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Everyone loves a good train wreck : why we can't look away / Eric G. Wilson.

by Wilson, Eric, 1967-

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Disasters -- Psychological aspects.

Horror -- Social aspects.

9780374150334 (hbk.)

9780374533700 (pbk.)

213 p. ; 20 cm.

"Sarah Crichton Books."

Includes bibliographical references (p. [191]-210).

Whether we admit it or not, we're fascinated by evil. Dark fantasies, morbid curiosities, Schadenfreude: As conventional wisdom has it, these are the symptoms of our wicked side, and we succumb to them at our own peril. But we're still compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and there's no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. Eric G. Wilson sets out to discover the source of our attraction to the caustic, drawing on the findings of biologists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and artists. He believes there's something nourishing in darkness. 'To repress death is to lose the feeling of life,' he writes. 'A closeness to death discloses our most fertile energies.'

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