The Shining

I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create
monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real
lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident
that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our
own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they
might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they
have their own terrible brilliance, it seems to me, and none shine so
bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own
families. To look directly at such brilliance is to be blinded, and so
we create any number of filters. The ghost story, the horror story,
the uncanny tale - all of these are such filters. The man or woman who
insists there are no ghosts is only ignoring the whispers of his or
her own heart, and how cruel that seems to me. Surely even the most
malignant ghost is a lonely thing, left out in the dark, desperate to
be heard.
-- The Shining, Stephen King