How do you write about the feeling of terror?

How does one write about terror?  I don’t mean the delicious spine tingling sensation evoked by the thriller or horror story, the literary equivalent of Halloween or the latest upside-down turbocharged fairground ride. I’m thinking that raw state of mind when logic goes out the window and with it any trace of pride or self-consciousness, when body and brain conspire towards a sole objective: survival. Even Verdi’s glorious Dies Irae doesn’t do justice to the torment.

Any strong emotion is difficult to portray; there's always the risk of overdoing it and ending up telling the reader what to feel. Like hallucinatory states, it’s an extra challenge to translate the reality of terror into language. True terror is a psychotic state where words have little currency. How do we begin to describe the all-engulfing fear, the belief – rational or otherwise – that our life is about to end?

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Even if we can find words adequate to the task, the writer may not be. Do I really want to plunge down into the darkest of my dark places to deliver an honest representation of the emotion? Can I guarantee I’ll ever surface again?

Suppose a writer brave, or masochistic, enough does manage to find the right words, readers may not be so eager to devour them. Despite the horrors on the nightly news, we like to delude ourselves our own world is secure. Yes, life has its ups and downs, its joys and griefs, but, particularly for those of us cocooned in the West, we assume that, once we’re grown, nothing could be so bad as to make us shit our pants and start howling for our mothers.

Yet many writers manage to overcome the limitations of language, safeguard their own sanity and avoid jeopardising readers’ expectations to explore the limits of human endurance. In The Banner of the Passing Clouds, we are not shown the worst atrocities directly. It is the narrator’s younger brother who is conscripted to fight in Afghanistan and returns home too traumatised to speak. The reader is thereby put in a similar position to the young man’s family, observing the damage while unable to offer any help:

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it was the very fact of his inability to witness and perhaps control events that drives Iosif to such extreme psychological distress. I hoped to convey this distress to the reader and allow them to fill in off stage action with their own imaginings
Anthea Nicholson

Adam Johnson categorised his Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, as a trauma narrative. In this not-so-fictionalised North Korea, the citizens exist in a state of constant terror where survival depends on renouncing their own initiative, curiosity and joie de vivre. I wish I could pin down what makes this bleakness so readable: perhaps it’s the sense of an insight into the machinations of a closed-off country, or that we’re rooting for a hero who, if only momentarily, beats the system.

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Or, as with The Banner of the Passing Clouds, it might be the love element that lends the novel enough hope to keep us reading. In In the Orchard, the Swallows, a man is sustained through fifteen years of imprisonment and torture through the memory of his first young love. The cover suggests a much lighter story than the author delivers: this is a novel that doesn’t shy away from the stripping away of the self that terror brings.

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Every instinct of the body is to recoil from pain, but they allowed us no escape. An awful sense of powerlessness grew steadily, as though I were inhaling a great breath of air and was unable to stop. The horror became overwhelming, and from some hidden place in my mind I felt a darkness, something huge and unnameable, begin to form  ...  I would wonder how many days I had been tormented, only to find, on being returned to the cell, that I had been gone no more than an hour or two.
Peter Hobbs

There is no redeeming love for Dr Yelland’s patients in Pat Barker’s First World War novel, Regeneration. Already traumatised by their experiences at the front, they are subjected to cruel and painful “treatment” from which there is no escape. Although we don’t witness this through the patient’s eyes, it comes across as an unflinching and honest betrayal of terror. Day of wrath, indeed: if there’s a God in this scenario, He isn’t here to offer salvation.

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As a writer, I’m interested in extreme situations, but I don’t want to give myself nightmares. You can check out my attempts to write about terror in a couple of my short stories. Habeas Corpus, recently published by Baltimore Review, is about a photojournalist taken hostage; look away now if you don’t want to know about the worst moment of his life:

all the love and buzz and satisfactions of his life could not compensate for how it was to end.  Dragged behind that car at forty miles an hour, skin flayed and bones splintered.  Thirty-seven years of connections and commitments whittled down to a trail of scrappy body parts on a dirt road in a land deprived of care. He had no thoughts.  No memories.  No pictures of better times to steer him through his final moments.

In a domestic setting closer to home, the young narrator of my flash fiction piece All Night, the Babby experiences his baby sister’s unsoothed crying as if listening to someone being tortured:

the noise of them others being tortured gans straight to your gut. So it might as well be you who’s having your head pushed into a bucket of shit, or the soles of your feet burnt wi’ cigarettes. It might as well be happening to you when the screaming gans inside you.

Terror doesn’t necessarily end when its source is removed and I’ll be exploring how writers have addressed the aftermath of terror in a later post. But I reckon we could do with something a bit jollier before that, so perhaps, with Spring just around the corner, it's time for my piece on allotment gardening.

In the meantime, what’s your take on this?