Читать книгу Russian Horror Book - Victor Bacau - Страница 2

For as long as I can remember, I always liked scary stories. I’ve always been a geek, I loved Lovecraft, Edgar Poe, and of course Stephen King. I always thought there was more life in horror stories than in ordinary stories. A couple of years ago I just collected stories of different people of the world, I collected many old legends, urban stories from around the world, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States. I was wondering what people from different countries are afraid of. I searched and studied them for several months, that was more than just interest. It was as if something was pushing me to that, and I soon found what I was subconsciously looking for all these terrible stories similarity. Each country has its own flavor, its own special monsters, and at the same time there is some terrible similarity.

I excitedly told my friends about such similarities, for me there was some discovery :

Spirits – owners of waters and forests

Child-eating witches, vampires

Werewolves – bears and so on

And a lot of monsters, similar to each other, even if they were from different countries.

All those similarities, all those stories from different parts of the world, in which there is something common, they seem to give hope to the crazy geek that in the world there really is something more remote, something more than our everyday life.

One day I decided to make my own list of scary stories and in this book I want to share our horror, as if I was telling these stories to a friend, perhaps from the other side of the world.

Here in Russia we are afraid of many things, perhaps, as lots of other people are.

Our history has long been divided into two periods, before and after the revolution. From ‘before’ we own numerous ancient legends of monsters living in cold forests and terrible swamps; stories about the human cruelty of merchants and landlords during serfdom.

The Soviet Union and its collapse brought some confusion to our thoughts and left us a lot of terrible tales about the military development programs of the time.

The first decade after the collapse of the USSR brought us pain and disappointment of new military conflicts and our hard lives.

While politicians and heads of states were arguing who was right and who was stronger, millions of people tried to survive on the brink of poverty, they learned to get used to a new life and, of course, they had something to fear.

The huge factories that had been accompanying us right from the Soviet Age had suddenly become awfully empty, staring at us with their black ‘eye-sockets’. The architecture that seemed pretentious, had became eerily creepy. The great and controversial era was then off, and its former extent remained a gray faceless houses, which nowadays we have a symbol of urban horror.

We have almost no haunted castles left, but something else.

Old high-rise buildings and dilapidated barracks, Soviet hospitals and factories, crumbling and rotting.

Russian horror was born in the hopelessness and despondency of old abandoned buildings; in tiny Soviet apartments with their old furniture. It hides in cold deep woods near our cities.

Our horrors are controversial just as our history.

The horror, the otherworldly, the inexplicable are every time a test to understand what you believe and to know who you are.

I can say that scary urban tales have been popular in Russia for a long time, and I can say why – even through fear, even through horror, people are ready to believe that there is something more in the world than their everyday life. And perhaps this is also true for people all over the world. Fear gives rise to terrible stories. And in every story, as you know, there must be a monster. And a hero.

So, that is not so bad, to feel fear, – for it’s an occasion to find a hero. Once, maybe, even in yourself.