'killing the Dead' Review: Watch the Graveyard

Posted2 months agoActive2 months ago

Thevet

27 points

14 comments

wsj.comOtherstory

calmmixed

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The WSJ reviews 'Killing the Dead', a horror novel, sparking discussion on the book's themes and literary merit among HN users.

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Oct 23, 2025 at 3:06 AM EDT
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Discussion (14 comments)

Showing 14 comments

Marshferm

2 months ago

2 replies

Historians and anthropologists develop neat explanations for horror tropes when genetics has them beat: animals are attracted to and entranced by the punishment and death of abberents. Just read Sapolsky’s Behave and linger in the punishment chapter. Even microbes do this.

SketchySeaBeast

2 months ago

1 reply

You don't think that you're being reductive?

Marshferm

2 months ago

1 reply

Actually, narrative explanations like the vampire book are exponentially the most reductive. Cause/effect, story. On the other hand, evolution is billions of hours of trial end error making footsteps of niche evasion.

Gotta think big, stories are puny both in terms of explanation load and their total existence in evolutionary time. They are fun over the dinner table but that’s about as definitive as they get.

SketchySeaBeast

2 months ago

1 reply

No, I meant your approach to the subject, having found an argument you find compelling and dismissing any others out of hand.

Marshferm

2 months ago

1 reply

I’m trained as a media anthropologist who now studies neurobiology as a vector into next-gen AAA game dev (using horror tropes in dystopian sci fi).

SketchySeaBeast

2 months ago

1 reply

And out of the entire gamut of literature and competing theories you found a single chapter in a pop sci book to be the most compelling? OK, fair enough.

Marshferm

2 months ago

2 replies

Actually to be fair, all of narrative theory and much of anthropology are untestable and unfalsifiable. Which makes them little more than hypotheses. So these tales are little more than the campfire tales that begin our slide into storytelling. Genetics and evolution are testable and falsifiable, giving them scientific, correlational validity. That book is not pop sci at all, it’s written by the leading endocrinologist of our time and has over 2K citations of deep scientific study. Pop sci it is not.

embedding-shape

2 months ago

1 reply

> all of narrative theory and much of anthropology are untestable and unfalsifiable

Isn't that also true for "Sapolsky’s Behave and linger" and what you're currently believing? Why does it work different for other stories than the one you happen to believe in?

Marshferm

2 months ago

Sapolsky isn’t storytelling. What I’m restating isn’t storytelling. It works differently as it’s different- it’s scientific.

Kim_Bruning

2 months ago

1 reply

If you're already into neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, I recommend looking one step up the emergence chain into Ethology too (biology's answer to psychology, across all living organisms) . There's still a lot you can do by treating the organism as a black box and treating behavior empirically; in an evolutionary framework.

Marshferm

2 months ago

I’m more a neo behaviorist, neo Darwinian leading into ecological psych and coordination dynamics. The 4E approaches make little sense to me. The black box is revealed by affordances etc.

serf

2 months ago

1 reply

>Even microbes do this.

are you anthropomorphizing quorum sensing? If so, that's ridiculous. It's an entirely chemical process. You may as well start anthropomorphizing the carbonation in soda.

Animal funerary ceremony isn't 'entrancement', it's either sequestration for simpler organisms like ants to avoid the spread of disease, or in the case of Corvids or other similarly intelligent species it seems to be a method of introspection and research towards the cause of death to be avoided.

We know this because studies have over-and-over again shown that animal cohorts perform worse when the funerary ceremonies are disallowed under study.

As for 'Behave', last I read it Sapolsky was very clear that the organism and behaviors are a grand tapestry painted by biology/society/culture -- not just a singular part of the three.

Marshferm

2 months ago

No behave is uniquely indiscreet about maladaptive aspects of culture misinterpreting biology. Read again.

Far from anthropomorphising, the biochemical under punishment extends seamlessly into culture but remains unconnected to our awareness. Our culture is post hoc retrofitted on top of neurobiology. Culture explains things wholly disconnected from neurobiology, this was experimentally demonstrated by Wegener in 2003 and empirically proven in aphasia studies in 2016.

In terms of funerals vs murder, this is a distinctly different phase, and yes, I would call the affective neuro drive to observe funerals an evolutionary entrancement that serves some memory-grief cleansing, though this is very separate from the punishment murder cycles in discussion. I’d read Panksepp’s areas about grief loss for explanations of ours and Corvid funeral behaviors. What you’re describing in ants and Corvid’s are functional explanations, which are the after effects of evolutionary trial and error. Functionalist explanations don’t explain how the neurons achieved this.

I’d read the source citations in aberrant punishment in the punishment chapter carefully.

throwup238

2 months ago

https://archive.ph/rsO3B

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ID: 45679050Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 1:48:02 PM

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