Disturbing? Yes. More than disturbing, plain repellent. The sort of thing you don’t want to look at straight on – and certainly do not want to encounter in real life.

Yet, the disturbing and the repellent exist. Not only do they exist, they exert enormous pressure on even the quietest, most orderly places on the face of a planet with more than its share of turmoil. How do  you deal with the repellent, be it in real life or in fiction? Do you denounce it, advertise it, wallow in it, turn your back on it, peek at it through your fingers,  in fascinated horror?

The disturbing and the repellent sell. If they didn’t, horror movies would go bust and noir as a genre wouldn’t exist. Both the movies and the novels (not to mention the tabloids and their internet offspring) provide the safe and vicarious setting in which the gruesome and the grotesque get to come out and play.

Except, safe and vicarious don’t always work. Nor do they cancel out the unsafe and straight on of real life encounters.

How do you deal with ugliness and violence in fiction? The same way you would in real life? OK, let’s try that for the sake of argument. How do you deal with it in real life? By avoidance, denial, panic, depression? With caution?

How? I’m not sure. All I know for now: the huge advantage of fiction over real life is you can change the scene order  – something you can’t do when the ugly and the repellent show up in real time.

Ergo: long live reading and writing as safety valves. At least, for me.  (The town’s one and only bookstore opens for business Friday morning. Hail!)