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

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concerning the gaffing of a fish, the narrator explains,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All's Well That Ends Well

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror writers with longstanding records as bestselling authors are not exempt from writing novels with unsatisfying endings. When the novelist is Stephen King, whose novels typically run as many as eight hundred pages (sometimes more), an unsatisfying ending is more than annoying; it's horrible.

Many of King's novels do end poorly, as It, Under the Dome, Revival, and many others attest. After reading hundreds of pages in which reality seems fairly real (other than the presence of the centuries-old, shape-shifting “It”), only to discover that the universe isn't a product of the Big Bang, as astronomers apparently mistakenly believe, but that it resulted from a gigantic turtle's need to vomit—well, readers are apt to think the effect is anything but agreeable. In fact, readers might think they'll be sick enough themselves to vomit a universe of their own. Likewise, the ending of Under the Dome is beyond frustrating. After plodding through hundreds of pages (many of which are devoted to King's Democratic progressivism and his obsessive hatred of Republicans and of President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in particular), readers discover that the invisible and impenetrable dome that cuts off Chester's Mill, Maine, is the result of a gigantic, mischievous female adolescent alien who placed an inverted dome over the town, much as a mischievous Earthling might invert a bowl over an anthill. Consequently, readers are likely to work out until they've acquired sufficient strength to rip this ridiculous novel page from page. While writing Desperation, King seemed to find nothing amiss with the views of Christian fundamentalists. He even sought out one of them, a pastor, as his adviser. But, as The Regulators, the companion novel to Desperation, indicates, King likes to turn the tables on himself. He does just this in Revival. He'd had no problem with the beliefs and teachings of Christian fundamentalists when he wrote Desperation, but, while writing Revival, he said he couldn't stomach the Christian fundamentalists' idea of hell, as it's described in the Bible. He doesn't cite chapter and verse, but here are a few passages, from the King James Version of the Bible, concerning hell, that most Christian fundamentalists would probably accept:

For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains (Deuteronomy 32:22).

The sorrows of hell compassed me about . . . (Samuel 22:6).

Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit (Isaiah 14:15).

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell (Mathew 5:29).

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell (Matthew 10:28).

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18).

Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? (Matthew 23:33).

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched (Mark 9:23).

And in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments . . . (Luke 16:23).

For . . . God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment . . . (2 Peter 2:4).

According to these verses, hell, an expression of divine wrath, is a locked pit below the earth. Made of several layers, it's a place of eternal darkness and everlasting fire, in which the damned, who are cast therein bodily, are beset by sorrows and live in constant torment (although both body and soul can be destroyed in hell). It's occupied by both fallen angels and by human sinners, and it's set against the kingdom of heaven, which shall overcome it.

This is the conception of hell that King finds ridiculous. In its place, he offers something so extremely absurd that it's laughable, and it is with this, his own conception of hell, which he believes is superior to the Biblical depiction of hell, that he concludes Revival, describing hell as a gigantic anthill full of gigantic, ravenous ants. Huh?

Somehow, King sees a huge anthill in which huge ants crush sinners with their huge jaws as superior to the depiction of hell provided in the Bible, the King James Version of which is, without argument, one of the greatest literary masterpieces of the English language. With judgment this poor, it is truly a wonder that King ever managed to write his much better, earlier work.

The endings of the stories by Bentley Little, another prolific horror novelist, are as bad as those of King's worst books. They're tacked-on, rather than being integral to the plot, and, typically, they explain nothing concerning what has transpired in the hundreds of pages preceding them. They seem to hint at an explanation, but, as there is no actual explanation at which to hint, the intimation itself is nothing more than a half-hearted, meaningless gesture. Read virtually any of Little's novels, including the one for which he won the dubious Bram Stoker Award, and you'll see what I mean—but be prepared for a major disappointment. For example, The Resort suggests the bizarre incidents which occur at the present resort are somehow linked to those which occurred at an earlier, nearby resort, which now lies in ruins. How and why the two resorts might have shared some common causal link is unclear because unexplained. Therefore, readers are within reason to assume that there never was such a link. Likely, they will feel cheated of the time, effort, and money they spent in reading the novel.

Horror master Edgar Allan Poe offered a solution to the dilemma of the sloppy ending 172 years ago. In “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), he explains how he wrote his narrative poem “The Raven.” First, he decided how the story would end. Then, he selected everything—every word, every image, every figure of speech, every point of the plot, every character, every line of dialogue, every nuance of the setting—so that the final result, the story's effect, would be inevitable, given what came before and led up to it. It seems clear that neither King nor Little (nor many other writers, of the horror genre and of other genres, have any idea where their stories are going or why, but write only in the moment, making up the plot as they go.

Poe applied his technique not only to “The Raven,” but to most of his stories and other narrative poems. One story for which the ending isn't as clear and fitting as the conclusions of his other tales is “Ligeia.” As Kevin J. Hayes points out, in The Annotated Poe:

The ending leaves many questions unanswered. The reappearance of Ligeia can be interpreted as a phantasmagoric illusion [an image projected by the so-called magic lantern, a type of early projector], an opium-induced hallucination [the narrator uses laudanum], a psychological fantasy, a modern recurrence of a traditional transformation legend, or an actual event. . . .

Comments Poe made concerning the story's problematic ending indicate that he'd intended the story to have a supernatural ending. A friend of his, Pendleton Cooke, asked about the story's resolution. In response, Poe “suggested how he might have improved it”:

One point I have not fully carried out—I should have intimated that the will did not perfect its intention—there should have been a relapse—a final one—and Ligeia (who had only succeeded in so much as to convey an idea of the truth to the narrator) should be at length entombed as Rowena—the bodily alterations having gradually faded away.

It seems that Poe, unlike King, Little, and a host of other writers, learned his lesson about writing sloppy endings. He was careful, from then on, to plan more carefully the outcomes of his stories, the vast majority of which have the unified structure and the single effect for which he has become famous. For example, “The Pit and the Pendulum” is based an article, “Anecdote towards the History of the Spanish Inquisition.” According to this article, “when General Lasalle entered Toledo, he immediately visited the Palace of the Inquisition,” where he tested a torture device, which he found to be in good order.

As Hayes observes, the way in which the article recounted the story was ineffective from “a dramatic point of view,” so Poe reversed its chronology:

Though fascinated by the story, Poe nevertheless recognized what was wrong with it, at least from a dramatic point of view: it was backwards. By having Lasalle arrive in the first sentence, the article destroys all possibilities for tension and terror. Poe turned the story around, describing what happens to one particular prisoner while saving Lasalle's timely intervention for the final paragraph.”

Poe had learned the lesson that he would teach in “The Philosophy of Composition” and exemplify in the majority of his own short stories, essays, and narrative poems: in the words of the bard, “All's well that ends well.”

Theme as the Springboard to a Story's Plot

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Dorothy Gale discovers she's not in Kansas anymore

I usually start my stories with an inciting moment, the point in the action that launches the rest of the narrative forward. (In The Wizard of Oz, the film version of L. Frank Baum’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, for example, the story begins when the protagonist, Dorothy Gale, runs away from home, because, had she not done so, she’d have been with Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and the farmhands in the storm cellar and would have avoided the cyclone that carried her off to her adventures in faraway Oz.)

A story’s inciting moment can be virtually anything. I once had a list of a couple hundred potential inciting moments. A few on this list might have been:

• The protagonist receives a strange package.
• The protagonist makes a spontaneous (and, as it turns out, a poor) decision.
• The protagonist is abducted by strangers.
• The protagonist buys his girlfriend a present different than the one he’d intended to buy for her birthday.
• The protagonist awakens in a strange place, not knowing how he or she got there.

In a previous post, I explain how Edgar Allan Poe wrote his famous narrative poem The Raven backward, by first determining the effect that he wanted to produce (horror) and then determining the details, of plot, tone, setting, and so forth, that would best help him to produce this predetermined effect. This morning, in the wee hours, as I lay half-asleep and half--awake, which is usually when the muse puts in her appearances--I hit upon another way to accomplish this same feat: One can write backward, so to speak, by first determining how the main character will change by the end of the story!

The change doesn’t have to be drastic, although it should be significant. The change may involve in alteration in the protagonist’s aspirations, attitude, beliefs, decisions, emotions, perceptions, reasoning, thoughts, understanding, or values. Whatever type of change occurs, however, it will derive from the experiences that he or she undergoes during the course of the story, and his or her change will constitute a lesson of sorts for him or her. In fact, I often think of the theme of a story as the lesson that the main character learns as a result of his or her experiences.

Looked at backward, so to speak, the story’s theme (the lesson learned, as reflected in the protagonist’s change of behavior) can be the springboard for the narrative’s entire action, a kind of inciting moment in reverse, as it were. In other words, by determining beforehand how the main character will change, a writer can then plot the story’s action in reverse, determining what will make him or her change and what lesson he or she will learn as the result of the experiences that he or she thus undergoes.

Job, in better days

Let’s take the Biblical story of Job (a horror story, if ever there was one) as an example. At the end of the story, Job’s understanding of God increases: Before the story, Job has a simple idea of God as One who rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior; by the conclusion of the narrative, Job learns that God’s will is inscrutable, or unknowable, and that He must be trusted despite human beings’ ignorance of His ultimate character, or, as Job phrases his newfound knowledge (the story’s theme), “The just shall live by faith.”

Job has not learned the lesson that bad things sometime happen to good people and not just to the bad guys. Therefore, he is puzzled when things go from good to bad for him, and his faith (trust) in God is severely tested. By knowing in advance that Job’s understanding of the nature of God is what will change as he learns his lesson (“The just shall live by faith”), the writer would be able to select the incidents of the plot, including those of the exposition (God points out Job’s faithfulness to Satan during an assembly of the heavenly host which the devil also attends); the inciting moment (Satan is allowed to test Job’s faith); the rising action (the increasingly horrific torments that Job must endure during the testing of his faith); the turning point (Job’s refusal both to curse God and to himself accept blame for the catastrophes that befall his fortune, his family, and himself); the falling action (God’s interrogation of Job out of the whirlwind); and the denouement (Job’s confession of both his ignorance of, and his faith in, God and God’s restoration of Job’s fortune, Job’s family, and Job himself).

By plotting backward, so to speak, from the story’s theme and using it as a sort of reverse inciting moment, the narrative’s sequence of action, including the elements of its plot, can be determined in such a way that this sequence of action will result in the protagonist’s change of behavior and the learning of his or her lesson. In addition, this approach allows the writer to connect plot to character much more closely, perhaps, than he or she might have been able to do had his or her story begun not with the final outcome (the theme of the story, which accompanies or leads to the protagonist’s change in behavior), but with a simple change in the routine of the protagonist’s normal, everyday life. Moreover, this approach helps the writer to ensure that everything that happens in the story is related to the character’s development and change and to his or her recognition of a new truth (the lesson that he or she learns).

Taking Away the Teddy Bear

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Whether a doll, a favorite blanket, or a teddy bear, many children have a favorite toy or other item with which they sleep, partly because they want company but also because they feel a need for security, especially when they are by themselves, in the dark, and ordinary things become large and threatening in their imaginations. We like to think that, long before we become adults, we give up our teddy bears or whatever we substitute for them, or that, at least, they are taken away from us, perhaps as we kick and scream in protest at losing such a trustworthy and faithful companion.

The truth? Even as adults, we have our teddy bears. They’re our husbands or wives, our children, our jobs, our homes, our automobiles, our doctors, and all the other persons, places, and things (and, for that matter, qualities and ideas) that make us feel safe and secure (as well as important and meaningful).

Most of us, although we may lose one or more of these teddy bears, seldom lose them all. A spouse may die; we may be fired; we may lose our homes to foreclosure, our doctors may retire or move away, but, most of the time, not all of these possibilities are realized; we are not, as a rule, fully abandoned. We retain at least, one teddy bear, and often several. That is, until death arrives, to strip us not only of these symbols of our security, but also of life itself and the very flesh we wear, leaving us both nameless and faceless in the grave forever.

In “The Horror of The Exorcist: Its Presentation and Confrontation,” J. W. Ocker contends that “horrifying an audience” is a relatively simple matter, requiring nothing more than the filming of “atrocity.” Such filming becomes “art,” he suggests, only when the atrocity is given some sort of redeeming value, when it is filmed “in a meaningful way without reveling in the horror” (72). The Exorcist is artistic because it accomplishes this end, using atrocity to examine “what has been termed, in the theological realm, ‘the problem of evil,’” or “the paradox that seemingly unbounded atrocity can occur in a universe that is the product of a loving, all-powerful, all-knowing, benign Creator” (74-75). The novel’s (and the movie’s) theme transcends the horror of evil per se and of “an individual child being subjected to that evil” (74) to ask what meaning or purpose human existence can have in such a universe.

In other words, The Exorcist’s unrelenting “presentation and confrontation” of evil “does not allow us to distance ourselves from the evil” by “turning it into some fantastical construct of the nightly news or [a] philosophical plaything” (74) and, therefore, the novel (and the movie) makes each reader come to terms with the significance of evil’s existence. In short, The Exorcist holds the reader’s (or the moviegoer’s) feet to the fire of hell. Evil becomes real; it is not merely an anecdote or an abstraction.

The type of horror that The Exorcist’s depiction of “the problem of evil” represents is both religious and existential: “Such a horror finds its potency in the possibility of a faith unfounded, a worldview demolished. . . . It is the horror of ultimate betrayal” (75). This is the horror, one might argue, of Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” or Sir Winston Churchill’s “Man Overboard.” In both short stories, the protagonists expect to be rescued, but learn, as they languish, dying at sea, that they are quite alone in an uncaring universe in which no sign of God is to be seen, perhaps because there is no God. It is a horror, one might suppose, to which there is no lower, deeper pit, the nadir of despair itself, but such is not the case, Ocker contends; rather, it is the herald of, and the catalyst to, a deeper, even more devastating understanding regarding the true nature of the universe, the type of vision that one discerns in the works, for example, of the Marquis de Sade:

This type of horror is different from, but the close forerunner of another type of horror. . . . That terror is of a universe that is either indifferent or hostile to our own existence. It is a universe in which there is no guarantee that good will triumph over evil “in the end” nor even any reason why it should. It is a universe where there is no real basis to value good over evil. . . [and] each one is a force as natural and as much a part of our reality as anything else. It is a universe in which saying that it is bad to subject a child to torment and obscenity is to say something nonsensical. One can only say in that universe, that the child is or is not being subjected to such, and one cannot tag onto that fact an objective moral judgment (75).

Earlier writers, both popular and mainstream, have suggested that God, if he exists at all, is a disinterested Creator (deism), is dead (Friedrich Nietzsche), is missing in action (Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot), or is inscrutable (Job). Shakespeare suggests that God may be but a gibbering idiot (the blind force of chance evolution, perhaps?). He also characterizes the type of universe that results from such a “creator”: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth).

In bringing his reader face to face, as it were, with mindless evil, The Exorcist’s author, William Peter Blatty, denies him or her the opportunity to escape into clichéd presentations or abstract understandings of human suffering. He gives to such evil a human face, that of preteen Regan MacNeil. In other words, he takes away the teddy bear of a shallow, but comforting, religious faith that assumes that, because “God is in his heaven, all is right with the world” (“Pippa Passes”).

Others who abandoned such a teddy bear include those writers whose names or works have been mentioned--deists (Thomas Jefferson, for example), Friedrich Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett, Stephen Crane, Sir Winston Churchill, the author of Job, William Shakespeare--and some, either they or others, have even gone so far as to suggest a purpose for life in what might be regarded as a purposeless universe. Hedonists suggest that we should pursue pleasure and avoid pain, enjoying life in the here and now. After all, once death occurs, we will ourselves shall have ceased to exist. Others, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, propose that, by pursuing our own interests while, at the same time, accepting responsibility for our actions, we can live as authentic an existence as it is possible for creatures who are both finite and temporal to live. Still others, such as Nietzsche, recommend that we persist in order to give rise to the superman who shall come, through us, to inherit the world and to live beyond the categories of good and evil, a law--and a sort of god--unto himself.

Blatty himself surrendered his teddy bear, believing that the so-called problem of evil was real and must be not only “presented” but “confronted,” as Ockley’s essay’s title suggests, but Blatty, in confronting this issue, remains a man of faith, and a man of a deeper and truer faith than that expressed by Robert Browning’s “Pippa Passes.” The novelist’s conclusion regarding the matter seems to be spoken by Father Merrin, who tells his fellow exorcist, Father Karras:

I think the demon’s target is not the possessed; it is us. . . The observers. . . Every person in this house. . . . I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity. . . To see ourselves as ultimately bestial; as ultimately vile and putrescent; without dignity; ugly; unworthy. And there lies the heart of it, perhaps; in unworthiness. For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it is finally a matter of love; of accepting the possibility that God could love us.

Blatty’s point of view is interesting in several ways, not the least of which is that, if a relationship between a person and God must be based upon love, living as if it must be predicated upon some other basis, whether rationality, emotion, or morality, for instance, is to miss the whole point entirely. The problem of evil is a moral problem. If God is good, how can he, if he is also both omniscient and omnipotent, allow human beings--especially an innocent child--to suffer undeservedly. This is a rational conundrum, defying logic; its force, however, is as much emotional as it is rational, and the true significance of the problem of evil, which is that of human beings’ living in a universe, which is “full of sound and fury” that signifies “nothing,” is that it leads humanity to despair, a state in which the acceptance of God’s love becomes impossible, leaving “every person in this house,” or universe, bereft of God and abandoned to him- or herself.

The problem of evil, truly understood, is the taking away of the final, and the most cherished, of all teddy bears, the belief that life is meaningful, purposeful, and worthwhile. Paradoxically, the loss of this final teddy bear can allow its replacement not by another token of security but by the only true security there is, if there is, indeed, any at all, the God who is not only the ground of being-itself but also love. This is the answer, to the extent that an answer is possible, that Blatty’s novel offers to the problem of evil, “not an explanation,” as Ocker observes, as much as “a context”:

For Father Merrin, the exorcist, there was no doubt that there is a God, there was no doubt that evil exists, and there was no reason to dally with paradoxes. As a result, he was ready for immediate action, unlike the doctors, psychiatrists, and Father Karras himself (at first). Nor does Merrin’s death take anything away from that, for without his help, without his strength, without his sacrifice and the catalyst of his death, there could only have been more horror for all involved (77).

The Value of Literature

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Fiction begins with empathy, as a writer imagines what it would be like to be another individual. He or she puts him- or herself into another person’s shoes, except that, of course, the person is a literary character, rather than a flesh-and-blood man, woman, or child, whom the writer creates. The process works in reverse, too--or is claimed to do so: readers, identifying with literary characters, experience and understand life from these figures’ points of view. For this reason, literature is said to broaden and to deepen human experience.

Since the behavior of fictional characters models that of actual human beings, fiction provides the potential for making ethical decisions and statements about human behavior in general; it allows readers to assess, evaluate, and judge whether a character’s conduct is moral and beneficial or immoral and disadvantageous to him or her and to others, including society in general. Indeed, fiction can be--or has been, at least--a means of transmitting values to present and future generations and societies, as, for example, Beowulf did and as the Bible continues to do for many.

In previous posts, we have considered the types of values that horror fiction conveys. It shows what writers consider to be wrong, or evil, and it demonstrates, through the behavior of the protagonist, how such wickedness can be resisted or overcome, indicating, in the process, that terrible and horrific experiences, including the loss of life and limb, can be endured and that the truly important things in life have nothing to do with such petty pursuits as power, fame, and fortune.

Can the assertions that literature makes--the themes of stories--be proven to be true or false, as a scientist, for example, can demonstrate the truth of the theory that some microorganisms cause disease or that the bonding of oxygen and hydrogen molecules results in the substance we call “water”? No. Are such claims without value, then?

Sigmund Freud

Until relatively recently, Sigmund Freud’s theory of human personality and behavior, psychoanalysis, was not only the predominant school of thought in this domain, but it was the domain, or, to use a different metaphor, it was the only game in town. Carl Jung’s psychology, like that of Alfred Adler’s, Erik Ericson’s, Ernest Jones’, Karen Horney’s, Jacques Lacan’s, Otto Rank’s, Erich Fromm’s, and others in the fold, were mere variations of Freud’s thought. Psychoanalysis was psychology.

Karl Popper

It was not until Karl Popper and other critics asked Freud, as it were, to set his theory’s superego, ego, and id upon the examination table, the better to see and feel, taste and touch, smell and measure them, that psychoanalysis lost its devotees. It was considered unscientific because it consisted of ideas which, by definition, cannot be measured or quantified and, therefore, cannot be empirically verified. In other words, it was a myth, not a science.

Besides the triune composition of personality that Freud posited, other of his ideas were also found to be unscientific and suspect, such as his theory of psychosexual development as being comprised of discreet stages (oral, anal, Oedipal, and genital) and his view of the existence of an “unconscious mind.” His much-vaunted “talking cure” and his attributing all behavioral disorders to unresolved sexual problems related to childhood also came under serious attack, chiefly by feminists, who regard Freudian thought and, in particular, his references to “penis envy” and to women as wannabe men, as highly sexist and offensive. Once the end-all and the be-all of psychology, psychoanalysis took on the appearance of being little more than a modern version of ancient shamanism, with its practitioners considered more witchdoctors than scientists.

How is this related to the value of literature? The themes that literature expresses are of the same type as those which psychoanalysis makes--that is, they are speculative, not scientific; they cannot be quantified or verified. They cannot be scientifically proven or disproved. If, therefore, psychoanalysis is without value, literature would also seem to be without value, for the same reasons.

Martin Heidegger

Those who believe that literature, including, for example, philosophical and religious texts, does have some kind of value have had to reevaluate the matter. Many, in doing so, adopt a position akin to that of the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argues that literature is not about the objective, measurable world of nature, but is, rather, about the inner man or woman.

In short, literary texts are about human experience, as it is understood consciously, by the person him- or herself, and, since people do not exist in a vacuum, but are products of their cultures and societies, literature also provides insights into the nature of such traditions and social groups. Moreover, literature is a means by which authors and readers may share such experiences and it is, as such, a sort of glue that helps to cement individuals and societies together and to suggest personal and social meanings for them that science, by nature, cannot suggest.

Since most other disciplines, scientific and otherwise, impinge upon literature (or literature impinges upon them), it creates a complex network of interrelated ideas which enriches the discussion of the artistic, moral, social, legal, philosophical, political, religious, and theological questions that literature often raises. Although many of these other domains are as unscientific as literature itself, they have value for the same reason that literature does: they unite human beings through shared experience. Men and women are more than natural objects among a world of other things. They are conscious. They think and feel, believe and desire, hope and strive. Science’s importance, notwithstanding, science has little to do with any of these subjective expressions and functions of the human soul.

Soren Kierkegaard

Science may tell us what is, but it cannot tell us what should be, any more than it can tell us how what is feels or how we should think or feel about reality. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that, although, in principle, through science, the universe is known, he himself is left over, as “an unscientific postscript.” The domain of philosophy, religion, and literature in general, including horror fiction, is that of the “leftover” self, and these domains are about sharing the self with the other selves of the world. As long as people believe that they themselves and others have value and that their experience matters, literature and its themes will continue to have value as well.

Besides, literature can be pretty entertaining.

Horror Story Formulae

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

I. General Horror Formula

1. A series of bizarre, seemingly unrelated incidents occurs.
2. The protagonist (and, sometimes, his or her friends or associates) discover the cause of the incidents (often, it is a monster).
3. Using their newfound knowledge, they end the bizarre incidents (perhaps by killing the monster).

Examples: It, Summer of Night, The Exorcist

II. Specific Horror Authors’ Formulae

H. G. Wells

1. An ordinary man lives an ordinary life.
2. He is confronted by extraordinary circumstances.
3. He has trouble fitting back into an ordinary life.

Examples: The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau

Edgar Allan Poe (1)

1. A man and a woman fall in love.
2. The woman dies.
3. The grieving man seeks to survive the woman’s death.

Examples: “Annabelle Lee,” The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe (2)

1. A villain insults the protagonist or the protagonist’s beloved.
2. The protagonist executes revenge.
3. The protagonist and/or the protagonist and his beloved escape.

Examples: “Hop-Frog,” “The Cask of the Amontillado” Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (3)

1. A madman becomes obsessed with another person.
2. The madman kills the other person or violates him or her in some way.
3. The madman succumbs to his madness.

Examples: “Berenice,” “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Stephen King

1. A fairy tale is reduced to its basic narrative elements.
2. The fairy tale’s conflict symbolizes a contemporary issue or concern (theme).
3. The fairy tale is retold in contemporary terms, in a small-town setting.

Examples: Carrie, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Misery

Dean Koontz

1. A guy meets a girl.
2. The couple encounters a force that tries to kill them.
3. The couple, surviving, fall in love.

Gary Pullman

1. Neglected or abused children face a common threat.
2. As a team, they fight their common threat.
3. They overcome the threat and become friends.

Examples: Saturday’s Child, Mystic Mansion, Revelation Point, Wild Wicca Woman

III. Christian Formulae

Christian (1)

1. People enjoy paradise.
2. Paradise is invaded, or the people give in to temptation.
3. Paradise is corrupted or destroyed or the people are exiled from it.

Example: Adam and Eve

Christian (2a)

1. People displease God.
2. God warns the people to repent.
3. When the people refuse to repent, God destroys them.

Example: Noah and the ark; the curses against pharaoh and the Egyptians

Christian (2b)

1. People displease God.
2. God warns the people to repent.
3. When the people refuse to repent, God curses them, and they suffer the consequences of the curse.

Example: Moses and the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness

Christian (3)

1. A people is oppressed by a tyrant.
2. God elects a leader to rescue them.
3. The people are rescued from the tyrant.

Example: Exodus

Christian (4)

1. God promises a people that it shall have a land in which to build a nation.
2. Through leaders, God seizes the land from its inhabitants.
3. The people occupy the land and build a nation.

Examples: Judges and Kings

Christian (5a)

1. A chosen one is called to undertake a mission.
2. The chosen one performs the mission.
3. The fortunes of a tribe, a nation, or the human race is improved.

Example: Moses, David, Israel, church

Christian (5b)

1. God promises a Messiah.
2. The Messiah arrives, performing his ministry.
3. The Messiah redeems humanity.

Example: Jesus Christ

IV. Another Formula

Hans Christian Andersen

1. A character is rejected by his or her peers or community.
2. The character accomplishes a great deed on behalf of his peers or community.
3. The character is accepted with praise by his peers or community.

Examples: "The Ugly Duckling," "The Littlest Christmas Tree," Revelation Point

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.