How Do You Write About the Inexplicable?

"Maybe it's not surprising that, in middle and high school, my favorite writer was Stephen King. Later, I fell into the vortex of "Twin Peaks," and of David Lynch more generally. The world is full of bad actors-cheats, liars, tyrants, sickos-who are, ultimately, mere human beings; at least, this was how rationality would have it. But King and Lynch were interested in evil, an abstract force."

"And yet it still exerted a pull, I thought, because every so often people do things so terrible that our rational, psychological vocabulary feels impoverished. Did I believe in evil? No. But I believed that people believed in it. And sometimes I could think of no other word for the insensible malevolence that seemed to steer people and events toward awful ends."

A narrator raised in a scientific family contrasts familial rationalism with a mother's deep superstition and attention to omens and coincidences. Encounters with horror fiction and surreal media foster a fascination with evil as an abstract force rather than merely bad human behavior. Acts of extreme cruelty strain psychological explanations and revive older categories for malevolence. Belief in evil endures because people sometimes personify abstract forces as concrete entities, such as the Devil, to make sense of senseless harm. Concrete images provide emotional weight to otherwise abstract concepts.

Read at The New Yorker