“Fear is an act of the imagination,” said Karen Thompson Walker. “Not just an act of imagination, but an act of storytelling — a kind of unconscious storytelling. So our fears are announcing these terrible stories to us.”
Walker is a novelist whose scary stories explore common fears in uncommon circumstances. She said the famous shipwreck of the Essex of Nantucket is a warning about the power of fear.
“In the middle of the ocean they had this idea that there were cannibals in that direction that really just activated some kind of primal, imaginative and salacious version of the story. And that story of like, ‘what if we arrive on the island and were eaten by cannibals’ was more powerful in their brains than this kind of maybe more subtle but more serious, ultimately, risk of starvation," she said. "And so what happened is they chose the long route and most of them did not survive because they ran out of food. And by the time the last survivors were rescued, they themselves had participated in a form of cannibalism just to survive.”