Free Will and Determinism in Two Recent Horror Novels

This essay addresses the novels Brother by Ania Ahlborn (reviewed here) and The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward (reviewed here). Be warned, this essay contains spoilers.

Ania Ahlborn, author of Brother

“For you, nothin’ matters,” Rebel Morrow bellows at his brother Michael, as we approach the culmination of Ania Ahlborn’s sixth novel, Brother. “You gotta have free will or some guts for shit to matter, and you don’t got neither.”

This is the closest Ahlborn comes to an out-and-out thesis statement for her novel. Michael tacitly acknowledges that, though he possesses free will, he’s never had gumption enough to use it. He’s always kept his head down to avoid Rebel’s unpredictable violent outbursts. This tactic isn’t unreasonable: around the book’s midpoint, Rebel drags Michael into a trackless forest and makes Michael dig his own grave, before suddenly, causelessly relenting.

Ahlborn’s novel shares thematic overlaps with Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street. Both novels address themes of inherited culpability, and the ways adults process the traumas of their childhood families. Both novels feature a character identified as “Momma” or “Mommy” who is, at once, terribly violent and remarkably absent from most of the narrative. Both show you can’t muscle through such traumas alone.

Michael Morrow survives tremendous abuse at his family’s hands. They not only whip him mercilessly for any transgression, real or imagined, they also force him to watch the similar punishments doled out on his sister, Misty Dawn. The latter is arguably more traumatic. After all, brave persons can stoically endure abuses poured onto their own bodies, but watching abuse poured onto others leaves people feeling helpless and despairing. Ask any child abuse survivor.

Constant abuse has left Michael conditioned to appease his abusers to survive. Again, Ahlborn addresses this, but doesn’t unpack it. For our purposes it matters that, as the novel commences, Michael is now nineteen years old: old enough, that is, to be legally culpable for his actions, and his inactions. This requires us to wonder what magical calendar date magically should’ve granted Michael maturity enough to resist his mistreatment?

Similarly, Ward’s protagonist, Ted Bannerman, survived something at his mother’s hands, though the novel mostly tiptoes around what. Unlike Ahlborn, who depicts Michael’s ongoing trauma in direct, brutal terms, Ward files Ted’s abuses in the sheltered past, where Ted can carefully avoid addressing them. Ted compartmentalizes his entire life to protect himself from understanding what Mommy did, and continues doing so, although Mommy’s been absent for years.

Catriona Ward, author of
The Last House on Needless Street

Ted creates an elaborate alternative narrative whereby he retreats into a world uncluttered by violence, pressure, or work. This alternative becomes so elaborate that it adopts its own personality, and ultimately displaces Ted altogether, at least periodically. We learn in the final chapters that Ted has invented a repertoire of alternate personalities, each equipped to handle different aspects of trauma. Having created them, though, he can no longer control them.

These alternatives, Michael’s constant mindfulness of every possible transgression, and Ted’s retreat into alternative reality, represent opposite responses to family abuse. Michael must remain permanently conscious of the traumas he endures, watchful to ensure he doesn’t do something that invites punishment. In the novel’s climax, however, we discover that Michael’s consciousness is finite, and Rebel has been hand-waving Michael’s (and our) attention from what really matters.

Therefore, Ted has arguably accepted something Michael cannot: that there’s nothing either can do to avoid this violence. Trauma is inevitable; our only reasonable response is how we handle it. Okay, so Ted’s approach isn’t necessarily productive, and possibly results in clothes getting hurt or killed. It certainly results in Ted living a diminished life. But it also results in Ted surviving, which is the important part for the child receiving the abuse.

The debate between free will and determinism, once a theological argument about humankind’s relationship with God, has become a secular psychological issue. Prominent public atheists like Sam Harris and John Gray contend that humans are driven entirely by deterministic systems which we can understand as essentially mechanical. They contrast this with a poorly defined “free will,” understood in terms of religious beliefs in the human soul.

Ania Ahlborn and Catriona Ward, neither of whom show any particular religious inclinations in their novels, temper these two extremes. In different ways, their novels indicate humans have sufficient liberty to make choices, can’t un-make them. Equally important, Michael and Ted make their choices as children, too young to be informed or responsible, then live with them as adults, when the choices are maladaptive but engrained.

Free will, these novelists imply, definitely exists. But we give it up, usually because we have to. Then we live with the mechanical consequences of that surrender.