Writers’ Considerations: Readers’ Likes and Dislikes

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

While it is true that a writer should not let his or her writing be determined solely by readers’ observations (i. e., likes and dislikes) about his or her work, any more than a politician should allow his or her politics to be solely determined by public opinion polls, it is also true that a writer (or a politician) has an audience whose interests he or she disregards at his or her own peril. Since a writer writes for an audience (or audiences, since one is apt to consist of professional critical and another composed of amateur fans), he or she should understand what his or her readers like and dislike about his or her fiction, and an astute reader, whether professional or amateur, can, and frequently does, offer valid observations from which all but the most insulated and arrogant writer can profit.

In doing so, one is advised to keep in mind the adage about following the money trail; some reviewers offer uncritically positive views because they are selling the book. One should also weed out blatantly unfair comments, especially on the negative side, as well. Be mindful, too, that some observations will be diametrically opposed to others, as when one reviewer calls the plot “boring” or “predictable” and another sees it as “well-paced” or “surprising.” (I tend to winnow out such contradictions unless there are many more on one side than there are on the other.) Also be careful to reject comments that are nothing more than superlatives (“rich plot”) or their opposites (“stupid plot”) which are so general and vague as to be meaningless.

This enterprise also offers a handy dandy way of distinguishing which features of a story female readers like or dislike and which male readers enjoy or find objectionable, and one can tell, just by eyeballing the lengths of the respective “Likes” and “Dislikes” columns, whether the book, in general, seemed to receive more favorable than unfavorable comments. (Admittedly, this is not a scientific approach, but it works reasonably well as a rule of thumb for those writers who lack the time, money, expertise, equipment, and laboratories in which to conduct the bona fide experiments that scientific research requires.)

Occasionally, younger readers will offer a review of the book without having finished reading it. Of course, this is not acceptable for most readers outside the circle of their peers, but it offers writers one advantage. Most writers, especially mystery writers and horror writers, present their readers with a red herring regarding the cause of the plot’s events, saving, for near the end, the true cause. For example, in The Taking, Dean Koontz suggests that aliens who seek to terraform the Earth in reverse, to make it hospitable for the army of their kind which is to follow, are responsible for the horrific incidents he details, whereas, in fact, the true cause is something else (an invasion of demons). According to the half-baked reviews of the adolescents who submit their takes on Desperation before they have finished reading King’s novel, the cause of the strange goings-on in the story is the madness of a police officer. Their reviews show that King has succeeded, with these reviewers, at least, in his sleight-of-mind suggestions that the strange and uncanny events are caused by something other than their true cause, which, as it urns out, is not a “mad cop,” as one reviewer believes (and as King has led him to suppose), but a demon, Tak, who has escaped from a caved-in mine and who now seeks to show his superiority over God, whom Tak regards as merely a competitive deity, rather than the one and only Supreme Being.

As an example of this approach, this post offers the following “likes and dislikes” of a number of readers of Dan Simmons’ novels The Terror and Summer of Night and of Stephen King’s Desperation. Obviously, the same two-column-table approach could be applied to any other writer’s work, recent or previous, including one’s own.

The Terror by Dan Simmons

Summer of Night by Dan Simmons

Desperation by Stephen King

In case you were wondering (you probably weren’t), my own takes are that Summer of Night is well worth reading, The Terror is nigh unreadable, and Desperation is one of King’s best books ever. The reasons for these assessments, in nutshells, are Summer of Night's realistic and believable recreation of America as it was for many during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, sympathetic characters, effective chills and thrills, and an interesting back story concerning the history of the bell that focuses and draws the ancient evil to the novel’s unsuspecting and enchanting town; The Terror's needless detail about the most minute aspects of everything nautical and historical, characters who are difficult to get to know, much less to care about, and a lack of overt action during most of the story; and Desperation's sympathetic and believable characters (always a strength in King’s fiction), an interesting antagonist, high stakes, the religious and moral dimensions, and, of course, the chills and thrills. Concerning Desperation, it was difficult to find any negative comments among horror fans.

Femme Fatales

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman started it all. Or maybe it was Lilith or the lamia. Or the bride of Frankenstein.

Actually, it’s probably impossible to say just which female character became the world’s first female monster, but the ladies have proven that she can be the deadlier of the species when she’s of a mind to be. In fact, in Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia argues that civilization is a result of men’s attempt to resist the overwhelming influence and control of humanity’s chthonian nature, as represented by woman as Mother Nature (which is roughly the same, one might add, as that which Biblical writers are pleased to refer to as the “flesh,” which is eternally opposed to the spirit and often calls one to take a nasty fall. It should be understood that the “flesh” does not mean simply the sexual aspects of men and women but, rather, all that is implied by their immanent and temporal nature or their mortality.)

As we have argued in a previous post, horror fiction is all about significant loss and our attempts to survive it. There are many, many such types of such loss, some personal, some psychological, some social, and some theological. The greatest loss of all, perhaps, is that of life itself. Can death be survived? Most religions insist that it can, and some horror stories suggest the same. Of course, one’s position on such a matter, whether pro or con, is one of faith, for the world, if any, that lies beyond this earthly, mortal realm is an “undiscovered country from whose borne no one has returned.”

One type of loss of which horror fiction treats is the loss of order. Order can be the result of a formal political process in which laws are codified and enforced by a police or military force or, less often, of an informal social process in which unwritten laws are transmitted from one generation to the next and enforced by the stigma of the tribe. In other words, order among men and women is a product, so to speak, of law or of tradition. In many horror stories, such social control, such regulation of behavior, such organization of society, including the roles that men and women play within their larger groups, is either set aside or, more frequently, cast down, as Moses, in a fit of rage, cast down the stone tables upon which God had carved the Ten Commandments. Sometimes, horror fiction inverts order; it turns insides out and upsides down.

In the animal world, the males are the pretty ones. This state of affairs is inverted among humans, where men are not only stronger than women but are also smart enough to know it and to use their superior physical strength to their advantage, one effect of which is to make women compete among themselves for their attention. It may be argued that, ultimately, women gain control of the situation, in marriages at least, although most societies are now patriarchic and are likely to remain so, at least for the foreseeable future. Therefore, to assert themselves, women have had to adopt stratagems that allow men the pretense, at least, of being in charge and in control. Allowing men the ego salve of being the dominant “partners” in the marital relationship, women rule, largely because they are pretty (or, more crassly, but accurately, sexy), and they take great pains and spend small fortunes to stay that way.

Men, it may be suggested, symbolize strength, whereas women represent beauty. What if women’s figurative significance were inverted, though, some horror stories have asked, and they were understood, even if for but a moment, as suggesting strength rather, or more, than beauty? The answer, in a word, writers of such literature imply, is a monster.

Equipped with the strength to subject men to their will and to dominate them individually and collectively, woman would become not seductive Eve but demonic Lilith. She’d become Pandora, the lamia, the gorgon, a fury, a she-mantis, a reptilian thing covered in scales, a female Frankenstein’s monster, a fifty-foot woman on an estrogen-fueled rampage, a blood-sucking fiend, la belle sans merci. She would become a femme fatale.

Some movies and books depict women as monsters, females as femme fatales. Such movies and books suggest their creators’ reasons (or lack thereof) for fearing the women whom they depict as monsters. Most such creators are men. Whether their fears are representative of their whole sex is debatable, but their qualms and uncertainties, at least, reflect how some members of the male sex have viewed the opposite sex. (The classics of Western literature that feature female monsters, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, The Metamorphoses and other sources of Greek and Roman mythology, European fairy tales, Beowulf, Christabel, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and others, are worthy of even more consideration, but they are not the topics of this post; here, we are concerned more with movies.)

What, then, do movies that feature female creatures suggest about women (or the moviemakers’ ideas about women)? Let’s consider a few of the more notable films to have threatened audiences with the dangerous doings of femme fatales:

• The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman
• Species
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Teeth
  

In Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958), Nancy Archer is mad as hell, and she’s not going to take it anymore after her two-timing husband, Harry, having inherited $50 million, abandons her for another woman, Honey Parker. After a close encounter with visiting extraterrestrials, she is radiated, which makes her huge, and she kills Honey before reclaiming her wayward hubby. As she carries him through the streets, as if he were nothing more than a live doll, the police shoot an electrical transformer as she passes it, and she and Harry are both electrocuted. This movie’s horror derives from the fear that a wronged woman may exact vengeance and suggests that infidelity is a much larger problem (literally) than it may appear to the man who perpetrates it, since it is more than a merely physical or sexual betrayal, which can have an emotionally and, indeed, existentially devastating and destructive effect on both marriage partners, the victim as well as the victimizer.

In the original movie’s remake (1993), the femme fatale has come a long way, baby, and her growth represents her emancipation from chauvinistic and patriarchal dominance, and the aliens who increase her size also imprison her husband until he can be convinced of the errors of his sexist ways.


Read from a male’s point of view, Species (1995) seems to depict women, in the guise of sexual predator (a role more often associated with men than with women). As such, women dehumanize men, seeing them (as men too often view women) as merely sex objects upon whom their own sexual needs may be satisfied. The product of an alien human hybridization experiment, Sil is both extraterrestrial and human. She’s also bent upon motherhood, and there are no candy or flowers in her courtship designs. There is just her beguiling appearance, with which she lures her prey, and her superior physical strength, which she uses to force herself upon them. Procreation is her purpose, and rape is her means to this end. Men are nothing to her but walking, talking sperm banks, and she can do without the walking and the talking very well, thank you. She rejects by killing those whom she finds unworthy of, or threatening, to her, and, after she finally mates successfully, she and her offspring are killed by the team of government scientists and military personnel who have been tracking her. The patriarchy, although threatened by their Galatea, resume the upper hand.


In her role as sexual predator, Sil is somewhat like Faith, a character in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). A sort of female Nietzschean superman, Faith has physical strength that far exceeds that of any man, and she uses it to satisfy her desires, sexual and otherwise, without regard to their effects, emotional or otherwise, on her victims. A love-him-and-leave-him sort of girl, she summarizes her philosophy succinctly, saying, “Get some, and get gone.” In “getting some,” she nearly kills Xander Harris, an ordinary teenage boy, after fornicating with him, but she is stopped by the timely arrival of Angel, a male vampire with a soul. That her views are horrible to the patriarchic society in which she lives is indicated by the more traditional, if rather liberated, lifestyle of her counterpart, the titular Buffy Summers, who is also possessed of superhuman strength but prefers to nail her lovers according to the much more traditional, socially acceptable rules that lesser women have been taught to use in the mating game. Buffy’s manner of dating and courtship highlight the aberrance of Faith’s sexual behavior and Faith’s nature as both a rogue vampire slayer and a femme fatale.


Teeth (2007) confronts viewers with an age-old fear among men--that of the castrating woman. In this film, the vagina of Dawn, the teenage cannibalistic protagonist, is equipped with teeth that respond to her anger or rage, biting off the genitals of a would-be rapist; those of a boy who had seemed to care about her but bedded her only so that he could brag about having done so to his adolescent friends, having bet with them that he could seduce Dawn; and those of her stepbrother, who’d hoped to have sex with her before their father ruined his hopes by marrying Dawn‘s mother. After these snacks, Dawn leaves town, finding self-confidence in her power to defend herself, and smiles at the elderly man who has stopped to give her a ride when, locking her inside his car, he insists that she have sex with him.

In the context of this film, the femme fatale is not a predator, but, rather, a young woman who is uniquely able to protect herself. She evens the playing field, so to speak, by being more than merely able to fend off unwanted advances or even intended sexual assaults. The organ which, in feminist thought, allows men to dominate women, becomes, in Teeth, the instrument, so to speak, of both liberation and vengeance. Talk about poetic justice! Women, who have been sexually assaulted by men, now have a means of defending themselves and of exacting a suitably ironic revenge upon would-be rapists or boyfriends who won’t take no for an answer. No doubt, some feminists believe that the makers of this movie corrected an error in nature’s or God’s work, equipping women with the very weapon they needed--a sort of dental chastity belt with (real) teeth--to be employed or not at the owner’s discretion.

The femme fatales we have considered in this post are not so much scary in themselves as they are scary to the men who watch them, for they represent what women would be like were they to act as men behave, as sexual predators who seek men only as a means to satisfy their own lusts. By turning the tables, as it were, on men, these movies’ femme fatales show men what it is like to be considered sex objects who are accounted as nothing more than things to be brutalized at will and discarded thereafter as having had their only value depleted.

To deny one his or her humanity is a horrible and monstrous thing, these films suggest, and the one who does so is a monster. Monsters may rampage for a time (every monster has its day), but, sooner or later, it will be exposed, understood, and, usually, terminated. Are these studies in feminine angst and rage reflections of men’s guilty consciences? Are they symbolic projections of rape fantasies? Are they nothing more than reinforcements--or, possibly, reassurances--of men’s superior status in nature and in society (as understood by the men who write and produce such films, of course)? All of the above? None of the above?

By turning the tables on men as sexual predators, movies like The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman show that sexual betrayal not only hurts the victim but also can have repercussions for the victimizer, since infidelity is destructive to both parties and to the marital relationship itself; Species and Buffy the Vampire Slayer show what it’s like, from the female’s perspective, to be the prey of such attackers; and Teeth, portraying women as able protectors of their own virtue, suggests that women are not irreducible to their body parts and that any man who attempts to dehumanize women by regarding them as mere sex objects may learn that he, as much as she, can be reduced to mere objectivity--in his case, by being deprived of the very type of organs that he insists are the only parts of women that are desirable by, and valuable to, men. After all, if he has no genitals of his own, hers are likely to become a lot less important to him. Femme fatales convey the message that women are not merely sex objects whose purpose it is to serve--or service--men and that they deserve dignity and respect. If they are ill treated, these movies suggest further, vengeance, of a poetically just sort, is sure to follow. After all, “hell hath no vengeance like a woman scorned,” and the disrespect of a person’s humanity is, perhaps, the very zenith (or nadir) of disdain.

The Heart of Horror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In previous posts, we have provided not only a justification for horror fiction but also several ideas as to its value beyond that of entertainment per se. This post discusses a similar, but broader, topic in an attempt to offer, if not the answer, at least an answer to the question of what is at the heart of fiction in general (and, consequently, of horror fiction in particular).

The answer--or an answer, at any rate--is mystery.

Mystery not in the sense that writers of mystery and detective fiction use it, but mystery in the sense that philosophers, theologians, and mystics use it. In this sense, mystery touches upon meaning and, if one sees teleology in the workings of the universe, probably, upon purpose, both of which (meaning and purpose) touch, in turn, upon value.

For some, life is invested with meaning by the creator, and this meaning is infinite and eternal. For others, life has no meaning but that which each individual imparts to his or her existence. For these folks--existentialists, for the most part--this meaning is not only finite and temporal, but it is also elusive. For others still--the absurdists, we may call them--life has no meaning. It is nothing more than a cosmic accident in which blind chance, rather than God’s will or personal choice, determines what becomes of all persons, places, and things.

Like any other genre of literature, horror is adaptable to any of these points of view, depending upon the writer’s worldview and that which his narrator adopts. Because it is so adaptable to even something as fundamental as one’s Weltanschauung, literature, horror fiction included, can address the widest array of natural, social, historical, psychological, philosophical, and theological considerations. There is room in the inn for all.

No single book, whether of science, sociology, history, psychology, philosophy, religion, or theology, can give a definitive answer to the great questions of human existence to which all will agree. Literature, however, is not this book or that book, but all books (and movies, too, for that matter). It is not only the stream of human consciousness, but the sea of knowledge and the mountaintops of wisdom and understanding as well--and the depths of the unconscious mind and the pathways to the stars. Literature is a telescope, a microscope, and a looking-glass, all in one. It is a catalogue of visions, complete with themes, or lessons, or morals.

In one story, a man may come to believe in God. In other, a man of God may lose his faith. A story may recount a knight in search of the Holy Grail, the chalice being a symbol for faith or, perhaps, for only the will to believe. A story may explain--or seek to explain--why there is no God or to show that the only gods that exist are the ones we make in our own images.

That’s what the mystery comes to, in the end. God is at the center, or, alternatively, nothing is at the center, of life. If God, he gives to existence the meaning he decrees it shall have. If nothing, either we impose meaning upon the world and upon ourselves or there is no meaning.

Horror fiction doesn’t solve the mystery of existence, nor does it demonstrate the purpose or value of life, any more than any other literary genre does. Thank God or goodness! For, if the mystery were solved, what would there be to write about? The wonder, the awe, the possibilities of existence would end. The stories would become The Story, advancing not another way of seeing or thinking or believing or hoping but simply another reiteration of the constant, unvarying refrain, and a refrain, beautiful and informative though it may be, is not a story.

How does the mystery of existence pertain, specifically, to horror fiction?

This genre addresses itself to the dark side of life, to evil and suffering, to what the Bible has called “the mystery of iniquity.” Evil is as mysterious, in its way, as life itself, for there seems to be no need for evil and no desire for it, among the normal and the sane, at least, and, yet, it exists; it persists. No one knows what to make of it. The ancients thought that it was either the result of ignorance or the result of merely negating the good. In other words, it was an act of the uneducated or it was a sin of omission. Evil was a passive phenomenon, in such conceptions, unable to do much by itself. History has since taught humanity a different lesson, not only with the holocaust, although the holocaust of itself might be a sufficient lesson--and is a sufficient lesson to those who are neither stupid nor of ill will toward others. Therefore, the question remains, Why is there such a thing as evil, and why does it persist?

Horror considers just such a mystery--“the mystery of iniquity”--and the great among its many authors have given, each his or her own, answer. None is definitive, but each is, as it were, a part of the gigantic jigsaw puzzle that is the heart of horror. In “Evil Is As Evil Does,” we mention the thoughts--or the conclusions--upon this matter of several masters of horror fiction. Is the search for the answer--or even an answer--to the question as to why evil exists itself a fruitful or a fruitless quest? The answer to this question must be answered by each individual, but we have suggested our own view concerning this question in the post “Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear.”

In this post, we are satisfied to conclude with just a syllogism, the validity of which is to be determined as you see fit:

All phenomena have a cause or causes.
Evil is a phenomenon.
Therefore, evil has a cause or causes.

A Dictionary of the Paranormal, the Supernatural, and the Otherworldly (G - I)

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Note: Unless otherwise noted, definitions are courtesy of dictionary.die.net, an Internet dictionary in the public domain.

G

Gaia--the planet earth, personified, often as a mother (the author).

Geller, Uri--a supposed psychic with telekinetic powers; famous for bending spoons with nothing more, allegedly, than his mind (the author).

Ghost--a spirit of the dead which sometimes are said to haunt the living (the author).

Global warming--the doctrine that the earth’s climate is warming, partially as a result of human activities and pollutants (the author).

Goatsucker, Puerto Rico--a mysterious animal in Puerto Rico, also known as the chupacabra, said to bite the necks of goats (and other animals) and suck their blood (the author).

God

God--in Christianity, Judaism, Muslim, and other faiths, the supreme being (the author).

Griffin--winged monster with an eagle-like head and body of a lion.

Gurdjieff, G. I.--a mystic; he established The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man (presumably, women aren’t included) in Russia), based on lessons he’d learned from other mystics while he was traveling in central Asia (the author).

Guillotining, and life after death--the theory that the brain remains conscious for one or more moments after it has been severed from the body by a falling guillotine blade (the author).

H

Hades--in Greek mythology, the underworld, home of the dead, ruled by Pluto (the author).

Hallucination--illusory perception; a common symptom of severe mental disorder.

Healing, faith--healing of blindness, deafness, disease, mental illness, demonic possession, and other physical, mental, and spiritual conditions by faith in God’s ability and desire to deliver or heal one from these conditions (the author).

Heaven--in Christianity, the abode of the souls redeemed by Christ (the author).

Hecate--the Greek goddess of witchcraft (the author).

Hel--in Norse mythology, the name of both the underworld to which those who were not selected as residents of Asgard lived after death and the name of the goddess who ruled it (the author).

Hell--in Christianity, the abode of the damned; named for the Norse underworld, Hel (the author).

Hill, Betty and Barney--a couple who, under hypnosis, claimed that they were abducted by extraterrestrial aliens and subjected to bizarre medical experiments and tests (the author).

Hoax--a fraud perpetuated upon the stupid, naïve, and desperate by charlatans, some of whom claim to possess paranormal or supernatural powers and abilities (the author).

Home, levitating

Home, Daniel--a Scottish spiritualist and medium who claimed to be able to levitate, to communicate with the dead, and to cause rapping sounds by the power of his mind alone; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, was one of his many supporters (the author).

Homeopathy--a method of treating disease with small amounts of remedies that, in large amounts in healthy people, produce symptoms similar to those being treated.

Hot reading--fortune telling that involves the surreptitious solicitation of personal information related to the medium’s or psychic’s client or an audience which is included in the fortune subsequently told (the author).

Houris--Muslim virgins waiting to serve faithful male adherents of the faith, especially martyrs (the author).

Houses, haunted--residences (and, sometimes, commercial properties) that are said to be haunted by ghosts, demons, or other paranormal or supernatural entities or forces (the author).

Houston, Jean and the Mystery School--a New Age self-help program that fosters self-development and social progress (the author).

Howe, Linda Moulton--an investigative journalist who writes what crtics characterize as sensational articles and books and produces lurid documentaries, and films about UFO’s and related topics (the author).

Hubbard, L. Ron--science fiction author and founder of Scientology (the author).

Hundredth monkey phenomenon-”a sudden spontaneous and mysterious leap of consciousness achieved when an allegedly "critical mass" point is reached” (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Hybrids, alien program to breed--an alleged program by extraterrestrial aliens and/or the United States government to breed hybrid alien-humans, possibly to fill roles of authority within the world’s governments (the author).

Hypersensory perception (HSP)--intuition, such as may be displayed in interpreting body language (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Hypnagogic state--the “state between being awake and falling asleep. For some people, this is a time of visual and auditory hallucination” and may explain some accounts of ghosts, demons, UFO abductions, and the like (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Hypnopompic state--“the transition state of semi-consciousness between sleeping and waking. For some people, this is a time of visual and auditory hallucination” and may explain some accounts of ghosts, demons, UFO abductions, and the like (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Hypnosis--a state that resembles sleep but that is induced by suggestion.

Hysteria--neurotic disorder characterized by violent emotional outbreaks and disturbances of sensory and motor functions.

Hysterio-epilepsy--“an alleged disease discovered by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), one of the founders of modern neurology” (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

I

I Ching

I Ching--a set of principles and symbols by the use of which people seek to balance opposite forces and find order in seemingly random incidents (the author).

Illuminati--literally, “enlightened ones”; a secret society often identified as participants in an international conspiracy to rule the world, openly or secretly (the author).

Incantation--a chant, sometimes in verse, by which sorcerers and witches sometimes cast spells (the author).

Incorruptibility of sacred bodies--bodies of saints that remain perfectly preserved, with no evidence of decay, for prolonged periods after their deaths and entombment or burial (the author).

Indian rope trick (levitation)--a magic trick in which an Indian fakir seems to climb a levitating rope (the author).

Indigo children--children of a higher degree of evolution than normal children and who are said to have paranormal powers, such as clairvoyance; they are identifiable by the indigo aura that surrounds them (the author).

Infrasound--sound below the threshold of human hearing (the author).

Intelligent design--the doctrine that the order and structure of the universe presupposes intelligent design; the basis of the argument from design, or the teleological argument (the author).

A History of Hell, Part III

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In their exhaustive survey of human civilization, historian Will Durant and his wife Ariel introduce many topics, including some that touch upon matters of interest to the writer of horror fiction, such as hell. This post provides a brief summary of the points that Will Durant (not yet joined in his venture by his wife) makes concerning this rather otherworldly theme in Volume IV, The Age of Faith, of The Story of Civilization:

• Al Ghazali claimed that theists considered heaven and hell to be “spiritual conditions only,” rather than actual places.
• The Sufi Moslems held that hell is but temporary and that, ultimately, salvation is universal.
• Arab descriptions served as part of the basis for Dante’s vision of hell in The Divine Comedy.
• For their inspiration for hell, the Hebrews referred to He Hinnom or Sheol, a valley in which rubbish heaps were continuously ablaze to prevent the spread of disease. Sheol, Durant observes, “was conceived of as a subterranean region of darkness that received all the dead.” The Hebrew hell consisted of seven stories , “with graduated degrees of torment.” It was a place of temporary torment for all but adulterers, those who shamed others publicly, and those who slandered or libeled others.
• Irishman Johannes Scotus Eringena believed that heaven and hell were spiritual conditions, not physical locations.
• Pope Gregory the Great held that hell is a physical place, wherein fire eternally burns the damned, tormenting them without destroying them; their suffering is increased, he maintained, by their being made to witness the torment of any of their loved ones who have also been damned and by their despair at ever being liberated or delivered from their suffering.
• Durant says that medieval Catholic men and women “hoped vaguely for heaven, but vividly feared hell.” The Bulgarian king, Boris, was converted, it is said, by seeing a mural of hell that an artist painted upon his palace wall. Mystics claimed to have visions in which they saw the “geography of hell.” Satan, chained upon “a burning gridiron,” was alleged to snatch suffering sinners and crush them in his teeth, swallowing “them down his burning throat,” as “assistant demons with hooks of iron plunged the damned alternately into fire or icy water, or hung them up by the tongue, or sliced them with a saw, or beat them flat on an anvil, or boiled them or strained them through a cloth.” A sumptuous stench permeated the damned and their environs, and the flames gave no light, the darkness adding to the terror and the suffering of the damned. Christ was feared in his aspect of the judge of the living and the dead, for he could send or deliver the souls of the dead to eternal bliss or to everlasting damnation. “The devil,” Durant points out, “was no figure of speech but a life and blood reality, prowling about everywhere, suggesting temptations and creating all kinds of evil.” He was also quite the ladies’ man, fathering monstrous children, one of whom is alleged to have had “a wolf’s head and a scorpion’s tail.” His many assistants also tempted people and liked to lie with women as incubi, or sex demons. Although the people feared the greater demons, “a saving sense of humor saved this demonology, and most healthy males looked upon the little devils rather as poltergeist mischief-makers than as objects of terror,” and one exhausted demon, resting “on a head of lettuce. . . was inadvertently eaten by a nun.” Limbo was introduced as the abode of the unapprised infant, although St. Augustine had believed that they also went to hell. There was debate as to whether more souls would be saved and go to heaven or more souls would be damned and go to hell, and Moslems believed most Christians would go to hell, while Christians believed the opposite. No soul could be saved, the Roman Catholic Church contended, except through itself. Volcanoes were assumed to be “the mouths of hell,” and “their rumbling was a faint echo of the moans of the damned.” According to Pope Gregory, “the crater of Etna was daily widening to receive the enormous number of souls that were fated to be damned.” Pope Gregory IX held as heretical Raymond Lully’s assertion that the greatness of Christ’s love ensured the salvation, rather than the damnation, of the vast majority of souls. “The last moment of life” was considered to be “decisive for all eternity,” which added to the terror of life that many felt. Purgatory offered slight hope to the living. According to a legend, St. Patrick had a great pit dug, into which monks descended; “some returned. . . And described purgatory and hell with discouraging vividness.” Many other travelogues of hell also existed. As Durant notes, “Apocalyptic literature describing tours or visions of heaven or hell abounded in Judaism and Christianity,” and priests, such as Peter Damian, delivered “fiery sermons on the pains of hell.” Nevertheless, some challenged these doctrines of the faith--and, indeed, the faith itself, asking, for example, why God should have created the devil if he’d known in advance that the devil would sin and fall, whether a just and loving God could “punish finite sin with infinite pain,” and whether hell-fire would not at some point render the damned insensitive to its pain.
• The doctrine of original sin was a theological attempt to account for “the biological theory of primitive instincts” and “the preaching of this doctrine” led to a diminishing of the “fear of hell. . . till the Reformation,” when it was “to reappear with fresh terror among the Puritans.”
• St. Anselm said that only the “infinite atonement” of Christ could atone for the “infinite offense” of Adam and Eve, their sin being “infinite” because it had been directed “against an infinite being,” God. Therefore, only “the death of God become man could ransom humanity from Satan and hell. . . . and restore the moral balance of the world.”
• For medieval people, “the earth was the chosen home of Christ, and the shell of hell, and weather was the whim of God.”
• Roger Bacon endorsed the study and use of mathematics because this subject “should aid us in ascertaining the position of paradise and hell.”
• Dante used many Arab sources as inspirations for his descriptions of hell, including the Koran, “the story of Mohammed’s trip to heaven and hell in Abu-l-Ala a;-Ma’arri’s Irisalat al-Ghufran. . . . and Ibn Arabi’s Futubat.
• The hell of Dante’s Inferno is entered through an opening in the earth near a forest. The opening leads to the gates of hell, where an inscription reads, in part, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!” In the poem, “hell is a subterranean funnel, reaching down to the center of the earth,” imagined by the poet as featuring “dark and frightening abysses between gigantic murky rocks; steaming, stinking marshes, torrents, lakes, and streams; storms of rain, snow, hail, and brands of fire; howling winds and petrifying cold; tortured bodies, grimacing faces, blood-stilling shrieks and groans.” The funnel leads through nine levels. Nearer the surface, the lesser sinners reside, whereas the greater sinners dwell at the lower levels. At the lowest level, the ninth circle of hell, traitors are housed, and, at the lowest of all points, “Lucifer lies buried to the waist in ice, flapping enormous wings from his shoulders, weeping icy tears of blood from the three faces that divide his head, and chewing a traitors in each of three jaws--Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.” Dante included actual people among the damned, including, in addition to popes. His Divine Comedy also describes purgatory and heaven, or paradise.

What can we learn from this part of the survey of the ideas of the afterlife and the underworlds? Many sources have formed the idea of hell, including mythological, pagan, Jewish, and Christian ones.

For the first time, the idea is formed that hell may signify a spiritual condition, rather than a literal place. Theology seems to be losing out to psychology as an explanation of human behavior.

The idea that hell is permanent and eternal rubs some the wrong way, and the doctrine of universal salvation appears, both in Moslem and Christian faith, only to be condemned in Roman Catholicism as heretical. However, Limbo is allowed for unapprised infants, to spare their innocent souls from hell. For those who maintain faith in the existence of an actual, physical hell, the torment of the damned becomes more extreme, the imagination supplying many details as to the nature and effects of the suffering that the lost souls must endure there, forever, as if the catalogue of horrors somehow ensures their reality and, therefore, the reality of the hell in which they occur.

Many write of their supposed journeys to heaven and hell, as if they are reporting trips to foreign lands. Locating heaven and hell becomes a motive for the study of science and mathematics.

Satan and the lesser demons are believed to be incarnate and to be able, in fact, to have sexual relations with women, as incubi (and with men, as succubi). Lesser demons are considered mischievous rather than malignant.

Churchmen argue whether more souls will be saved or damned, with more supporting the latter over the former view.

Dante’s Inferno, borrowing from many earlier sources, Christian and otherwise, offers the most detailed geography of hell, populating it with both imaginary and actual historical figures, including popes, suggesting that hell is a real place to which anyone, including leaders of the church itself, may be tormented in a variety of real and agonizing ways.

Today, the imagining of hell continues in sermons and in books written by people who claim to have undergone near-death experiences, and the debate continues as well as to whether a literal hell exists or, whether, for that matter, literal demons live and stalk the earth.

Those who appear as damned in literary texts represent the values of the society or the poet or other writer in whose work the damned appear, for the values of the lost souls are the values that are rejected by these creators of hell. Therefore, hell can be thought of, in the Jungian sense, as representing a psychic reservoir, akin to the universal mind, in which humanity’s collective shadow archetype lives, in bits and pieces, disguised as this or that individual or type of person. For example, in Dante’s hell, from least (closest to the surface) to the greatest (farthest down), these are the damned; whose values represent the opposites of those embraced by the poet himself:

1. Unbaptized infants
2. Lustful
3. Gluttonous
4. Greedy and wasteful
5. Wrathful and sullen
6. Heretical
7. Violent
8. Fraudulent
9. Treacherous

Plus, did anyone notice the historical references to "mouths of hell"? Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, apparently did, because at least two are mentioned in his television series, one of which was located beneath the Sunnydale High School library (or, in the high school later built on the same site, the principal's office)!

Inner Demons

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

 

To be alone is to be alone with one’s inner demons, with what plagues or haunts oneself. Perhaps a person doesn’t even know that he or she is possessed, as it were, by an inner demon of some sort (but, most likely, this individual’s friends, if he or she has any, will know).

 

For most people, the phrase “inner demons” refers to emotional obsessions or semi-conscious impulses, such as rage or a tendency toward alcoholism or some other sort of addiction. According to psychoanalyst Carl Jung, these inner demons are aspects of the shadow archetype. The shadow consists of those aspects of the self that one denies and represses. A good example of this archetype is the rogue slayer Faith, a character who appears in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Faith is Buffy’s shadow--the aspects of herself that she denies expression and the temptations she faces in repressing the impulses to behave according to the desires of these potential selves. Dutiful and responsible, Buffy longs for the carefree (or seemingly carefree) lifestyle that the footloose, if irresponsible, Faith projects. Unhindered by the concerns for morality, Faith has a simple philosophy, which she expresses in bold, if amusing, proverbs and slogans of her own devise. Concerning sex, for example, Faith says, “Get some; get gone.” Her use of Xander Harris as a “sex toy” shows that she is serious about the implications of this statement, that it is a principle by which she actually does operate. Her superhuman powers makes her above the law, Faith tells Buffy, just as Buffy’s own superhuman powers as a fellow slayer make Buffy above the law. They are laws unto themselves, Faith argues. Faith and Buffy, as Nietzschean supermen, as it were, are not bound by the traditional expectations and requirements of the herd. Buffy and Faith are wolves. Although Buffy ultimately rejects Faith’s views, she is tempted to live according to Faith’s philosophy, which seems to follow the dictum laid out by Aleister Crowley: “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” In an episode of the series, Faith, stealing from a store, gives Buffy a shopping hint: “Want. Take. Have.” Crashing a hand through a display case, Buffy retrieves an item of merchandise--a crossbow. “Want. Take Have. I think I’m getting it,” she says, smiling as she echoes Faith’s philosophy. As Buffy’s shadow, Faith is a foil to Buffy--a character who, by demonstrating traits opposite to those of the main character, highlights the protagonist’s characteristics. Faith’s amoral nature and her willingness to live as she pleases, even if her irresponsible behavior results in tragedies for others, contrasts sharply with Buffy’s sense of duty and need to take responsibility for herself and others, even at the cost of her own life, if need be. Joss Whedon, the series’ creator, and the others on his writing team were adroit in the use of both character types, such as the foil, and archetypes, such as the shadow, and their use of these types of characters and archetypes adds a dimension of depth to a show that, otherwise, would have been nothing beyond the ordinary fare offered by weekly television series. To view a character’s inner demons, make a two-column chart. In the left column, list the character’s expressed traits (the ones that make up his or her personality as it is known to him or her and to others). In the second column, list the opposites of these traits; these will be the repressed traits that, together, make up the character’s shadow. (A thesaurus is a useful tool in ascertaining opposites traits, because it will list antonyms as well as synonyms.) Here’s an example, based upon the character of Buffy Summers: 

 

EXPRESSED TRAITS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . REPRESSED TRAITS (Buffy, as Persona).

 

(Faith, as Shadow) Dutiful . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rebellious Responsible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irresponsible Careful. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Negligent Humorous. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Snide Altruistic. . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selfish Heroic*

Anti-heroic* *See "Beowulf as the Prototypical Monster Killer" 

 

The list could be extended, but you get the point. (By the way, it’s important to notice that the traits of the character that represents the persona, or public self [Buffy, in this case], and the traits of its shadow, the repressed self [Faith, in this case], need not be mutually exclusive. The characters can share some attributes. For example, both Buffy and Faith are strong, agile, skilled at combat, courageous, witty, popular, and attractive. It’s important to observe that the shadow’s shadow, so to speak, will be the character whose traits contrast his or her own--for example, just as Faith is Buffy’s shadow, Buffy is Faith’s shadow. In the story, however, the viewer or the reader will not be likely to consider the protagonist’s being the shadow of the lesser character, the foil.) 

 

By employing archetypes and stock characters in a similar way, you can add depth (and interest), to say nothing of drama, to your horror story, just as Whedon and his show’s fellow writers did with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This technique is not limited to the psychological level. As we shall see in a later post, it can be employed on the social level as well