The fascination for sad, scary, heartbreaking, soul shaking stories

Do you have a characteristic that you think is awesome...but at the same time a bit of a problem? For me, it's my easy falling for stories that make me anxious. What can I do? It's a part of me. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one with this characteristic. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many creepy or melancholy stories out there.

WARNING: The next lines may contain spoilers.

But where does the fascination for such stories come from? Everything started with the very first epic of mankind, the Gilgamesh epic, Homer's epics, as well as the first dramatic works. The ancient world preferred tragedies over comedies as they were a sign for dignity.

Who was not moved by Romeos desperation when he finds Juliet's (wrongly assumed) dead body, or scared by Lady Macbeth's slightly bloodthirsty behavior? I was worried sick about the poor little orphan boy Oliver Twist when he was making his way all alone to London.

When I finished reading The Black Cat by Poe I decided not to leave my bed that evening because I was afraid to find the silhouette of a strangled cat on my bathroom wall. I felt sick when I was reading Kafka's Metamorphosis. When I was reading Atonement, I hated Briony for accepting the letter from Robbie because at the very same moment as she takes it she knows she is going to read it, although she is not supposed to.

I cried my heart out (not really but my I thought I heard my heart making a silent cracking noise) after I learned that Natasha thinks that she is in love this bastard Anatol (although a good looking one- at least in my imagination), who only wanted to seduce her. She breaks the engagement with Prince Andrei, whose pride is obviously hurt. (foolish, FOOLISH girl!!!).

When I was a teenager, I loved the Harry Potter books. I was really, really addicted to them. Today, Game of Thrones replaced them. Sort of. No I just changed my mind: Nothing can replace Harry Potter. Anyhow, everytime J.K. Rowling, R.R.Martin or Susanne Collins decided to kill a character I had become overly attached to, I felt like this:

Needless to say, it is very depressing when a hero or a heroine fails. Before the failure happens, the main emotions the reader experiences are fear, cluelessness and uncertainty. After the failure it is sadness, grief and disappointment. Nevertheless, the reader is more fascinated by this fear and sadness than by the hero's success. But why do we crave so much pathos? (I know some of you might think differently).

One reason for our craving is perhaps because sad and scary things release more intensive emotions than funny ones do. The requirement, however, is that those things are not real but only part of a fictional world. I think it is a sort of aesthetic satisfaction we get when we see a character escape death by a whisker, and even more when he/ she suffers from his/her failure. I wouldn't call this schadenfreude, though, because this would mean that the reader wishes or wants the character to fail, which is not the case.

In a nutshell: Although those stories make us sad, depressed, angry or horrified we still gain satisfaction from them. Therefore, we really like them or in my case get addicted to them. Well, why not? I'm in!