Blurb Plotting, Part 2

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

In my previous blog, using Dean Koontz’s What the Night Knows, I demonstrated how an analysis of publisher’s blurb can--on occasion, at least--result in the identification of a formula by which a writer may plot a novel of his or her own, using this same formula.

In this post, using Bentley Little’s The Store, I demonstrate again how this method can generate a plotline for one’s own novel.

Fiona Webster summarizes the plot of Little’s novel; I add, in bold font, the steps that she creates in doing so that you or I (or anyone else, Bentley Little included) could extract from Webster’s synopsis, using these steps to develop the plot for his or her own novel:

Appeal to readers’ personal interest: . . . "In The Store Little examines the steadily expanding influence, over all of us, of chain stores. . . . "

Focus upon the ordinary while suggesting that, underlying the everydayness of the initial situation, something bizarre might be happening: "The Store builds paranoia by starting with simple descriptions of the picturesque landscape and the deceptively banal Western town that is Juniper, Arizona. Then The Store arrives. The Store razes a lovely hill to build its huge parking lot. The Store offers well-paying jobs and an astonishing variety of consumer goods. The pattern of delight and worry in the citizens, as The Store spreads its tentacles into local concerns, is believable--disturbingly so. The Store seems like any other of the familiar chains that reproduce like rabbits, invade communities, wipe out small businesses, and turn unique localities into a generic America that looks just the same from Alaska to Florida." 

Involve the main character and others in the situation: "But what exactly goes on, when Samantha and Shannon meet with their boss in the basement of The Store? And who are the Night Managers?"

Refer the situation to an established type of fiction (in this case, the dystopia): "This is dystopia in microcosm. This is horror fiction at its subversive best." --Fiona Webster 

Once again, the blurb has provided a sequence of steps by which to plot one’s own novel:

1. Appeal to readers’ personal interest.
2. Focus upon the ordinary while suggesting that, underlying the everydayness of the initial situation, something bizarre might be happening.
3. Involve the main character and others in the situation.
4. Refer the situation to an established type of fiction (in this case, the dystopia).

For a Writer, Too, Two (Or More) Heads Are Better Than One

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Dusted: The Unauthorized Guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Lawrence E. Miles, Lars Pearson, and Christa Dickson, includes a sidebar concerning “Spike’s Nature” in which the author (presumably Dickson, since she waxes poetic about “the sight of James Marsters half-naked [sic]) suggests that the series’ writers view the same character differently, creator Joss Whedon seeing the vampire as redeemable and Doug Petrie as unredeemable. Other writers also have their own points of view concerning Spike’s nature: “Any attempt to work out whether he’s good, bad, or just going through his second adolescence is doomed to failure,” the author or authors conclude, “because frankly it’s hard to find three episodes in a row which all agree” (203).

In an earlier post, “Writing as a Schizophrenic,” I suggested that one way to layer a character (that is, to give him or her several, sometimes conflicting traits, making him or her a round and dynamic, as opposed to a flat and static, character) is to develop schizophrenia. Not real schizophrenia, of course. Vincent Van Gogh’s ear aside, there’s a limit at which an artist should draw the line when it comes to making personal sacrifices for the sake of his or her art (or the man or woman of his or her dreams). I meant imaginary schizophrenia or, even better, the sprouting of several heads, each with a mind of its own. By adopting different perspectives (political, religious, philosophical, and otherwise) and different points of view even among these perspectives (Democrat, Libertarian, Republican, conservative, moderate, liberal, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheistic, agnostic, dualistic, monistic, materialistic), one could add depth to one’s depiction of a character.

The authors of Dusted suggest another way of accomplishing the same enrichment of one’s characters: imagine him or her the way that several established authors might portray the same character. How might Stephen King depict your protagonist, antagonist, or other type of character? How might Dean Koontz represent the same literary person? How about Robert McCammon or Dan Simmons or Bentley Little? By sketching your character as other writers--and famous or at least well established ones, at that--might see him or her, you can yourself develop a richer understanding and appreciation of him or her. If the character is a complex one, you can even create various scenes that show his or her perhaps conflicting characteristics. Perhaps you started with a cartoon-style hero or villain. Now, he or she has developed into a dramatic persona worthy of William Shakespeare (or maybe King or Koontz, Whedon or Petrie).

The Adaptation of the Gothic

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

South cloister of Gloucester Cathedral, looking eastwards.  By William Avery.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Images of the Gothic no longer haunt us, perhaps, as they did earlier generations. Americans, in particular, do not identify much with aristocratic living or, for that matter, peasantry. Most Americans live in apartments or single-family dwellings. Their houses, although often spacious, are seldom the size of castles, and Americans are more likely to be haunted by natural, as opposed to supernatural, events. War, sickness, broken relationships, the deaths of loved ones, upward mobility, taxes, and the heartbreak of psoriasis are apt to frighten Americans more than things that go bump in the night.

Writers like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Dan Simmons, Robert McCammon, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and James Rollins have survived the decline of fantastic literature in general and of horror fiction in particular by adapting the Gothic in various ways. King and Little bring it to contemporary small-town or rural America, substituting mansions, hotels, universities, and resorts for castles and middle-class neighbors for the peasantry. The nobility is pretty much gone from the picture altogether, with the exception of such stand-ins as occasional politicians, celebrities, and business tycoons. Koontz’s fiction adapts the fantastic and the horrific to modern life, too, but, in doing so, makes both the fantastic and the horrific merely elements of a more inclusive, “cross-genre” body of fiction that includes elements of such other genres as romance, science fiction, adventure, thrillers, and mystery. He even includes, more often than not, a dog of a purer and nobler character than any of his protagonists is likely to develop.

Simmons’ Summer of Night, a slow starter, is a rewarding read similar to King’s It, and other of his early novels tread ground that is likewise familiar to Gothic and contemporary readers alike as well: vampires (Carrion Comfort), ghosts (A Winter‘s Haunting), and even an irate volcano goddess (Fires of Eden). His more recent work, when it has dealt with horror rather than with science fiction, has reworked Gothic themes (Drood) or historical events (The Terror). McCammon’s novels often deal with sociological (The Sting) or psychological (Mine!) themes, especially as they relate to growing up (Boy’s Life). Preston and Child introduce elements of the police procedural and the thriller into their uncanny fiction by having the FBI’s Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast solve unusual, X-Files-type crimes that often take the reader into such exotic locales as museums, subway and sewer systems, cruise ships, Buddhist monasteries, and dream worlds, at the same time acquainting fans with specialized and esoteric knowledge about ancient artifacts, engineering marvels, the maritime trade, the finer points of Zen, and astral projection. Rollins brings special forces personnel into stories set in Amazon jungles, subterranean worlds, and other places similar to those of his literary mentors, the Doc Savage authors, Edgar Rice Burroughs, L. Frank Baum, C. S. Lewis, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne.

The Gothic elements, although transformed, persist not so much in imagery as in mood and tone. Darkness. Shadows. Monstrous faces appearing out of the gloom. Fog. Images of decadence and death. Hints of a stranger, deeper cosmos beyond the familiar, everyday world. Portals to nowhere--and everywhere. Wraiths and apparitions that may be merely imaginary. Intimations of immortality. Mysterious ruins. Beautiful, but deadly, women. Hideous, half-seen shapes. The falling of divine judgment, like lightning, at the stroke of midnight. Time out of joint and space deformed. The themes and images may be interpreted to fit the prejudices and needs of the day, but they remain eternally Gothic, even when they are disguised.

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The Vanishing: Why Theme Matters

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

A horror novel does not hang entirely upon the explanation of the horror, perhaps, but a good amount of readers’ satisfaction (or lack thereof) does hinge upon a satisfactory account of the horrific incidents or events that transpire during the course of the story. By satisfactory, I mean satisfying, and, by satisfying, I mean that the explanation is both feasible and integral to the action for which it is the account. It is not simply tacked on, as if it were an afterthought, to bring the narrative to a convenient conclusion. It is not a deus ex machina.

As both critics and readers have pointed out, Bentley Little’s novels too often end in such a manner, without rhyme or reason. This has happened, followed by that, for two or three hundred pages, for little enough (if any) reason, and that is, too often, enough for Little. The story is the important thing, and he has entertained his readers; a theme is of no real importance. Such seems to be the point of view of writers such as Little and, indeed, his unofficial mentor, Stephen King (who labels Little “the poet laureate of horror”).

Theme, however, does matter to most readers, writers, and critics. (One suspects that it matters to King, too, if not to his unofficial protégé, because King’s novels and short stories typically do suggest relatively important lessons.) Perhaps themes matter less to Little because fiction that doesn’t challenge or enlarge one’s understanding or tolerance or perspective or sympathy is much easier to write than fiction that does do so.

Unfortunately, although Little’s fiction frequently entertains, it seldom edifies. He often raises some important issues and, more importantly, perhaps, questions, but, because he is seldom, if ever, concerned with such matters as unity and cohesion and the logic of his plot is rarely rigorous, these issues and questions go largely unaddressed. The Vanishing is no exception.

After tantalizing readers with his insightful suggestion that perverse sexuality implies the decadence of human nature out of which such distorted impulses arise, while implying, at the same time, that religious faith (perhaps because it is mired in the same perverted nature), fails to remedy such impulses or to redeem the souls from which they arise, Little ignores these lines of development. Although horror stories frequently depend upon misdirection, which is generally effected through situational irony, such bait-and-switch tactics are usually narrative, seldom thematic, having to do with action rather than the meaning of the story as a whole. Instead of following his own suggested train of thought--that the perverted nature of human beings cannot be rectified through religious redemption or salvation (because, it may be, their very faith is also tainted by their sinful nature), Little turns his could-have been, should-have-been theological story into an ecological one, with the monstrous, Yeti-like creatures who menace the humans (with whom they also fornicate to preserve their corrupt stock), seeking, native American-like, to defend their territory, from encroaching civilization and its pollution of the environment:

“. . . Something Phillip Emmons said last night stuck with me: ‘They slaughtered invaders in order to preserve and defend the vanishing wilderness in which they lived. It was a protective measure.’ When I was doing my research at the library this morning, I looked at everything through that lens, and I have to admit, it made a kind of weird sense. What if whoever--or whatever--is left of this dying breed is trying to fight back, retake the land that was stolen from them, come out from whatever small corner of the wilderness they’ve been pushed into and strike against the now dominant species that stole their spot on the food chain: us?”

He looked at her skeptically. “So we’re involved in some kind of ecological horror story?’

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the forest grew back the day--the day--after the last stand of old growth trees was cut down.”

“Not only that,” she added. “Besides their money, what do Lew and Stephen Stewart and all those other men have in common? Oil, gas, construction, development, real estate. They all make money off the land, through its exploitation or the theft of its natural resources. Sure some of them give back and do good and try top help others, but that’s only because deep inside they feel guilty and know they’ve done wrong.”

“So what are you saying? That they’re killing their own families and committing suicide in order to stop themselves from drilling for oil or building more homes? That’s pretty ridiculous.”

[Readers will doubtlessly agree with this sentiment, at least.]

“. . . When cities expand and encroach on wilderness areas, the animals that live there are either removed or exterminated, forced to coexist or, as is usually the case, pushed even farther out into whatever open country remains. Why should this be any different? Besides, the defense and pursuit of land has caused even more wars than religion.”

“So we’re at war?”

“Aren’t we?” (337-338)

The reference to religion at the end of the novel is entirely too late and too weak to ennoble Little’s ecological theme, however widespread and wholesale his characters may consider the rape of the land and the consequent suffering of its furry denizens. In writing The Vanishing, Little could have given his readers a novel worth reading, akin to King’s Desperation. Instead, “the poet laureate of horror” delivers a mangled tale worthier of M. Night Shyamalan than Little’s own unofficial mentor.

It’s a shame to see talent as great as Little’s go to waste.

Quick Tip: Remind the Reader

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Most longer fiction occasionally pauses in the presentation of its action to summarize what has gone before, thereby refreshing readers’ memories as to the narrative’s previous events. Journey to the West (published in the West as Monkey), The Song of Roland, and even Hamlet and other Shakespearean plays use this technique. In the days of ancient Greek dramas, the chorus reminded audiences of what had happened in the previous parts of the play, as did the protagonist and other characters, through monologues). Horror novels are no exception. Their authors also pause from time to time to remind their readers of what they’ve read. Occasionally, such summaries can be used to misdirect the reader, suggesting that a plot is leading toward a particular denouement (or catastrophe, if the story is to be a tragedy) rather than the one in which it actually will be resolved. On page 210 of his 386-page page-turner, The Vanishing, Bentley Little takes time out to remind his reader, through dialogue between two newspaper reporters, as to what is occurring, with increasing frequency, throughout the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area:

Wilson swallowed. “I suppose. . . we have a California-based phenomenon that causes heretofore sane and sensible individuals to go on murderous killing sprees and/or commit suicide in unusually violent ways. It’s accompanied by unusual plant growth and primarily affects the wealthy. . . . And it’s been occurring off and on for well over a century.”

(The plot sounds somewhat like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, but, trust me, Little’s novel is way better than Shyamalan’s movie [although it’s certainly not the author’s best work]).

Little’s summary suggests that whatever the hell is going on in The Vanishing has something to do with “unusual plant growth,” which, elsewhere (on page 124, to be exact), he describes in generally malevolent terms:

His gaze moved on to the surrounding grounds. The damn place was overgrown with vegetation. This was the fourth landscaping service he’d hired just this year and it looked like he’d have to find yet another one. He’d explained to Gary Martinez, the owner of the business, how he wanted the property maintained, but either he hadn’t properly communicated with his employees or the landscapers who worked for him were incompetent. Whatever the reason, the area around the house looked like hell. . . .

Does the “phenomenon” really have anything to do with these plants, though, or does Little only want his story’s readers to assume that it does? In other words, is Little purposely misleading his readers so that, in the end, he can switch directions, surprising his fans? I don’t know, because I haven’t read the entire novel yet. However, Little has led me to believe that there may be such a connection. Either there is one, or he’s purposely misleading me through misdirection. Time will tell.

Tip Top: Mutual Admiration Lists--Useful or Self-Indulgent?

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Most readers (and writers, for that matter) have a short list of the novels they have most enjoyed, the best of the best, so to speak, or “the top ten.” Of course, these lists differ from one person to another, because we all have our own likes and dislikes, our own interests, biases, values, beliefs, and concerns. We also have different levels of sophistication as readers--and different backgrounds.

Any list of the “best” or the “top” novels in the horror, or any other, genre is necessarily subjective. There may even be someone (besides M. Night Shyamalan himself, I mean) who enjoyed his dreadful movie, The Happening.

Despite the idiosyncratic nature of such lists, perusing them, especially if they are annotated by their creators with the reasons that the novel is on the list (that is, why the lost maker listed the book), can be instructive for writers who write with their readers’ interests in mind. On his blog, Antibacterial Pope, Nick Cato offers such a list, citing the following as the best of the best for the past year, in “My Top Ten HORROR Novels of 2009”:

1. Blue Canoe by Tim Wright
2. His Father’s Son by Bentley Little
3. Cursed by Jeremy A. Shipp
4. This entry is missing for some reason.
5. Far Dark Fields by Gary A. Braunbeck
6. Afraid by Jack Kilborn
7. Depraved by Bryan Smyth
8. As Fate Would Have It by Michael Louis Calvillo
9. Sacrifice by John Everson
10. Orphan’s Triumph by Robert Buettner

Except in general terms, I won’t identify the reasons that Cato considers these books the best of the best for 2009; you can visit his webpage for that information. In general, though, he cites their credible characters, innovative perspective, cross-genre content, philosophical musings, action, intensity of pace, suspense, gore, and, of course, frightening fare.

Michael Marshall Smith has also offered a “top 10 horror books” (apparently, of the “of all time” type) list:

1. Dark Feasts by Ramsey Campbell
2. Pet Sematary by Stephen King
3. Ghost Story by Peter Straub
4. Dead Babies by Martin Amis
5. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
6. Night Shift by Stephen King
7. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
8. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
9. At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft
10. Best New Horror (edited) by Stephen Jones

In general, Smith cites such criteria for his judgments as “disturbing.” storylines, cross-genre content, setting, creepiness, atmosphere, psychological realism, style, and variety.

Not to be outdone, I have likewise offered my own lists, both of what I consider the top ten horror movies of all time (“Toppers”) , “Horror Story Failures” and “Ideas That Don’t Work” and a list of horror novels that I believe should be on everyone’s “Contemporary Horror Fiction Bookshelf.”

There’s no need, of course, to rehash my views here. Anyone who’s interested in them can peruse my previous posts easily enough and decide whether they are the perceptions of genius or imbecility (that is, whether he or she agrees or disagrees with them).

The important point is to identify what other readers and writers like. By doing so, you, as a writer, can address these concerns and interests in your own fiction, increasing its relevance to others and, perhaps, your work’s sales appeal as well.

I’m not suggesting pandering, but a meeting of the hearts and minds or readers and write, when possible, in the pages of your novels. In many cases, you are apt to find that we all like pretty much the same sorts of things; the horror genre is, after all, a genre, and genres appeal to specific audiences or communities who share similar views, interests, and concerns.

Quick Tip: Connect the Nouns

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In school, we’re taught that a noun is a word that names a person, place, thing, quality, or idea. In a scene, a writer should connect each of these types of nouns to one another so that, together, they create a unified effect: Person = Character Place = Setting Thing = Property (“Prop”) or Figure of Speech Quality = Atmosphere or Emotion Idea = Theme. Here’s an example, courtesy of Bentley Little’s novel The Vanishing:

It was a muggy day in Manhattan [place], and Kirk [person] spent most of it in his apartment [place], sitting in his desk chair listening to the stack of CDs [thing] he’d bought the day before. But, by late afternoon, even he was tired of sitting on his ass. His mom had just returned from a two-week trip to France, and he’d promised to stop by and see her, so he took a shower, put on some clothes his parents wouldn’t find too offensive and made his way uptown to their building. He was happy [quality] to see his mother again. It was embarrassing [quality] to admit, but he’d missed her. Mama’s boy, he chided himself [idea].

This approach makes even a short paragraph seem as if it is telling a story. Little uses this technique frequently in the course of his novels, the scenes reading like anecdotes, or miniature stories, which serve other such purposes as characterizing his characters, developing atmosphere, expressing mood, developing conflict, locating action, and expressing themes, while, at the same time, both individually and collectively, they move the greater narrative forward. It’s a sound approach, built upon connecting words that refer to persons, places, things, qualities, and ideas.

Religious Fundamentalism Is Not the Answer in "The Vanishing"

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In a previous post, I addressed Bentley Little’s thematic use of aberrant sexuality in The Vanishing, observing that he employs it in this novel for the same purpose as he does in his others: it expresses and represents the degenerate nature of the men and women who engage in it. I concluded that, in Little’s fiction, sexual debauchery suggests that men and women, separated not only from God and nature, but also from any sense of moral decency or even decorum, are haunted, or even possessed, by an idolatrous sensuality and a demonic sexual deviance and that, regardless of the shapes and appearances of the monsters in Little’s novels, sexual perversion--or, rather, what it symbolizes--the moral degeneracy that issues from the godlessness and idolatry of modern, secular society--is the true demon about which he writes, the nature of the human beast, unclothed by cultural pretenses and rhetorical rationalizations.

However, Little has no evangelical mission. He seeks not to proselytize. He wishes to make no converts to traditional Christian faith, in either its Roman Catholic or its Protestant versions. Indeed, Little appears to have serious misgivings about Christian faith as it is interpreted and practiced by both Roman Catholics and Protestants. His omniscient narrator makes this clear in such comments as these:

. . . “Reverend Charles asked about you the other day.”

“Really?” he said noncommittally.

“He knows you’re a writer and thought you might help us out with our letter-writing campaign. The school board refused to allow science teachers in the district to talk about creationism or intelligent design. We’re trying to get that changed.”

“Mom. . .”

“Don’t worry. I told him you wouldn’t be interested.”

“Yeah, you’re right. They should be teaching religion at school and leave the controversial stuff like science for the parents to teach their kids at home.”

“Don’t you start blasphemin’ with me.”

. . . His mom had always been religious, but she’d never been nutty. He wasn’t sure that was still true. . . .

. . . Disbelief in evolution was no longer just a fringe viewpoint. An antiintellectual [sic], anti-science attitude no seemed to hold sway over vast sections of the country (17-18).

After characterizing Christians as irrational, if not insane, Little suggests that their holy book is unsatisfactory as a guide to anthropology, using myths to explain away, rather than to explain, mysteries of nature:

It was a graveyard unlike any they had ever seen, not least for the fact that the graves had been big enough to accommodate giants. . . . and footprints led away from the pit through the muddy soil, monstrous footprints that were not only four times the size of an ordinary man’s but resembled those of neither animal nor human.

. . . And how had the one giant come back to life and emerged from the grave?

“There were giants in the earth in those days,” Morgan James said, quoting the Bible as if that explained everything.

Of course, it explained nothing . . . (129).

Next, the author implies that Christians are stubborn and prefer to attribute impossibilities to God rather than to accept the possibility that bizarre phenomena may contradict their faith in the order and intelligibility of the universe and the rule of an omnipotent and omniscient creator, behavior that an agnostic character sees as fanatical:

. . . in this new land they were encountering phenomena no civilized man had ever seen. But the religious among them took this to mean that God Himself was intervening on their journey, performing miracles, scourging the land of evil, and for the rest of their trip they had prayed and proselytized to the point where [sic] Alf Thomas raised his hands to the sky and yelled, “God, if you’re up there, strike these” men “mute so I don’t have to listen to their. . . voices any more.! Do. . . it. . . right. . . now!” When nothing happened, he turned to Emily Smith and her group of fanatics and said, “See? Either God is dead or He doesn’t exist. Now shut the hell up!”

But of course they didn’t (131).

Many other passages depict Christians in an unfavorable light, such as this one, that implies believers’ trust is both absurd and inadvisable, if not, indeed potentially fatal:

So they parted ways after happening upon the well-worn tracks of the Mormon Trail and connecting with another wagon train a few miles up the route. The religious contingent headed west on the California Trail, claiming God would protect them from the winter, though they had been warned by fellow seekers that Donner Pass was inaccessible. The remainder headed northwest along the Oregon Trail. . . (134).

If aberrant sex marks humanity as morally degenerate, their faith (or fundamentalism, mistaken for faith), as Little characterizes it (as irrational, unscientific, fanatical, absurd, and potentially fatal--the Donner party was caught in a blizzard and, when some died of exposure or starvation, the others cannibalized them), depicts them as hopelessly dependent upon a vain and foolish tradition that, far from having any survival value, is not only fantastic and incredible but is also likely to get them killed.

What answer, if any, to the problem of the human predicament, as involving moral degenerates whose faith is absurd and impotent, does Little’s fiction suggest? I’ll save the answer to this question for my next post concerning The Vanishing.

Bentley Little: Aberrant Sex as Symbolic of the Nature of Sin

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Horror Trilogies: Not Quite Triptychs

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

A trilogy is a three-part series of novels, each of which tells a separate story, intelligible in itself, but which also, collectively, make up a longer, continuous narrative that is unified by various elements, such as the same cast of characters, the same settings, and the same or similar themes.

Perhaps one of the better known modern trilogies is J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast is also a well-known fantasy trilogy. Trilogies are relatively rare among horror novels.

The Pine Deep Trilogy, by Jonathan Maberry, is such a series, however. It focuses upon the “Most Haunted Town in America,” the futuristic Pine Deep, Pennsylvania. The trilogy’s title volumes are Ghost Road Blues, devoted to the pursuit of serial killer Karl Ruger, who is attracted to Pine Deep by the ancient evil that resides thereabout; Dead Man’s Song (2007); and Bad Moon Rising (2008). The initial volume won the 2006 Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel, the horror genre’s highest prize.

The plot?

Thirty years before the opening of the series’ present-day story, Oren Morse, a traveling field hand and blues musician whom the community’s children nickname the “Bone Man,” kills Ubel Griswold, a werewolf who’d been terrorizing Pine Deep. Local racists, blaming Morse for Griswold’s killings, murder Morse. Fifteen years later, Griswold’s spirit awakens, and, assisted by Vic Wingate, the werewolf seeks revenge upon Pine Deep.

Among those whom Morse saved was nine-year old Malcolm Crow, who now owns a craft store based upon a Halloween theme. His fiancé, Val Guthrie, is also a survivor of the original massacre. Their friend, Pine Deep’s mayor, Terry Wolfe, suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of his sister’s having been murdered (and his own near murder) by Griswold.

In Ghost Road Blues, Ruger attacks Val and her family again. Wingate’s adopted son, Mike Sweeney, who dreams of confronting various evils, is targeted by Tow-Truck Eddie after “God” tells Eddie that Mike is the antichrist. In reality, “God’s” voice is that of Griswold.

In Dead Man’s Song, Crow and local newsman Willard Fowler Newton, research the events of thirty years ago, while Wingate and Ruger assemble an army of the undead for Griswold to command during the “Red Wave,” a massive attack on Halloween night. While Crow and Newton visit Dark Hollow, where Griswold had both lived and died, one of Ruger’s companions, Boyd, becomes a vampire and Griswold’s ghost sets a trap for Crow, as Wingate sends Boyd after Val.

In Bad Moon Rising, Crow and his friends learn the truth concerning their foes, just as the Red Wave is about to get underway.

The formula for Maberry’s trilogy is simple, but effective:

1. An ancient evil returns.
2. The ancient evil repeats its atrocities.
3. Armed with knowledge concerning the ancient evil, the protagonist combats it.

Another trilogy by a well-known writer who has written horror fiction in the past and still dabbles in the genre on occasion is Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein series: Prodigal Son, co-authored with Kevin J. Anderson (2004), City of Night, co-authored with Ed Gorman (2005), and Dead and Alive (2009). (Now we know, I guess, how "Koontz" manages to write so many novels so quickly; he has more help than just his handful of psuedonyms.)

Dead Souls (2010) launches a second trilogy on the same theme.

Koontz, whose plots are often recycled and derivative of his own previous work and the works of others, is at least making no bones about such redundancies in the writing and co-writing of these trilogies.

In Koontz’s Frankenstein update, Victor Frankenstein, now going by the name Victor Helios, has set up shop, so to speak, in New Orleans, where he uses synthetic biology to create a new race of androids as replacements for the human race, much to the chagrin of his nemeses, police detectives, Carson O’Connor and Michael Madison, and his original monster, who is now known as Deucalion. The new creatures’ personalities are downloaded directly into their brains through the wonders of computer technology.

The plot?

In Prodigal Son, O’Connor and Madison pursue a serial killer dubbed “The Surgeon.” Attracted by the killer’s serial murders, Frankenstein’s monster believes that his creator has somehow returned.

In City of Night, the detectives team up with the monster to stop Helios and the army of programmed android killers that Helios has unleashed upon New Orleans.

In Dead and Alive, the series’ grand finale takes place as Deucalion leads the hordes of his master’s creatures against Helios himself in a confrontation that is part showdown and part revenge. Koontz, however, hints at the sequel that is to launch his second Frankenstein series. After all, there’s gold in them thar monsters.

The formula for Koontz’s trilogy is simple, but effective:

1. An ancient evil returns.
2. The ancient evil repeats its atrocities.
3. Armed with knowledge concerning the ancient evil, the protagonist combats it.

The formula for both Maberry’s and Koontz’s trilogies suggest that Stephen King’s It could have been a trilogy; at over 1,000 pages, it is certainly long enough to have been broken into three installments, in which the first, the second, and the third, respectively, would present a plot in which--

1. An ancient evil returns.
2. The ancient evil repeats its atrocities.
3. Armed with knowledge concerning the ancient evil, the protagonist combats it.

Wait! Isn’t that also the plot of King’s Desperation? And of Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night? And of Bentley Little’s The Resort? And. . . .mmm. . . it seems we may be onto something here (maybe the reason there are comparatively so few horror novel trilogies).

Quick Tip: Writing Means Reading

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

It seems self-evident that writers must be (not should be, but must, be) readers. Every writer worth his or her salt will tell anyone who wants to write (or, more likely, thinks he or she wants to write), that, to be successful as a writer, he or she must also read.

Stephen King, for example, reads a couple of hundred books or more every year. In fact, his reading has caused him to discover, among others, Bentley Little, a horror writer of no small talent himself. As the many blurbs he has written to help sell other writers’ works indicate, King is as much a fan of other writer’s work as readers are of his oeuvre. His love of reading is shared by his wife and fellow writer Tabitha and their children, one of whom, Joe Hill, has followed in his father’s footsteps, writing horror novels himself.

Writers should read every novel or short story (or see every movie) at least twice (although several times more is actually recommended), the first time for pleasure and to get a sense of the story’s structure, of how it is put together, and of how it attains unity. The second time, readers who would also be writers should read for technique.

How does the writer describe persons, places, and things? How does he or she create and maintain suspense? How are transitions used to tie action and scenes together? Are flashbacks used? If so, why, and, again, how are transitions used to tie past and present together? What figures of speech (metaphors, allusions, irony, symbols, and so forth), either explicit or implicit, are used in the story, and how and why are they used? Why is the action narrated in this, rather than some other, sequence? What can be gleaned from the writer’s choices of words and images? How does he or she fully involve readers in the action of the story? Why is the setting important, if not essential, to the characters, plot, conflict, setting, and theme? What is spicy or memorable about the dialogue? If the novel is a murder mystery or a detective story, what clues does the writer drop, when, where, how, and why? Which are red herrings? If the novel is a horror story, what mythos, legend, historical fact, or scientific discovery or theory grounds the paranormal or supernatural incidents or characters in the everyday world of commonsense realism, and how does the protagonist learn the truth of the monster’s origin or nature so that he or she can banish or destroy it?

Almost every writer has weaknesses as well as strengths, and both aspiring and established writers can learn from both. One of King’s weaknesses is his inclusion of extraneous scenes and exposition in his overly long plots; one of his strengths is his characterization, especially of the young. One of Little’s weaknesses is his novels’ unsatisfying, tacked-on or inconclusive endings; one of his strengths is his ability to create, maintain, and heighten suspense, often through the powers of his descriptions of menacing places. As a reader, learn to avoid the mistakes of writers and to adopt their strengths.

Then, read the novel or the short story or watch the movie again to discover all the wonderful tricks of the trade that you missed the first couple of times you read or watched the story unfold.

Generating Horror Plots, Part II

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A careful analysis of the storylines of motion pictures, novels, narrative poems, and short stories in the horror genre discloses recurring plot motifs, or formulae. Here are the first three of a baker’s dozen (plus one) of them, each of which is complete with one or more examples to get you started on the compilation and maintenance of your own list of such plot patterns.

1. Find the ugly within or among the beautiful. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 2. Develop a continuing theme. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 3. Enact revenge. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 4. Rescue a damsel in distress. Perhaps Dean Koontz uses this technique for generating horror plots more than any of his contemporaries, especially in his more recent novels, including The Husband and The Good Guy. In Koontz’s universe, a woman can seldom protect and defend herself, or even find her way through life, without relying upon a strong, competent, able-bodied, and taciturn man. The women’s ineptitude in this regard often cause rather improbable plots on Koontz’s part. Nevertheless, his stories tend to be suspenseful, fun reads. In The Husband, Mitch Rafferty, a gardener, receives a telephone call from his wife’s kidnapper. He tells Mitch to watch a man who is walking his dog across the street. The man is shot and killed on the kidnapper’s orders, demonstrating that he is dead serious about killing Mitch’s wife, Holly, if Mitch tips off the police or fails to provide the hefty ransom that the abductor demands--one which is way beyond Mitch’s financial scope. Fortunately, as it turns out, Mitch’s brother is wealthy, but, of course, the plot twists and turns to the point that the reader wonders whether Mitch will ever rescue Holly or even manage to stay alive himself. The Good Guy’s storyline is similar. This time, the blue-collar worker is Tim Carrier, a stone mason. He’s having a drink at a local bar when a man arrives and, mistaking him for the hit man he’s hired to kill a woman, hands him his $10,000 fee and a photograph of the intended target, Linda Paquette, a Laguna Beach writer (like Koontz himself). Minutes later, the hit man, Krait, enters the bar, mistaking Tim for his client. Tim hands him the money he’s just received, telling Krait that he’s changed his mind about having Paquette killed. Then, he finds the intended target, and he and Paquette flee, the killer on their trail. Fortunately, Tim’s past has well prepared him to be Paquette’s protector, for Krait is an able and relentless, conscienceless killer. Koontz’s modern knights in white armor will uphold the tradition of chivalry, no matter how dead it may be in the everyday world in which the rest of us have to live.

5. Find the strange in the familiar. Two specimens of this approach may be offered, one as much a failure as the other is a success. Although we have discussed them previously, we offer a truncated version of our previous discussions here to demonstrate the technique of finding the strange in the familiar. The failure is the film, The Happening (2008), which was directed by M. Night Shyamalan. As most horror stories of this kind begin, the movie starts by showing a series of bizarre, seemingly inexplicable occurrences: mass suicides and murders by individuals and groups whose behavior is markedly aberrant. As the series of such incidents continue, spreading from person to person, from group to group, and from town to town, various theories are considered and abandoned as to the cause of the strange happenings. Is a bio-terrorist attack behind the events? Is it an epidemic of some kind? A botanist thinks that plants may be responsible for the murder and mayhem, releasing airborne toxins to defend themselves against humanity. The protagonist, a scientist named Elliot Moore, and his wife Alma take refuge with an murdered friend and colleague’s orphaned daughter Hess inside an eccentric old woman’s house as the plants continue to press their attack. Their hostess becomes infected, but they escape her attempts to kill them and, later, leave the house, surprised to find that the attacks have ceased. Three months later, watching TV, Elliot, Alma, and their adopted daughter hear a newscaster warn that the mysterious happening might have been but “the first spot of a rash” to come. Alma discovers she is pregnant, and, as she and Elliot celebrate, another series of bizarre suicides and murders take place in France. The film seeks to find the strange in the familiar, seeing flowers and shrubs and trees, especially those which blow in high winds, to be as menacing as poisonous weeds, but it is difficult to fear vegetation, wind or no wind, and the suspense simply doesn’t build, despite the mad and dangerous behavior of the infected humans whom the plants are bent upon exterminating. The heavy-handed, moralistic environmentalist theme of the movie is about as profound in its delivery as a PETA ad. The plot suffers in other ways, as does the characterization of all the players, but these are matters outside the present concern. A story that is more successful in eliciting the strange within the familiar is Bram Stoker’s short story “Dracula’s Guest.” Stoker suggests, far more subtly and effectively than Shyamalan, that there may be prodigious unseen powers operating behind the scenes, so to speak, of the natural events that take place in a remote stretch of forested countryside outside Munich on Walpurgis Night. Stoker he suggests that a tall, thin man who’d appeared seemingly out of nowhere and vanished as abruptly after frightening the coachman’s horses and leaving the Englishman stranded in the countryside as twilight gathers toward Walpurgis Night may be the unseen watcher, and perhaps also the occult, supernatural force that seems to control such natural forces as the weather, the wolves, the effects of the blizzard, and the hail. Alternatively, a note to Herr Delbruck by Dracula suggests that Transylvanian count himself may be opposed to whatever supernatural force is controlling these forces of nature and that, as this power’s adversary, he is acting, for reasons of his own, as the Englishman’s protector, however short-lived this self-assigned role may turn out to be. Examples of other stories that are more or less successful in seeking the strange within the familiar are Stephen King’s From a Buick 8 and most of the stories by H. P. Lovecraft. Concerning the finding of the strange in the familiar, the reader is advised to peruse the several articles that we have posted previously on Thrillers and Chillers, under the heading “Everyday Horrors.” 6. Bring up the past (and relate it to the present). The past is prologue to the present. Stephen King employs this technique in It, in which an ancient evil makes a reappearance in Derry, Maine, every 27 years. In its last previous appearance, it was defeated by the Losers Club, who reunite as adults to take it on when it makes its next appearance in town. In Summer of Night, a novel that is similar in both plot and theme to King’s It, Dan Simmons’ ancient evil, associated with the House of Borgia, seeks to establish itself in the small town of Elm Haven, Illinois, but it encounters the determined resistance of five pre-teen boys and a street-smart girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Bentley Little also employs the technique of bringing up the past and relating it as prologue to present catastrophes on several of his novels, including The Resort, in which a former nightmarish resort, although razed long ago, somehow determines the fate of a present, nearby resort and what befalls its staff and guests. A movie that takes this tack is Poltergeist, wherein, because a housing development has been built upon an Indian burial ground, there is hell to pay. Stay tuned: We will explore additional horror plot staples in subsequent posts.

Motivation as Explanation

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In earlier posts, we have considered the nature of evil as various horror writers have defined it. Some have seen evil as sinful; others as indifference on a cosmic, worldly, or local level; and still others as destructive of one’s local community.

These considerations of evil can be considered as being metaphysical. They deal with the very nature, or character, of evil. They delve into the heart and the soul, as it were, of wickedness, seeking to penetrate the depths of the mystery of iniquity.

More than many genres, horror cries out--one might say, given the nature of the genre, screams--for an explanation of evil on such a level. Moreover, horror fiction, to work at all, must also offer an explanation for the particular evil--the specific monster or other adversary--that threatens the protagonist of a particular tale. The very mechanics of the horror story demand this of its authors, and those who fail to supply such an explanation or whose explanation is not all that explanatory or plausible within the context of the story in which it is offered tend to perturb their readers.

Elsewhere, we laid bare the bones of the horror story’s skeleton, or formula:

1. A series of bizarre incidents occurs.
2. The protagonist discovers the cause of these incidents.
3. The protagonist uses his or her newfound knowledge to put an end to these incidents.

The second stage of the narrative is our topic in this post, for the cause of the bizarre incidents in a particular story is the antagonist’s motivation, and this motivation is the explanation, on the immediate and narrative, if not the metaphysical and universal, level, for the evil that occurs, although, often, the former is a consequence or, at least, a parallel, of the latter. An example of these two levels? In Christianity, the nature of evil is pride (“pride goeth before a fall,” as Satan learns), whereas Satan’s individual and personal motive in corrupting humanity is his blasphemous attempt “to be like the most high God”:

How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! 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: 12-15).

Likewise, the apostle Peter, although he protests that he would never betray Jesus, even if his loyalty to the Messiah should cost him his own life, betrays Jesus, an act which stems from the greater love that he had for himself than that which he had for God (a sort of pride), but is, more immediately, directed at the saving of his own life, in the here and now.

This chart shows some of the explanations that are provided for the series of bizarre incidents that unfold in several well-known horror stories; again, as the motives of specific antagonists within particular narratives, they are causes in the immediate sense and within the contexts of the stories themselves, not in a universal and cosmic sense, as definitions of the very nature of evil itself:

These example could be multiplied ad infinitum, but the point is that, in the horror story that accommodates itself to the formula we identified, the antagonist’s motive is the explanation for the horror--the series of bizarre incidents that unfold in the first part of the tale, whatever the ultimate, metaphysical nature of evil itself may be.

Therefore, the horror writer’s first task is to determine what the antagonist’s motive shall be, to identify, in other words, what the antagonist wants and hopes to accomplish. Having done so, the author withholds this explanation for the bizarre incidents that occur in the story until the middle of the tale, wherein, discerning or learning the antagonist’s motivation (i. e., the cause of the evil events that are taking place), the protagonist is equipped to put an end to these incidents (and, possibly, the monster that is causing them). It’s extremely doubtful that the protagonist will ever but an end to the nature of evil, to sin, or pride, or indifference, or threats to the local community, or whatever this nature may be.

Despite the chaos, there must be order. Despite the madness, there must be a method. Despite the bizarre series of incidents, there must be a motive to the monster’s behavior which causes these incidents. Writers who do not provide a plausible motive for the bizarre series of incidents that result from their antagonists’ actions do not fare well with readers and critics, and otherwise good, or even superior, novels suffer as a result of such failures as well. Although Stephen King’s motives usually suffice to make his villains’ actions believable, he drops the ball in a big way with It, and Bentley Little, despite having written nearly a dozen novels and many short stories, has yet to pick up the ball or, perhaps, even to notice that it exists. The effect, upon It, is to all but ruin a potential masterpiece of the genre. The effect, upon Little’s reputation, of not yet his career, is sustained disappointment and, most likely, eventual oblivion.

Some motives that horror writers have used to explain the bizarre incidents that unfold in the first parts of their stories include:

• Demonic possession in an attempt to bring about a person’s damnation
• An alien’s mission (for example, conquest or mating with a man or a woman)
• Vengeance upon a wrongdoer
• Eruptions of a past or future events into the present
• Pollution
• Humans’ encroachment upon a monster’s habitat
• An effort to steal or control dwindling food or other resources
• Behavioral control or modification
• Recruitment or testing
• Eugenics
• Efforts to survive a plague or the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust
• Genocide
• Punishment, individual or wholesale
• Colonization
• Commerce
• War

Duma Key: The Decline of Horror?

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In recent years, it seems that Stephen King has begun to think of himself as a great American writer who can write simply to please himself. In reality, most of his fiction is apt to be forgotten soon after his demise. One or two books, perhaps, will survive their author. Duma Key isn’t likely to be one, any more than the self-parody that was Lisey’s Story. His latest (and certainly not his greatest) is self-indulgent and pretentious and disappointing as hell.

The protagonist, Edgar Freemantle, loses his right arm and then his wife. He becomes suicidal, and his shrink tells him to seek a change of scenery, which leads him to Duma Key, Florida. Too bad the shrink didn’t tell Edgar to go ahead and end it all. His having done so would have spared readers his endless bellyaching.

At Duma Key, Edgar tries his hand at art. He also meets a lawyer who also wanted to commit suicide (and should have) after his wife and daughter were killed; he did manage to put a bullet in his brain, and although even that didn’t end it for him, at least he made the attempt, which is more than can be said for Edgar.

There’s something supernatural about Edgar’s artistic talent; he can use it to kill or to heal and to paint a mysterious “ship of the dead” that troubles him. From here, the plot, such as it is, sickens further, dying well before the story’s absurd denouement. Suffice it to say that this is another King-size ripoff, involving, this time, a goddess-doll that collects servant-souls and commands the ship of the dead that Edgar spends most of his days trying to paint. After the goddess-doll kills Edgar’s daughter Ilse, Edgar encounters a giant alligator, and--well, who cares, really? Certainly, King doesn’t seem to have.

For the most part, since his own death-defying accident, King’s fiction has become increasing self-indulgent and unnecessarily circuitous, losing any pizzazz, suspense, or horror. They’re just interminably boring. Maybe there’s another book up King’s sleeve that’s worth reading, but he hasn’t written one in the past 10 years or so.

What does this decline mean? If it’s only King’s decline, not all that much, but if his deterioration heralds that of horror fiction per se, then it’s noteworthy--and scary. For many years, King’s name has been more or less synonymous with contemporary horror fiction and with horror fiction that was relatively good. If anything, it’s since become tantamount to wallowing in the slime of narcissism. Dean Koontz, who cut his fangs in the science fiction and horror genres, is pretty much writing cross-genre stuff about as meaningless as Duma Key and Lisey’s Story, recycling the same sad story lines as he’s been using for the last 20 or 30 years. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have discarded everything but Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast and his tiresome ward, Constance. Dan Simmons has gone over to the science fiction side of the Farce, and his writing has become impossibly self-important, denser than Herman Melville or William Faulkner or Henry James on their worst days. Bentley Little has told the same story, in different settings, nearly a dozen times--and still hasn’t figured out how to end the damned thing. James Rollins’ stories, although not horror per se, are page-turners, but, again, each seems much the same as the next, since he writes, as do so many in the genre, according to a fairly rigid formula. Robert MacCammon hasn’t written anything worth reading in well over a decade. True, there’s Speaks the Nightbird, but it’s not worth reading.

It may not be merely King who’s petering out; it may be the whole horror genre. Maybe a moratorium on horror is needed. Maybe the ingredients need to steep a while or new ingredients need to be brewed.

King’s attempt to pass the torch to his son, Joe Hill, is proof that more of the same isn’t going to work; the best thing about Junior‘s book is its title, Heart-Shaped Box. The rest is of the same quality as an expletive deleted.

Unless there’s an Edgar Allan Poe or an H. P. Lovecraft waiting in the wings, the horror genre’s immediate future seems bleak, indeed.

Bleaker, perhaps, even than Duma Key.

The Academy: Learning from the Masters, Part 2

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In part one of “The Academy: Learning from the Masters,” we explored how Bentley Little juxtaposes the normal, the natural, and the rational with the paranormal and the supernatural throughout his novel, The Academy, allowing (until the final resolution of the narrative’s conflict), a dual understanding of its incidents. We argued that the idea that everything could happen as a result of the natural and could be rational prevents readers from rejecting the situations as unlikely from the beginning and, by the story’s end, allows them, perhaps, to accept that they are, in fact, paranormal or supernatural. We also suggested that the juxtaposition also creates, maintains, and heightens suspense and fear and that Little, like other horror writers, recognizes that horror is personal, and, in his fiction, he makes it personal for his characters, relating it to their past or present experiences and to their future aspirations.

In this post, we are going to explore another technique that Little and other horror writers typically employ to create, maintain, and heighten suspense and horror: the presentation of experience from the viewpoint of the prey or the intended victim. A good example of this technique occurs in chapter nine of the novel, as a student arrives at Tyler High School to participate in a session of the student council, of which she is a member:

Myla took the key out of the ignition, shutting off the radio, causing the lit dashboard to go black. The world was suddenly silent. Getting out of the van, she locked the vehicle’s doors. She wished she’d brought a flashlight. There was one somewhere in the van that her mom kept there for emergencies, but she didn’t know exactly where it was, and she didn’t have time to look for it. She was already late (97).

There’s more to the description, but let’s pause for a moment and analyze it so far. The first two sentences function well together, the first delineating an incident that is typical of teenagers--listening to the radio as they drive a parent’s car. Teens usually like to turn up the volume, so, in reading this paragraph, many readers would be apt to imagine the radio to have been loud, even blaring. Therefore, when Myla turns off the engine, the resulting silence would be deafening, so to speak, and it might well seem that the whole “world was suddenly silent.” Going from loud music to a “world” of silence in a mere instant--the amount of time it would take for the driver to shut off the ignition--would be dramatic in itself, and it changes the tone of all that went before and all that follows this sentence. In such complete silence, especially after such loud sound, there might be an element of menace. It is normal behavior to lock one’s vehicle after exiting it, but locking doors also suggests the need to take precautions to ensure one’s safety. The use of the word “emergency,” in reference to the flashlight, also plants the idea that Myla may be abut to have an emergency of her own. She is a character in a horror novel, after all. As a teenage girl making her way from her parked, locked car in the darkness, Myla is vulnerable, but she is made more so by the fact that she is “late already” to her destination and “doesn’t have time” to search for the flashlight, because hurrying makes one less cautious than he or she might otherwise be and suggests that Myla’s thoughts might be elsewhere, focused upon her being late and, perhaps, upon whatever task she is executing. We, the readers, are on the scene, somewhere, as observers, and what we see is disquieting; we are afraid for Myla, about whom we have a premonition that all may not go well for her.

The first paragraph focuses upon Myla’s sense of sight (and her thoughts). The next paragraph describes her sense of hearing and her sense of sight. In addition, it describes her emotions:

Myla stepped over the curb, starting down the walkway that led into the center of campus. She didn’t like the echoing sounds her footsteps made on the cement or the way that indistinct lighting from within the quad ahead of her made the surrounding trees and buildings look unfamiliar and threatening.

By hearing through Myla’s ears and seeing though her eyes and by getting inside her heart, at her emotions, and inside her head, at her thoughts, Little’s omniscient narrator has made his story’s suspense (if not yet its horror) personal. It is not something that the reader merely imagines, but it is something that is seen and heard and believed and felt from within a character with whom the reader, for the nonce, at least, identifies. The familiar campus is alien to her, and her echoing footsteps suggest to her, perhaps, that there are others in the area. Their footsteps could be among her own, lost in their echoes. Someone could be stalking her. She feels threatened, and, the next sentence informs us, “she quickened her pace.” A moment later, she sees “a small dark form rush past the front of the library” and she runs. By making the suspense personal, Little has ratcheted up the tension.

Myla makes it safely inside, to participate in a decidedly odd session of the student council. The paragraphs were just a teaser, were they? Yes and no. They did tease, making us think that something was going to happen to poor Myla--something bad, something horrible. When nothing bad did happen, we breathed a sigh of relief, but, while she was crossing the dark campus, frightened at the shadows, sounds, and sights she heard and saw along the way, we bonded with her. Now, when something terrible does happen to her, it will affect us all the more strongly, because we have come to care, however much, for Myla. We didn’t want anything horrible to happen to her, and it didn’t.

Not this time.

But it might--and probably will--next time.

By presenting the action from the point of view of the prey or potential victim, Little gains his reader’s sympathy. If next he presents her injury or death from her point of view, we will be all the more horrified than we would have been had, in seeing her for the first time, as she is injured or killed, we otherwise would be. Seeing the action presented from the potential victim’s point of view makes us, the readers, potential victims, too. We become more than mere observers; we become the prey.

The Academy: Learning from the Masters

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Although Bentley Little has been taken to task, and rightly so, for the poor ways in which his novels typically end (not with a roar, unfortunately, but with a whimper), and his short stories and novels are often nothing more than a series of meaningless, although bizarre and horrifying, incidents or situations, he remains a talented writer who is especially adept at creating, maintaining, and heightening suspense. Despite his difficulty in suggesting causal relationships among the incidents of his story’s action and his trouble in sustaining a single narrative effect, he remains, because of his considerable strengths in other areas, a master of the horror genre who, as such, has much to teach the aspiring writer. We’ll look at one of his strengths in this post, just as we have considered some of his weaknesses in previous posts.

As we have pointed out elsewhere, a convention in horror stories is to offset a sense of the paranormal or the supernatural with the normal or the natural. This double perspective in horror stories allows either a natural interpretation or a supernatural reading of the bizarre incidents and situations that take place in the story.

H. G. Wells’ short story, “The Red Room,” which appears in the left column, is a good example. Is the room in the castle haunted or are the rumors of ghosts results of a natural cause? The castle’s caretakers are convinced that the chamber is, indeed, haunted, but the young narrator-protagonist has come to spend the night in the room to prove that it is not. (Stephen King’s “1408” is a contemporary version of the classic tale, as is the movie of the same title, which is based upon King’s narrative.)

Obviously, to maintain this dichotomy, the things that take place in the tale must be open to either type of interpretation; they must be understandable from the basis of faith in the paranormal or supernatural and from the basis of skepticism about the same. This is not easy to accomplish, especially without recourse to a rather heavy-handed use of ambiguity. The ability to accomplish this feat is the mark of a master, and Little does so with great facility.

He goes above and beyond the call of merely setting up the dual point of view by a few ambiguous descriptions that could be taken, as it were, either way--that is, as suggesting the effects of paranormal or supernatural causes or natural ones. In most chapters, he includes a scene which, on each page, contains at least one sentence, paragraph, or passage that suggests this twofold possibility of understanding.

Usually, this juxtaposition of the normal and the paranormal or the natural and the supernatural suggests that whatever seemingly paranormal or supernatural incident is happening may be the result merely of a character’s own feelings or thoughts. As he continues to present these juxtapositions, however, Little increasingly suggests that it is not merely someone’s way of looking at or feeling about his or her environment but something in--or, perhaps, behind--the appearances that is the cause of the uncanny and the eerie incidents that the character begins or continues to experience.

In the prologue to The Academy, Little writes:

. . . Kurt . . . . looked toward the classrooms.

Something was wrong.

There was a chain-link fence blocking off the buildings in an effort to prevent vandalism. Behind the fence, he could see closed classroom doors and windows shaded by off-white institutional blinds. The sight of the shut-down school had made him feel happy last year, but now it made him feel uneasy. Even the field and the blacktop basketball courts put him on edge, their emptiness somehow emphasizing the fact that the two of them [Kurt and his friend Van] were all alone here.

And no one would know if something happened to them (2).

Little tucks explanations (identified by me by the use of bold font) into the sentences to attribute natural causes to the unusual incidents, and his inclusion of the reason for the building of the fence suggests that the characters’ world is one of reason and sanity--a suggestion that will soon be toppled:

. . . Kurt . . . . looked toward the classrooms.

Something was wrong.

There was a chain-link fence blocking off the buildings in an effort to prevent vandalism. Behind the fence, he could see closed classroom doors and windows shaded by off-white institutional blinds. The sight of the shut-down school had made him feel happy last year, but now it made him feel uneasy. Even the field and the blacktop basketball courts put him on edge, their emptiness somehow emphasizing the fact that the two of them [Kurt and his friend Van] were all alone here.

And no one would know if something happened to them [bold added] (2).

On the next page, Kurt discerns something else, but it moves so swiftly that he’s unsure of what he’s seen; again, Little deftly tucks in an explanation that offers a natural cause for the incident (indicated by the bold font):

. . . Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a motion, a furtive shadow the size of a skinny girl that darted between two of the buildings so quickly that he was not sure it was even there (3).

Embarrassed by his seemingly unfounded fear, Kurt hopes to persuade his friend to leave their high school’s basketball court. As he ponders the issue, he and Van seem top come under a strange sort of attack:

Too embarrassed to let Van know that he was scared, Kurt stood there for a moment while his friend dribbled around the court and made a layup [sic]. He still wasn’t sure why he was scared, but he was, and despite the fact that it was the middle of the day, and hot and sunny to boot, the fear seemed to be
intensifying. He moved beneath a tree for the shade, leaning his back against the trunk, trying to think of a way to get his friend to leave.

A nut fell from the tree and hit him on the top of the head, bouncing to the ground. . . . The damn thing felt more like a rock than a nut . . .

Another nut came speeding down and hit his forearm, a round red bruise appearing instantly on the skin (4-5).

The fact that not one or two, but three, acorns fall (or are thrown) at him suggests that their fall is more than simply an accident or a coincidence, as do the heft and the force of the nuts and their immediate effect on their victim (“a round red bruise appearing instantly on the skin”). (Anyone who has ever had an acorn fall on him or her from a tree knows that, ordinarily, they don’t feel like a rock or ordinarily leave a bruise, especially not an “instant” one.)

Kurt tells Van it’s time for them to leave, but, oddly, Van reacts with “real hostility in his voice,” leaving Kurt mystified as to “where it had come from or what had brought it on.” As Van resumes shooting baskets, the rebounding ball seems to attack him, as the acorns had seemed to assault Kurt. When Van still refuses to leave the court, Kurt walks away. The narrator tells the reader, ending the prologue on an ominous note, “It was the last time he ever saw his friend” (5).

These repeated suggestions that there may be more than meets the eye behind apparently normal and natural incidents and situations helps to create and maintain suspense, as does Little’s very effective strategy of ending many of his chapters on an eerie, mysterious, or ominous note (a cliffhanger, but one that includes an element of the eerie and, possibly, the paranormal or the supernatural). As the story continues, it seems less and less likely that the increasingly bizarre incidents and situations can be explained as resulting from normal and natural causes and more and more likely that only a paranormal or a supernatural cause can account for them.

By the time the reader reaches chapter three of the novel, he or she will have pretty much decided that there is something beyond the ordinary going on at the charter school. The custodial staff is afraid to work the night shift: “It’s not that we don’t like to work,” Carlos tells his supervisor, Enrique. “We just don’t want to work here. At night” (30). Some of the janitors have reported odd, even eerie, events, and some of them believe that the school is haunted.

They notice that the school is different, too: “Something had happened to the school over the summer” (31). For one thing, “it seemed as if all over the school the illumination was dimmer than it had been before summer,” but, again, Little’s character--in this case, the custodian named Carlos--attributes the apparently dimmer lights to an understandable cause (although he isn’t convinced by his own explanation): “He tried to tell himself that it was intentional, part of an effort to save electricity and cut down on energy expenses but he couldn’t make himself believe it” (32).

Carlos’ doubt undercuts the reader’s tendency to attribute the story’s unusual goings-on to natural and rational causes. However, the reader will want to hedge his or her bets, just as Carlos does, in the event that the bizarre incidents do turn out to have a natural or rational explanation, as it would be embarrassing to discover that, all along, the events had, in fact, resulted from natural or intentional grounds.

Sometimes, Little starts an ominous passage by having his narrator tell the reader, directly, that something is amiss. He did so in the earlier passage about the vacant classrooms behind the chain-link fence that Kurt saw from the basketball court, and he does so, again, in this chapter, as Carlos hears voices coming from the girls’ locker room, which, at this time of night, should be deserted:

. . . Something was wrong tonight [bold added].

There were voices coming from the locker room and there weren’t supposed to be. Any summer practice ended hours ago, and at this time of the evening, the PE department should have been as silent as a tomb (35).

The repetition of the sentence “something was wrong” makes readers recall the earlier scene when something else was also “wrong,” and the use of two male names which sound similar--”Kurt” and “Carlos”--helps to tie the earlier scene to this one, in which something else is likewise “wrong.”

It’s something of a cliché to point out that people, more often than not, tend to think in clichés. Language itself, someone has said, is a “tissue of faded metaphors.” We speak, as we think, in such “faded,” or dead, metaphors, constantly relating one thing--frequently a thought, a perception, or a feeling, but also inanimate objects and even other people--to something else. In the passage quoted above, Carlos associates the should-be silence of the locker room to the quiet of a tomb, and, of course, “silent as a tomb” is a well-worn cliché. Therefore, the thought seems natural, because it is, in fact, commonplace. However, Little’s use of the metaphor also allows him to characterize the incident he’s describing as one that is eerie (because tombs are not only silent but are also creepy). The transition between the clichéd thought and Carlos’ feelings is almost inevitable, and Little capitalizes upon it by offering, once again, the possibility of a rational explanation for the mysterious and frightening sounds that the janitor hears in the girls’ locker room after hours. This extended explanation, in fact, illustrates perfectly how horror writers typically simultaneously suggest both a natural or a rational and a paranormal or a supernatural cause of the story’s bizarre incidents or circumstances. Notice, however, that Little tilts the reader’s interpretation toward the paranormal or supernatural explanation by characterizing Carlos’ attempt to explain--or to explain away--his perceptions as a rationalization rather than as reasoning and by adding the rhetorical question, at the end of the passage, “But he didn’t think so, did he?”:

. . . Something was wrong tonight.

There were voices coming from the locker room and there weren’t supposed to be. Any summer practice ended hours ago, and at this time of the evening, the PE department should have been as silent as a tomb.

Tomb.

. . . Why had he thought of that word?

Carlos shivered. Sound could do weird things here in the PE department, he rationalized. The big echoey [sic] gym with its exposed beams and high ceiling, the tiled bunker like [sic] showers, even the coaches’ offices with their windowed half walls, all distorted the resonance of voices and often made the sound as though they were coming from a room or section of building that they were not. So while there wasn’t supposed to be anyone in here at this hour, it was entirely possible that one of the coaches had left a radio on in an office or something. There could be a perfectly innocent explanation for the fact that he heard people talking in the girls’ locker room [bold added].

But he didn’t think so, did he?

No (35-36).

Having offered a rational (or rationalized) explanation for what could be a paranormal or a supernatural incident, Little next exaggerates the “voices” the janitor hears, turning them into the “moans and yelps, grunts and gasps” of participants in an apparent orgy in progress, which includes “other sounds as well, disturbing sounds, and male laughter that was harsh, cruel, and far too loud” (36). Associating the sounds of the “harsh, cruel” laughter of the males with his abusive father, Carlos actually encounters him as he investigates the locker room, and he flees from the apparition, nearly knocking over his partner, Raakem, who has been working in a different part of the school and who looks as if he has also just fled from something horrific. By having more than one character experience and report bizarre, uncanny incidents, Little adds a veneer of verisimilitude to these experiences.

Typically, the natural or rational explanation follows the suggested paranormal or supernatural cause of the bizarre events, almost as if the reference to the natural or the rational grounds is a corrective to superstition or magical thinking concerning the dubious presumptive agency of occult powers. Later in the novel, Little reverses this typical order, offering a motive for an apparent threat by the school’s principal (“You will never graduate. . . . I’ll make sure of that”) that is both irrational and immoral, if not illegal, but is also non-violent, only to follow it with a much more unlikely and downright insane motive that portends not merely violence, but also death:

Ed found that his hands were shaking. What exactly did she mean by that remark? That she was going to make sure he didn’t have enough credits to graduate?

Or that she was going to make sure he was dead before his senior year?
(128)

Like a true master of the macabre, Little continues this juxtaposition of the normal, the natural, and the rational with the paranormal and the supernatural throughout his novel, allowing (until the final resolution of the narrative’s conflict), a dual understanding of its incidents. The idea that everything could happen as a result of the natural and could be rational prevents readers from rejecting the situations as unlikely from the beginning and, by the story’s end, allows them, perhaps, to accept that they are, in fact, paranormal or supernatural. The juxtaposition also creates, maintains, and heightens suspense and fear. Like Shirley Jackson and others, Little also recognizes that horror is personal, and, in his fiction, he makes it personal for his characters, relating it to their past or present experiences and to their future aspirations.