Morbid curiosity. Rubbernecking. Schadenfreude. From our national obsession with celebrity crackups to the popularity of gore fests such as The Passion of the Christ and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Americans lead the world in the urge to wallow in everything grotesque, blood-spattered and shocking — as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

What in the world is wrong with us? Or, if Eric G. Wilson is to be believed, right? In his last book, Against Happiness, Wilson talked about why the world needs melancholy — a connection to sadness, grief, even despair — and examined the overemphasis on cheer, arguing that a permanently, exclusively happy individual would be a sort of monster. Now, he asks if looking away — or being unable to — from horror and misery is just as inhuman.

Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck examines our collective “addiction to the grim” in 50 brief but erudite essays. Perhaps, Wilson suggests, the urge to slow down at a horrific car wreck, gawk at a two-headed baby in a jar or even observe the artifacts of annihilation at the 9/11 Museum in New York conceals a deeper need, “a hunger to penetrate the most profound mysteries of existence.”

A professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., Wilson freely acknowledges his preoccupation “with the gothic” and his passion for romantic, gloomy, death-haunted poets such as Coleridge, Poe, Dickinson and Keats. He has battled “devastating depression” and been treated for bipolar disorder, a chapter about which, toward the end of the book, movingly reveals how “the morbid nadir carries traces of the apex.”

In an attempt to make sense of his own dark obsessions — “my terra incognita,” as he calls it — Wilson delves into as many gruesome diversions as he can find, alternating his personal experiences with illuminating testimony from philosophers, filmmakers, writers, biologists, theologians, sociologists and other experts in the field.

Every rock he pries up reveals a wonder of perversity, whether it’s a gore-hound’s collection of “murderabilia” — self-portraits, used toothbrushes and other “relics” of murderers and serial killers — the grisly “reality” of a modern evangelical Passion play, or the erotic hanging of a woman in a black silk dress that forever influenced writer Thomas Hardy.

Nothing is too morally repugnant: Wilson considers the appeal of fight clubs, torture porn and “dark tourism” — the habit of visiting disaster areas such as hurricane-battered New Orleans, Civil War battlefields or the Genocide Museum in Cambodia, site of the Khmer Rouge’s worst atrocities.

Part of our lust for the morbid kicked in, Wilson says, when hospitals and funeral homes took over the management of death in the 1950s. Before then, “people usually suffered and died in their own homes,” he writes, and we were well-acquainted with dying; even children knew “its sounds and its smells, the agony of it, and its peace.”

Death may have disappeared behind closed doors, but deep down, we know “our brief time on earth” will end, and may be vicariously slumming, through the medium of car wrecks or slasher flicks, for a closer look. In that sense, the appeal of darkness, Wilson says, is also the appeal of the sacred, the sublime.