In a post on CrimeReads, Lilian West examines how writers can create horror by showing what real people are capable of. “Imagine the terror of realizing you were around, perhaps even lived with, someone capable of doing the unimaginable before returning home for dinner, a kiss on the cheek for family members unaware of a hidden shoebox with photographs and mementos that would change their lives,” she says.
Ted Bundy worked for a suicide hotline. Dennis Rader (BTK) had a family and was a Boy Scout leader. “He was there – in parks, the grocery store, and pumping gas next to innocent people – and nobody knew,” West writes. “That thought is terrifying.”
Why are readers fascinated by stories about average people doing horrible things? “In my opinion, it’s because they’re the equivalent of the monster in the darkness or thing hiding around the corner waiting to pounce,” West says. “We don’t see them, expect them or understand them, which makes learning about them safe…from a distance.” It’s disturbing to think that someone could commit vicious murders and then go back to their normal, everyday life, but it happens all the time. Chances are, you’ve encountered someone with a dark past. Maybe not Bundy dark, but darker than you might be comfortable with.
We like to think that killers and villains send off obvious warning signals, but they don’t. “The truth is, many times there aren’t any, or they’re so subtle that only hindsight is enlightening,” West says. “In those instances, is it our instinct that lets us down or do the perpetrators adopt such genuinely distinct personalities that there’s nothing for our instinct to pick up on? Did Bundy truly care about the callers who reached out to the hotline in the middle of the night? We can never really know.”
