I did, and there it was. Too slowly, a jet, brilliant white, wide enough to seat a hundred, plowed into a narrow rectangular tower, luminous and silver in the September sunshine. The blast silently boomed, and the skyscraper turned black billow, spume of flame: an immense sinister candle. There was a stop, and the sequence rolled once more, sound-less, with the same dilatory tempo. It repeated, each time more mesmerizing and meaningless, someone else’s eerie dream. No words explained it— fit it into a familiar story, with reassuring causalities and characters. It was unmoored destruction, sublime. I watched, and watched.

——-

We all know what this was, and likely remember our need to witness the eruption one more time, and also to look when the events became more horrific: another fiery collision, and then buildings sucked to the ground, leaving only rubble and crushed loved ones.

Don’t look. Look. This refrain has played in my head much of my life, one voice telling me it’s wrong to stare at morbid events and another urging me to stare anyway, hard.

It’s my turn to pass the accident on the side of the highway. I tell myself to keep my eyes on the road, to avoid being one of those rubberneckers who clog traffic just for some sick titillation. But decadent anticipation takes over; I realize I’m going to gaze, and I’ll enjoy the experience all the more because it’s frowned upon. I hit my brakes and gape, until an angry horn prods me forward.

I imagine we’ve all felt that guilty rush before the morbid. The exploitation of a suicidal starlet, the assassination of a world leader; the hypnotic crush of a hurricane, the lion exploding into the antelope; the wreckage and the rapture, the profane and the sacred: whatever our attraction, we are drawn to doom. Everyone loves a good train wreck. We are enamored of ruin. The deeper the darkness is, the more dazzling. Our secret and ecstatic wish: Let it all fall down.

What is this fixation on the perverse — the deviant, the macabre, the diseased? Jack B. Haskins, late professor of journalism at the University of Tennessee, offered this definition of morbid curiosity: “an enduring unusually strong attraction to information about highly unpleasant events and objects that are irrelevant to the individual’s life.”

My own experience tells me that Haskins is wrong. My attraction to the macabre might well be directed toward “unpleasant events,” but it’s certainly not irrelevant. My Gothic sensibilities, though sometimes silly, to be sure (what man over forty monthly watches Freund’s “The Mummy”?), have inspired my writing and fueled my intellect. Morbidity seems essential to others as well, and maybe not just to humans. Consider a scene. On the edge of the savanna, an elephant rots. The cow had been sick for a week, stumbling, alone, over the hot plain. Ten days ago, it fell in the dust and died. Now its flesh has decomposed. Only the large skeleton recalls the mammoth’s grandeur.

A herd lurches near to the bones. The pack is composed of females, all related, led by the matriarch. They’ve had no prior contact with the dead beast. They stand over the corpse. With their trunks, they gently probe the bones, seizing choice remains, turning them in the sun, then dropping them. Eventually, each picks up a bone or tusk and carries it hundreds of yards away.

This behavior is difficult to account for. Other instances of animals attending to their dead seem to possess evolutionary value, to preserve shared genes. In many cases, the living linger near their fallen companions in hopes that breath remains and that they might be able to assist in the recovery. Elephants prop up collapsed members of their herds, ostensibly to keep them from suffocating. Dolphins aid their wounded by carrying them to the ocean’s surface to take in air. But what of the elephants who are simply fascinated by another rotting elephant, one obviously dead and not in the same herd? Is this an example of animal morbid curiosity? If so, what are the motivations for such behavior?

Some scientists suggest that the elephants’ practice bears evolutionary value. Studying the dead might give the living hints about how the creature died and so reveal behavior that should be avoided. Others, though, believe that the conduct of the elephants is not adaptive at all but simply an instance of normal instincts breaking down in the face of incomprehensible death.

Carl Jung, who founded, along with Freud, psychoanalysis, believed that we like to witness violence precisely because it, the watching, allows us to entertain our most destructive impulses without actually harming ourselves or others. Jung himself was drawn to darkness. When he was four, he couldn’t stop thinking about the corpse of another four-year-old boy, who had drowned in a nearby river. Around the time the child was found, Jung almost leapt into the same deadly rapids; he was saved only by the swift grip of the maid. To this suicidal urge, the adolescent Jung added a fixation on ghosts, nightly encountering haunts throughout his house.

Jung continued this “corpse preoccupation,” as he called it, his entire life, and it informed one of his most lasting contributions to our understanding of the human psyche: the idea of the shadow. He believed that the self is composed of three levels— the conscious ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is made of repressed memories and instincts unique to an individual’s history. The collective unconscious, in contrast, transcends the particular. It is a ubiquitous, timeless reservoir of archetypes that organize conscious existence. One of these archetypes is the shadow, an archive of all that we hate about ourselves, usually morbid impulses, such as the propensity toward melancholy or suicidal and murderous urges. The shadow’s favored forms are devils, demons, imps, vampires, werewolves, goblins, enemies of planet and country and town, and other people who just irritate the hell out of us.

Because we loathe the shadow, we push it deep into the unconscious, hoping to forget about it, make it go away. But it won’t. The harder we repress it, the more aggressively it rebels. Think of water pressure in a hose: the longer we impede its flow, the more its force builds, until it explodes, a geyser. A repressed shadow floods our minds with harmful visions. It bedevils us with traumatic nightmares that can make our days neurotic. Or, worse, it foments outright psychosis, tempting us into projecting our own internal demons onto others, usually loved ones. We distort our parents or wives or children or friends into monsters and so sabotage our most valuable relationships. Though we hate the shadow, we also secretly desire it, because in our deepest recesses we actually yearn for ruin.

We might profess pristine piety, but we really have sympathy for the devil. This is an obvious point— that we all have a dark side, a perverse imp. However, most of us deny it, trying to convince ourselves, and others, that our intentions are always righteous, our thoughts preeminently pure. And so we set up a game that seems silly, though in fact it’s dead serious: don’t let the right hand, bearing the torch of righteousness, know what the left hand, the sinister appendage, is doing. Such self-delusion ensures that we will remain divided against ourselves — reason versus the shadow, light against darkness — and moreover that the more nefarious side, because repressed to a place beyond awareness, will persist, unchecked, in its sowing of discord. Jung thinks that mental health arises from concord between the darkness and the light. As long as we continue to demonize our morbid tendencies, we are only half a person, unnatural, out of whack, like day with no night, up without down.

We become whole, healthy, harmonized, only when we acknowledge our innate addiction to the macabre. We must welcome it into our consciousness and embrace it. Then, almost as if by miracle, what earlier seemed simple destruction becomes necessary to life. No longer feared, demons turn angels. Luke offers his affection to Vader, and off comes the scary mask and there stands a father, loving and in need of love.

This reconciliation, like all negotiations between sworn enemies, is extremely difficult to achieve, often requiring a lifetime of psychotherapy or disciplined meditation. How best to go about this work of welcoming the macabre, finding the light in the darkness, the darkness in the light? Through a Jungian teaching known as “active imagination.” Jung’s example suggests this bold idea: to create or to contemplate morbid phenomena is necessary for mental health, for expressing the psyche’s destructive powers and reconciling them with bright reason. In going to the multiplex to check out the latest gore, I’m really plopping down on the therapist’s couch, in quest of a more concordant and capacious and generous self. Halloween is the seventh heaven. The chain saw massacre: a kind of mass.

- – - – - -

In an experiment designed to determine reactions to seemingly real violence, and to understand how these differ from responses to obviously fake Hollywood mayhem, male and female college students were shown three violent films.

Each student had the power to shut off the video whenever he or she wished. Most quit watching about halfway through, expressing disgust with the gory scenes. In contrast, students found an excessively violent scene from “Friday the 13th, Part III,” fully scored, to be “involving, exciting, and not boring.” When this same clip was shown without the audio enhancement, it was less riveting.

It appears that the trappings of Hollywood movies, especially sound tracks, can make a horrific experience grippingly dramatic. The psychology professor Clark McCauley, who conducted the experiment, accounts for this result by invoking a Sanskrit text, the Natyasastra, written around AD 200– 300. This work explores the concept rasa, “aesthetic or imaginative experience.” In discussing tragedy — which shares traits with horror — the Natyasastra claims that although we try to avoid actual sadness, we are attracted to aesthetic renderings of grief because they pull us away from our “preoccupations with ourselves” and open us to the suffering of others. We transcend narcissism and empathize.

This transcendence grows from catharsis: normally self-interested feelings, like pity and fear, are purified of their egotism and connected to more altruistic concerns, such as how to assuage the suffering of the collective. Fiction encourages this emotional free play. We are invited to explore without the pressure of consequences.

McCauley applies the Natyasastra to horror films. The fear and disgust inspired by such films invite us to sound the depths of our humanity, to contemplate the origins of our own disgusts and fears, or to put ourselves in the place of the characters in the story, killer and victim alike. In either case, if we could respond positively to the invitation, we might be expanded, awakened, enlightened — to a great and possibly transformative degree when we behold the more brilliant works of horror.

Of course, life is messy, as likely to be selfish and stupid as expansive and wise, and so it’s the rare occasion that making or watching a film is devoid of egotism’s blindness. Some scary movies will exploit suffering more than open us to its trans- forming depths. And most fans of the horror genre are probably going to be ignorant of their favorite films’ invitations to transcend selfishness. Still, the potential is there: viewing a scary movie, especially one by a true artist — a del Toro or a Kubrick or a Polanski — can, however infrequently, call forth what is best in us and maybe make us a little more empathetic and charitable than we were before.

- – - – - -

On September 11, 2001, my wife and I sat down together and watched the catastrophe worsen.

But I had classes to teach, and so reluctantly left the screen. I held the students only briefly in each of my three sections, telling them that we would pick up with Keats the next class — even his wisdom did not that day suffice — and urging them to go back to their dorms and call their families and friends. Between classes, I persisted in watching the footage, breaking only to call Sandi, to comfort and in turn take solace. I returned home around five. Sandi was in the kitchen preparing dinner, food that would best nourish our baby. The small television beside the coffeemaker, like the other sets in our house, was off.

After giving my wife a hug, I clicked the set on: the conflagration in the sky, now strangely comforting, like a wound you can’t imagine not having. More than that, the footage at this point was, as shocking as this might sound, gruesomely beautiful: swelling ebony smoke against the blue horizon. And the film inspired this staggering thought: “Here is one of those rare ruptures from which history will not recover, and I am alive at its occurrence.” I felt exhilarated, inappropriately, and I was ashamed.

“Come on,” Sandi said. “Turn it off and help me chop the vegetables. Don’t look.”

But I did, though she asked me again to stop, and I continued into the night, brooding.

Excerpted from “Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can’t Look Away” by Eric G. Wilson, published this month by Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2012 by Eric G. Wilson. All rights reserved.  

Wheatley’s debut feature, “Down Terrace,” was a bizarre, bleak and hilarious blend of genres, starting out as a Mike Leigh-style working-class family drama and ending up as an especially gruesome “Sopranos” episode, transported to the south coast of England. Let me introduce “Kill List,” Wheatley’s highly touted second film, by admitting that I’m infinitesimally disappointed that it’s not as funny as “Down Terrace” (though it definitely has its moments) and also that he’s gone so deep into the tradition of creepazoid British genre movies. (Rather than, you know, making the kind of depressing, no-audience films I like better.) But there’s no disputing the ingenuity and even the brilliance of this mind-bending mashup, which begins as a gritty recession-era marriage drama — the opening scene features a couple arguing about whether they have the money to get the Jacuzzi fixed — and then descends into ominous violence and finally total insanity.

I suppose you could say that the way Wheatley splices incompatible kinds of movies together into one story, like some demented mad scientist, has an Internet-age flavor to it. But that’s not something entirely new, and he actually comes off more as a hardcore fan of British independent and low-budget cinema, who loves the kitchen-sink realism of the ’60s and also loves a bunch of well-known horror movies and thrillers that I’d better not mention right now. Love it or hate it, “Kill List” is a definite widescreen cinematic experience loaded with delicious details, from the hotel clerk who holds a conversation without really listening to the sound of someone getting his brains beaten out against a concrete wall. He’s like a faux-Cockney Quentin Tarantino, passionate about the things he loves and also dedicated to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of “taking the piss” — and believe it or not, I mean that as a compliment.

The woman shrieking about the Jacuzzi money in the opening scene is named Shel (MyAnna Buring), the blond-bombshell Swedish wife of Jay (Neil Maskell), an unemployed ex-soldier who’s kicking around their suburban house outside Sheffield, in north central England. Jay at first seems like a hundred other unappealing husbands in British movies of this ilk — he’s a bit of a whiner and a bit of a drinker, he’s put on some weight around the middle, he’s much too hot-tempered and has a laddish London accent that seems halfway affected for a guy who has a Jacuzzi and a garage full of garden chemicals. It takes us a while to figure out that he doesn’t have some vague freelance I.T. gig, as he tells a friend’s visiting girlfriend. He was a private-security Mafioso during the Iraq war and is now a hit man, evidently suffering from the after-effects of a job that went wrong in Kiev a year ago.

Maskell is a well-known presence on British TV, and gives a fearless performance here, in the sense that Jay is the protagonist of “Kill List” and neither the actor, the director nor the screenplay (credited to Wheatley and his partner, Amy Jump, “with contributions by the cast”) ever tries to make him seem even remotely likable. As with “Down Terrace,” how you feel about this is likely to determine whether you can stand this movie or not. As you go deeper into the swirling maelstrom of “Kill List,” you’ll identify more and more with Jay’s struggle to remain afloat amid the bloodshed, madness and general atmosphere of malice. But you’re never going to admire the guy, and you’re always likely to conclude that whatever horrible fate befalls him is one he’s brought upon himself.

After eight months away from the game, Jay and his shaggy Irish partner in crime, Gal (the delicious Michael Smiley, who was also in “Down Terrace”), have received a mysterious commission from a sinister, leathery little man (only identified as The Client, and played by Struan Rodger) who seems to know way too much about what happened in Kiev. From the very beginning, this assignment seems loaded with mysterious significance, and wrapped in a feeling of unspeakable dread. Gal and Jay are sent to assassinate a Catholic priest in his church, and then a “librarian” who curates an especially repellent collection of pornography. What connects these two people — and why do they seem so eager to thank Jay, just before he kills them? And then there’s Gal’s ex-girlfriend, a wide-eyed brunette named Fiona (Emma Fryer), who keeps turning up in unexpected places — and who may not be the clueless corporate drone she appears to be.

Oh crap — I’ve almost told you way too much! But not quite. Here’s the key thing to understand: Every craft element of “Kill List,” from the acting to the cinematography (by Laurie Rose) to the cracked but seemingly inevitable downward progress of the narrative, is absolutely terrific. This movie is yet another testament to the thriving creativity of the British indie-film scene. It’s also the kind of movie designed to mess up your mind, like some unseen Nicolas Roeg or Ken Russell picture out of 1981, and it will. As Gal and Jay descend further into mayhem and madness, uncertain whether they’re going crazy or being lured into a dreadful trap, you may want to consider the surprise ending of “Cunning Stunt,” and to get ready for something even worse here.

Whether the shocker final scene of “Kill List” has been earned — and whether it can survive a logical interrogation — is a conversation we’ll have to have after you’ve seen the film. I have my own questions about that matter, but to think in fatalistic terms, Jay’s odyssey can only end badly, and without question there’s a terrible karmic justice to what happens. This is the kind of movie you’ll want to work over with friends after you see it, unless you want to go straight to bed and vow never to take my recommendations ever again. I halfway want to get Ben Wheatley on the horn and have him explain the ending, and halfway suspect that it’s supposed to stem from an evil logic so deeply rooted in human society that it defies all explanation.

“Kill List” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York and the Cinefamily in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers.

Written by “X-Files” veteran James Wong and directed by Michael Lehmann (“Heathers”), the hour greatly escalated the madness on this already demented show. Created by “Glee” executive producers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, the series seems to be inventing a new kind of horror — a 21st-century, short-attention-span-theater version, with no lulls. The traditional buildup to the big scare? Booooo-ring. Perhaps operating under the assumption — not unwarranted — that most viewers are watching the program on DVR or illegal download and will just fast-forward to the “good parts” anyhow, they’ve decided to save us all the bother. Every few seconds there’s a fabulously bitchy one-liner, a grim bit of exposition or a surprisingly deft transition between the two, or a beating or stabbing or disembowelment or horrendous searing of flesh, or a faintly S&M-dungeon-flavored sex scene, or a revelation that a character you thought was alive was actually dead all along, or that the heroine has been impregnated by both her husband and by a black-rubber-suited spectral hunk and is carrying both of their children.

What happened tonight? Let’s review — with the caveat that when you describe the actual events on this show, they sound like the plot of a hypothetical horror novel being plotted out by a couple of precocious 13-year-olds.

Ben Harmon visited his wife Vivien at the asylum where he’d had her committed and shamefacedly said that he should have believed her when she said she was raped, because of the aforementioned dual pregnancy and the fact that the only other man Ben suspected Vivien of having sex with — the handsome black home security guy played by Morris Chestnutt — is sterile. The non-Ben twin is courtesy of Tate Langdon, the dead school shooter who’s in love with the Harmons’ troubled daughter Violet. A team of detectives headed by Charles S. Dutton (who always seems to be investigating something) called on Lange’s character (and Tate’s mother) Constance, whose boy-toy lover, Travis, was recently found vivisected in a weed-strewn lot in the manner of the 1947 Black Dahlia murder. Viewers who saw last week’s episode knew that the latter atrocity was no mere copycat crime. In the show’s mythology, the Dahlia –  played by “American Beauty” co-star Mena Suvari — was an aspiring actress who died of an excess of anesthesia while being sleep-raped by her dentist (Joshua Malina, no doubt missing Aaron Sorkin terribly); the vivisection was committed by the ghost of a murdered surgeon who was living in the dentist’s house at the time. The surgeon vivisected Travis in the Dahlia style to help out Hayden, the vengeful former lover of Ben Harmon, who killed Travis after having ghost-sex with him and learning that he was going to marry Constance anyway. Larry Harvey, Constance’s long-ago gentleman friend and Ben’s disfigured stalker, killed Hayden very early in the season, and Ben buried her body in the yard and built a gazebo on top of it. Pretty much everyone who ever lived in, or even visited this house is a murderer or murder victim. Sex! Rape! Murder! Ghost rape! Ghost sex! Ghost murder! That’s what the writing staff chants before every meeting, I bet. I also think the black rubber suit belongs to Ryan Murphy and that he wears it while watching rough cuts.

Anyway, the two Big Reveals in the episode were (1) Violet is actually dead and has been for quite some time, having bought it during an earlier suicide attempt, and (2) Larry falsely confessed to killing Travis out of unrequited love for Constance.  How unrequited? Permanently, I’d say. That last scene between the two of them was truly pathetic — the hapless romantic literally reaching out to the object of his desire, placing his hand on the glass hoping for some kind of reciprocal gesture, and Constance reaching her hand out, then drawing it back and walking away. The tearful scene in which Tate tried to convince Violet to join him in death — even though she’s already there! Psych! — was simultaneously dumb and powerful in the way that dreams often are.  Violet’s assent turned out to be a ruse that allowed her to escape the attic and discover that her father had been beaten unconscious by Tate, but in the moment it made a certain thoroughly irrational, adolescent sense. Or a dream sense.

The whole series captures this emotionally upside-down feeling, even in scenes so weakly conceived that they might have been extracted from the writers’ posteriors with huge tongs. “American Horror Story” has that eerie twilight quality that afflicts the consciousness when you’re half asleep or awake. You aren’t quite sure if the dream you’re having is really happening; you may wonder if the logical inconsistencies aren’t just evidence that you don’t, in fact, know everything, that there are some important workaday rules that nobody explained to you, like “Some of the people in your life that you think are alive have actually been dead for years,” or, “If a woman has sex with a male ghost, she can get pregnant, and give birth to the world-ending abomination that supposedly every ascendant Pope is warned about.” This is the kind of series in which the murdered Travis’ ghost can ask Larry if his death made the news, then seem half-delighted that Constance took his death “pretty hard,” then slightly hurt that she hasn’t been over to see him yet, then introduce Larry to the disfigured ghosts of his wife and two daughters, who died when Larry’s wife learned of their affair back in 1994 and set them all ablaze. The button on the end of this dazzling scene — which shifts from smart-ass humor to soapy sentiment to heartsick grief and guilt — was the conversation between Larry and his wife. It suggested that there’s an underlying moral and parapsychological order to the show’s madness, and that it will eventually be revealed to us.  “Why am I seeing you [all] now, after all this time?” “You’re ready now … You’re on the cusp.” But on the cusp of what?

Oh, let’s not kid ourselves. Murphy and Falchuk cannot possibly have a long-range vision for any of this. Nothing that either of them has ever worked on indicates a talent for — hell, even an inclination toward — left-brained qualities such as story structure and character consistency. “Nip/Tuck” and “Popular” both had a “We’re just making this up as we go” quality, and despite moments of utter brilliance, “Glee” always was, and remains, a weekly 12-car pileup on the Bad Idea Freeway. These guys have very, very, very short attention spans. You can tell by the sorts of shows they make, and in the case of “Glee,” largely abandon when a newer, shinier project becomes available. (Did you watch “Glee” last night? Maybe the most half-assed and disorganized episode yet, and that’s saying something; in every closeup of Idina Menzel, you could see the fear and panic in her eyes, as if she were trying to send a psychic distress signal through the TV screen begging somebody, anybody, to give her some direction.)

That’s why I haven’t bothered hypothesizing about the “rules” of “American Horror Story”: Why a ghost can seem “alive” to actual living people, why the maid Moira appears as old to certain characters but young to others. I just don’t think it matters that much, or that Murphy and Falchuk gave it much thought before FX said yes to their pitch for a horror series. Yes, yes, on a basic level, I get it; it’s ultimately not too different from any other ghost story, a form that presents dead people as manifestations of living people’s longings, sins and unfinished business. It’s all about what’s in the eye, or the heart, of the beholder — thus Ben realizing that Vivien told him the truth when she said she was raped, and suddenly seeing Moira as an older woman instead of a younger one. (Ben saw the young Moira instead of the old Moira for the same reason that the Armenian home buyer did — because he’s a horndog.)

But really, the parsing of rules regarding ghost sex and ghost rape and ghost pregnancy and appearances and projections and guilt and the desire for redemption (Larry’s motivation for his false confession) is ultimately a parlor game. It doesn’t explain precisely what sort of universe we’re seeing, and why characters who have no prior contact with the house or its inhabitants can instantly “see” dead people and mistake them for living, and why certain characters appear in the condition they were in when they died, while others look just peachy — and why so many doomed people keep being drawn to the same freaking house. Maybe every character on this show is already dead, or in purgatory. Maybe the series is set in Hell, or on the edge of Hell, or it’s all just a disturbed child’s daydream. Whatever. I suspect the explanations behind “American Horror Story” will matter even less than the “mythology” of another addictive and pretty clearly ret-conned fantasy drama, “Lost.” I’m not watching “American Horror Story” to Figure It All Out. I’m watching it to appreciate the eerie confidence of Jessica Lange, with her Tennessee Williams accent and dancer’s hands and Gorgon stare, and Denis O’Hare’s deft comedy/tragedy footwork as Larry, and to see just how long Murphy, Falchuk and the gang can continue to sustain this nerve-jangling feat of bravura show-running. One more season? One more week? One more minute? Sooner or later this show will fall apart, or implode like the house in “Poltergiest,” and I want to be there when it happens.

Mind you, “it’s not what you’re thinking” is kind of the situation in general with “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1,” a movie that masks its genuine perversity under layers of artifice and saccharine melodrama. I truly do not mean that as a criticism. To my taste, savvy Hollywood veteran Bill Condon (“Dreamgirls” and “Gods and Monsters”) debuts as director of the two-part “Twilight” conclusion in satisfying fashion, delivering a voluptuous if often inert spectacle that splits the difference between high camp and decadent romance. (This opinion may not be widely shared.) We will in fact see Bella bleeding copiously later in the movie — there’s a startling amount of gore, as well as an overripe, nearly pornographic sensuality, to this PG-13 film — as the direct, if delayed result of her deflowering by Edward. See, he has impregnated her with some kind of succubus-like demon child, which is impervious to the science of humans and vampires alike and poses an intriguing challenge to the pro-life, family-values fantasy universe of “Twilight” author Stephenie Meyer. Does life begin at conception even if it isn’t entirely human?

I have other logistical and/or theological questions that “Breaking Dawn Part 1″ cannot quite answer. I suppose it makes sense that vampires possess the power to block or distort caller ID, since in one scene Bella calls her pining dad — the young, single and handsome one played by Billy Burke, whose relationship with Stewart’s Bella has always had a Freudian undertow — from across town, pretending she’s in Brazil or Switzerland or something. But Bella and Edward are apparently married by some kind of priest or minister, and I can’t get my head around that one at all. Holy matrimony plus undead monstrosity — does not compute! Either they’re not telling the dude any version of the truth (and in that case are also lying to God), or the officiant’s got nothing to do with any Christian denomination I’ve ever heard of, and in either case the whole wedding, rendered in such sugary detail you can almost taste the cake icing, is a hypocritical sham. I could insert a Mormon gag here — but I’m no bigot! Not gonna go there!

I recognize that as a member of the educated upper middle class, and a man to boot, I’m supposed to feel outraged and horrified by “Twilight” on various levels. I’ve never seen the point of that. I haven’t read Meyer’s books and don’t intend to, but the Twi-movies so far range from mediocre teen horror to outrageous pulp melodrama, a combo I’m perfectly happy to absorb. This beginning-of-the-end chapter is without doubt the most momentous episode in the saga, and not just because Edward and Bella consummate their relationship (a risky narrative maneuver in any love story). In rapid succession, Bella gives up literally everything: her girlhood, her virginity, her childlessness, her life itself and even her humanity. Rarely have the metaphorical transformations of horror fiction been carried to such rococo extremes. Is this a story about a young woman coming of age or a deviant, heretical Christ legend with a female hero? If you’re going to wring your hands and insist plaintively that Meyer intended no such thing and that director Condon and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg (who has handled an impossible task gracefully) have remained faithful to her vision, I shall nod sagely and say, of course, of course, but no artist or author can ever fully control meaning and interpretation. And that’s really going to piss you off.

“Breaking Dawn Part 1″ definitely involves less action than the last couple of “Twilight” chapters, and a lot more shots of Bella lying on the couch looking like crap. Taylor Lautner’s American Indian-slash-wolf-slash-shape-shifter character, Jacob, spends most of the movie brooding in the shadows, now that he’s definitively lost Bella and been thrust in the role of chaste, vulpine protector. (There is a major Jacob-related plot twist late in this movie, as many fans will already know.) But a lot of it is absolutely ravishing to watch, in the manner of eating hot buttered corn with marshmallows and Champagne; a woman sitting next to me at the New York media screening was literally moaning out loud during the wedding sequence. There are some bizarre, Goth-flavored fantasy sequences that are better than anything in the first three films, notably Bella’s nightmare version of the wedding, in which everyone she loves is killed. Of course it’s Bella herself who will learn not to fear the Reaper, and prepare for her new undead life in “Breaking Dawn Part 2.” But not until after Edward sits her down, at long last, and tells her about all the guys he’s been with. Some of you think I’m kidding, don’t you?

In Whitehead’s version of the classic scenario, the world has just wakened from an extended nightmare: the spread of a zombie disease that has transformed millions and overwhelmed the rule of law. Hope has come in the form of a newly established central government in Buffalo and the creation of an experimental vaccine. Set over a period of three days, “Zone One” chronicles the efforts of a man nicknamed “Mark Spitz” and the other members of his Omega Unit to clear zombies from New York City.

Every good zombie story needs unique variations on its central subject matter, and Whitehead provides not one but two types of zombie: “skels” and “stragglers.” Skels are the dangerous, fast, flesh-eating zombies — they provide the immediate sense of menace and terror in the novel. Stragglers are zombies lost in a memory loop who, oblivious to the wider world, perform some repetitive act, like making photocopies in the business that employed them prior to their transformation. They suggest more existential problems, especially the haunting and pointed descriptions of generic workplaces that force the reader to ask the uncomfortable question, “What was the point of all of this before the zombie attacks?”

As the Omega Unit terminates skels and stragglers alike, the novel also opens up to show how Spitz survived Last Night (the name used for the moment the epidemic began, two years before the novel’s action) and dangerous encounters on his journeys thereafter. In a sample of the surreal wit Whitehead brings to the story, we learn that Spitz, a black man who can’t swim, received his nickname on a prior mission when he shot his way out of a zombie trap rather than escape by diving into a river. Not that it bothers him: “No harm. Affront was a luxury like shampoo and affection.” As the equation of affection with luxury suggests, the physical threat posed by the zombies is often not as dire as the emotional threat posed by other human beings. Spitz has survived by not allowing himself to become close to people who might soon rob him, try to kill him, or be devoured by zombies. He even has three versions of his personal Last Night story, each of which reveals more of the truth: the Silhouette, the Anecdote, and the Obituary.

These flashbacks deepen characterization but also allow Whitehead to deploy almost every possible zombie attack scenario. The novel teems with lovingly staged, truly terrifying scenes, from hiding out in a toy store while “necrotic multitudes” march past in a “sick procession” to a standoff at a farm that is as much about the psychology of the besieged as about the zombies outside.

These are more than moments of suspense or straight-out horror, though Whitehead (whose early novel “The Intuitionist” also deployed a fantastical scenario to raise stirringly real questions) is interested in the consequences of the rise of the zombies, social and psychological. For example, survivors are diagnosed with Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, which, in a darkly humorous passage, manifests through every possible symptom, from “being ‘jumpy’” to “diarrhea.” Although Whitehead skewers aspects of PASD’s description by the government, he also takes the implications seriously. Spitz’s fellow Omega Unit zombie killers are both damaged people. The devil-may-care Gary calls zombies “squares,” “suckers,” and “saps,” as if they were the naive victims of some elaborate con he would never fall for. The “stickler” Kaitlyn, who survived a terrible trauma on a train, keeps both Spitz and Gary in line as part of her coping mechanism. Other well-conceived touches include looting regulations that protect only those corporate brands that actively sponsor the government’s efforts and the miraculous survival of three triplets born at a compromised outpost held up as both a symbol of hope and of an absurd and outdated sentimentality.

“Every race, color, and creed was represented in this [zombie] congregation that funneled down the avenue,” writes Whitehead late in the novel, as Spitz encounters new threats. “As it had been before, per the myth of this melting-pot city. The city did not care for your story, the particular narrative of your reinvention; it took them all in.” In a similar way, “Zone One” takes in all the classic tropes of the zombie novel and blends them to create a novel both melancholy and feverishly exciting, one that is as much about our past and our present as any possible future.