The Ted Dilemma: Is Evil a Matter or Nature or Nurture, Determinism or Free Will?

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes life is more horrible than horror fiction. In The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule demonstrates the truth of this observation in recounting a nightmare she had as she tried to come to terms with the apparent guilt of her friend, Ted Bundy:

I found myself in a large parking lot, with cars backing out and racing away. One of the cars ran over an infant, injuring it terribly, and I grabbed it up, knowing it was up to me to save it. I had to get to a hospital, but no one would help. I carried the baby, wrapped almost entirely in a gray blanket, into a car rental agency. They had plenty of cares, but they looked at the baby in my arms and refused to rent me one. I tried to get an ambulance, but the attendants turned away. Finally, in desperation, I found a wagon--a child’s wagon--and I put the injured infant in it, pulling it behind me for miles until I found an emergency room.

I carried the baby, running, up to the desk. The admitting nurse glanced at the bundle in my arms. “No, we will not treat it.”

“But it’s alive! It’s going to die if you don’t do something.”

“It’s better. Let it die. It will do no one any good to treat it.”

The nurse, the doctors, everyone, turned and moved away from me and the bleeding baby.

And then I looked down at it. It was not an innocent baby; it was a demon. Even as I held it, it sunk its teeth into my hand and bit me (240-241).

This is the end of her dream. It is horrific. It seems mysterious, too. A baby that’s not a baby, but a demon--what could such imagery mean? Rule is certain that she knows. The baby symbolizes innocence, the demon (its true self), evil: evil is masquerading as innocence, or as she informs her readers: “I did not have to be a Freudian scholar to understand my dream; it was all too clear. Had I been trying to save a monster, trying to protect something or someone who was too dangerous and evil to survive?”(240-241).

To describe Bundy as a monster is an understatement. According to Wikipedia, the law student confessed to thirty murders, but may have committed as many as a hundred, and his modus operandi wasn’t merely cruel; it was savage: “Bundy would bludgeon his victims, then strangle them to death. He also engaged in rape and necrophilia” (“Ted Bundy”). His youngest victim, Floridian Kimberly Leach, was only twelve years old. If the brutality of his crimes, the sexual perversions he committed, and the slaying of a preteen girl are not enough to manifest the evil that was Ted Bundy (and, of course, they are), then his own words, chilling to the bone, concerning morality certainly are:

Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself--what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself--that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any ‘reason’ to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring--the strength of character--to throw off its shackles. . . . I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable ‘value judgment’ that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure that I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me–after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.

At about the time of the rise of modern psychology, which is often identified with the work of Wilhelm Wundt, who established the school of experimental psychology at Leipzig University in 1879, more than a decade before Sigmund Freud launched his ill-fated psychoanalysis, Edgar Allan Poe became one of the earliest, if not the earliest, modern writer to include madmen in his stories instead of inhuman monsters. Many other writers of horror fiction have since followed suit, and the human monster is one of today’s most popular types. One of the most widely known contemporary examples is Thomas Harris’ Hannibal (“The Cannibal”) Lecter (Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal).

Perhaps, as they age, aficionados of horror fiction become more interested in human monsters like Bundy than in fantastic creatures such as demons, werewolves, and zombies, recognizing that the true monsters are those in the mirror. Certainly, as the authors of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Monster Book point out, there is no lack of variety for such human fiends, a category of the monstrous that includes not only serial killers, but also Adolf Hitler, murderers, rapists, “monsters and abusers, drug trade predators, the heartless and shallow, and even the bitter, belittling monsters,” concluding “there are so many people whose behavior is unnatural or inhuman that we need go no further” than human nature itself “to find our monsters” (360). Joss Whedon, the creator of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series seems to agree. It is people, he confesses, who “terrify” him more than anything else (330).

Among the many more traditional (that is, inhuman) monsters that appear on Buffy the Vampire Slayer are a number of human monsters, as the authors of The Monster Book point out, including Billy Fordham (“Lie to Me”), “the Kiddie League baseball coach” (“Nightmares”), Ted Buchanan (“Ted”), Frawley, Frederick, and Hans (“Homecoming”), Tucker (“The Prom”), Coach Marin and Nurse Greenleigh (“Go Fish”), “the lunch lady” (“Earshot”), Kyle, Tor, Rhonda, and Heidi (“The Pack”), “the demon-worshiping fraternity brothers” (“Reptile Boy”), Eric Gittleson (“Some Assembly Required”), Pete Clarner (“Beauty and the Beasts”), Gwendolyn Post (“Revelations”), Maggie Walsh (several episodes), and Jack (“Beer Bad”) (361-362).

There are a number of theories as to what causes human monsters. Are they born and bred or are they made? Is it nature or nurture? Perhaps it is a combination both of genetics and environment. Another way to ask the same question is to pose it as a philosophical issue: is evil behavior determined or does it result from the exercise of free will? The authors of The Monster Book favor nurture (or, perhaps, the lack of it) over nature, arguing that “abnormal brain chemistry may account for certain psychopathic and sociopathic behavior, but most human monsters are not born that way; they are made into what they are by circumstances, by experience and example” (363).

Buffy’s executive story editor and writer Douglas Petrie even offers an etiology for the evil of one of the show’s long-standing human monsters, the rogue slayer Faith. The causes of her monstrosity are parental neglect; feelings of isolation, loneliness, and alienation; and an inability to “compete” against Buffy, but, at bottom, Petrie suggests, the "key" to understanding the wickedness of Faith is her “pain”: “The whole key to Faith is that she is in pain. . . . She’s so lonely and so desperate, and all her toughness comes out of trying to cover that. That’s what monsters are made of.” Her pain, however, he intimates, comes out of her lack of the relationships she would like to have: “You’ve always got a carrot you can dangle in front of her. Mrs. Post was the mother she never had. Buffy and her friends are the best friends she never had. The Mayor is the dad she never had. So she’s always looking for a family and always coming up short and making these horrible choices, and it drove her insane” (368). Primarily, Faith’s monstrosity, then, results from her abuse by her family and by society in general, by the way she has been treated--or, rather, mistreated--but it is also a result of her “horrible choices.” Evil is caused, in Petrie’s estimation, by societal abuse and the exercise of the abused person’s own free will. Secondarily, nature might also have a part to play in human monsters’ origin and development, Petrie seems to admit, tossing in, as if for good measure, the observation, concerning Faith, “Plus I think she was missing a couple of screws to begin with. ‘If you don’t love me, you will fear me’ seems to be her m. o. [modus operandi]” (368).

Paradoxically, Whedon and Petrie appear to disagree with respect to how they view threats represented by human monsters. Whedon admits that “people scare him,” the authors of The Monster Book reveal. “Terrify is the actual word he uses” (330). Petrie, on the other hand, in discussing the rogue slayer Faith, a human monster in her own right, says, “she’s not a stable girl, but a fun one” (368). In their commentary upon human monsters, the book’s authors resolve this paradox, perhaps, when they argue that, because of the number and variety of actual human monsters among us, fictional ones seem to be unnecessary:

There are so many people whose behavior is unnatural or inhuman that we need go no further to find our monsters. We don’t really need vampires or werewolves.

Or do we?

In a world where such real, visceral horrors are so disturbingly commonplace, horrors on the screen or the page may be more comforting than terrifying. We can close the book. We can turn of the television when the show is over. We have control. But in the real world, the show is never over. Nothing is more disturbing or monstrous than that (360-361).

That’s not a bad rationale for the genre.

The Protagonist as Leader

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

From the earliest days, since the time that the theory of the four humours was popular among ancient shrinks, the concept of personality types has been popular with psychiatrists and psychologists, and, indeed, the idea that human beings can be pigeonholed as this, that, or the other type of personality remains attractive to some social scientists even today.

One such personality type, they contend, is the leader, who is said to demonstrate specific character traits, or qualities, among which are intelligence, the ability to adjust, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and general self-efficacy (“Leadership,” Wikipedia). Others identify various other traits, among which, according to “Leadership Theories and Summary”), the “central” ones are intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity, and sociability. The matter is much more complex, of course (what isn’t?), but this is the gist of it, as leadership theory relates to personality traits.

The protagonist of a horror story, short or long, is typically a leader and, therefore, he or she will, according to psychology, demonstrate the qualities just mentioned. Let’s consider a few examples of horror fiction protagonists. Do they fill the bill?

David Carver is the protagonist of Stephen King’s Desperation. He’s not one’s typical protagonist; he’s chosen by God Himself to lead the ragtag band of survivors and near-survivors against the demon Tak. To me, he seems intelligent, but not overly so. He is certainly able to adjust to changing situations and shifting responsibilities. He doesn’t appear all that extroverted, but, then, on the other hand, he doesn’t seem all that introverted, either. He is definitely conscientious. Open to experience? Nothing suggests that he isn’t, but he doesn’t seem to seek out new experiences, either. Does he demonstrate self-efficacy? Yes and no: he is willing to obey God, but he doesn’t act of his own accord. He does what he is told to do, and he is willing to allow others to take the lead on occasion. His self-confidence ebbs and flows (as whose wouldn’t who is called to face a demon?). He is definitely a determined soul, and he has integrity to spare.

How does Father Damien Karras, of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, stand up as a leader? Since he is a priest, the reader must assume that he, too, is called by God, for Catholics believe that one is called to the priesthood: he does not choose, but is chosen. Intelligent? Yes, but not more than average, perhaps. Able to adjust to changing situations and expectations? Pretty much. Extroverted? No. Open to experience? Hard to say. Does he demonstrate self-efficacy? He depends more on his mentor, Father Lankester Merrin, and upon God than he does upon himself, although he does take it upon himself to jump out of Regan MacNeil’s bedroom window, sacrificing his life for hers, at the end of the story, so, to that extent, perhaps he demonstrates some self-efficacy. He appears to have little self-confidence, although he shows determination and integrity, despite his crisis of faith.

Like David Carver, Father Karras seems to have some of the traits that psychologists claim a leader must have, but not others. Nevertheless, God has apparently selected him as a leader.

What about Moses, who, at an advanced age, was called by God to lead the ancient Hebrews out of bondage to the Egyptians? Moses does not seem especially intelligent, although he is certainly not stupid. He sometimes has trouble adapting to change. He may be extroverted (or not). He is usually not open to experience: he does not want to be a leader, and he is angry at his people when they began to worship the golden calf instead of Jehovah. He has little self-efficacy, distrusting even his speaking ability and his other abilities in general because of his advanced age. He does appear, at times, to have a fair degree of self-confidence, as might be expected of a high member of pharaoh’s court. He is definitely determined, refusing to take pharaoh’s “no” for an answer, and he is willing to wander about in the desert for forty years, seeking the Promised Land. He is certainly a man of integrity.

Once again, as in the cases of David Carver and Father Karras, Moses appears to possess some, but not other, leadership qualities, but, even so, he accomplishes his mission, where others would be likely to fail.

Let’s conclude our musings upon the psychological theories of leadership qualities with a consideration of Satan, who some scholars contend is the true hero of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. He seems to possess all the qualities of leadership but integrity (the religious would probably add, as a necessary leadership trait, faith in God, so I likewise include it in my consideration); obviously, Satan lacks this quality as well.

Psychiatrists and psychologists who enjoy playing the personality traits game might argue that one need not possess all of the qualities of leadership to be a leader or, perhaps, that one is a more or less effective leader, depending upon the number of leadership qualities that he or she does possess. Such thinkers usually argue from a secular, rather than a religious, perspective, of course, which is a point of view that does not consider theological alternatives.

The Bible’s stories of heroism tend to suggest that God expects faith, or imputed “righteousness,” and integrity, which may be defined, in this context, as the willingness to obey divine commands, more than He demands any other qualities, being more than able Himself to supply whatever those whom He chooses to lead may lack. Indeed, traditionally, He has chosen the weaker, or even the weakest, vessel as his instrument, pouring His Holy Spirit into them so that, in His name and for His sake, they can work miracles, perhaps to demonstrate that it is He, and not those whom He calls, who actually gets the job done.

If a story features a secular protagonist, he or she should be expected to rely upon him- or herself, and, it may be argued, may be more likely to achieve his or her goals if he or she has more, rather than fewer, of the leadership skills that trait theorists have identified, whereas, if a story features a religious protagonist, he or she may well succeed in spite of not having many of these traits, since it is God, presumably, who is acting within and through such a vessel or instrument.

Disappointment "Under the Dome"

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

To say that the ending to Under the Dome is anticlimactic is an understatement. To say, moreover, that it is sophomoric is to put the matter mildly. It is both a letdown and a disappointment.

King’s characters have suffered, most of them greatly; many of them have died. Were they real, flesh-and-blood people, the survivors would be traumatized, probably for life, by the death and destruction they have seen. Their friends, neighbors, and families, children included, are dead; their homes and businesses have been destroyed; their lives are in ruins. Why? What has caused this wholesale loss?

It could be argued that much of the death and destruction stems from the machinations of the greedy, self-serving, power-mad, criminal Big Jim Rennie and his cohorts. In the guise of doing what is best for the town, Big Jim has caused more than a good deal of mischief. He has abused his constituents, neglected the community’s real needs, and capitalized by pandering to the townspeople's weaknesses and fears. He has profited from the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine; he has ordered others to commit arson and violence; he has encouraged the incitement of a riot; he has murdered people with his own hands and has covered up the murders of others by his son. He has set friend against friend and neighbor against neighbor. His ordering of a raid against the drug addicts who hold hostage the propane tanks that he stole from the local hospital and other businesses to fuel his illegal drug operation resulted in a conflagration that decimated the homes and businesses of the thousands who also perished in the inferno, burned alive. Throughout the crisis that began with the descent of the dome and the many others that he himself created, Big Jim prospered while others suffered and died.

The townspeople are not blameless; both as children and as adults, they, too, have participated in the evils that befall themselves and others. Even the heroes and heroines of King’s novel have past sins for which to atone.

There are few true innocents under the dome, apart from infants such as Little Walter Bushey and the canines Horace, Clover, and Audrey.

Some citizens are guiltier than others: Big Jim Rennie, Junior Rennie, Pete Randolph, Georgia Roux, Frank DeLesseps, Melvin Searles, Carter Thibodeau, Stewart and Fern Bowie, Roger Killian, Joe Boxer, Phil Bushey, Lester Coggins, and Sam Verdreaux.

A few, the children, are innocent or relatively innocent: Joe McClatchey, Norrie Calvert, Benny Drake, Judy and Janelle Everett, Ollie and Rory Dinsmore, Alice and Aidan Appleton. However, as Julia Shumway’s account of the “watershed moment” in her own girlhood indicates, even children are capable of cruelty and evil.

Other characters are not developed enough for the reader to determine their guilt or innocence: Rose Twitchell, Anson Wheeler, Marty Arsenault, Rupert Libby, Stacey Moggin, Ron Haskell, Ginny Tomlinson, Dougie Twitchell, Gina Buffalino, Harriet Bigelow, Jack Cale, Johnny Carver, Lissa Jamieson, Claire McClatchey, Alva Drake, Tony Guay, Pete Freeman.

Finally, still other characters are guilty not because of corruption or meanness, but because of personal weaknesses or a significant, but lone, moral failure: Andréa Grinell, Andy Sanders, Dale Barbara, Angie McCain, Dodee Sanders, Freddy Denton, Piper Laurie, Rusty and Linda Everett, Romeo Burpee, Samantha Bushey, Stubby Norman, Brenda Perkins, Thurston Marshall, Carolyn Sturges.

King is careful, in most cases, to indicate his characters’ various moral offenses or failings, which include drug addiction, alcoholism, child abandonment, sexual promiscuity, adultery, henpecking, negligence, a reluctance or unwillingness to involve oneself in social and political conflicts and the duties of citizenship, assault (physical, sexual, and verbal), murder, malfeasance, theft, arrogance, a greater concern for economic advancement than for ending human suffering.

King suggests a practical means of distinguishing good from evil. Moral actions help others (or, presumably, oneself); immoral actions hurt others (or, presumably, oneself). In addition, in quoting Jimi Hendrix, the author suggests another, more nebulous criterion for determining what behavior is good and desirable and what behavior is bad and undesirable: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the earth will know peace.” For the most part, his characters’ deeds and misdeeds fit into one or the other of these classification systems. Clearly, Big Jim’s actions are motivated by a love of power rather than by the power of love; likewise, his behavior has a harmful, more than a helpful, effect on others, including his son (and, ultimately, himself). In other cases, the classifications are not as clear cut, but the moral theory that King suggests seems applicable to their conduct, nevertheless. Human behavior’s effects, whether good or evil, desirable or undesirable, right or wrong, continue beyond individuals' lives, effecting the lives of their posterity. Police Chief Howard Perkins’ collection of evidence against Big Jim certainly influenced the events that transpired in the town long after his own demise. Likewise, the lesson in humility that Julia Shumway learned when she was abused as a child by her classmates at the Commons’ bandstand had a definite effect upon her behavior in begging the alien child for mercy at the end of the novel and was critical in the salvation of the remnant of the townspeople.

In his exploration of moral and immoral behavior and the effects of both upon the human community, both present and future, King’s novel offers penetrating insights and a good deal of food, as it were, for thought and is a rewarding read. The story itself is also a fairly suspenseful, almost always intriguing, and entertaining experience. Like most of King’s other novels, this one is apt to stay with the reader, to become part of who he or she is. This is certainly a test of effective, even of good, literature.

The test, perhaps, of which characters King finds worthy of salvation is indicated in his catalogue of final survivors, which appears on page 1066 of his novel. If this is true, one can extrapolate from what the omniscient narrator and the characters themselves have revealed concerning these characters’ past deeds and misdeed:

(On page 997, according to the omniscient narrator, “on Saturday morning. . . “just thirty-two” survivors remained of the town’s population:

1. Aidan Appleton
2. Alice Appleton
3. Dale Barbara
4. Harriet Bigelow
5. Gina Buffalino
6. Romeo Burpee
7. Little Walter Bushey
8. Ernest Calvert
9. Joanie Calvert
10. Norrie Calvert
11. Ollie Dinsmore
12. Alva Drake
13. Benny Drake
14. Linda Everett
15. Janelle Everett
16. Judy Everett
17. Rusty Everett
18. Pete Freeman
19. Tony Guay
20. Lissa Jamieson
21. Piper Libby
22. Thurston Marshall
23. Claire McClatchey
24. Joe McClatchey
25. Big Jim Rennie
26. Julia Shumway
27. Carter Thibodeau
28. Ginny Tomlinson
29. Dougie Twitchell
30. Rose Twitchell
31. Sam Verdreaux
32. Jackie Wettington

By page 1066, seven others (Aidan Appleton, Ernest Calvert, Benny Drake, Thurston Marshall, Big Jim Rennie, Carter Thibodeau, and Sam Verdreaux) have died, bringing the total number of survivors to twenty-five. 

1. Alice Appleton (child)
2. Dale Barbara (Army colonel; cook)
3. Harriet Bigelow (elderly woman)
4. Gina Buffaloing (volunteer nurse)
5. Romeo Burpee (department store owner)
6. Little Walter Bushey (baby)
7. Joanie Calvert (mother)
8. Norrie Calvert (child)
9. Ollie Dinsmore (child)
10. Alva Drake (mother)
11. Linda Everett (police officer)
12. Janelle Everett (child)
13. Judy Everett (child)
14. Rusty Everett (physician’s assistant)
15. Pete Freeman (news photographer)
16. Tony Guay (sports reporter)
17. Lissa Jamieson (librarian)
18. Piper Libby (pastor)
19. Claire McClatchy (mother)
20. Joe McClatchy (child)
21. Julia Shumway (newspaperwoman)
22. Ginny Tomlinson (nurse)
23. Dougie Twitchell (nurse)
24. Rose Twitchell (restaurant owner)
25. Jackie Wetting ton (police officer)

Barbie did not stop the torture of war prisoners that his team was interrogating in Fallujah. Romeo is an adulterer. Initially, Linda was willing to believe false testimony and bogus evidence against Barbie. As a boy, Rusty tortured ants, burning them alive. Piper still preaches, although she has become an atheist. As a child, Julia was arrogant toward her classmates, thinking herself superior to them. The other adults are unlikely to be blameless (what adult is?), but the narrative does not provide enough information concerning their backgrounds to identify any specific wrongdoing on their part. As the abuse that Julia suffered at the hands of her classmates shows (and as the torture of the residents of Chester’s Mill by the young alien also indicates), children can also be guilty of wicked, cruel behavior, but, again, the reader is not made privy to enough information regarding the children who survive to know exactly what wrongs they may be guilty of having committed. Because of Julia’s humiliation, she learned humility, and she pleads with the young alien who has imprisoned her and the other residents of Chester’s Mill under the dome to release them so that they may live out their “little lives” in a scene reminiscent of both her own abuse (as punishment for her arrogance toward her fellow students) and Rusty’s realization that ants have “little lives” that should not be wantonly destroyed any more than any other life. The alien’s sparing of them may be regarded as a sort of redemption for them, a pitying, if not a forgiveness, of them. Just as one of Julia’s tormentors returned and gave her a sweater to wear home, the extraterrestrial child removes the dome to allow her and her fellow survivors to live out their “little lives,” an act that the novel’s protagonist attributes not to love, but to pity: “Pity was not love, Barbie reflected. . . but if you were a child, giving clothes to someone who was naked had to be a step in the right direction” (1072).

King’s morality (helping others = good; hurting others = evil) is a survivors’ morality. It does not depend upon God or love or anything else but the assumption that helping others is morally proper, whereas hurting them is morally improper. All of the survivors, despite the horrific experiences they have undergone and whatever their faith, if any, may be, or their philosophy of life, may agree to accept this most basic definition of righteousness. It is virtuous to help and depraved to hurt others. King’s characters pass or fail the morality test depending upon whether they help or hurt their friends, neighbors, and families. In quoting Jimi Hendrix (“when the power of love overcomes the love of power, the earth will know peace”) and in suggesting that, while it is not love, pity for another is “a step in the right direction,” King implies that, beyond the simple morality of survivors, there is a deeper, more mature standard for determining right and wrong, or good and evil, which is whether one loves and is loving; he also suggests that, for the majority of human beings, who are morally immature, such an understanding awaits the humility and wisdom that may follow from horrific and traumatic suffering.

The disappointment is the cause of the dome or, at least, of its descent. Earlier in the novel, several possible causes for this phenomenon were suggested, including that the dome was a living entity, that it is the invention of rogue scientists, that it is a means of terrorist attack, that it is a government experiment using the Chester’s Mill residents as guinea pigs, and that it is the work of extraterrestrials possessed of superior technological sophistication. It turns out to be a toy of sorts, and the ones who use it, children. Granted, they are children of extreme intelligence, but children, nevertheless, with no more compassion or love for the human beings whom they torture than children who set fire to anthills have for the ants they thereby kill. The problem with this premise is that it creates a context--a dome, if one pleases--in which adult behavior is perceived by immature, alien beings. They are cosmic creatures, but without the wisdom and love of the omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent God in whose existence Piper Libby comes to disbelieve and, finally, to deny, accepting, in its stead, a belief in the aliens:

Piper Libby. . . was thinking of all those late-night prayers to The Not-There. Now she knew that had been nothing but a silly, sophomoric joke, and the joke, it turned out, was on her. There was a There there. It just wasn’t God (934).

The absurdity of a pastor rejecting the traditional idea of God for one in which the deity is a group of extraterrestrial “kids” is ludicrous. For greater minds than that of King’s own, such as those of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, Soren Kierkegaard, and Paul Tillich, to mention but a few, such a revision of faith would be not only ludicrous, but also blasphemous. By reducing the complexity of human behavior, predicated as it is, to some degree, upon free will, to conduct that parallels the simple, instinctive, and probably completely determined behavior of ants is itself ridiculous, but then to make human existence a plaything of amoral and sadistic (albeit cosmic) children is to vacate any suspension of disbelief the reader is capable of extending to the author’s work. A belief in the God of the Jews, the Christians, or the Muslims is a basis for understanding human nature; substituting extraterrestrial children for such a deity is simply incredible and silly. Under the Dome is an entertaining novel, to be sure, but, one may be confident in the belief that neither William Golding nor T. S. Eliot need fear having their work confused with King’s novel, the master of horror’s allusions to their respective novel and poem notwithstanding.

NOTE:  Be sure to visit Chester's Mill's website!

Social Protest vs. (a) Religious Tolerance or (b) Hellfire Under the Dome

Copyrigjt 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Two forces which conflict with the authoritarian regime that arises in Chester’s Mill, Maine, in the wake of the descent of the dome, a transparent barrier that cuts the town off from outer, surrounding world in Stephen King’s latest novel Under the Dome, are the band of social protesters whom the town’s boy genius, 13-year-old “Scarecrow” Joe McClatchey, organizes and the congregations of Christ the Holy Redeemer Church, pastured by the Reverend Lester Coggins, and the Congo Church, pastured by the Reverend Piper Libby.

None of these organizations, the reader is apt to think, seems likely to stand up to Second Selectman Big Jim Rennie; Police Chief Randolph; Jim’s sadistic son, Special Deputy Junior Rennie; or the U. S. military forces that guard the perimeter of the town.

McClatchey’s Committee to Free Chester’s Mill offers outdated political platitudes such as “FIGHT THE POWER!” and “STICK IT TO THE MAN!” Coggins preaches that the town’s isolation under the dome is the consequence of unconfessed sin. Libby encourages her congregation to “love one another,” characterizing the descent of the dome as a mystery like the affliction to which Job was subjected.

“In times of crisis,” King’s omniscient narrator informs the reader, “folks are apt to fall back on the familiar for comfort”; consequently, “there were no surprises for the faithful in Chester’s Mill that morning; Piper Libby preached hope at the Congo, and Lester Coggins preached hellfire at Christ the Holy Redeemer. Both churches were packed” (192). Of course, McClatchey’s message--“STICK IT TO THE MAN!”--is familiar, too, in quite another way, recalling similar sentiments from the 1960s, when political protest was all the rage.

Against these traditional, or “familial,” approaches to crisis, that of social protest (“STICK IT TO THE MAN!“) and religious tolerance (“love one another”) or “hellfire,” King suggests a third alternative--the one that most of his fiction also implicitly endorses: the banding together of the community--or whatever part of it will band together--against a common foe. So far, at page 192, this is a small band, indeed: former Army captain and current short-order cook Dale (“Barbie”) Barbara; Julie Shumway, the Republican owner and editor of the local newspaper, Democrat; and, possibly, Brenda, the widow of slain police chief Howard (“Duke”) Perkins, who has not yet been enlisted in the community’s cause.

In times past (for example, in Insomnia), King seems to have been more liberal in his ideology than he appears to be today. ‘Salem’s Lot takes issue with disbelief and hypocrisy among the clergy. Since Firestarter, he has been leery of government authority; in Insomnia, he all but champions abortion as a fundamental feminist human right. In Needful Things and, to a lesser extent, Christine, he offers some rather obvious critiques of capitalism. (Needful Things is also highly critical of Christianity’s get-rich-quick prosperity brand of preaching, and was, in fact, according to King himself, inspired by the excesses of Jim Bakker).

In Desperation, though, which is perhaps King’s most religious novel to date, he seems to have reached a turning point and, indeed, a maturation in his thinking about religious faith. On an individual, personal level, such faith, as exercised on the part of Desperation’s David Carver and John Marinville, trust in God can, indeed, move mountains, King suggests, although, in the process, the faithful themselves are apt to be among those hurt the most, both physically and emotionally. If God promises his followers a garden, it’s no longer the Garden of Eden, it appears, but the Garden of Gethsemane.

With nearly 900 pages left to go, I’m not clear yet as to whether Under the Dome will separate the wheat (Piper Libby’s brand of the faith) from the chaff (Lester Coggin’s brand of Christianity), showing the reader what’s fake faith and what’s the real deal (or, perhaps, why both versions of the gospel message offered by these churches is only partially complete and sustainable). Regardless of the outcome of this line of thought, one form of resistance to tyranny that seems likely to stand is the one that is suggested again and again by King’s fiction: it takes a village to stick it to the monster, whether the monster is a nightmarish fiend or a disturbed fellow human being.

Capitalism doesn‘t escape implied censure, either, because, sure enough, in the next scene, which follows hard upon the heels of the papering of Chester’s Mill with posters announcing the Committee to Free Chester’s Mill’s upcoming protest, King introduces Romeo Burpee, who, as the owner of “the largest and most profitable indie department store in the entire state,” hopes to profit from the protest and the churches’ meetings by selling his overstock at “the biggest damn cookout and field day this town has ever seen” (197).

For Burpee, who is always on the lookout for “the main chance,” entrepreneurial capitalism is synonymous, at times, at least, with opportunism, and, when the opportunity presents itself, he is quick to capitalize upon it, as “ruthlessly” as possible. It seems that opportunistic capitalism can save the day no more easily than social protest for the sake of social protest or the preaching of organized religion, either in its gentle-as-a-dove or its serpents-of-hell formulation.

And, now, back to the marathon that is Under the Dome. . . .

The Grand Entrance

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Buffy Summers, the protagonist of the television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that bears her name, moves from Los Angeles to the “one-Starbucks town” of Sunnydale, California. She’s a young, nubile hottie, and, as she ascends the stairs leading up to the sidewalk that approaches her new high school, she catches the eye of Xander Harris as he arrives on the scene, aboard his skateboard (“Welcome to the Hellmouth“). Enthralled by the new coed, he is so busy examining her physical assets, instead of watching where he’s going, that he’s doubled over the handrail with which he collides as his vehicle flies out from under him. Not only is his mishap humorous, and perhaps deserved, but it also has the benefit of focusing the viewer’s attention upon him and, indirectly, upon the object of his attention, Buffy herself--or a portion of her, at any rate.

In another episode, “Lover’s Walk,” the vampire Spike runs over a “Welcome to Sunnydale” street sign as he returns to town.

In “Hell’s Belles,” Xander’s future self (or supposed future self) arrives at his younger self’s wedding to warn Xander not to go through with his marriage to former vengeance demon Anyanka Jenkins. The elder Xander makes his appearance carrying a bright red umbrella.

When Buffy goes to Sunnydale’s bus station in search of the male foreign exchange student who is supposed to stay with her and her mother, Joyce, during his visit to the golden state, she is surprised (as is the show’s audience) to discover that the student, Ampata, is a girl (“Inca Mummy Girl”).

Kendra Young, another slayer, activated, so to speak, upon Buffy’s earlier (and temporary) demise, is mistaken for an assassin, come to kill Buffy (whom Kendra herself mistakes for a vampire after she observes Buffy kissing her vampire boyfriend Angel) (“What‘s My Line, Part I”).



“Faith, Hope, and Trick” introduces not only the slayer Faith who is called after Kendra’s death at the hands of the vampire Drusilla, but the episode also introduces viewers to Faith’s nemesis, an ancient vampire named Kakistos and to his henchman, Mr. Trick, another, lesser vampire. As Faith dances with a young man at Sunnydale’s teen nightclub, The Bronze, his outdated dance moves make Buffy suspicious. Thinking he may be a vampire, Buffy follows him outside when he leaves with his dance partner, only to be astonished to see how quickly and easily the dark-haired beauty dispatches the fiend when he does attack her. Obviously, a new slayer has arrived in town. Earlier, Mr. Trick, chauffeuring Kakistos, orders a soda at the drive-through window of a local fast-food restaurant. Becoming hungry when Kakistos talks about devouring the slayer, Mr. Trick decides to pick up some food to go, and he drags the terrified restaurant clerk through the window, into the limousine.

What these scenes and incidents have in common is that each of them represents a grand entrance of sorts for the characters they introduce. By bringing a new character on the scene in an unusual, dramatic manner, rather than simply having him or her make an appearance in an ordinary, banal way, the series’ writers make the new characters stand out from everyone and everything else, and, from the very outset, these characters are memorable.

Once characters are established as regular or recurring members of the cast, viewers aren’t allowed to take them for granted. Through witty dialogue, the show’s writers keep viewers interested in the characters as the dramatic personae continuously deliver hilarious, often characteristic lines.

Narcissistic Cordelia Chase, for instance, after running over a fellow student during Driver’s Education class and breaking the girl’s leg, exclaims, “It’s the worst day of my life, and she’s trying to make it about her leg” (“Out o Sight, Out of Mind”). In another episode, Cordelia says, “Look, Buffy, you may be hot stuff when it comes to demonology or whatever, but when it comes to dating, I’m the slayer” (“Halloween”).

Xander, likewise, is full of comical one-liners, many of them targeting Cordelia’s vanity and arrogance: in reply to her question, asked while she’s complaining about having been awakened to give him a ride to Buffy’s house, “What am I now, mass transportation?” he quips, “That’s what a lot of the guys say, but it’s just locker room talk” (“What’s My Line, Part I”). Regarding a skimpy outfit Cordelia wears, Xander remarks, “I don’t know what everyone’s talking about, Cordelia. That outfit doesn’t make you look like a hooker” (“The Zeppo”).

The series has much to teach writers, and the importance of having a new character make a grand entrance and of keeping him or her interesting throughout the story (or series) by putting witty words in their mouths are two lessons that the show imparts to discerning viewers who want to be beguiling writers. In a later post, we’ll look at a few of the show’s other narrative techniques.

The Vanishing: Why Theme Matters

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So we’re at war?”

“Aren’t we?” (337-338)

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

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

Religious Fundamentalism Is Not the Answer in "The Vanishing"

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

“Really?” he said noncommittally.

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

“Mom. . .”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But of course they didn’t (131).

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

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

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

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

Fiction For Thought

Copyright 201 by Gary L. Pullman

Although it isn’t necessary to have a fully developed, systematic philosophy of life to be a writer, some writers of fiction--Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre come to mind--did have such a worldview and wrote novels and short stories, in fact, to popularize their beliefs. Others’ fiction--the short stories and novels of Flannery O’Connor and the novels of Walker Percy, for instance--are informed by religious traditions.

Whether one has a well-thought-out worldview, his or her fiction may be based upon, and reflect, the values and traditions of the society of which he or she is a member. In Dean Koontz’s fiction, brotherly love saves the day against natural, paranormal, and even supernatural threats, and Stephen King’s work suggests that it takes a village, so to speak, to put down the types of threats that horror stories typically involve.

It seems fair to say that a well-thought-out philosophy of life, a religious tradition, or a set of social mores is likely to add depth to, and enrich, popular fiction, including the horror story. Sometimes, such concerns create themselves in the telling of the tale, but, more often, to be enduring and fulfilling, such philosophical, religious, and social underpinnings must be either the outcomes of protracted and systematic deliberation or sustained religious and emotional conviction. The difference is one of quality such as is seen, in horror fiction, for example between Child's Play or The Happening and Psycho and The Exorcist.

The Reestablishment of Order as the Restoration of Faith

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror fiction often establishes a norm that it then violates. In Stephen King‘s fiction, the norm is usually everyday life as it transpires in small-town America. After setting the stage, often literally before the readers’ eyes, by having them follow a character on his or her way about town, delivering newspapers, jogging, or going about some other, ordinary, everyday task, and introducing them to several characters, King, at some point, upsets the applecart of everydayness by letting not the cat, but the monster, out of the bag. The ordinary laws of the universe no longer apply. At least, they don’t seem to apply.

When something spectacular enough to void the laws of nature occurs, readers may (and do) expect it to explain itself or, rather, they expect the protagonist to find the answers to the conundrum that the abrupt arrival of the uncanny represents. In fact, that’s the formula for much contemporary horror fiction, as I pointed out in a previous post:

1. All is well.
2. Something strange happens.
3. The protagonist learns the cause of the strange event (or series of events).
4. The protagonist uses his or her new-found knowledge to put things right again.

I also argued, as have others, that horror fiction is basically a conservative genre, because it is generally concerned with routing or destroying the monster and reestablishing order. However, in this post, as a sort of follow-up to the one in which I discuss the horror plot formula (“Horror Story Formulae”) and the one in which I talk about the loss of security in the face of evil and death (“Taking Away the Teddy Bear”), I would like to suggest, further, that the reestablishment of order renews readers’ sense of security, hope, and faith in the possibility of experiencing meaning in regard to their lives. Obviously, if the world makes no sense, if it is chaotic and capricious, nothing matters, and there is no hope of accomplishing anything that really counts.

Things that don’t fit the big picture (the model of reality that human beings have pieced together over millennia and continue to piece together in each new generation and age) threaten our security as a species, a nation, a community, or a family. The wholesale death that accompanied the spread of the bubonic plague during the Middle Ages threatened nations’ security, because the Black Death did not fit the picture of a world governed by a loving, all-powerful God. The Holocaust threatened the Jews’ security because the wholesale slaughter of their people did not fit with their understanding of themselves as God’s “chosen people.” A serial killer or a serial rapist threatens a community’s sense of security because a whole series of deaths or rapes in one’s own neighborhood suggests that the local police force is unable to protect the public; therefore, potentially anyone, male or female, is at risk of murder and any woman is at risk of being sexually assaulted. Extramarital affairs, among other things, threaten a family’s security because such behavior can destroy the family’s trust and psychological welfare.

Scientists supposedly revise their models of the universe, or nature, when discoveries warrant such revisions, replacing, for example, Newton’s theory of physics with Einstein’s theory of the same and foregoing Lamarckian evolutionary theory in favor of the Darwinian theory of evolution. By changing the big picture, scientists keep their understanding of the universe current with their discoveries of new facts. In theory, at least, and ideally, this is how scientists are said to work.

Scientists have faith that the universe is orderly, even if their own knowledge and understanding of this order is imperfect and changeable. It is, in fact, upon this bedrock of assumed certainty, of faith, that the scientific enterprise itself is based, for, without such assumed certainty with regard to the universe as orderly, no possibility of obtaining true and certain knowledge at any point would be possible. That doesn’t mean that one’s big picture is perfect; it will need correction from time to time.

The concept of the supernatural versus that of the paranormal clarifies such “paradigm shifts,” as the adaptations of scientific views concerning the universe have been called. At one time, ghosts, werewolves, zombies, and such were believed to be spiritual entities or monstrosities empowered by supernatural entities--beings beyond nature and outside the universe. Today, scientists, when they accept the notion that such phenomena exist at all (and many do not), consider them to be natural forces or entities which are, as yet, not understood, but which are, nevertheless, as natural, rather than supernatural, phenomena, understandable by science in principle.

Individuals have a harder time making such adjustments to their own big pictures. Often, the information they base their decisions--and, indeed, their very lives--on is fragmented, erroneous, partial, or untested. It is more a matter of faith and tradition, of custom and wishful thinking, than it is a matter of knowledge. It is disconnected and idiosyncratic. When new information or experiences challenge individual world views (if, indeed, such a lofty term can be applied to individuals’ often half-baked Weltanschauungs), individuals have trouble adjusting their thinking and adapting their beliefs so as to accommodate such challenges.

Some monsters challenge the world (the Martians in The War of the Worlds); others, nations Godzilla); and still others, communities (King Kong) or families (Cujo). Those that threaten the world or a nation challenge humanity on a global or national level; the others challenge humanity on a communal or familial level. In other worlds, the Martians in H. G. Wells’ novel challenge the security of a species which considers itself God’s gift to the universe, the “crown of creation” itself. If other intelligent life exists, human beings are not unique or even all that special--especially if the extraterrestrial species is technologically superior to the Earthlings whom they seek to conquer.

Human beings tend to congregate, to form cliques, families, communities, nations, and international alliances, mostly to increase their own chances for survival and to protect their group against others. A force that is not powerful enough to destroy the planet may be strong enough to destroy a nation, as the United States appeared to be, during World War II, when it dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. If the building of a nation, over a period of centuries, if not millennia, is no guarantee of safety or survival, nations have a right to tremble, as Japan does, in the shadow of the radioactive Godzilla.

Communities are based upon commonly shared characteristics (geographical location, if nothing else), common interests (the church, for example), or both. Depending upon the strength of the ties that bind such groups together, a community can withstand quite a challenge. New Orleans is regrouping after Hurricane Katrina, and the church has survived a variety of threats, internal and external, throughout much of the world, for thousands of years. However, a resurgence of the primitive, or primordial and instinctive drives that are normally repressed in the interest of the common good, can be potent enough to threaten a community, as King Kong, an embodiment of the primeval and bestial within human beings, almost succeeds in doing.

Likewise, a moral threat, such as adultery, symbolized by the attack of the rabid Saint Bernard in Cujo, or alcoholism and child abuse, the demons that haunt Jack Torrance in The Shining, can destroy one’s family.

There are plenty of threats, on every level of society and civilization, from peer pressure to nuclear annihilation. Security, which depends upon order, social, political, economic, cultural, psychological, moral, and otherwise, is subject to assault at any moment, and, indeed, it is under almost continuous attack. Whether one anchors his or her faith in God, in the human mind, in cultural and social traditions, in law, in parental love, or in some other seabed, sea serpents are apt to threaten such faith and to seek to overturn, or even to destroy, the order it tends to engender and to sustain.

Monsters shake up the big pictures that human beings piece together, on the individual, the familial, the communal, the national, and the global level. In doing so, as painful and as horrible as such “attacks” can be, the monsters do humanity a service. They expose the chinks in the armor of the individual, the familial, the communal, the national, or the international world views which, individually and collectively, comprise the beliefs, understandings, and values of humanity.

Like pain that alerts a person to a health problem, monsters alert people to moral, philosophical, theological, social, cultural, political, economic, or other problems that need to be addressed (or vanquished). If the monster doesn’t kill one (and, more often than not, it doesn’t kill the whole herd), it makes one stronger. By pointing out weaknesses in individual or communal beliefs, knowledge, or values, monsters help us to overcome them and, in the process, to transform fallacies, ignorance, and false values into the real deal, strengthening the bases of security upon which men and women build lives and societies of order, purpose, and significance, for the reestablishment of order which follows the vanquishing of the monster is a restoration of the faith which gives a sense of security to human beings who live in a dangerous world in an uncertain universe.

Man Overboard: Questioning Nature and Its Creator

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

It is not generally known, but Sir Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain during World War II, not only painted landscapes and other paintings, but he also wrote short stories, one of which, “Man Overboard” (1899), is the subject of this post.

Sir Winston Churchill

The story is similar, in some ways, to Stephen Crane’s short story, “The Open Boat,” and to the 2003 film Open Water. Perhaps we shall consider these other stories in future articles.

Churchill’s first short story, “The Open Boat,” appeared in this magazine.

In “Man Overboard,” the anonymous protagonist falls overboard from a “mail steamer” that is sailing east through the Red Sea. It is “a little after half-past nine,” the omniscient narrator informs us, “when the man fell overboard.” He’d left the ship’s “companion-house,” where a concert was in progress, to “smoke a cigarette and enjoy a breath of the wind,” when, leaning back upon a railing which gave way, he “fell backwards into the warm water of the sea amid a great splash.”

The story’s second paragraph describes sights, sounds, and tactile sensations that could be discerned from either the deck or the sea itself, and is, therefore, ambiguous as to the man’s whereabouts. Is he still aboard at this time or has he already fallen overboard? The story shifts back and forth, between the interior and the deck of the ship and the water:

The night was clear, though the moon was hidden behind clouds. The warm air was laden with moisture. The still surface of the waters was broken by the movement of the great ship, from whose quarter the long, slanting undulations struck out like feathers from an arrow shaft, and in whose wake the froth and air bubbles churned up by the propellers trailed in a narrowing line to the darkness of the horizon.

The painter’s eye is discernable in the writer’s imagery; Churchill paints a clear picture, terrible in its simplicity. This paragraph is an example of something that literature can do that would be difficult, if not impossible, for film to accomplish. Its ambiguity provides a double perspective, allowing the reader to see and hear and feel the sky, the air, and the water both from the ship and from the sea at the same time. These shifts between the cozy comfort of the ship and “the blackness of the waters” heightens the horror of the story, producing uncertainty as to the man’s location and representing both the possibility of his safety as well as that of his peril.

Although his fall produces “a great splash,” the noise is not enough, over the distance and the sound of the musical instruments, to be heard, and the concert to which he’d been listening, mere moments ago, with pleasure now becomes something of a mocking and terrible reminder of his separation from the ship and its passengers and crew. Separated from the group, he is all alone in the sea. His absence goes unnoticed as the band plays “a lively tune,” the first verse of which is, rather ominously, “accompanied” by “the measure pulsations of the screw,” or ship’s propeller.

Churchill employs the passive voice throughout much of his story, an unusual technique, which heightens the impersonal character of the sea and the shock of the protagonist who has fallen overboard. His actions are automatic, desperate, and “inarticulate.” His terror has robbed him of his ability to think or to speak in an articulate fashion:

For a moment he was physically too much astonished to think. Then he realised he must shout. He began to do this even before he rose to the surface. He achieved a hoarse, inarticulate, half-choked scream. A startled brain suggested the word, “Help!” and he bawled this out lustily and with frantic effort six or seven times without stopping. Then he listened.

He listens, but he hears only the chorus of the song that the ship’s distant passengers and crew sing, their very singing proof that they are as unaware of the man overboard as if he didn’t exist.
Nor does the sea respond to his desperate cries for help. Nature has no heart, no mind, no soul; it is utterly indifferent, so to speak, to the fate of the man overboard, and he is more acted upon, both by nature and his own instinctive drives, than he is active. Free will means little when one is alone in an impersonal ocean.

Technology, as represented by the mail steamer--a ship that carries human correspondence, representing connection and communication among men and women--is of no avail in the world of nature. The narrator, stripped, as it were, of humanity’s technological capabilities and armor, is mere flotsam, no better or more valuable than any other detritus afloat upon the seas. Men may value themselves and one another; the sea, a synecdoche of nature as a whole, does not, a theme that “The Open Boat” and Open Water share with Churchill’s story and which is well expressed by Crane in a short poem, “A Man Said to the Universe,” that could stand as the epigraph to any of these stories:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

As the ship continues to steam away from the man, the music and the vessel’s lights dim, the ship seeming to get smaller and smaller in the distance, heightening the horror of the protagonist's situation and the terror he feels, even as the increasing silence and the lengthening gap emphasizes his aloneness, his vulnerability, and his desperation:

The chorus floated back to him across the smooth water for the ship had already completely passed by. And as he heard the music a long stab of terror drove through his heart. The possibility that he would not be picked up dawned for the first time in his consciousness.

As he hears, again, the chorus, he screams again for help, “now in desperate fear,” only to hear, as if it is mocking him, the chorus’ refrain, its “last words drawled out fainter and fainter.”

The instinct for self-preservation is strong within him--at first; however, his desire to live soon weakens as, after setting “out to swim after it [the ship] with furious energy, pausing every dozen strokes to shout long wild shouts,” he stops, as “full realisation” comes to him that he is “alone--abandoned.” This “understanding” of his predicament, the narrator remarks, causes his brain to reel, and he has a second burst of determination to save himself, praying, this time, rather than shouting. Instead of depending upon his fellow human beings for assistance, he has turned to God, pleading for divine assistance.

Almost immediately, as if Churchill intends his story’s theme to be that God helps those who ask for his help, after the steamer’s having become nothing more than “a single fading light on the blackness of the waters and a dark shadow against the paler sky,” the ship seems to stop so that it might return. His prayer, it seems, has been answered. God, it appears, has heard him, and “a surge of joy and hope” flashes “through his mind” as he gives thanks to the deity.

A moment later, his hopes are dashed, and he despairs as he sees the ship’s light become “gradually but steadily smaller,” and, where, before, he’d given voice to his gratitude, he now curses his fate: “Beating the water with his arms, he raved impotently. Foul oaths burst from him, as broken as his prayers--and as unheeded.” It seems clear that, whether he pleas for deliverance, gives thanks, or curses God, neither nature nor its Creator hear or respond. They are as indifferent to his gratitude as they are to his need and his thanksgiving. As he becomes exhausted, his “passion” gives way to “fear,” and after only “twenty minutes” have “passed,” he resigns to his fate. Rather than attempt to “swim all the way to Suez,” he decides to drown, and he throws “up his hands impulsively,” sinking, only to find that his instinct to survive takes over, preventing him from committing suicide:

Down, down he went through the warm water. The physical death took hold of him and he began to drown. The pain of that savage grip recalled his anger. He fought with it furiously. Striking out with his arms and legs he sought to get back to the air. It was a hard struggle, but he escaped victorious and gasping to the surface.

He has fought the sea and won. Nature has been vanquished. Even without God’s help, he has managed to escape the “savage grip” of “physical death,” but his is a short-lived, hollow victory, for, as he bursts through the surface of the water, “despair awaited him.” He realizes that it is futile for him to struggle, that his fate is sealed. He pleads, once more, to God, praying, “Let me die.”

The narrator describes the appearance of a shark, a maritime angel of death, as it were, as beautiful and awesome as any other terrible messenger of God. The creature’s beauty seems, from a human perspective, incongruous and inappropriate, but the story is being told from the omnipotent point of view, as if it were God himself who tells the tale of the man overboard, and human attitudes are irrelevant. As the moon drifts out from the cover of the night’s cloud, symbolizing divine revelation, an epiphany occurs, for the reader, if not for the man overboard, courtesy of the narrator’s concluding observation concerning the significance of the shark’s appearance:

The moon, then in her third quarter, pushed out from the concealing clouds and shed a pale, soft glimmer upon the sea. Upright in the water, fifty yards away,was a black triangular object. It was a fin. It approached him slowly.

His last appeal had been answered.

Significantly, it is the man’s “last appeal” that has “been answered.” He had made an earlier appeal, praying that God would deliver him, but those pleas had fallen, as it were, upon deaf ears. Only his prayer that he be allowed to die is answered. He will be allowed to die, but not by drowning. Instead, he will be ripped apart, alive, and devoured. The moon, shedding the light of revelation, as it were, upon this final incident of the story, suggests that, if God is not altogether indifferent to man’s fate, he is, if anything, a sadist.

Just as the ship is a synecdoche for technology; music, for art and the pleasures it brings; the mail, for human contact and communication; and the sea, for nature itself, the anonymous man is a synecdoche for humanity itself. Not only is the nameless, faceless man of the story alone and abandoned by God in an uncaring and impersonal universe which is equally indifferent to the man’s happiness and welfare, but, in him, all humanity is overboard, awash in a sea of cosmic unconcern and disregard.

Is the tone of the story (and, therefore, of the narrator’s final observation, that “his last appeal had been answered”) sincere, ironic, or cynical? There is some ambiguity in the story’s wording, as there is in its structure and its incidents--and enough uncertainty, perhaps, to make all three interpretations of the tone possibilities. The answer to the question of whether the tone is ultimately sincere, ironic, or cynical is up to each reader to decide, and his or her answer will be determined by the views that he or she holds concerning nature and its Creator.

The Christian might consider the shark’s appearance, in answer to the man’s prayer that he be allowed to die, to be a sincere response on the part of God; the Deist might suppose the shark’s appearance to be mere coincidence, since God, although he exists and did create the universe, takes no current interest in his creation; the atheist might consider the shark’s appearance also a matter of nothing more than mere blind chance, since there is no God to hear or respond to the man’s--or anyone else’s--prayer.

The story is marvelously short, just as it is marvelously uncanny. Despite its brevity, it presents amazingly complex questions concerning the character of nature, the problem of evil, and the nature of God. Although one opinion concerning the story’s tone and the narrator’s final observation may seem more likely than others, each remains a possibility, and God may not be the sadist he at first appears to be. Death by shark would be horrible, to be certain, but would drowning be any quicker, more merciful, or dignified? On the other hand, if God exists, maybe he is as capricious and even as sadistic as the story can be interpreted to imply. For that matter, why did the man fall overboard?

To universalize the question, we might ask, instead, Why did humanity, in the Garden of Eden, take a similar fall? Is there a grace behind both “falls,” discernable only to the eye of faith, as Job suggests? Is the fall overboard a test of one’s trust in God, even when one faces his own mortality? Is the story a repudiation of the very idea of a merciful and loving God? Is he, instead, merely just and inscrutable? Does he exist at all?

Mapping the Monstrous

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

In Monster (2005), Frank Peretti includes a map of his novel’s setting, which he updates at the end of each chapter. His use of this device accomplishes several narrative purposes. It orients the reader as to what takes place, when, where, and to whom, even as characters’ actions and narrative events change. It thus reinforces the idea that something is happening, that actions and events are unfolding. The map also adds verisimilitude, or a sense of reality, to the story, for its narrative landscape is charted, just as a real-world stretch of territory might be. The map also implies that the action of the narrative is significant, because only important events are recorded on a map.

The publisher of Monster notes, in a word to the reader, that the novel’s “custom maps,” updated “at the end of each chapter,” are included “to help you keep track of all the action.” So much action occurs between the novel’s covers, the publisher’s statement suggests, that the reader will need a visual representation of the setting just “to keep track” of it all. However, the publisher also suggests that, “even with maps. . . you will still find it hard to guess where things are headed.” The map, in other words, may orient the reader, but it will certainly not inhibit the plot’s imaginative meanderings, and, the maps notwithstanding, one should expect the unexpected: “Just when you think you have things figured out, Peretti’s imagination takes you down an unexpected route. . . and you realize there are more layers to the story than you imagined.”

A map, as Wikipedia observes, “is a visual representation of an area” which emphasizes “relationships between elements” that share a common space. Of course, there are many types of maps--aeronautical charts, contour maps, political maps, nautical charts, road atlases, pictorial maps, and others--but each is a depiction of a region, often terrestrial. That is, they enclose a space, thereby framing it, as it were, and making it special.

Maps cannot show every feature of the territory to which they correspond, so the mapmaker must select those features that the map will include, meaning, of course, that others must be excluded. In including some, while excluding other, features of the environment, the cartographer creates an image of the true world, and, of course, the mapmaker could be honest and straightforward or devious and duplicitous in depicting the terrain, its features, and their relationships to one another. A map is only as reliable as its maker. In other words, a map, like a storyteller, can be, as it were, an unreliable narrator.

Maps are often (but not always) scaled, so that an inch of map surface represents a much larger, corresponding surface of the actual terrain that the map represents. The map in Monster is scaled such that one inch of map surface equals ten miles of terrestrial surface. (Unfortunately, Peretti does not always honor his map’s scale.)

As the story progresses, more and more features are added, such as would not appear on any ordinary map of the area in which the story takes place--the deep forests of Idaho--suggesting that the novel’s maps are, indeed, as the publisher describes them, “custom maps.” The features that most maps include--highways, a river, creeks, a lake, forests, dry creek beds, trails, a resort, a dangerous “rock face”--are all present and accounted for, forming the relatively stable background, so to speak, against which foreground objects are added, subtracted, and rearranged as the story’s action progresses (although some settlements, towns, and directions to cities that do not themselves appear upon the maps are occasionally added as well). The stable landscape features are the relatively permanent, the more-or-less fixed, the comparatively reliable.

The foreground features, which are mostly technological or manmade, change; they appear, vanish, or reappear in other locations. Against the relatively permanent backdrop of nature, human and technological activities, temporary and tentative, shift and move. Like the scale--and, indeed, the map itself, as a mere “visual representation” of reality--the human attempt to chart the previously unknown--the difference between background and foreground features seems to represent the difference between the fixed and the determinate and the fluid and the free, or between fate and the freedom of the human will, just as it also suggests the gap between the known and the unknown and the monstrous and the human.

The shifting of the symbols on the map suggests that it’s not easy--and it may not even be possible--to truly represent reality, for, despite the stability of the known and the understood and, indeed, of the given features of nature, so to speak, there are always changeable and changing features which represent human freedom and behavior, including the products of
both--technological artifacts.

It would be unfair to divulge the secrets of Peretti’s impressive novel by describing the changes that occur with regard to the foreground objects that his ever-changing “custom maps” depict, for they both offer clues as to the story’s action and the direction that the plot takes. However, for the sake of further elucidating our idea as to the narrative significance of the map in mapping the monstrous, we shall address a couple of these shifting features.

One is the campsite of a young couple, Ted and Melanie, which, represented by a symbol of an Indian teepee in silhouette, doesn’t make its debut on the map until the end of chapter six, at the end of Service Road 19, which makes its first appearance along with the campsite. Both the service road and the teepee remain on subsequent maps, but the label, “Ted & Melanie’s campsite” vanishes, never to be seen again (until the final map, that is, representing, perhaps eternity), signifying that the couple is gone and that their campsite is now merely an abandoned location, not even marked, or labeled, as such anymore (until, again, the last map).

Likewise, at the end of chapter eight, Sing’s mobile lab appears on the map, parked, as it were, alongside the north shoulder of Highway 9, near the settlement labeled “Three Rivers.” On the map at the end of chapter nine, however, the settlement of Three Rivers, represented by a cluster of buildings in silhouette, remains, as does the text that labels it, but Sing’s satellite-dish-equipped van, labeled “Sing’s Mobile Lab,” has been relocated to the east of Road 228, west of Lost Creek and north of Abney & Tall Pine Resort, reflecting the character’s drive south.

Other, more critical objects are also represented, both on previous and subsequent maps as well as this one, but, again, it would be unfair to identify or discuss many of them for fear of spoiling readers’ pleasure in discovering these clues for themselves.

What is clear, however, even without an exhaustive detailing of the symbols’ appearances, disappearances, reappearances, and relocations or removals, is that the use of these “custom maps” adds interest, on several levels, to a novel that is exciting throughout and thrilling at times. The maps seem to help the reader to pin things down, but, as the publisher rightly observes, Peretti, nevertheless, succeeds in surprising the reader, time after time.

A map is not a journey, but it can suggest, at least, the terrain and its features, both relatively permanent and comparatively dynamic, and it can, when it involves a monster, suggest that there may be a disconnect between appearances and reality, between the known and the unknown, between the certain and the dubious, between fact and fiction. The maps in Monster are part of its fictional universe, and they both satisfy and frustrate the reader’s search for meaning and certainty. There is more to life than meets the eye, these maps suggest, and more to be taken upon faith than can be ascertained by reason.

The Here, the Now, and the Eternal

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Paintings and illustrations are, of course, visual modes, whereas fiction is a narrative form. A painting or an illustration may suggest a story, but fiction must tell a tale. In the process, it will suggest images, through description. However, in doing so, its purpose will be ever the same: to tell a story. Paintings and illustrations are under no such obligation; they may or may not tell a story, as their creators please. For visual artists, the picture is the point; for writers, pictures are means, not ends, and the end that they do serve is to contribute to the tale’s overall effect and theme.

In “The Premature Burial,” Edgar Allan Poe describes, from the point of view of one who has suffered the fate suggested by his story’s title, what it would feel like to be buried alive. In doing so, Poe puts his reader alongside his living corpse, as it were, heightening the horror and the terror of the protagonist’s situation. Before reading his story, one may have dimly understood the horror and the terror of such a situation, but Poe ensures that his reader shall comprehend, in full, the emotional and even the visceral significance of such a situation. The author makes the reader live, as it were, inside the coffin for much of the duration of his story.

The tale is horrific, and its great fear deepens as one returns to the tale when he or she has advanced in years and the story’s potential threat looms larger--or closer. The victim’s struggle inside the coffin seems to suggest the ordinary person’s fear that life may be ultimately without meaning or value, that eternity reduces a life lived in time to insignificance. (Art, as represented by “The Premature Burial” itself, it may be argued, transcends time and, thereby, may give value and significance to temporal human existence.)

A visual artist might depict the living corpse’s situation, as, for example, Buffy Summers’ having been buried alive is depicted in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which, having died, she is brought back to life by a spell cast by her friend, the witch named Willow Rosenberg: the viewer sees Buffy’s somewhat skeletal remains take on flesh, as it were, as her corpse reverts to life, and her eyes, having reformed, snap wide in abject terror.

It’s a disturbing scene, to be sure, but it’s over almost as soon as it begins, Buffy’s reversion to life taking but a few seconds, and, thereafter, we only hear of her sustaining lacerations and bruises to her hands (and, presumably, a few broken nails) as she clawed her way out of her premature grave. In a couple of later episodes, Buffy performs in a mechanical fashion, merely going through the motions of living, before finally confiding to the vampire Spike that Willow’s spell had snatched her out of heaven, returning her to this world, which seems, by contrast to the bliss she’d experienced, rather like hell to her. Nice touches, but they are far removed from her plight as one who has been, as it were, buried alive. Poe keeps the pressure on his reader by focusing his entire story on the trauma that his story’s victim experiences as one who has been buried alive.

A story, as Aristotle taught us, long ago, is a sequence of causally-related incidents which comprise a single, unified action theoretically divisible into a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a destination, in other words; having started somewhere, it goes somewhere, that it might, as it were, arrive somewhere. It moves (as do our eyes, from left to right, as we track the text down the page). A painting or an illustration may suggests a sort of narrative flow, but, of course, it is not going anywhere; it is, even if it does draw and move the eye, a static picture, a snapshot of life, eternally memorializing a moment rather than an experience.

The significance of the painting or the illustration is the moment which it captures in paint or ink. The significance, in fiction, is not in the momentary image, but in the relationships among a series of such images and the incidents which give rise to these images. It is as if the visual artist is saying, “Behold the moment; in it is the meaning of life,” whereas the author is proclaiming, “Behold the experience; in it, is the meaning of life.” One artist is seized by the particular moment; the other, by the relationships among a series of moments in which he or she discerns a cause-and effect or a logical sequence.

For the visual artist, meaning is fragmented and brief, here one moment, in this or that instance, and gone the next. Life is a transitory and temporal affair. For the literary artist, meaning is whole and long-lasting, if not permanent. Life is enduring and eternal. One artistic form is not necessarily better than the other, for painters and illustrators remind us that the here and the now are important, that much of life is lived in the instant, and that what happens today shall happen just this once and, therefore, should be appreciated and, where possible, enjoyed and prized, and writers remind us that it is important to understand relationships among the momentary and fleeting parade of sensations and perceptions, to interpret them together, whenever possible, and to take away from our experience an understanding that transcends the moment and can be recalled again, in some sense, independent of the moments themselves, out of which the understanding arose.

Visual art immerses us in the moment; narrative art lifts us above the present. To remain immersed forever in the present would cause one to tire of the assault of impressions upon his or her flooded senses, but to remain, as it were, on the dock, looking out to sea, would be never to bathe one’s soul in the refreshing ebb and flow of life and to be as much alive as one of the stationary planks or posts of which the pier is built.


In horror fiction, a series of seemingly unrelated incidents of a bizarre and horrific nature occur, and the protagonist seeks to understand the reason or the cause of these incidents. In other words, he or she seeks to fathom their meaning, their significance, their importance. When something--even something horrible--can be understood in such terms, it may remain horrible, but it also becomes consequential; its importance recognized, it becomes known and familiar, and it may also be understood to have some benefit, despite the pain and suffering it causes in the moment, in the here and now. An early narrative of such a theme is the story of Job, who learns, as a result of the horrific and undeserved suffering he undergoes, that “the just shall live by faith.”

But let’s have an example from the horror genre. In The Exorcist, the protagonist, Father Damien Karras, has come to doubt his faith because of the suffering that his dying mother endured before her death. Since, in Christianity, an unbeliever goes to hell after dying, the priest is in danger of losing his immortal soul. According to William Peter Blatty, the author of the novel, it is in the hope of bringing about the priest’s damnation that the demon possesses the soul of young Regan MacNeil.

In doing so, the demon sets up the occasion of the exorcism which involves Father Karras and so now has the opportunity to tempt the priest to renounce his faith by showing him the work of the devil, up close and personal, so to speak, as the demon torments the innocent girl whom it has possessed. Father Karras’ suffering now has meaning. It has importance beyond itself. It has value, for it has become the means by which, in the exercise of his own free will, he will retain or lose his faith and, thereby, his soul.

Other horror stories depict sets of circumstances or series of incidents which also find meaning and value by pointing beyond themselves, to the eternal realm of value, of reason, of faith, of beauty, and, in doing so, point the way to something like the possibility of Platonic forms or (less abstractly) the enduring value of life, or, for the religious reader, the reality of God. (“The just shall live by faith,” as both Job and Father Karras learn.) Along the way, such stories often also criticize many of the fallacies and idols, philosophical, theological, personal, cultural, and otherwise, that we hold in false esteem or false reverence.

The good life, horror fiction suggests, lies not in misery, madness, mayhem, suffering, and sin, but in the significance that such experiences may have beyond themselves, as stories, so to speak, that lead one from the temporal to the eternal. Without the hope of meaning within and beyond the moment, we would be mired only in sensual and perceptual experience; we would be lost among the phenomena of subjective experience, forever an image among images in a painting or a drawing of the here and now.

As Buffy’s Watcher, Rupert Giles, once quipped, concerning his protégé, “Buffy lives very much in the now.” Her philosophy, as Buffy herself tells Willow, is carpe diem, or seize the day--that is, live for the moment--because life is short. The series itself, however, rises above the discrete incidents of pain and suffering, of beauty and joy, that make up the protagonist’s day-to-day existence to show the series’ viewer that the meaning of life lies (as it is understood in the context of the series as a whole) in the acceptance of responsibility and the answer of the call of duty, even when doing so requires the sacrifice of oneself. Life may be short, but the consequences of one’s behavior can have lasting effects on others, including those generations which are yet to come.