Anthology Ideas

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

There are probably as many ways to come up with an anthology idea as there are editors who come up with anthology ideas. In the brief head notes to his stories in his own anthology of twice-told tales, The Collection, Bentley Little mentions a few of them. For any who imagined that the innards of the publishing industry are as confused and messy as those of a dissected high school biology class frog, his comments on the matter suggest that such cynics are pretty much right on the money.

The ecology movement gave rise to the notion for one anthology: The Earth Strikes Back was to be a collection of tales concerning “the negative effects of pollution, overpopulation, and deforestation” upon the planet, or so Little supposed, at least, “judging by the title of the book.”

Another anthology, Cold Blood, was also to be centered on a “theme” and its stories were to have been written to “specific guidelines.”

A third anthology was to have included “stories based on titles the editor provided,” all of which “were. . . clichéd horror images.” This one, Little says, “never came to pass.”

According to Stephanie Bond, author of “Much Ado About Anthologies,” these collections “are assembled in various ways,” sometimes as the result of a group proposal by several authors, sometimes at the suggestion of an editor, sometimes as a way to test the marketability of an idea, and sometimes to capitalize upon a specific author’s unusual success. Usually, they come together because “editors formulate ideas for anthologies to fill holes they perceive in the market.”

I submitted a story for an anthology myself. It (the anthology, but my story also) concerned animals. My story was accepted, but I declined the invitation, because it was to have appeared in an electronic magazine and the editor wanted to pay via PayPal. I prefer payments by check, the old-fashioned way.

Anthologies have a common theme, of course, provided by a timely or evergreen topic, a holiday, an intriguing situation, or any other reasonably good excuse for a score or more (or fewer) stories by the same or different authors of the same genre.

Horror movies have also gone the anthology route. Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye and Creepshow are only two among many. Most follow the simple convention of sandwiching three of four short movies between an opening prologue that sets up the theme to be followed and an epilogue that rounds out the series and provides an appropriate sense of closure.

Shirley Jackson: Learning from the Masters

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In an early scene of the movie Rose Red, its author, Stephen King, playing the role of a pizza deliveryman, announces his delivery of a “fully loaded” pie for “Jackson.” The line is King’s tribute to the author of The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson, who also wrote the famous horror story “The Lottery.” (Rose Red is a takeoff--some might say a rip-off--of Jackson’s Haunting.)

What can the aspiring (or professional) horror writer learn from Jackson’s take on the fiction of fear? Quite a bit.

Like most writers, she writes what she knows. She begins many of her stories by recalling a situation or an incident that frightened her. In a letter she wrote, but never mailed, to the poet Howard Nemerov, she confesses, “I . . . consolidate a situation where I was afraid and. . . work from there.” Like King, Bentley Little, and other masters of the genre, Jackson finds the horrific, the eerie, and the dreadful in common, ordinary events and circumstances. She had, one might say, a highly developed sense of horror, just as the better comedians have a highly developed sense of humor.

Her discerning eye saw the dreadful and the appalling in people, places, and things that others tend to take for granted, accepting or rejecting without a second thought or, perhaps, any thought at all. In such activities as a communal lottery, a couple going about their daily business, the chores associated with marriage and motherhood, and college experiences, she found inspiration for six novels (The Road Through the Wall [1948], Hangman [1951], The Bird’s Nest [1954], The Sundial [1958], The Haunting of Hill House [1959], and We Have Always Lived in the Castle [1962]), three short story collections (The Lottery and Other Stories [1949], Come Along With Me [1968], and Just an Ordinary Day [1996]), and several other works for children and non-fiction publications.

Just as such contemporary horror writers such as Little, Dean Koontz, and H. P. Lovecraft locate the horrific in apathy, Jackson, like Little and King, finds it under the rock, so to speak, of everydayness. It is the malaise of the routine, the ordinary, the usual that destroys the mind and slays the soul. (For King, it is more a threat to one’s community, or hometown--an extension, as we have observed in other posts, of one’s own home.)


After marrying Stanley Edgar Hyman, she resided in Vermont, “in a quiet rural community with fine scenery and comfortably far away from city life”--an environment well in keeping with the ordinariness that infuses her fiction.

Interestingly, the houses in her stories are often more interesting (and sinister) than the stories’ characters. The opening to The Haunting of Hill House is justifiably famous:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

As a Wikipedia article points out, the same is true of the house that appears in The Sundial:

A less obvious but nonetheless imposing character in the novel is the Halloran house itself. Built by a man who came into great wealth late in his life, the house is lavish to the point of garishness, and the endless details of the grounds and interiors are carefully described by Jackson until they overwhelm both characters and reader alike. One of these details is the titular sundial, which stands like an asymmetrical eyesore in the middle of the mathematically perfect grounds and bears the legend “WHAT IS THIS WORLD?” (a quote from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in “The Knight's Tale”). Jackson herself was fond of joking of an “architectural gene” that cropped up in her family once every few generations, and the house presented in The Sundial might foreshadow the infamous Hill House in The Haunting of Hill House. In both Hill House and Sundial, there are many striking similarities between the two houses: both Hill House and Halloran House were built by husbands as gifts for wives who died shortly before or shortly after seeing the house for the first time, and both houses become the source of conflict between various family members who disputed the house's ownership. The “mathematically perfect” grounds and the jarring sundial might remind readers again of Hill House, where all the floors and walls are said to be slightly off-centre. Halloran House, while never openly “haunted” in the sense that Hill House claimed to be, is the site of at least two ghostly visitations.

The tendency to invoke the ominous character of everyday objects is a convention in the horror genre, and women writers frequently attribute such a quality to houses and to domestic objects. One thinks, for example, of Charlotte Gilman Perkins’ “The Yellow Wallpaper” and of the house in which the apparent death of her husband prompts a revelation in the protagonist concerning her personal plight in “The Story of an Hour.”

It is possible, given Jackson’s statement that she starts her stories with “a situation where I was afraid and. . . work[s] from there” that her agoraphobia was a source of her interest in depicting sinister houses. Typically, an person who suffers from agoraphobia finds comfort in familiar surroundings, especially their homes, and are loathe to leave these sanctuaries of safety and security. What if one’s sanctuary should turn upon one, betraying one--perhaps even, in a manner of speaking, stalking one? The result could be The Haunting of Hill House, The Sundial, or We Have Always Lived in the Castle. At least, Sigmund Freud might entertain such notions. If we were to go so far as to take a leaf from those who believe in the efficacy of dream analysis (whose number numbers not only psychoanalysts of the Freudian stripe but others as well), and consider the house a symbol of the body, many of Jackson’s works might even be considered, like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” examples of body horror.

It seems possible, too, that Jackson found the multi-tasking, or more specifically, the multiple roles of modern women to be a potential source of stories of the uncanny and the bizarre. In “Shirley Jackson: Delight in What I Fear,” Paula Guran points out that there is something almost schizophrenic about the many roles that contemporary women perform: “We're all expected to be multiple personalities these days. Nurturing mom, supportive wife, hard driving on the job and carpool driving off. Or maybe we can create a great soufflé while whipping up a new novel. If we've opted for a family we have to somehow be several people at once.” She points out, furthermore (as Chillers and Thrillers also points out, taking a different approach, in an earlier post) that “Writers often feed their creativity through several coexisting personalities.” (The mother who can’t balance the demands of these conflicting roles has recently become a stereotype in contemporary horror fiction, recognizable in King’s Carrie, Robert McCammon’s Mine!, Robert Bloch’s Psycho, and, of course, she originally appeared in ancient myth as such characters as the furies, the gorgons, the lamia, and the sirens.

So, what have we learned from our consideration of Shirley Jackson as a master of contemporary horror fiction? Quite a bit:

• Relive the fear, using it as the basis for creating a horror story.
• Find the terror in everyday situations and incidents.
• Don’t overlook the opportunities for horror that exist in one’s own phobias, if one is fortunate enough to acquire any such “irrational” fears.
• For hints of the horrific, look to the conflicts generated by the familial, social, and other roles that one is compelled to play.
• Seek the horrific in the things, as well as the persons and places, associated with the familial, social, and other roles that one is compelled to play: any may inspire a story that makes readers’ hair stand on end and pimples their flesh with goose bumps.
• Understand the horror of betrayal by the people--or places or things--that one holds nearest and dearest to one’s heart (and remember that no one, no place, and nothing is really safe).
• Know that even Mom (and her apple pie), emptied of the good or seasoned with madness and taken to extremes, can be truly terrifying.
• Realize that horror, like evil itself, is not only natural, social, psychological, and theological in nature, but that it is, above all, personal and should be taken personally.

Bentley Little’s "Collection"

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

This is the second of two posts concerning Bentley Little’s anthology of short stories, The Collection (2000).

Assembled in The Collection, Little’s short stories fall into two broad categories:

1. Those that make sense.
2. Those that don’t make sense.

Tales in both categories tend to entertain. However, the senseless stories also annoy--sometimes, enough to cause a pretty bad rash.

The reason that the senseless stories annoy is that they’re senseless.

After spending ten to twenty minutes reading a story, a reader may not be entitled to a kiss, but he or she should--and does--expect the tale to have had a point, which is to say, to have made sense. When it doesn’t, the reader feels cheated. Hey! he or she is apt to think, I paid over eight bucks for this book, and, at that price, I want each and every story it contains to make sense.

Those of Little’s stories that don’t make sense fail to do so because their endings don’t add up to anything. They don’t explain why the bizarre incidents and situations in the story existed (or may still exist at the story’s end). They don’t suggest that the protagonist’s experience meant anything. In short, these stories--the ones that don’t make sense--are annoying, disappointing, and frustrating because they fail to provide the reader with a satisfying and appropriate sense of closure; they have no proper conclusion. They’re nonsensical.

In a moment, we will cite an example of one of his stories that doesn’t make sense. First, however, maybe we should explain what we don’t mean when we say Little’s often otherwise good-to-excellent stories don’t make sense and are, therefore, unsatisfying and annoying.

We don’t mean that they are ambiguous. Stories that end ambiguously are legitimate if the author has examined the two (or more) sides of an issue and leaves the story’s outcome to the reader’s interpretation, provided that the author has sufficiently explained the two (or more) ways that the story’s conflict could be reconciled and both (or all) are satisfying and appropriate conclusions, as Frank R. Stockton's “The Lady of the Tiger” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” to name a couple, end. There’s a difference in leaving the ending up to the reader and leaving the reader suspended in midair air.

We don’t mean that they lack a happy ending. Not every story’s ending is happy, nor should every story’s ending be happy. There’s a place, especially in horror fiction, for the tragic outcome, after all, as well as the comedic. What matters is whether the story ends in a logical fashion, without violating its own theme, tone, purpose, and type. “The Tell-Tale Heart” does not end happily, but “The Pit and the Pendulum” does. Both of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, however, end logically and, therefore, satisfyingly and appropriately.

What we do mean by saying that some of Little’s stories don't make sense is that they either come to an abrupt conclusion, without bothering to offer any explanation at all for the bizarre incidents they’ve recounted, or that they offer only a half-hearted and half-baked explanation that hems and haws but doesn’t really explain anything. The whole bottom of the story simply falls out from under it, and it ends in midair, with neither foundation nor support, meaning nothing. They’re nothing more than absurd exercises in creating suspense, more like the assignments of a creative writing student than a creative writer.

Having prepared the groundwork for our discussion, let’s take a gander at a Little story that, because of its ending, does make sense and then at one that, for the same reason, does not make sense. The former is both satisfying and appropriate; the latter, neither satisfying nor appropriate.

One of Little’s stories that does work is “Life with Father.” In a brief blurb, Little explains its origin:

I wrote “Life with Father”. . . for an ecological horror anthology titled The Earth Strikes Back. . . . [It was] rejected. Judging by the title of the book, I figured that most if not all of the stories would deal with the negative effects of pollution, overpopulation, deforestation, etc.

So I thought I’d do something a little different.

My wife is a hard-core recycler. Cans, bottles, newspapers, grocery bags--she saves them all. Even on trips, she brings along plastic bags in which to collect our soda cans.

I exaggerated her compulsion for this story.

Anything can be taken to extremes (The Collection, p. 71).

In this story, a father requires that his family recycle everything possible: urine, excrement, sanitary napkins, clothing, father’s semen (through incestuous unions with his daughters), and the offspring of these illicit unions (as food). Finally, unable to endure their father’s abusive “recycling,” the daughters unite, killing him. However, the apples don’t fall far enough from the tree, despite the girls’ horror at their father’s insistence upon recycling everything possible, and, as the story closes, the elder of the two considers how she might best recycle her father’s remains:

I place the biodegradable bags next to the butcher block, and as I take the knife from the drawer, I plan out where and what I’m going to cut, what I’m going to do with his skin, his blood, his hair. I try to think of the best way to utilize his bones.

Old habits die hard (p. 79).

This story, a satire regarding recycling taken to extremes, works because its exaggeration has a reason. It is not exaggeration simply for exaggeration’s sake or as for no other reason than to serve as a means to effect horror or terror (to take a narrative cheap shot, as it were). Instead, it is integral to the story’s plot and theme. In addition, the father’s obvious madness is a satisfying and appropriate explanation for the story’s bizarre situation and the incidents associated with it. The story is, within the context that it creates, believable--or at least does not stretch to the breaking point the “willing suspension of disbelief” that Samuel Taylor Coleridge has argued should be allowed for the sake of enjoying the chills and thrills that imaginative literature, including horror fiction, provides.

“The Woods Be Dark” is one if the many of Little’s tales that doesn’t make sense. In this story, a daughter mates with her father and then her brother after the men of the family fall victims to a dark force associated with a “bad place” in a woods near their mountain cabin. Once she becomes pregnant, she, accompanied by her mother and a medicine woman-cum-midwife of sorts, smash the head of her freakish infant, and order is thus restored, by virtue of this “ritual.” Although the story itself is interesting, frightening, and suspenseful, it makes absolutely no sense, because Little never bothers to explain how and why the men are transformed into monsters, who or what actually is responsible for their transformations, what the ritual is based upon and why it is effective in breaking the power of the dark force (whatever it is), why the incestuous union with the father and the daughter or the brother and the sister is necessary or what it accomplishes and why, or other important questions related to the story’s conflict. “The Woods Be Dark” with ignorance, and, although the tale is frightening and weird, it does not apply to anything beyond its own action. There is neither symbolism, metaphor, theme, or (other than to frighten and earn a few dollars) reason for being. There is no outcome, and the tale leaves the reader annoyed because the narrative wool has been pulled over his or her eyes only to be removed and to reveal. . . nothing.

In his account of the occasioning of this tale, Little does a better job of explaining its inspiration than he does its denouement:

“The Woods Be Dark” was written in the mid-1980s for a creative writing class. At the time I was under the spell of William Faulkner and turning out a slew of interconnected Southern Gothic stories all set in the same rural county. I lived in California, had never been anywhere near the South, didn’t even know anyone from the South--but arrogant and self-important jerk that I was, I didn’t let that stop me (The Collection, p. 13).

For whatever reason, Little does not end tales well, whether they are short stories or novels. Is it carelessness, laziness, or ignorance? Possibly, it is, one time, one, and another time, another. In any case, it is always annoying, disappointing, and frustrating, and, despite Little’s considerable gifts and talents in other areas, his stories’ endings have the unfortunate consequence of destroying the tale’s intended effect and of leaving an unpleasant taste in the reader’s mouth.

Fortunately, there is both help and hope for Little. Edgar Allan Poe offers a solution to Little’s problem: plot backward. Since we have discussed Poe’s advice in a previous post, we won’t discuss it again here. Anyone who is interested in reading the discussion should click here, on the title of the article, "'The Philosophy of Compsoition' and 'The Red Room.'"

Little on "The Collection"

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Many writers are fascinated, even to the point of obsession, with other writers’ inspirations. Stephen King claims to have located a small, curious store that sells multi-million-dollar story ideas for a mere pittance, although he’s rather vague as to the emporium’s exact location.

Horror maestro Bentley Little accounts for his facility with terror by letting his readers in on a little--or should one say a “Little”--secret: his birth followed closely upon his mother’s having attended a showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

In his volume of short stories, The Collection (2002), Little offers more specific accounts of his muse’s muses, prefacing each of his tales of terror with a brief explanation concerning its inspiration.

Bentley, who won the Bram Stoker Award and was thereafter “discovered” by both Dean Koontz and Stephen King, is excellent at plotting--except in one crucial respect: his endings (at least of his novels) are notoriously unsatisfying. However, his fans, aware of this near-fatal flaw, forgive him, for his action-packed plots, full of odd characters and odder incidents, propel readers forward with roughly the same force (and at the same pace) as that of a rocket. Before they fully realize that the conclusion of the story that they’ve spent hours reading is, to put it mildly, disappointing, they’ve finished another otherwise-excellent narrative, full of suspense and horror--trademarks, as it were, of a Bentley Little production.

There are 32 stories in The Collection, involving hitchhikers, newlyweds, a unique serial killer, residents of a town as strange as it is small, and an assortment of other grotesques of only the sort whom Little can create. It would be unfair to share all of the inspirational tricks that Little’s muse played upon the writer of this volume, but a few might suggest the variety of inspiration that Little experiences.

The lead-off tale is “The Sanctuary,” which was inspired by a source similar to one of those which motivated King to write his first novel, Carrie (1974).

King was inspired, in part, to write the story of a telekinetic girl’s use of her powers to avenge herself against her high school’s in-crowd bullies by his having wondered what it might be like to live in the house of a religious fantastic, as a girl he’d known in his childhood did (and as Carrie White, his novel’s protagonist, who was based, in part, on this girl, does). Strangely enough, the “inspiration” for his first novel has since been revamped for his official website, and it now includes a theme that has received an overtly feminist interpretation:

The character “Carrie” was a composite of two girls Stephen knew during high school. The story is largely about how women find their own channels of power, and what men fear about women and women's sexuality. “Carrie White is a sadly mis-used [sic] teenager, an example of the sort of person whose spirit is so often broken for good in that pit of man--and woman--eaters that is your normal suburban high school. But she's also Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.”

(That's quite a revisionistic view of the novel's theme!)

The same sort of wonder concerning the effects of religious fanaticism upon a child prompted “The Sanctuary,” Little confides to his readers:

Religious fanatics have always seemed scary to me, and when I hear them espousing some wacky eschatological theory or promoting their perverse interpretations of the Bible, I always wonder what their home lives are like. What kind of furniture do they have? What kind of food do they eat? How do they treat their neighbors and their pets?

“The Sanctuary” is my version of what life would be like for a child growing up in such a household (The Collection, p. 1).

The similar inspirations are interesting and allow fans, readers, critics, writers, and others an opportunity to see how two masters of the horror genre each handle a similar theme, one in a full-length novel, the other in a short story. What perspective does Little take as compared to King?

The sixteenth story (the one that appears at the halfway mark, so to speak, of Little’s anthology) is “The Pond.” According to Little, it had a somewhat more cerebral theme, “about lost ideals and selling out,” and is, as such, a story concerning “moral shortcomings”:

This is a story about lost ideals and selling out--moral shortcomings which are not limited to the boomer generation depicted here.

By the way, there really was a group called P. O. P. (People Over Pollution). They used to gather each Saturday to collect and process recyclables. Back in the early 1970s, my friend Stephen Hillenberg and I belonged to an organization called Youth Science Center, which would offer weekend science classes and field trips. We got to do Kirlian photography, visit mushroom farms, learn about edible plants on nature walks, tour laser la oratories--and one Saturday we worked with People Over Pollution, smashing aluminum cans with sledgehammers.

Stephen grew up to create the brilliant and wildly popular cartoon SpongeBob Square Pants (p. 199).

The final story in The Collection is “The Murmurous Haunt of Flies,” about which Little writes:

I’m not a poetry fan. Never have been, never will be. But while suffering through a graduate class on the Romantic poets, the phrase, “the humorous haunts of flies” leaped out at me while [I was] reading Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” I thought it was a great line and wrote it down.

Some time later, I found myself thinking of my great-grandmother’s chicken ranch in the small farming community of Ramona, California. She’d died years before, and I hadn’t been there for a long time, But I remembered a little adobe banya or bathhouse on the property that used to scare me (this bathhouse pops up again in my novel The Town). I remembered as well that there had always been flies everywhere--because of the chickens--and I recalled seeing flypaper and No-Pest Strips that were black with bug bodies. The Keats phrase returned to me, a light went on, and I wrote this story (p. 433).

A graduate class in Romantic poetry. A phrase from a John Keats poem. A grandmother’s place in Ramona, California. A bathhouse. Flypaper, No-Pest Strips, and “bug bodies.” For the writer, all human experience is “grist for the mill,” and nothing is sacrosanct. Anything and everything related to being human in an inhuman world is raw material for literary treatment in the horror genre, as The Collection itself does a pretty good job of showing.

An interest in a writer’s inspiration teaches another lesson, too, for aficionados of literature, and its reading and writing pursuits. These insights into the origins of stories--or, at least, of the ideas for stories--indicate an all-too-important, if basic, truth. (Often, because such truths are basic, they are easily and soon forgotten.) As Ihara Saikaku reminds the readers of his own short story, “What the Seasons Brought to the Almanac Maker,” there is a fundamental difference between literature and life. The latter, made up of a discrete and separate series of incidents involving, more often than not, random, and even contradictory situations and expectations, lacks a pattern to its events--especially, a cause-and-effect pattern. In other words, it lacks a plot. Therefore, much of the experience--or series of experiences--that, collectively, we call “life,” seem absurd, meaningless, and purposeless, which can lead to despair at the sense of the futility of existence, tempting us to say, along with King Solomon, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

By selecting from the multiplicity of life’s--and, indeed, of history’s--incidents and situations, those which, assembled in a particular sequence, according to the principles of cause and effect, literature suggests that life is what it otherwise does not seem to be--significant, meaningful, and purposeful, which perception leads one to hope (sometimes against hope) that it is worthwhile, after all, despite Hamlet’s “ slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and “proud man’s contumely.”

With respect to horrific incidents and situations in particular, horror fiction suggests that such experiences are not only survivable but are also important. They can teach as well as torment. They can enlighten as well as frighten. They can help us to get our minds right about ourselves, others, and the world around us. How, specifically, horror fiction accomplishes such feats is analyzed in several other, previous posts and is likely to be examined, yet again, in still future essays.

Meanwhile, The Collection awaits, with interesting insights of its own.

Contemporary Horror Fiction Bookshelf

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In other posts, we have dropped the names of several of the horror genre’s greatest authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and H. P. Lovecraft. In addition, in his 10-part series concerning “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft himself lists many additional big names among the masters of the genre. What’s missing is a roster of the names of horror fiction’s contemporary masters. This post fills this gap on the horror fiction bookshelf by naming the names of many of those who are missing in action, so to speak.

A word or two of explanation is in order, though, for those who are new to this type of reading. First, contemporary horror fiction tends, more so, in many cases, than its predecessors, to mix various other genres with its own, so that science fiction, fantasy, detective, adventure, folklore, myth, legend, and even romance and Western elements become part and parcel of the bogeyman stories. That’s quite a literary stew, but anyone who follows any literary genre long enough will find that, along the way, whatever path it takes, it will include, from time to time, not only elements from other types of fiction, but also a good many themes and topics from such academic disciplines as theology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, geography, geology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, botany, zoology, astronomy, history, art, and a host of others. Fiction’s value lies, largely, in fact, in its capacity to impinge upon all these territories, bringing together in dramatic or narrative form, the whole experience of humanity. Horror fiction is no exception. For this reason, expect to find, in the works of the authors whose works belong to the contemporary horror fiction bookshelf many of these other literary genres and academic disciplines. Second, even a list of contemporary horror fiction won’t likely to be exhaustive. This one certainly won’t be. Rather, it offers a roster of many of the names of writers who are writing today whose names would show up on almost anyone’s list of such authors. Once one becomes a fan of horror fiction, he or she will no doubt find additional writers to add to his or her own contemporary horror fiction bookshelf. The names in this post are a start, and a good and reliable one at that. (The works listed are novels; short stories, although, in some cases, they are numerous, are not included in the list.) As with all writers, some of their works are better than others; I have indicated the ones I found to be superior in red font.

Stephen King: Bag of Bones, Black House, Blaze (written as Richard Bachman), Carrie, Cell, Christine, The Colorado Kid (detective, rather than horror), Cujo, Cycle of the Werewolf (illustrated), The Dark Half, The Dark Tower series (seven novels), The Dead Zone, Desperation (companion novel to The Regulators), Dolores Claiborne, Dreamcatcher, Duma Key, The Eyes of the Dragon, Firestarter, From a Buick 8, Gerald’s Game, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Green Mile, Insomnia, It, Lisey’s Story, The Long Walk, Misery, Needful Things, Pet Semetary, The Plant, Rage, The Regulators (companion novel to Desperation), Roadwork (written as Richard Bachman), Rose Madder, The Running Man (written as Richard Bachman), ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Talisman (written with Peter Straub), Thinner (written as Richard Bachman), Tommyknockers. (King’s official website).

Dean Koontz: Odd Hours, The Good Guy, Brother Odd, The Husband, Forever Odd, Frankenstein (three-book series; two have been written to date), Velocity, Life Expectancy, The Taking, Odd Thomas, The Face, By the Light of the Moon, One Door Away from Heaven, From the Corner of His Eye, False Memory, Seize the Night, Fear Nothing, Sole Survivor, Tick Tock, Intensity, Icebound, Strange Highways, Dark Rivers of the Heart, Winter Moon, Mr. Murder, Hideaway, Cold Fire, The Servants of Twilight, Shadowfires, The Bad Place, Midnight, Lightning, Watchers, Twilight Eyes, The Mask, Whispers, The Funhouse, The Voice of Night, The Key to Midnight, The Vision, Face of Fear, Night Chills, Invasion, Dragonfly. (Koontz has also written a number of science fiction novels, the genre with which he started his career. He wrote some of these novels and others under various pen names: David Axton, Brian Coffey, Deanna Dwyer, K. R. Dwyer, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Anthony North, Richard Paige, Owen West, Aaron Wolfe, and Leonard Chris. Although Koontz denies it, some researchers contend that, much to his current regret and dismay, under the Leonard Chris pen name, Koontz wrote a 1970 erotic potboiler, Hung, and, according to Stu Weaver, Koontz may also have written “13 other erotica titles under as many as 5 other pseudonyms.”). Koontz and his dog Trixie maintain a website.

Bentley Little: The Academy, The Vanishing, The Burning, Dispatch, The Resort, The Policy, The Return, The Association, The Walking, The Town, The Ignored, The House, The Store, Dominion, University, The Summoning, Death Instinct (written as Phillip Emmons), The Mailman, The Revelation. Little does not maintain a website.

Robert McCammon: The Queen of Bedlam, Speaks the Nightbird, Gone South, Boy’s Life, Blue World, MINE, The Wolf’s Hour, Stinger, Swan Song, Usher’s Passing, Mystery Walk, They Thirst, The Night Boat, Bethany’s Sin, Baal. (McCammon’s official website is robertmccammon.com).

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child: Relic, Reliquary, Cabinet of Curiosities, Still Life with Crows, Brimstone, Dance of Death, Book of the Dead, Wheel of Darkness, Mount Dragon, Riptide, Thunderhead, The Ice Limit. (Both Preston and Child have also written both novels and non-fiction separately, under their own individual bylines--Child has written Death Match and Deep Storm; Preston has written Monster of Florence, Blasphemy, Tyrannosaur Canyon, The Codex, Cities of Gold, Ribbons of Time, The Royal Road, Jennie, and Dinosaurs in the Attic). The authors maintain a joint website, located at Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child).

James Rollins: Amazonia, Deep Fathom, Excavation, Subterranean, Ice Hunt, Sandstorm, Map of Bones, Black Order, The Last Oracle. (Rollins maintains a website at jamesrollins.com).

Dan Simmons: Carrion Comfort, Song of Kali, Summer of Night, Children of the Night, Fires of Eden, A Winter’s Haunting. (Simmons, who also writes science fiction, thrillers, and mainstream novels, maintains an official website at dansimmons.com).

Everyday Horrors: The Police

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In more innocent times, parents taught their children that the police were their friends. Cops were good guys, who could be trusted. If one were ever to be in trouble, he or she was to run to an officer of the law (assuming that an officer was available, although, adults often joked, “there’s never a cop around when you need one”). In those days, only a few policemen were women--mostly crossing guards and meter maids. Police officers were respected, if not admired, or, at least, they seemed to be, and, among bakers, glazed doughnut-crazed cops were loved. Whenever the police appeared in films (other than as the Keystone Kops), they were cast as good guys who were brave and noble, living, like Superman, to enforce “truth, justice, and the American way,” if not always life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In the interval between the 1950’s and the turn of the century, something happened. Cops lost their shine. The badge became a badge not of honor so much as of disgrace. Rather than receiving praise from the public that the police claimed to “protect and serve,” the blue knights became the recipients of doubt, fear, and disdain, especially among minorities, who complained of “police brutality” (a charge that has often been shown to be true in videotapes of brutal police beatings and of cops' unnecessary use of their favorite new weapon, the taser). Newspaper and television reports cited police corruption, detailing cases in which cops had been bribed or became extortionists, rapists, and even murderers. The police became criminals themselves. They were just another gang among gangs. The public no longer trusted and admired, or even respected, the police. Instead, they feared and loathed their supposed protectors, their alleged servants, their supposed defenders.


As the public’s confidence in the police waned, the police became “pigs,” and the ways in which they were portrayed in fiction changed as well. In science fiction and horror stories, as in mainstream literature, when the cops weren’t shown as incompetent or as victims themselves (as in The Terminator, in which a cyborg killer goes on a rampage inside a police precinct, slaughtering the officers and detectives on duty), the police were revealed as just another threat in the ever-growing cavalcade of monsters. They were seen, and portrayed, as fiends with badges, handcuffs, Mace--and guns. In Terminator 2, the villain, a new breed, as it were, of cyborg assassin known as a T-1000-series android, is a shape shifter among whose many disguises is that of a policeman. A cop-killer, the T-1000 assumes the identity of its victim, tracking down his target, John Connor, using the computer aboard the dead cop’s patrol car. The movie’s anti-police subtext is anything but subtle, showing the public’s fear and hatred of corrupt peace officers who use their badges and guns to perpetrate crimes against members of the very public they are sworn to protect and serve.

Not surprisingly, Stephen King’s novels sometimes depict police as everyday horrors. Like his fans, King knows the horror that can lurk behind the badge of a cop gone bad. In Rose Madder, the protagonist’s husband, Norman Daniels, is a brutal, sadistic cop who routinely beats his wife, Rose, within an inch of her life, even when she is pregnant with their child (causing her to have a miscarriage). Norman is, in fact, a misogynist, having been charged, recently, with assaulting a black woman, Wendy Yarrow. The internal affairs investigation has been as fuel to his fiery rage, which explodes in his near-fatal assault upon Rose. Her latest beating, for the “offense” of having accidentally spilled iced tea upon Norman, makes her again consider leaving him. She’s been the victim of his brutality for fourteen years. If anything, his mindless rage has become even worse, and she fears that if she continues to stay with him, she’s liable to be killed. If she isn’t killed, she might well wish she were dead if she suffers at his hands for another fourteen years. By then, she may be unrecognizable, she thinks. She finally flees, but Norman, adept at skip-tracing, soon locates her, and the story takes on a supernatural dimension that leads to a particularly violent and gruesome climax and a resolution that underscores the permanent damage that domestic violence, especially at the hands of a rogue cop, can have upon its victim’s life.


As bad as Norman Daniels is, he’s not King’s worst monster behind a badge. This distinction (so far) belongs to Desperation’s Collie Entragian, whose very surname is an anagram for “near giant.” The deputy sheriff of Desperation, Nevada, a small mining town along U. S. Highway 50, the “loneliest road in America,” Entragian makes a habit of stopping, kidnapping, torturing, and killing hapless motorists, using the highway as if it were a strand of spider’s web bringing victims into his jurisdiction. True to the experience of many a driver, the deputy uses one trumped-up charge after another to justify his many traffic stops. However, the arrested offenders are, in reality, his captives, and they soon discover that Entragian is a madman. (In reading one couple their Miranda rights, he reserves his “right” to kill them.) In fact, he’s worse even than a psychotic killer; he’s possessed by a parasitic demon named Tak who uses the police officer as his latest host. The device of having the deputy possessed by a demon allows King to depict the mindless violence of a policeman whose own soul has become corrupted by the power that society has bestowed upon him. This cop could care less about bribes and payoffs; he wants nothing less than the power to bludgeon, torture, and kill those who fall into his demonic hands. In this novel, the power of the police is absolute, and absolute power not only corrupts but kills in the most horrific ways imaginable. Again, the subtext is hard to miss: a police state is a terrible state of affairs, indeed, even in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Entragian--or Tak--is such a threat to society that God himself intervenes to put things right, just as the deity does, implicitly, in Thomas Jefferson’s call to revolution, in The Declaration of Independence.

Of course, the police are sometimes dependable, if perfunctory, characters in King’s fiction. In this dichotomy as dutiful, but unimaginative, defenders of the status quo on one hand and as vile and brutal criminals or worse on the other hand lies the true terror of the men (and, increasingly, the women) in blue. Daily news stories of out-of-control cops reinforce the ambiguity with which law-abiding folk view those whom they’ve trusted to protect and to serve them. It’s a horrible experience to know that the police officer who, today, saves a hostage from a psychotic drug addict with nothing left to lose may be the same one who, tomorrow, pulls over a female on a dark and deserted highway and rapes and kills her or who turns a blind eye to a mob killing.

Modern-day variants upon the Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde theme, police fare the same in other horror writers’ fiction. They’re both the good guy and the bad guy (sometimes at the same time). For example, in the novels of Dean Koontz, cops are sometimes competent and trustworthy, but they are, other times, corrupt and treacherous. When they’re neither the good guys nor the villains in his novels, they’re often simply ineffective, incompetent, and moronic. Velocity, The Husband, and The Good Guy are cases in point. Cops don’t generally fare well in such novels as Bentley Little’s The Store and The Ignored, either, where they’re cast as barely a blip on the Stanford-Binet I. Q. scale.

Even when the police aren’t stupid, bungling, or vicious and corrupt, they’re not good for much when it comes to matching wits--or tooth and fang--with the monsters of horror fiction. As the protagonist of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer says, “Cops can’t fight demons. I have to do it.” (Besides, as the town’s high school principal says, “The police in Sunnydale are deeply stupid.”)

In horror fiction, cops are often creepy--maybe it's because of their fetish for polyester and doughnuts.

“Everyday Horrors: The Police” is one in a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured in Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

The Role of the Back Story

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In a horror story, the back story must explain the cause, motive, or reason for the uncanny incidents that have been occurring in the narrative. To be satisfying, the explanation must be plausible. It must be feasible. It must be believable. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be impossible. Let me explain.

In Dean Koontz’s novel The Taking, a series of bizarre incidents begins when Molly Sloan, one of the novel’s two protagonists, unable to sleep, goes downstairs to work on a manuscript in progress and sees wolves huddled on her front porch. Other animals, some of which would ordinarily be prey to their predatory companions, flee together from what the Molly supposes must be a common enemy. What could be so threatening to wild animals, including wolves, she wonders, as to cause them to flee in panic, putting aside their innate enmity toward one another?

A strange, silver rain with an unusual scent falls, and an eerie fungus grows upon every surface, including plants, trees, buildings, and even human beings, as a thick fog cuts people off from one another, reducing visibility to near zero.

Molly and her husband Neil gather with other townspeople in a local tavern, trying to understand what is happening and what can be done about their situation. Strange objects, resembling spaceships, loom overhead, and residents of the town feel as if, bathed in lights from these ships, they are known thoroughly, from the inside out. Another, more personal marvel also occurs as Molly, who has been unable to conceive for years, becomes pregnant. The townspeople conclude that the earth has been invaded by an advance team of aliens whose purpose is to reverse-terraform the planet to make its atmosphere suitable for their kind.

Mirrors in the tavern show images of the deaths of those who have sought shelter there, and Molly and Neil flee, pursued by strange creatures as the seek children whose parents have abandoned then. Strangely, a dog guides them on their mission.

By morning, the uncanny rain has stopped, and the fungus, along with the corpses of those who have been killed by monstrous beings, are gone, The dazed remnants of the town’s citizenry begin to rebuild, acting as if nothing unusual has happened.

Such is the plot of the story proper. As is typical of horror stories, much of the novel’s suspense derives from the succession of increasingly bizarre incidents that destroys civilization and its comforting traditions and customs, creates dangerous situations, and moves toward an inevitable catastrophe that threatens to obliterate life itself. All along the way, even as the reader enjoys the panic, terror, and chaos, he or she wonders what has caused these bizarre incidents. The answer is the back story.

Cleverly, Koontz provides an explanation early in the course of the story proper, attributing the bizarre incidents to an advance party of extraterrestrials who, by reverse-terraforming the earth, prepares the planet for the main party of invaders who are yet to come. His explanation is a red herring that allows his real explanation for the mystery of the bizarre incidents to surprise his readers.

His novel’s epilogue provides the back story, as readers learn that the town is not under attack by aliens from another world, after all. Recalling a message that she’d heard (and to which Koontz has made his readers privy as well) the crew aboard a space station transmit at the outset of the attack, before they were killed and the station was destroyed, Molly is able to translate the strange words of the message, after writing it phonetically in sand: “Yimaman see noygel, see refacull, see nod a bah, see naytoss, retee fo sellos” means “My name is Legion, is Lucifer, is Abbadon, is Satan, Eater of Souls.” She and Neil realize that the Rapture has occurred. God has taken the souls of the blessed, leaving behind the rest, and the strange rain has brought a flood upon the planet similar to the one that occurred in the time of Noah. Once again, humanity has become too wicked to continue its existence, and the judgment of God has fallen. Molly tells her husband that she will write a book for her as-yet-unborn child, so that he or she will know how the world ended and why they were spared.

In the story proper, Koontz, while intentionally misleading his readers as to the true cause of the strange incidents that are occurring, also prepared them to accept the actual cause. In telephoning a family member, Molly and Neil learned that the relative, a Christian, attributes the strange rain and the other bizarre incidents to God’s work in ending the world, rather than to some other cause. Therefore, in a sense, both Molly and Neil were tipped off to the actual cause, but Koontz includes their conversation only briefly, letting the readers assume that the relative simply believes something that he finds comforting or is even, perhaps, simply a misguided religious fanatic whose explanation of events can be dismissed. In fact, in the end, it turns out to be true. Thus, the final and “true” explanation of the events that have transpired is not something the reader hears for the first time at the end of the story; he or she has been clued in early on.

Other writers are not as adept at developing a back story that, within the terms of the story’ internal logic, is plausible, feasible, and believable even if, in another world, such as our own, it would not necessarily be possible. Bentley Little is a good example of a horror writer whose back stories often disappoint because they do not explain the novel’s bizarre events in a manner that his readers find to be satisfactory. As a result, many of his readers find his otherwise-entertaining plots to be ultimately unsatisfying.

For example, The Resort, like most of Little’s novels, has an interesting premise, and he does his usual excellent job of creating and maintaining suspense, generating and sustaining an eerie mood, and introducing one astonishing and bizarre incident after another, prompting his readers to want to know what is causing these fantastic events. Lowell and Rachel Thurman and their children visit a fabulous resort, the Reata, that caters to its guests’ every whim. Soon, visitors begin to disappear. Long, loud parties take place in supposedly vacant rooms. The Thurmans’ sons believe there’s a corpse below the swimming pool’s artificial waterfall. Couples engage in perverted sexual behavior. During a trek along a nature trail, the Thurmans’ sons depart from the path and find an older version of the modern resort, where guests participate in depraved sexual activities. As the boys near the resort, its guests vanish. Finally, during a game in which the resort’s guests are forced to participate, players are maimed or killed. The Thurmans try to flee, but their car won’t work and, unable to recruit a mechanic or a tow truck driver who’s willing to make the long trip to the remote resort, the family is stranded among the resort’s mad employees and insane guests. It appears that whatever befell the earlier resort is now happening to the present one.

The novel never explains what causes the madcap behavior of the Reata’s employees and guests. Instead, Little merely suggests that their antics may be related, somehow, to the older resort and to the greed of an early land grabber. Without a plausible, feasible, and believable explanation for the strange activities and events that the story has presented, the reader feels cheated, and what could have been a satisfying and enjoyable read feels more like a con game in which the reader, having spent both time and money for the privilege of being diverted and amused, is the novel’s true victim.

How can writers prevent such disappointment?

In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe, explaining how he write The Raven, provides a way to avoid such unsatisfying outcomes to one’s stories. Start at the end, Poe advises, determining the effect one wants to create. (In horror fiction, the effect, is, of course, horror.) Then, plot the best way to get there, planning the series of incidents that will make up a realistic, logical, and believable series of connected incidents.

This approach is known as the “working backward heuristic.” By adopting this strategy, a writer can, hopefully, avoid the pitfall of writing an otherwise-satisfying story that nevertheless fails due to a disappointing, or even non-existent, explanation for it’s plot’s strange series of incidents. Based on the determination of the effect he wishes to create, Poe then decides what the narrative poem’s length, “impression,” tone, “keynote,” logic, topic, relationships between characters, topic, rationale, denouement, and theme should be, working out each part in relation to the preceding and the following parts and to the poem as a whole. As a result, his poem has a logical and necessary unity and coherence, with one part leading inexorably into, and supporting, the next. A horror writer may not need to work out the details of his or her plot in the exact manner that Poe does with regard to the storyline of The Raven, but starting with a plausible, feasible, and believable explanation for the incidents of the story’s action, at least, will ensure a logical or causal chain of relationships among these incidents and, therefore, a unity and coherence that is both credible and satisfying to readers.

Evil Is As Evil Does

copyright 2007 by By Gary L. Pullman

If God is loving, omnipotent, and omniscient, why does evil exist? That question expresses the philosophical (and theological) dilemma that’s known as “the problem of evil.” In horror fiction especially, it’s this problem that’s the basis of the antagonist, who- or whatever he, she, or it may be.

Various authors of horror fiction, past and present, have defined evil. Most of them have presented specific ideas as to what constitutes wickedness. Let’s consider some of their conclusions.

For Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote not only The Scarlet Letter, but also such classic horror stories as “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” “The Birthmark,” “The Great Stone Face,” and “Young Goodman Brown,” evil, boiled down to its essence, is a result of sin, in the traditional sense of the term’s meaning: pride, vanity, hypocrisy, and so on.

Edgar Allan Poe, author of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, found passion, usually combined with various mental disorders, the source of various evils, most of which culminated in murder. The protagonist of “The Cask of the Amontillado” walls up a man simply because the main character envies his rival’s knowledge and success about wines and other matters.

H. G. Wells wrote horror stories as well as science fiction classics. One of these stories, “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid,” appears on this blog. For Wells, horror derives from and takes the form of human beings’ abuse of technology, which usually results either from ignorance or arrogance or both.

The Stephen Crane of the horror genre, H. P. Lovecraft found the universe to be indifferent to human existence. His fiction is replete with otherworldly beings and strange creatures from other dimensions who are representative of a cosmic indifference to humanity, having no regard for or understanding of the humans whom they often slaughter as if they were mere cattle. Viewed objectively and impersonally, from a cosmic perspective, life, for humans, Lovecraft’s fiction suggests, is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Evil doesn’t exist as such; it is rather, a matter of perception: people may regard meaninglessness, as represented by his fiction’s monsters, as evil, but, in itself, it’s just the nature of the universe in which such insignificant creatures happen to exist. His mosnters may be taken, therefore, as embodiments of the idea of nature as it appears apart from the control of an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent deity such as the God posited by Christian belief.

Dean Koontz values, above all things (except, perhaps, dogs), brotherly love. In his fiction, it is the ties to one’s community, to one’s nation, and to one’s species that counts. Even against great adversity and loss, brotherly love, he implies, gives human existence dignity and significance. It seems, therefore, that, for Koontz, evil is whatever threatens or denies the maintenance and development of such love, especially an insensitive indifference to humanity as such. Koontz, despite, or in addition to, his Catholic faith, is also, in this sense, a humanist.

Whatever threatens one’s hometown (an extension of one’s home) is evil, according to Stephen King’s many works of fiction. In this sense, King’s take on wickedness is similar to Koontz’s view of evil. However, King is more provincial, most of the time, finding those nearest at hand (and, presumably, dearest) to be more valuable than strangers who happen to reside in the same state or country or upon the same planet. It is one’s family and friends, not necessarily humanity in its entirety, that seems to matter to King; therefore, whatever threatens one’s family or local community is the bogeyman. Such a theme is conveyed in the bulk of King’s many novels, from Carrie onward.

For Bentley Little, evil is the indifference of nameless, faceless bureaucracies and other impersonal organizations.

Such an alaysis helps us to see the reigning demonic spirit of the age as various literary artists, living and working at various times in the history of the human race, have envisioned it. In his poem, “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yates asks, now that Christianity has come to a close, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches. . . toward Bethlehem to be born.” According to modern horror writers, the beast “with a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun” is indifference, or apathy, at the local, organizational, or administrative, and the universal levels of human existence. However, the beast is nothing if not protean and has appeared in many previous incarnations, as indicated. Most likely, in future generations, it will assume still different forms.