Showing posts with label Florida. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Florida. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Writing the Murder Mystery

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman


Typically, the story starts in media res, with the discovery of a body. Early on, perhaps in the second chapter, the detective is introduced. He or she is often slightly eccentric, unassuming, and of superior intellect, although he or she may disguise his or her intellectual superiority in various ways. During the course of the investigation, the detective discovers various clues and red herrings as he or she examines evidence and unofficially deposes suspects. Finally, the detective learns how and why the murderer committed the crime, identifies the killer, and an arrest is made.

To plot the story, the writer may begin with character (the killer, the victim, the detective, or a supporting character, such as a suspect or an eye witness); with scene (the when and the where of the murder); with the crime and its commission; with the motive (or motives) for the murder; or with the means by which the murder was committed. Eventually, all six of the following questions should be answered in a single sentence:

Who?
What?
When?
Where?
How?
Why?

Here are three examples, one fictional and two actual (but the actual ones could be fictionalized as novels or movies)*:


Adrian Monk [who] fingers a Mexican coroner [who] as the culprit who faked the cause of death (midair drowning) [what] of a parachutist [who] in order to lure the consulting detective south of the border so he (the coroner) could engineer Monk’s death [why] after Monk had tarnished the coroner’s professional reputation [when].

Three years ago [when], Casey Anthony [who] (allegedly) kills [what] her three-year-old daughter Calley [who] by drugging and asphyxiating her [how] in Orlando, Florida [where], so she (Casey) [who] can resume her carefree, single, party girl lifestyle [why].

After his mother dies [when], Ed Gein [who] shoots [what] Bernice Worden [who] in her hardware store in Plainfield, Wisconsin [where], so he can use her body as food, clothing, and decorations [why].



*Actually, Gein has been the subject of a movie, Ed Gein (2000), starring Steve Railsback and Carrie Snodgress and directed by Chuck Parello.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Guest Speaker: Robert Bloch

Poe & Lovecraft

Robert Bloch, author of Psycho

Comparisons between Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft are, I suppose, inevitable; seemingly, in recent years they are also interminable.

I shall not, therefore, repeat the usual recital of similarities to be found within their work--there will be no mention of black cats, revenants, or Antarctic settings per se.

But at the same time I have no intention of making a calculated bid for attention by deliberately asserting, as some have also declared, that no real resemblance exists aside from superficial employment of stock characters and themes common to virtually all stories in the genre.

To me, this is an untenable statement: Lovecraft, like every writer of fantasy and horror fiction subsequent to Poe, was necessarily influenced by the work of his predecessor--and to certain extent his work needs must be derivative in some slight sense. Actually, Lovecraft's homage to Poe in his essay "Supernatural Horror In Literature," indicates a degree of appreciation and admiration which leaves no doubt as to the profound impression made upon him by the earlier master.

But to me the most fruitful area of comparison lies within an examination of the backgrounds and personalities of the writers themselves.

Consider the facts. Both Poe and Lovecraft were New England born. Both were, to all intents and purposes, fatherless at an early age. Both developed a lifelong affinity for poetry and the elements of a classical education. Both utilized archaisms in their writing styles and affected personal eccentricities which in time became consciously cultivated.

Although Poe spent a part of his youth in England and traveled along the Atlantic seaboard in later life--and while Lovecraft ventured up into Canada and down into Florida on vacations a few years prior to his death--neither man ever ventured west of the Alleghenies. Lovecraft, on one occasion, did skirt them to visit E. Hoffman Price briefly in his New Orleans home, but essentially he and Poe were Easterners. Their outlook was, to a marked degree, provincial; even parochial.


Both men distrusted "foreigners" in the mass: both retained a profound admiration for the English. These attitudes are plainly evident in their work, which is many particulars removed and remote form the main current of American life.

A reader attempting to capture some glimpse of the United States in the 1830-1850 period would gain small enlightenment from the poetry and fiction of Poe.

At a time when the entire nation was engaged in a westward thrust, beginning with the peregrinations of the mountain men and ending with the Gold Rush in the year of Poe's death, one searches in vain for a wet which does not seemingly even exist in his literary compass.

Byronic heroes sequestered in British and continental locales scarcely reflect the American attitudes or aptitudes in the era of Old Hickory, Davy Crockett, the fall of the Alamo, the Mexican War and the growing turmoil over slavery.

Nor would a reader find more typically American protagonists amongst the pendants, professors and regionally-oriented recluses of Lovecraft's tales, in which there's scarcely a hint of the manners and mores of the Roaring Twenties or the Great Depression which followed in the ensuing decade. Aside from a few remarks regarding the influx of immigrants and concomitant destruction of old folkways and landmarks, plus brief mentions of the (intellectually) "wild" college set, Lovecraft ignores the post WW1 Jazz Age in its entirety: Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Al Capone, Valentino, Mencken and the prototypes of Babbit have no existence in HPL's realm. It is difficult to believe that Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a literary contemporary of Ernest Hemingway.

And yet a further comparison between Lovecraft and Poe remains; one of profound importance in any consideration of their work, because it softens any charge that two writers were totally unaware of the actual world and unrealistic in their treatment of their times.

I refer, of course, to their mutual interest in science. Both Poe and Lovecraft were acute observers of the scientific and pseudo-scientific developments of their respective days, and both men utilized thee latest theories and discoveries in their writing. It is only necessary to cite Poe's use of mesmerism, his employment of the balloon hoax, his detailing of data in the Arthur Gordon Pym novella, to prove the point.

Lovecraft, for his part, relies on scientific background material in his Pym-like At the Mountains of Madness, "The Shadow Out of Time" and other efforts; notable is his immediate adoption of the newly discovered "ninth planet" in "The Whisperer in Darkness."

Lovecraft's interest in astronomy undoubtedly led to his increasing interest in other fields of scientific endeavor, just as Poe's early experiences at West Point must have fostered his preoccupation with codes an ciphers. And both men, as professional writers, were well and widely-read in the contemporary work of their day: Poe as a working critic, demonstrates his knowledge in his nonfictional efforts and Lovecraft, in his correspondence, proves himself no stranger to Proust, Joyce, Spengler and Freud.

But the point is that Poe and Lovecraft deliberately chose to turn their backs on contemporary styles and subject-matter and created their own individual worlds of fantasy. In this above all else they were similar.

And in this, above all else, we readers of Poe and Lovecraft are fortunate indeed.

We shall never know, and never care, what Edgar Allan Poe thought of Andy Jackson's "kitchen cabinet" or how H. P. Lovecraft regarded the Teapot Dome scandal. Small loss, when both have given us glimpses of worlds peculiarly and provocatively their very own.

For the final similarity is this--Poe and Lovecraft are our two American geniuses of fantasy, comparable each to the other, but incomparably superior to all the rest who follow in their wake.

This article was first published in Ambrosia #2 (August, 1973), © 1973 Alan Gullette and Robert Bloch. It was subsequently revised slightly by the author and reprinted in H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980), pp. 158-160, © 1980 Ohio University Press.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Scientists: Ghosts and Vampires Need Not Apply

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Physicists have lowered the boom on ghosts and, while they were at it, vampires.

According to Professor Costas Efthimiou of the University of Central Florida, a theoretical physicist, ghosts can’t both walk and pass through solid objects, such as walls, any more than, presumably, they can talk and chew gum at the same time. To walk requires the exertion of force to propel oneself forward, because a stationary object will remain stationary unless an exterior force is exerted upon it.

When we (and, presumably, ghosts) walk, we exert force on the floor or ground, and this downward-directed force (an action) causes an opposite and equal reaction, the lifting of our foot, which propels us forward.

The exertion of such a force requires a material body (here, represented by the foot, which is attached to the ankle bone, which is attached to the shin bone, and so forth), and material bodies, alas, cannot pass through solid objects. However, if ghosts are spirits and, as such, have no material form, they cannot exert the force necessary to walk.

Dr. Richard Lord, a British acoustic scientist has also come up with a way to explain (or explain away) haunted houses. Low-frequency sound, which is usually inaudible to humans, can cause people to experience anxiety, grief, chills, and other bizarre sensations. He theorizes that such sound may be associated with allegedly haunted sites.

Mathematics proves vampires are impossible, because, if they were real, and they went around biting people to turn their victims into fellow vamps, even at the rate of one victim per month, in two and a half years, their whole supply of victims (the human race) would have been converted into pantry (or maybe freezer) items.

Fortunately, horror writers, fans, and critics have a powerful counter to these eggheads: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous law of counterphysics: the willing suspension of disbelief, so there!

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Everyday Horrors: The Electric Chair

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Thomas Edison, who gave us the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, the motion-picture projector, and a host of other technological goodies, also gave us the electric chair--or did he?


According to “Electric Chair Wars,” Edison is credited, incorrectly, with inventing the electric chair. The dubious honor of having invented this execution device actually goes to a dentist, Alfred P. Southwick, who witnessed an intoxicated man get electrocuted during a visit to a power plant in Buffalo, New York.

Like many other serial killers, Southwick practiced on animals before trying his hand with people, convincing the city’s animal welfare organization that killing stray animals with electricity was more humane than drowning them. This attempt at persuasion having proved successful, the dentist and a legislator convinced the governor of the Empire State that electrocuting humans was a more humane way of destroying them than hanging.

The state had a new way of executing criminals, but it was yet to be decided whether alternating current (AC), championed by George Westinghouse, was deadlier that direct current (DC), endorsed by Thomas Edison. Southwick’s chair used the former, the brainstorm of Westinghouse employee Nicola Tesla. In 1890, the death sentence of William Kemmler offered the two rival inventors the opportunity to put their respective currents where their mouths were.

A showman of sorts, Edison staged the executions of domestic animals to convince the public that DC was a superior means of killing people (or domestic animals, at least) than AC. When Topsy, a circus elephant, objected to having been fed a lit cigarette and killed the drunkard who fed her this snack, she was labeled a “rogue elephant” and scheduled to be executed by hanging by her neck until she was dead, probably of strangulation. Edison saw his chance to offer what Ed Sullivan might have called “a really good show”: he would use AC to kill Topsy. Outfitted with copper-lined sandals and hooked to electrodes, she was given a lethal dose of the current and died a quick death, earning a belated memorial in 2003, in New York’s Coney Island Museum.

Edison was successful in getting the state’s Medico-Legal Society to urge the use of AC in New York’s electric chair. However, financed by Westinghouse, Kemmler’s attorney protested that the use of electricity to kill his client would be unconstitutional, representing, as it would, “cruel and unusual punishment.” Kemmler lost his appeal, and he was electrocuted, the chair employing AC. According to witnesses, a second jolt was required to kill the condemned man, and fire issued from his mouth.

According to “Both Sides of the Wall,” after receiving seventeen seconds’ worth of juice, “Kemmler's slumped body started to moan and wheeze,” prompting the attending physician to call for the second jolt, on the grounds that “This man is not dead!” Wanting to make sure they killed him this time around, the executioners let the current flow for 70 seconds (some claim 240 seconds), while smoke rose from his head and “the room was filled with the stench of human flesh.” In full, Kemmler spent eight minutes in the chair. In 1963, the use of the chair as a means of executing criminals was discontinued.



Legal challenges to the use of the electric chair have continued, intermittently, with a state judge ruling, on August 2, 1999, that “Old Sparky,” as the Sunshine State has nicknamed their chair, is not unconstitutional. There was some question as to whether it constituted cruel and unusual punishment after the “bloody execution of a 344-pound inmate,” Allan Lee (“Tiny”) Davis in July 1999, according to CNN. As the CNN article points out, citing the following instances, Allen’s case was “not the first time the mechanics of the chair raised questions”:

  • In 1997, flames shot from the head of death row inmate Pedro Medina during his execution.
  • In 1990, smoke poured from the hood of inmate Jessie Tafero as he was put to death.
According to the state’s website on the topic--yes, there really is one-- the executioner “is a private citizen who is paid $150 per execution.” The chair has three legs, rather than four, and was fashioned out of oak by prison inmates. Florida’s website offers trivia fun concerning its electrocutions, including these factoids:

  • Frank Johnson was the first inmate executed in Florida's electric chair on October 7, 1924.
  • On March 30, 1998, Judias "Judy" Buenoano became the first woman to die in Florida's electric chair.
  • 12.19 years is the average length of stay on Death Row prior to execution.
  • William Cruse, Jr. is the oldest death-row inmate in Florida, having been born in 1927, and Jerome Hunter, born in 1986, is the youngest.
  • The oldest inmate to be executed, to date, is Charlie Grifford, who was 72 at the time.



The chair’s most infamous client was Ted Bundy, who was zapped on January 24, 1989.

The Sunshine State’s website also offers visitors a virtual tour of the state’s prisons, during which one may “visit a Death Row cell.”

Electric chairs appear in several horror movies and novels, including Stephen King’s novel The Green Mile and the movie, of the same title, based on it, in which a wrongly convicted healer meets a particularly nasty demise; The Gingerbread Man, in which a gingerbread man, possessed by the soul of an electrocuted killer, seeks revenge against the girl who fried him; Alive, in which an electric chair survivor is invited to participate in sadistic experiments that pit him against another prisoner and an extraterrestrial of sorts; The Horror Show, in which an electric chair survivor seeks revenge against the cop who arrested him; Shocker, in which an electrocuted killer returns from the dead, able to take charge of the force that killed him; and a host of others.


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

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

The Underbelly of the Bug-Eyed Monster Movie

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman


The 1950’s and 1960’s horror movies, in particular, frequently featured what have come to be known as BEM’s: bug-eyed monsters.

Let’s list a few of these films and the threats they boasted before seeing what, if anything, these movies were really all about.

Them! (1954) focused on gigantic ants. They were mutants, spawned, as it were, by the radiation of atomic bomb tests, which transformed them into enormous, man-eating monsters. The insects established nests--one in New Mexico, another in a ship at sea, and a third in Los Angeles.

A giant octopus, a giant bird, and giant bees appear in Mysterious Island (1961). Giant rats--and a giant chicken--attack human-size humans in The Food of the Gods (1976). The title of Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) gives away its decapitating antagonists’ identity, as does the title of Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959). The Florida swamps are full of the bloodsuckers, and they’re hungry!

Those who’ve seen The Beginning of the End (1957) know that the monsters to watch out for are really giant locusts--except in Mexico, where The Black Scorpion (1957) and its kin, recently escaped from volcanoes, ruled.

A huge gila monster, an enormous gopher, and a particularly unattractive, one-eyed fiancé (the Cyclops of the movie’s title) wreck havoc in The Cyclops (1957), whereas a colossal, deadly mantis makes its debut as a mega movie monster in The Deadly Mantis (1957).

We could go on. . . and on. . . and on, but, suffice it to say, many, many more bug-eyed monster movies debuted in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and there have been a bevy more of them in the early years of the present decade, such as Arachnid (2001), in which, as the title implies, giant spiders are the culprits; Boa (2002), and its sequel, Boa vs. Python (2004); and Crocodile (2000), in which the croc attacks obnoxious teens. More interesting than simply listing such monsters, however, is asking (and attempting to answer) the question, Why? Why do such films exist? What do they represent? What’s going on behind or beneath these movies and their monsters?

One reason that animals are often the monsters of horror fiction, especially that of the big-eyed monster variety, is that we fear them, as Emily Dickinson’s poem about “a narrow fellow in the grass” clearly and dramatically indicates:

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him, did you not,
His notice sudden is. . . .

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
Of course, making something that we fear naturally hundreds or thousands of times its normal size makes it correspondingly fiercer and more fearsome.

Possibly, another, more important motive also accounts for our frantic, frenetic, frenzied concern for and obsession with the environment, with ecology, with the fate of the planet. Like the narrator of “When the Music’s Over,” a Doors’ song, we wonder:

What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravished and plundered
And ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives
In the side of the dawn
Tied her with fences
And dragged her down.
We--or some of us--have gone from believing, as Genesis assures us, that God gave us the earth and all its animals (and plants) to subject to our will to the belief that these creatures are not, and ought not to be, thought of as lesser animals but as our fellows. If that’s true--if there is no hierarchy of life forms, with us at the top and everything else below us, on one level or another, as the great chain of being concept held, and we are not the “crown of creation”--we’ve done an injustice to our animal (and plant) brothers and to “our fair sister” (or Mother), the Earth. Since animals are sharper of tooth and claw, move faster, and are far stronger than we, we may have cause to be troubled. Maybe we should be worried.

We have exercised “dominion over the earth” and all her inhabitants, commanding the sands of the shores to become the glass panes in our houses, automobiles, storefronts, and office buildings; ordering trees to become paper and wood and furniture; compelling ores to become the chasses of vehicles, tools, machines, and construction site skeletons. We have transformed animals into food and clothing and servants as well as companions. Some, we have put in cages or made to perform in circus acts for our own amusement. We have stripped them of their dignity, their nobility, their freedom.

Instead of considering them our fellows, as a “thou,” in the language of Martin Buber, we have regarded them as an “it,” alien and other, and have exploited them at every opportunity for our own advantage, convenience, and comfort, even using rats and monkeys and pigs as subjects of painful, often lethal research. Afterward, before discarding their cadavers, we have dissected and autopsied them. In some cases, we have not even waited until their deaths, but have, instead, performed vivisections on their live and functioning bodies.

In “The Tables Turned,“ William Wordsworth warns us, “We murder to dissect”:

Sweet is the lore that Nature brings,
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things--
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art,
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
D. H. Lawrence writes, in his poem, “The Snake,” of our tendency to regard the serpent as alien and other and to fear, rather than to honor, this fellow creature. The narrator of the poem, in obedience to the dictates of his education as a human being, drives the snake away. Then, he feels guilty, as though he has a “pettiness” to expiate:

. . . immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.
And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
Part of the reason (blame?) for the state of affairs in which we find ourselves vis-à-vis our no-longer animal friends may be science and technology. Both Wordsworth (“we murder to dissect”) and Edgar Allan Poe suggest that this is the case. In “Sonnet to Science,” Poe contends that humanity’s scientific approach to nature has had the consequence of demystifying the world and of reducing it from having been viewed as a place full of wonder and divinity to its being considered a mere object among other objects.

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. . . .
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
In the days preceding science’s objectification of the world, hunters regarded the beasts they slew for food and clothing as fellows and apologized for having killed them. Animals were regarded as having souls, like people, and to kill one of them was no light matter. Rules governed the hunt and the kill, and the animal was slain only when necessary and, always, in a humane fashion. Sometimes, their spirits were adopted as the tribe’s totems, and animal spirits could be guides to shamans. In the world that Poe describes, there is no reason to apologize to animals or to treat them in a respectful or humane manner, for they are merely organisms that compete with other organisms for their survival, and we happen to occupy the highest levels of both the evolutionary and the food chains. We are predators, and animals are our prey, not our fellows.

On one hand, in the dim recesses of our memory as a species, we may retain the pesky, half-remembered notion of our ancestors, that animals are our brothers and sisters, so to speak. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Native Americans, and many other so-called primitive peoples envisioned half-human, half-animal creatures, regarding the gulf between they themselves and their animal “others” to be not so vast as to be an altogether unbridgeable chasm or abyss. There were apologies, rites and rituals, totems, and interspecies communication. There was respect.

Now, there is only an uneasy feeling that, in ravishing and plundering “our fair sister,” we are committing dishonorable, perhaps even irreverent, deeds, and deeds for which, one day, as, in The Birds and a hundred other cautionary tales we are warned, we may be repaid; the animals may exact revenge. This uneasy quiet, this silent dread, may be, as much as fear itself, the underbelly of the bug-eyed monster movie. Could the Industrial Revolution, in its military aspect as part of the "military-industrial complex," and its transformation of our world, have been the scientific and technological parents who spawned the ecology movement and, perhaps, even Al Gore's global warming warnings?

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.

It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.

What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”

Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.

As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.

Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:

Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.

Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.

According to Todorov:

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).
Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).

Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.

My Cup of Blood

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:

Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.

Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.

Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.

Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).

Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.

Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.

Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.

A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.

A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.

Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


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