Learning from the Masters: Lawrence Block's Use of Metaphor as a Narrative Device

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

According to his website, Lawrence Block started his writing career writing “midcentury erotica,” but is better known for his Matthew Scudder novel series and short stories. A Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America (MWA) and a former president of MWA, he has written other series of novels, some under various pen names, several non-fiction books; has contributed to several screenplays; has seen a number of his novels adapted to film; and maintains an occasional blog.

In his short story “Catch and Release” (Stories: All New Tales, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio), Block's metaphor, comparing fishing to killing, unifies the story's action, allowing the author, at the same time, to characterize his nameless first-person protagonist as a philosophical, if psychotic, serial killer.

The narrative's opening paragraph lays out the protagonist's modus operandi. A fisherman, he subscribes to the practice identified by the catchphrase “catch and release”:

When you spent enough time fishing, you got so you knew the waters. You had certain spots that had worked for you over the years, and you went to them at certain times of the day in certain seasons of the year. You chose the tackle appropriate to the circumstances, picked the right bait or lure, and tried your luck.

If they weren't biting, you moved on. Picked another spot (168).

Throughout the rest of the story, the fisherman employs this strategy. In terms of Block's metaphor, the fisherman (protagonist) is the serial killer; the “sport” of fishing is the killing; and the fish are the vulnerable young women for whom he fishes. The metaphor is extended by the narrator's exposition and dialogue and by Block's descriptions.

 

For example, the protagonist entertains violent fantasies after he catches (gives a ride) to a female hitchhiker whom he releases (lets her depart from his vehicle alive and well):

. . . he gave himself over to the fantasy she inspired. A lonely road. A piece of tape across her mouth. A struggle ending with her arms broken.

 

Stripping her. Piercing each of her openings in turn. Giving her physical pain to keep her terror company.

And finishing her with a knife. No, with his hands, strangling her. No, better yet, with his forearm across her throat, and his weight pushing down, throttling her (172).

Like the fisherman in the story's opening paragraph, the narrator also moves from location to location, visiting “certain spots that worked . . . over the years.” he cruises the interstate, selecting his prey as he seeks to catch “a girl all by herself” (178). Like “the true fisherman,” he is content to “fish all night and catch nothing” while he reminisces about previous fish he's landed (179).

His identification with the ideal fisherman extends to his description of a woman he sees in a roadhouse, as he describes “her full-lipped mouth” and explains how he “closed the distance between them,” as if he were reeling in a fish (173).

Alternating between talk of fishing and his stalking of young women keeps the story's metaphor alive. For example, in recalling a previous murder victim, he compares her murder to the gaffing, or impaling or clubbing, of a fish:

. . . He'd pulled up behind her just as she was about to put her groceries into the trunk of her car, and hopped out and offered his help. She smiled, and was about to thank him, but she never had the chance. He had a flashlight in one hand . . . and he took her by the shoulder ans swung hr around and hit her hard on the back of the head. He caught her as she fell, eased her down gently (178).

Concerning the gaffing of a fish, the narrator explains,

. . . Most people, they think of fishing and they somehow manage not to think about killing. They seem to think the fish comes out of the water, gulps for air a couple of times, and then obligingly gives up the ghost. Maybe he flops around a little at first, but that's all there is to it. But, see, it;s not like that. A fish can live longer out of water than you'd think. What you have to do, you gaff it. Hit it in the head with a club. It's quick and easy, but you can't get around the fact that you're killing it (179).

Although the woman he clubs in the head with his flashlight does not die from the blow (she's rendered unconscious, instead), he later kills her, after terrorizing and raping her. In fact, his telling her about the gaffing of the fish is part of the way he terrorizes her, before he mentions “the other unpleasant chores” that result from the killing of a fish, “the gutting, the scaling, the disposal of offal” (179). He stops talking only so that she can reflect upon the terrible things he's told her, “letting her figure out what to make of it” (179).

As the protagonist points out, for him, “fishing is not just a metaphor” (174). he is a fisherman; fishing is part of his life and the means of his livelihood (he sells fishing lures through a mail-order service) ((171-172).

Fishing is also something akin to a religion for him, a source of moral precepts and guidance for living. Instead of the Bible, he reads (and rereads) Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler and is familiar with Stephen Leacock's comment that “angling was the name given to fishing by people who couldn't fish” (177). Again and again, he repeats, “I am a fisherman.”

The act of fishing (capturing and killing young women) defines him: he is one who captures and kills, a serial killer. Even after he decides to “catch and release” women, he continues, occasionally, to kill his captives rather than releasing them. He remains, at the end of the story, what he was at the beginning of the tale: a fisherman, which is to say, a serial killer.

In the murder of a woman he encounters at a supermarket, the narrator describes himself as he appears to see himself (although his description, the reader sees, is not entirely accurate): he tells her that he is a “catch-and-release fisherman,” who enjoys fishing: “It does something for me that nothing else has ever done. Call it a sport or a pastime, as you prefer, but it's what I do and what I've always done” (178).

A narcissist who believes that women are no better than fish and can be used to satisfy his need to dominate, control, and decide their fate, as if killing is as much a “sport”—and as much a justified, morally correct “pastime”—as fishing, he captures and kills them with as much abandon as “most people” who “think of fishing” without associating it with “killing.”

In fact, the narrator derives his moral principles from the sport, an action that in itself suggests his madness:

. . . He had hooked and landed three trout. Each had put up a good fight, and as he released them he might have observed that they'd earned their freedom, that each deserved another chance at life.

But what did that mean, really? Could a fish be said to earn or deserve anything? Could anyone? And did a desperate effort to remain alive somehow entitle one to live?

Consider the humble flounder. He was a saltwater fish, a bottom fish, and when you hooked him he rarely did much more than flop around a little while you reeled him in. Dis this make him the trout's moral inferior? Did he have less right to live because of his genetically prescribed behavior? (175)

In his reflections, the protagonist moves from a fish to “anyone,” including, it seems, human beings or, more specifically, the young women for whom he routinely fishes. In conversing with the first young woman, the hitchhiker, whom the reader observes him to hook, or pick up, he tells her, “When [he releases them, and] they swim away . . . I get the sense that they're glad to be alive. But I may just be trying to put myself in their position. I can't really know what it's like for them” (170). He also wonders whether “they learn anything from the experience” of having been caught and struggles to free themselves and save their lives: “Are they warier the next time around?” When she replies, “I guess they're just fish,” he agrees: “I guess they are” (170).

These two passages, juxtaposed to one another, show that the narrator believes that the same moral principles, if any, that apply to fish also apply to his human victims. When it comes to morality, one precept fits all, regardless of species. If fish are undeserving of mercy, if they are undeserving of life, despite their valor, so, also, are young women. At least, that is true as far as anyone can know, because, to assume otherwise, requires a projection of one's own subjectivity upon creatures of the natural world. Whether fish or woman, the narrator says “I can't really know what it's like for them.” His inability to empathize aids his dehumanization of women.

Although the narrator may be right in asserting that we must presume that each of us must assume that others, like ourselves, are self-conscious entities capable of thought and emotion and belief and other subjective powers and processes and that we can, therefore, to some extent, at least “know what it's like for them,” he commits the fallacy of moral equivalency when he equates the value of a fish with that of a woman. A fish and a human being are not essentially the same, and there is no reason to value them equally. The comparison of them as equals is false and shows that the protagonist's thinking is deranged.

What type of “fish” captures the protagonist's attention, readers wonder (because the protagonist himself suggests this very question. While shopping at a grocery store, “he hadn't been looking for her,” or anyone else, but “then he looked up and there she was” (177). Although she is beautiful, he admits, “it wasn't her beauty he found himself responding to” (177). What was it, then, the reader wonders, that caught his eye?

Like the other young women whom he does not “catch and release,” she is killed by him. Perhaps, then, by recalling the other women he has killed already, we can glean the source of his attraction to this woman. One woman he recalls killing had passed out from drinking too many gandy dancers. Unable to terrorize her by suggesting his intentions to her before committing the outrages against her, “he let himself imagine that she was dead, and took her that way,” before breaking her neck (174). What seems to have excited him was her helplessness.

However, in considering the “many” women he's killed, the narrator states that “little of what he did ran to pattern” (175). In fact, he admits, “if anything, he'd deliberately sought variety, not for precautionary reasons but because it was indeed the spice of life—or death, if you prefer” (175-176).

Unlike many other serial killers, he does not take “trophies” and does not keep “souvenirs.” Moreover, he confuses memories of real victims with memories of imaginary victims about whom he has fantasized (176).

The woman he encounters in the grocery store is “beautiful, not young-pretty like the hitchhiker” he catches and releases, “or slutty-available like Marni the barfly,” whom he also catches and releases, “but genuinely beautiful,” so beautiful that 'she could have been an actress or a model” (177). However, he says, it is not to her beauty that he responded, and “it scarcely mattered what she wore” (177). After he hits her in the back of the head, knocking her unconscious, the woman is as helpless as the woman who'd drunk too many gandy dancers.

His victims' helplessness seems to be one of the elements that he finds attractive in his victims, which may be the reason he selected the drunken woman, but the grocery shopper was not helpless before he'd struck her. Like the gandy dancers victim, the protagonist snaps the grocery shopper's neck, after arranging “her on the ground on her back” and smashing “both her kneecaps,” but laving “tape on her wrists and across her mouth” (179). In other words, he renders her even more helpless, denying her the ability to run or scream or fight. Helplessness certainly seems one of the elements that the protagonist finds attractive, whether it is present when he kidnaps a victim or whether he himself causes her helplessness after the fact.

Toward the end of the story, the narrator recalls “the first time he'd departed from the catch-and-release pattern,” which was “less impulsive” and more planned. She was “the right girl,” and, like the other victims, had “turned up.” Thus, she was a target of convenience, as were most of his other victims. She was also physically attractive, “young, blond, a cheerleader type, with a turned-up nose and a beauty mark on one cheek” (180). 
The narrator does not tell what he did to this girl; he mentions only that “he'd thought long and hard about it.” However, his recollections of other victims' fates suggests that he also rendered her unconscious and, therefore, helpless, and dispatched her after terrorizing and raping her. Despite his claims to the contrary, there does seem to be a method to his madness, after all.

The protagonist finds justification for his killings in viewing himself as a fisherman and the women he kills as being prey who are of no more value than fish. However, he also cites the Bible or alludes to it on several occasions, leaving readers to wonder what might Block's purpose be in having his protagonist make such references.

The first reference to the Bible is actually a quotation of Luke 5:5: We fished all night and caught nothing. The Gospel verse is quoted out of context. The fisherman Simon (later, the apostle Peter), a fisherman, is suggesting to Jesus that it is pointless to continue to fish, as Jesus has instructed Simon and the rest of the ship's crew. However, when Simon obeys the command, Jesus performs a miracle, and the net is so full of fish that it breaks. When, with the assistance of the crew of a second ship, the fish are loaded aboard both ships, they are so heavy that they sink. Despite Simon's petition to Jesus to leave him, because Simon is a “sinful man,” Jesus tells the fisherman to follow him and that Jesus will make Simon “a fisher of men.”

Jesus calls his disciple to a very different sort of fishing expedition than that to which the protagonist of Block's story devotes himself. Instead of saving the souls of the unworthy, Block's narrator seeks to destroy the bodies and minds of his captives and to take their lives. The narrator of “Catch and Release,” as readers will learn, is too narcissistic, too sadistic, and too psychotic to understand the significance of the Bible verse he quotes or, perhaps, knowing the meaning of the scripture, perverts it by citing it in reference to his own monstrous deeds.

The protagonist seems to see himself and his victim, the grocery shopper he has bound and maimed, n the roles of Adam and Eve, describing them as “Adam and Eve in the garden . . . . Naked and unashamed” (180). Of course, Adam and Eve were only “naked and unashamed” before they disobeyed God, whereupon their innocence vanished, and, “the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Gen 3:7). They then “sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons,” aware and, it seems, repentant of their sin.

Once again, the narrator's reference to scripture is either intentionally ironic and blasphemous or misapplied. It seems, given his character, as it is revealed throughout the story, that the protagonist intends to mock Christian morality, which, after all, does not only conflict with his own, but censors it. In Christianity, the creature is not the equal of the Creator any more than the beast is the equal of the human. Women are not fish, and the fisherman is not a god.

Block leaves the reality of the protagonist's monstrosity before the reader; at the end of the story, the narrator continues to believe that he is doing nothing wrong, even when he kills, rather than releases, his victims. It is his position of moral equivalency that allows him to indulge his delusion that women, like fish, are expendable commodities in the satisfaction of his sadistic “sport” or (the metaphor changes) his appetite for flesh:

He was still a catch-and-release fisherman. He probably always would be. But, for God's sake, that didn't make him a vegetarian, did it?

Hell, no. A man still had to have a square meal now and then (180).

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Prominence

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles, we all need to feel “admired and respected, to enjoy prestige and high social status.” Such a need is represented by “distinction” and by being of high social rank. Although prominence may not include wealth, a prominent person is apt to be perceived as “classy.” In short, to be prominent is to stand out from the crowd.

In horror fiction, which characters stand out and why?

The heroes of horror stories seldom come readily to mind, but the villains are memorable:

Movie or Novel	Villain	Hero
A Nightmare on Elm Street (movie)	Freddy Krueger	Nancy Thompson
Desperation (novel)	Tak	David Carver
Frankenstein (novel)	Monster	Dr. Victor Frankenstein
Halloween (movie)	Michael Myers	Laurie Strode
Paradise Lost (poem)	Satan	God
Psycho (movie)	Norman Bates	Lila Crane and Sam Loomis
The Silence of the Lambs (movie)	Hannibal Lecter	Clarice Starling

Horror stories belong to the villains, even though they are often overcome by the hero or heroes at the end of the novel or movie in which they are featured. The villains make things happen; the heroes, until the end (and sometimes even then) mostly react. This observation applies to literature as old as John Milton's Paradise Lost, for which, both William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley contend, Satan is the true hero of the epic, a point of view I address in my urban fantasy novel, A Whole World Full of Hurt. The protagonist, Raven Westbrook, a turncoat witch, is discussing God's seeming indifference to the evils she and her rescuer, government agent Lloyd Edwards:

“One of the things I remember about reading the poem . . . is that the accepted criticism of the day regarded Satan as the true hero of the poem. He was made unforgettable, these critic claimed, while God was given such short shrift that he was, at best, a marginal character.”

“That's the way it seems today, too, sometimes. God keeps a low profile.”

“I said God seemed all the more impressive to me because he didn't appear directly in the epic. Readers heard allusions of God, in the dialogue of other, lesser characters, but God himself, as you put it, seemed to keep a low profile, as if he himself needn't deign to confront the evil that Satan represented.”

Raven considered his words. “Wow. I get that. What did the professor say?”

Lloyd chuckled. “I don't think he knew what to say, really. He didn't expect any thinking outside the box of received criticism. He admitted the possibility of such a point of view and, without endorsing it, moved on to the next point.”

Why do horror villains typically stand out more than the heroes who defeat them? One reason seems to be that they represent behavior, or even a way of life, that, fortunately, is alien to most of us. As a rule, we don't; stalk and kill young people who are sexually active; we cannot possess other people; we don't create monsters in scientific laboratories; we're not out to kill our sisters; we don't challenge the rule of God; we don't mount and stuff our dead mothers or kill in their names; we're not so wise to the ways of the criminal mind that we can instruct FBI agents as to how to hunt serial killers. Characters who can and do accomplish such diabolical feats are fascinating to us.

On a deeper level, characters the likes of Freddy Kruger, Tak, Frankenstein's monster, Michael Myers, Satan, Norman Bates, and Hannibal Lecter allow us, vicariously, to see life through their eyes, to become them, in our imaginations, for a time, doing what they do. Except for sociopaths, readers and moviegoers have the capacities to empathize and sympathize, to walk a mile in another person's shoes, to get inside someone else's head, to identify with even the most vile and disgusting, heartless, cruel, and evil villains without, we hope, becoming them ourselves, although Friedrich Nietzsche, suggested we may endanger ourselves by such actions: “when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Memorable villains are Evil, with a capital “E.” There is nothing, or very little, they will not do in the interests of obtaining their own goals, whether they seek another victim, victory of God, the creation of life itself, or escape from themselves through their adoption of another personality. Because of the magnitude of their evil, as it is represented in the horrible deeds they commit, they stand out.

Finally, there is at least one other reason that such characters attain prominence: their hubris, or excessive pride, the extreme arrogance which results from their unwarranted self-regard and the self-egoistic centering of the universe upon themselves. All that matters to them are their own desires. They who are merely men (or, far less often, women) would be gods. This is the basic motivation of all bigger-than-life villains. It is the sin of Adam and Eve. As Satan tells the first couple, concerning God's prohibition of their eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God had but the fruit of the tree off limits because “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). It is the sin that leads to Lucifer's downfall:

For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:/ I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High./ Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit (Isaiah 14:14-16).

It is the sin, too, of Freddy Kruger, Tak, Frankenstein's monster, Michael Myers, Satan, Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter, and the other prominent villains of horror fiction. It may also the sin of such actual villains as Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Ghadafi, and other serial killers and dictators. Herein lies the true horror and terror of the most prominent villains, both of fiction and of history.

Sex and Horror, Part 4

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

The werewolf doesn’t figure large in Jason Colavito’s Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, in part, perhaps, because, as a horror icon, the werewolf was never as popular as such other monsters as vampires, witches, demons, and ghosts. In most werewolf fiction, the beast’s origins are seldom explained except to say that his existence is said to be due to a person’s having been bitten by a werewolf. Where the first werewolf came from, no one seems to know for sure or, if someone does, he or she isn’t saying.

The very mystery of the wolf is itself intriguing, for, often, the less we know concerning a person, place, or thing, the more interesting he, she, or it seems to us. The lore of the werewolf is sparse. A bite transforms someone into the monster. The beast transforms at the onset of the full moon (and, indeed, perhaps is transformed by this moon). It prowls by night, seeking whom it shall devour. Only silver bullets are fatal to it. Some werewolves have been the servants, but never the pets, of vampires.

Colavito makes reference to vampires’ keeping of werewolves as servants, as is the case in The Return of the Vampire, a 1944 film in which Bella Lugosi plays “a vampire” who “holds sway over a servant he has turned into a vampire”:

The vampire is Armand Tesla, who was once an eighteenth-century scientist but whose mastery o science led him to become an undead vampire. . . . Tesla re-enslaves his werewolf and uses his powers to stalk the family of Lady Jane Ainsley. . . .

. . . But Lady Jane uses psychology to reason with the werewolf, whom she rescued from lycanthropy once before. When a Nazi bomb knocks out Tesla, the werewolf drags the body into the sunlight, where the vampire melts away, freeing him from Tesla’s control (210-211).

Although Colavito doesn’t discuss the symbolic significance of this monster, it’s a fairly safe bet that the werewolf represents the animal nature of human beings. He is the beast within all of us, the animal that struggles to be free. From a scientific point of view, human beings are, after all, themselves animals of a higher order, perhaps, than the so-called lesser animals, the lions and tigers and bears, oh, my, and werewolves, like lamia, centaurs, minotaurs, sphinxes, mermaids, and other human-animal hybrids, represent the connection that human beings share with other predators.

Christians may accept the existence of demons, witches, and even ghosts, but most would be likely to draw the line at accepting the existence of werewolves. Such creatures, they would probably argue, are merely imaginary.

At best, werewolves represent a secular depiction of the animal instincts and impulses that human beings are said, from an evolutionary point of view, to have more or less repressed in the interests of civilization, culture, and society. They embody, in their shaggy forms, passions unrestrained, and may suggest an abandonment of the spiritual in pursuit of an unadulterated indulgence of the fleshly appetites, and, therefore, a denial, implicit or otherwise, of the soul

Moreover, werewolves are predators. They embody “nature red in tooth and claw,” suggesting that the world really is a jungle wherein species survive only if they are the fittest of their kind. As animals, werewolves are powerful and fierce and hard to beat. However, as humans, werewolves, one might be tempted to suppose, leave a lot to be desired. Aren’t they all but brainless, with fetid breath, terrible table manners, and worse etiquette? Aren’t they but brutes, pure and simple, reminders of what, perhaps, our forebears were, millennia ago, and what we may, should we devolve, be once again? So might men and women, as higher animals, suppose, but human beings are not allowed even this conceit, for, as The Return of the Vampire makes clear, these beast-men can reason, act in their own best interests, and even exact revenge against their cruel, but supposed, betters. Stronger, with greater stamina, and ferocious, werewolves are also capable of thinking and of forming beneficial relationships with others while punishing adversaries.

For Christians, there is no such animal. Instead, the equivalent might be an animated corpse--not a zombie per se, nor a mummy, nor a vampire--but someone more akin to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient mariner or Adam after the fall, a person who is spiritually dead. In other words, someone very like modern men and women, more dead than alive and completely without tail or fangs or fur.

But a werewolf? For Christians, there’s no such animal. Or is there?

According to some accounts, God Himself might punish sinners by transforming them into wolves, and some of those whom the church excommunicated were believed to become werewolves. Likewise, saints could curse men and women, transforming them into werewolves (“Werewolf,” Wikipedia). However, such accounts are relatively sparse. For the most part, werewolves are and remain secular creatures more akin to evolutionary theory than to theological doctrine.

If, in psychoanalysis, the superego substitutes for the moral commandments of God (or, alternatively, for heaven or righteousness), the ego for the free will exercised by human beings (or, alternatively, earth or corrupted virtue) , and the id for the devil (or, alternatively, hell or sin), the fate of those whom God curses by transforming them into werewolves seems to represent, in a Freudian reading, a psychotic obsession with sex and death, or eros and thanatos, the life instinct and the death instinct. The werewolf is a creature that is immersed in his or her own animal nature, in his or her own id, in his or her own sexuality. He or she is a figure half alive and half dead, just as he or she is a figure half human and half animal.

In the Christian reading of the same figure, the werewolf is a figure of the damned sinner, whom God has cast into the hell of him- or herself, cursed forever to remain the beastly, unrepentant sinner he or she has become, most likely long before God placed the lycanthropic curse upon his dying soul.


Note: In Part 5 of “Sex and Horror,” I will consider another icon of the genre, that of the witch.

The Guide to Supernatural Fiction: A Review (Part II)

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In A Guide to Supernatural Literature, Everett F. Bleiler, of Kent State University, identifies six “statements” from which “countless stories can be generated”:

1. A man injures another man (and may be punished).
2. A man rebels against the heimarmene (and may be destroyed).
3. An outlaw power touches upon a man (and may be punished).
4. A good power touches upon a man (and may transform him).
5. A man is caught up and carried along by the heimarmene.
6. A man eases or repairs damage to the heimarmene, thereby helping other men.

He then analyzes each of these “statements,” relating each to his Guide’s “Index of Motives and Situations” (omitted here):

1. A man injures another man (and may be punished).

a. A man commits murder--time gap--punishment by avenging ghost.
b. A man usurps power and oppresses--time passes--punishment by Fate.
c. A man is negligent to others--disturbances--possible resolution by outside party.
d. A man profanes a grave--is haunted by hostile dead--is punished.
e. A man injures another--is punished by avenging powers.

Bleiler also outlines a “special case”: “a man injures another--sets up bad karma--is reincarnated to atone.”

2. A man rebels against the heimarmene (and may be destroyed).

a. A man will not accept death--tries to buy life--is cheated.
b. A man will not accept death--appears after death--may be a nuisance.
c. A man will not accept powerlessness--uses arts--may be punished.
d. A man will not accept his identity--assumes another--is punished.
e. A man acts as a creator--creation gets out of hand. In science fiction, this is motif of the mad scientist.
f. A man affronts the gods--is punished.
g. A man will not accept the deaths of others--awakens them--usually loses.
h. A man will not accept temporary limitations--seeks to remove them--may succeed.

“It would be possible to extend this listing. . . by giving more precise information about the agents, altering the middle events, and varying endings,” Bleiler notes, and to indicate the “community of ideas among the variant situations” he has listed, he expands upon his discussion of situation 3a, ‘A man meets power--a man’s flaw or gives power a hold over him--man is destroyed or threatened’”:

This encounter with the outlaw power has four commons situations, plus several others that are less common. The common situations involve fairies, temptations by the Devil, the hostile dead, and vampires. In each. . . there is a flaw or fault associated with the human that puts him in danger of the outlaw power. In abductions by fairies, the woman must yield sexually to the fairy, which yielding is usually accompanied by some sort of glamour. In temptation by the Devil, the human is usually motivated by greed or lust for power. With the hostile dead, the human is usually trespassing against warning, and is defying a ban. In the vampire story, the victim must give the vampire an initial invitation. As for the ending, the fairy abduction usually ends with the disappearance of the woman. If she returns at all, it is with horrible disfiguration. In the diabolic temptation the Devil almost always wins, and there is little that can be done about the hostile dead. Vampires, however, do permit an escape. Sentence 6 is usually applied, and the human is rescued by outside aid.

3. An outlaw power touches upon a man (and may destroy him).

a. A man meets power--a man’s flaw or gives power a hold over him--man is destroyed or threatened.
b. A man meets power--resists it--may win.
c. A man meets Death--diversions--Death wins.

4. A good power touches upon a man (and may transform him).

a. A man meets power--is victorious--receives gift.
b. A man meets power--is receptive to gnosis--is instructed.
c. A man meets power--has undergone tapas or equivalent--is elevated.

5. A man is caught up and carried along by the heimarmene.

a. Fate needs correction of crime--display--revelation.
b. Ignorance needs correction--death--surmounting of death.
c. Life pattern must be continued on basis or morality--death--path determined.
d. Fate needs correction--sensory limitations removed--adjustment.
e. Ignorance needs correction--man is apt--knowledge imparted.

6. A man eases or repairs damage done to the heimarmene, thereby helping other men.

a. Horrors--invocation of savior--allaying.
b. Disruption--invocation of savior--allaying.
c. Danger threatens--intervention--safety.

“It would be possible to extend this listing. . . by giving more precise information about the agents, altering the middle events, and varying endings,” Bleiler notes, and to indicate the “community of ideas among the variant situations” he has listed, he expands upon his discussion of situation 3a, ‘A man meets power--a man’s flaw or gives power a hold over him--man is destroyed or threatened’”:

This encounter with the outlaw power has four commons situations, plus several others that are less common. The common situations involve fairies, temptations by the Devil, the hostile dead, and vampires. In each. . . there is a flaw or fault associated with the human that puts him in danger of the outlaw power. In abductions by fairies, the woman must yield sexually to the fairy, which yielding is usually accompanied by some sort of glamour. In temptation by the Devil, the human is usually motivated by greed or lust for power. With the hostile dead, the human is usually trespassing against warning, and is defying a ban. In the vampire story, the victim must give the vampire an initial invitation. As for the ending, the fairy abduction usually ends with the disappearance of the woman. If she returns at all, it is with horrible disfiguration. In the diabolic temptation the Devil almost always wins, and there is little that can be done about the hostile dead. Vampires, however, do permit an escape. Sentence 6 is usually applied, and the human is rescued by outside aid.

Bleiler next offers some tips as to how writers may extend or diversify these basic narrative situations. Among these expansion “techniques,” he lists:

. . . duplicating sentence material, interweaving sentences, adding the matter of life, generalizing, rendering more specific, treating figuratively, treating more literally, negating, turning scientific, allegorizing, combining characters, subdividing characters, using offset in various ways, fragmenting, temporally or
geographically. . . .

The bulk of Bleiler’s book is comprised of its “Index of Motifs and Story Types,” in which he lists the recurring themes and topics that the 7,200 stories he considers address. The listing continues for hundreds of pages, but a short list of some of the themes and topics, which Bleiler cross-references to the stories that involve them, suggests the nature of his scheme:

• Abduction, supernatural-by the dead, ghosts, demons, monsters.
• Adam and/or Eve.
• Afterdeath evolution--soul into form of life--necromorphs--reincarnation.
• Age changes--fountain of youth--rejuvenation.
  

An excerpt of an individual entry from the Guide illustrates the general approach to specific discussions and suggests the value and use of his tome: In discussing the film The Thief of Bagdad, Bleiler summarizes the plot: To win the hand of a caliph’s daughter, rivals compete to bring her the “most remarkable gift”: “Props then include a flying carpet, the fruit of life and death, an all-seeing idol’s eye, a cloak of invisibility, a magic rope, a magic casket of wishes.”

His summary allows the reader to see that the basic situation that Bleiler describes is has an important function: it establishes the reason, cause, or motive of the action that follows in the remainder of the story, namely the introduction of the various “props” and the ultimate wining of the contest for its prize, the hand of the caliph’s daughter.

Bleiler’s Guide uses some terminology that may not be familiar to the general reader, even of supernatural, or contranatural, literature:

• Heimarmene: A complex term that suggests one’s personal fate, or karma, but also the universal wheel of fortune, or cosmic destiny. It also suggests the dependency of the one’s character and individual destiny upon the interactions of cosmic forces and events, such as, for instance, the alignment of the stars. One must be in the right time and place, within the great wheel of fortune, to triumph. If, on the other hand, he or she is born, as Hamlet was, when “time is out of joint,” the individual may come to a bad end. Basically, one may think of heimarmene as the rule and operation of fate.
• Tapas: “Tapas” is a Hindu term that means religious austerity. Living the simple, plain life is considered a preparation for the understanding and acceptance of spiritual truths. In Catholicism, something of the spirit of tapas is seen in vows of silence and poverty and in the season of lent and its practices, which include fasting and penitence in preparation for Easter.
• Necromorph: Literally, this word means “death-form,” and may be applied to revenants, such as ghosts, vampires, and zombies as well as to corpses and skeletons.

Bleiler, Everett F. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983.

Note: Bleiler is also the author of The Checklist of Science Fiction and Supernatural Fiction. Glen Rock, NY: Firebell Books, 1978, 266 pages.