I started reading a webnovel yesterday (I’ve been trying to explore new media frontiers and my trip into the world of Webtoons and the app Tapas has proved to be full of all kinds of semi-familiar culture objects), and I think I’m finally starting to really understand the “cozy horror” trope.

I’ve spent the last few years being deeply perplexed by the people who seem to be interested in the topics most traditionally associated with the horror genre (ghosts, magic, eternity, death, life, suffering, despair, helplessness, hopelessness, etc) but also seemed perturbed by the tone or outcome of stories which make up the usual style of the genre. (The word I’m talking around here is the often pejorative “tenderqueer” — those who seem to want access to the monstrousness and outsider territory of horror and specifically queer horror, but are unwilling to engage with the moments when identification with monstrousness can take a darker turn, or when the experience of sorrow or suffering is expressed in ways that are disinterested in fairness or justice or moral rectitude.)

But I’m reading this webnovel and I’m enjoying it quite thoroughly, but I keep being somewhat charmingly surprised by the way that what I would consider a somewhat “slice-of-life” slow-burn queer romance story keeps folding in these elements which are so familiar to me from my other literary pursuits. Tangling with issues of what it is like to be separated from the corporeal world, loneliness in the face of eternity, the violence we do to ourselves and others when we cannot see a way out, loss, grief, etc.

It’s true—unlike in a true horror novel, there is functionally no violence “on screen,” and while there is suspense over where the narrative will go and how the problems or issues will be resolved, I do not have the real fear, which I associate with a scary story, that terrible things will happen to these people I’m reading about. There is no real threat, as there is in even books which get close to promising that things will “mostly work out” that these characters will suffer horrible damage as a result of experiencing their reality. (I think in this moment of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Lake Witch trilogy, which has a high body count, and some real tragedies, but the core of the novels is often in celebrating the strength it takes to survive the unimaginable, which is very often part of our mundane reality, which is not, strictly speaking, an entirely happy thing.)

But to come back around to the nominal title of this post, the experience has reminded me how often and how deeply “love” is often the guiding force, the primary motivation, within a horror novel. Whether the horror is embedded within the love itself, or if the love is something more like a co-morbid condition with the horror, rarely is love entirely absent from tales of terror.

Now, I’m using “love” rather broadly at the moment, “love” can mean “romance” (when romance goes wrong, horror is almost always the direct result), but “love” can also be the more all-encompassing “agape” — when the desire to keep others from suffering, or even merely the recognition of the suffering of others, be they close friends or complete strangers becomes an unbearable weight, for example, horror can result — and “love” can also be the relationships we have with others, or with ourselves, the ways in which our hearts and our minds can be at odds with one another, which is almost always in evidence in a horror story.

Robert Heinlein wrote a number of good books and stories, and some real big “yikes” ones, and was probably kind of a jerk, but he gets credited with one of the better definitions of love that I’ve ever come across, in Stranger in a Strange Land: “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”

One reason I like this quote is that, technically, it doesn’t actually make any differentiation between “healthy” and “unhealthy” types of love. Furthermore, it is structured in such a way that its inverse is also true: “Love is that condition in which the unhappiness of another person is also your own.”

Within this quote we get two version of the horrors of love.

The first is when love is what we might call “misplaced” — most of us have had some version of a relationship with another person where we loved them, and we desired for them to be happy, but the price of their happiness was our own. Many of us have loved something enough to want to break ourselves upon it, and when we have tried — done all we can to change the shape of ourselves so that it might match with the shape of the one we love — we have realized that some transformations can be impossible. (Or at least, it is the kind of transformation where no meaningful trace of the original remains.) I’m not actually saying that none of us should ever change for love, because I do believe that love in its best and most elevated form is transformative — but it makes us more ourselves in a way that allows us to grow and flourish.

The second “inverted” version of the quote serves to bring attention to “failed” or even “rotten” love. The failures here are ones which I tend to associate with parents and friendship, personally. Those moments when (often through inaction) grave harm is perpetrated against someone whom we love and their pain and their suffering becomes something we feel ourselves, and even for which we are responsible. (Lampshade here the longer complex conversation I’m not going to engage with about when its appropriate to feel a trauma which occurred to someone else as your own, and what exactly the process and nature of forgiveness can and do and might look like for different people in different situations.)

But the truth is, if we do not love someone, their pain cannot have true meaning to us. If we don’t care about someone, their pain is meaningless. At best it’s an abstraction, and at worst it’s a curiosity. (And yes, I suppose I am saying that I believe that the core of the human experience and existence is love, because empathy and love are extensions of one another, so when we feel sorrow for the troubles of a stranger, it is because on some level we love this stranger.)

All this is really just to say, I guess, that in my experience there is no horror from which love is absent. (Though we would have to debate the cases where the absence of love is the horror in question, but I’m pretty confident it’s there too, I just haven’t gotten that far quite yet.)

It’s what love makes us do that scares us.