IndieBound and many others. She has written for the NYT, WSJ, NPR, and Travel+Leisure. She lives in Florida with her family. Park Row will publish her next book, Close Your Eyes and Count to Ten, on February 25, 2025.

Karin Slaughter is one of the world's most popular storytellers. She is the author of more than 20 instant NYT-bestselling novels, including the Edgar-nominated Cop Town and standalone novels The Good Daughter and Pretty Girls. An international bestseller, Slaughter is published in 120 countries with more than 40-million copies sold across the globe. Pieces of Her is a #1 Netflix original series, Will Trent is a hit television series starring Ramón Rodríguez on ABC, and it was just announced that Jessica Biel will star in the adaptation of The Good Daughter, which Karin adapted herself. Karin Slaughter is the founder of the Save the Libraries project—a non-profit organization established to support libraries and library programming. Her most recent book is This is Why We Lied, which William Morrow published on August 20, 2024.

Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for 15 years before writing her first novel. Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, she now splits her time between London island Edinburgh. Her first thriller The Girl on the Train became a global phenomenon, selling more than 23-million copies. Published in 50+ languages, it was a #1 bestseller around the world and a box-office-hit film starring Emily Blunt. Paula’s most recent thrillers, Into the Water and A Slow Fire Burning, were also instant #1 bestsellers. In 2021 A Slow Fire Burning was nominated for Thriller of the Year at the British Book Awards. Her most recent thriller, The Blue Hour, was just published on October 29, 2024 by Mariner Books.

Lucy Foley studied English literature at Durham University and University College London and worked for several years as a fiction editor in the publishing industry. She is the author of five novels including The Guest List, The Paris Apartment, and The Hunting Party. She lives in London. Her latest book is The Midnight Feast, just published June 2024 by William Morrow & Co.

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