What If You Knew It Was a Trap?

We tell ourselves we would know better, that we'd see it coming, that we'd listen to the small voice and walk away before anything happened.

I don't think that's how it actually works.

Sometimes you know exactly what you're doing. The calculus is already done. The decision is already made.

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We've gotten very good at making life safe. Research, reviews, neighborhood checks, Google searches on the stranger. We surround ourselves with warnings about everything that could hurt us, every risk quantified and managed.

Then we pick up a book and go looking for danger.

We want the locked door opened, the beautiful person who shouldn't be trusted, the enormous house with forbidden rooms. We want sex with teeth in it, wealth without limits, people who don't follow our rules. We want to know what it feels like to step outside the perimeter we've spent our lives constructing.

As long as we can close the book when we're done.

Maybe that's why we have so much trouble admitting that the same impulse exists outside fiction.

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I knew someone once who was wrong for me. I knew it while it was happening—there was no moment afterward when everything suddenly clicked into place and I realized I'd been tricked. I wasn't tricked.

I wanted to know what it would feel like. So I found out.

That experience found its way into Tanya. She isn't stumbling blindly through her day when Grey appears. She notices. Her life has been predictable, and he most certainly isn't. She could walk away.

She doesn't want to.

She wants to see what happens next.

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There's something dangerous about that impulse—something that's probably caused more trouble in human history than we'd care to admit.

A trap doesn't work if what's inside it repulses you. The trap has to contain something you want, something you want despite the danger, or (if we're being honest about what we actually are) something you want because of the danger.

That's the devil's snare.

The trap doesn't care whether you were forced into it or walked in with your eyes open, doesn't care if you enjoyed the walk. Every choice has a consequence. The freedom you had before the choice isn't the freedom you'll have after, and the snare only has to tighten.

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That's one of the ideas beneath Grey House. The Kalos don't need to create the human appetite for danger, temptation, pleasure, or curiosity—we already have those. They simply make the consequences more interesting.

And I think that's why we enjoy entering places like Grey House in fiction. For a few hundred pages, we can stop being so carefully safe. We follow the beautiful stranger. We open the forbidden door. We find out what happens next.

Then we get something Tanya doesn't: we can close the book. We can step back out into the world where the consequences don't follow us.

You wouldn't want to live in Grey House. But you may not want to leave.