Ghost Stories Are a Cross-Cultural Hard Currency

@Kutná Hora's Bones: People generally say that Chinese web novels are better than American ones, but American online literature has one genre that is truly unique and thriving: horror stories.

There are many published American horror stories and famous authors, but here I mainly want to talk about online works. Their online horror fiction isn't quite like the dedicated book format on current Chinese web novel sites; rather, it resembles the old writing style on Tianya, mostly in the form of forum posts, varying in length.

American horror stories have a long history. While it can't be said that Americans invented the modern horror story, Edgar Allan Poe was the first to write horror that was highly internalized, where fear entering the human mind served as the primary source of atmosphere.
The genres are also very diverse. For example, there are those with Christian backgrounds, especially Puritan ones, focusing on demons, exorcisms, hell, and revelations; Native American legends, focusing on loss of identity, shapeshifting, and mysterious taboos; Southern Gothic, focusing on decaying swamps, eerie small towns, mysterious families, and haunted houses; Alaskan horror, featuring extreme cold, space-time distortion, and monsters; and modern settings, like dark highways and gas stations, or mysterious radio frequencies, and so on. It's essentially a public worldbuilding database.

Americans are particularly obsessed with writing these. Reddit's nosleep forum has great posts every day. Many authors don't care about money; they write simply because they love it. They don't even care about owning their concepts. It's common for someone to toss out a premise hoping others will finish it, and there are dedicated boards for people to share plot devices for public use. There's a pure enthusiasm dedicated to building a horror universe.

The good writers have truly impressive prose. They excel at describing sounds and smells, pacing the narrative, depicting psychology, and building suspense. The texts are often not very long, many just a few thousand words, but the story density is incredibly high.

Compared to the horror stories I grew up with, the biggest characteristic of American horror stories to me is the lack of karma (cause and effect).

In traditional Chinese ghost stories, ghosts appear for a reason—they suffered injustice, were betrayed by a lover, or died with a strong unfulfilled obsession. When a person encounters a ghost, it's usually because they did something themselves, or they were unlucky enough to stumble into a karmic chain. In the end, it can generally be resolved, because the living have agency: they can untangle the karma, help the vengeful spirit get revenge or fulfill their wish, or if all else fails, they can invite a monk to deliver the soul or a Taoist priest to suppress it. The Chinese universe of ghosts and spirits has order.

The underlying logic of American horror stories is chaos. There is only the fact that fear itself has arrived—you were just there, you were unlucky. For example, you take an online gig driving a long-distance highway route, follow the GPS given by the employer, and boom—how did you end up on an infinite highway? I just wanted to make some money. Or, parents take their kids to a cabin in the woods for a vacation; at night, there's rustling or howling outside. What's causing the commotion is unknown, but it makes noise all night. By dawn, mom and dad are either dead or mutated, and only one kid is left, who might even be carried off by a monster. There's no karma; this family was just unlucky to walk into that cabin. The American horror universe has no viewpoint or attitude toward humanity. Whether you're a good or bad person doesn't matter, whether you're capable doesn't matter—as long as you happen to be there, you're the target.

Therefore, Chinese horror stories often have closure at the end. At the very least, even if the supernatural entity is suppressed or the location is blown up, there is an ending. But American horror stories don't. They often go on for thousands or tens of thousands of words, only to end with "I don't know what's outside" or "It's coming in," and that's it.

I feel that this worldview devoid of karma might stem from the American living environment. Native American legends go without saying; for most of them, most of the time, they lived on vast, unfamiliar lands where the indigenous culture had no connection to them. The natural environment was massive and uncontrollable. Communities were tight-knit internally, but from a wider perspective, highly fragmented, and the foundation of religious fanaticism was extremely solid and deep-rooted.

As for why people still love horror stories so much today, it might be because, first, it's a tradition, and second, this existential state hasn't fundamentally changed.