Vocational Horror: The Tools of Its Trade

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 

A device often used to generate plots is to imagine a vocational role that, given a dark twist, produces unusual, horrific goods or provides equally bizarre, terrifying services. Stephen Kings; characters include writers (“1408,” Bag of Bones, The Regulators, Misery); painters (Duma Key); politicians (Under the Dome); a shop owner (Needful Things); a former police officer (Black House) and prison guards (The Green Mile); journalists (The Colorado Kid), government agents (Firestarter), and military personnel (The Tommyknockers), among others, whose wares and services are anything but mundane—or safe.

Other writers of horror have used the same technique. Bentley Little, King's “poet laureate of horror,” is a great example. His novels' protagonists include a mailman (The Mailman), store clerks (The Store); a homeowners association (The Association); resort staff and guests (The Resort); an insurance agent (The Policy), teachers (The Academy, University); and others.

In part, such fiction—what we might designate as vocational horror—works because it is associated, as it typically is in King's works, with forces equipped with vast resources, investigative abilities, access to the general public, political power, are backed by the authority of the state, or are imbued with supernatural or paranormal power (King) or perform essential services, operate in remote locations, or, again, enjoy supernatural or paranormal power (Little).

Another reason that vocational fiction works is that it is based on a twist, or a perversion, of the normal purposes of offering goods for sale or a perversion of the normal functions of a service, as is almost always the case in Little's satirical novels, synopses of a few of which suggest the nature of his twists:

[The Mailman:] “the strange new mailman is up to something sinister, an idea bolstered as people in town start receiving increasingly disturbing hate mail” (Wikipedia).

[The Store:] “customers are hounded by obnoxious sales people, and strange products appear on the shelves. Before long . . . [is] taking over the town!”

[The Association:] “Members of the neighborhood's Homeowners' Association, a meddling group that uses its authority to spy on neighbors, eradicate pets and dismember anyone who fails to pay association dues and fines” (Publishers Weekly).

[The Resort:] “[At] the exclusive Reata, an isolated resort in the Arizona desert, . . . . unnerving encounters with strange employees, wild parties in empty rooms and bizarre sex antics in the family restaurant prompt . . . key characters . . . to think about leaving early. Yet the Reata's magnetic pull essentially brainwashes all the guests into believing that their odd experiences are normal” (Publishers Weekly).

[The Policy:] “Recently divorced Hunt Jackson, his new wife, his co-workers and his best buddy from high school . . . are continually harassed by a pesky insurance salesman [who] tries to convince them to purchase bizarre policies protecting them from the law, their bosses and even death, and if the clients refuse, inexplicable consequences usually follow” (Publishers Weekly).

[The Academy:] “Students and faculty who embrace [a school's new] charter get steadily darker and more sadistic; teachers and students who oppose the charter find strange things happening and people disappearing; and the school seems to have taken on a life of its own” (Publishers Weekly).

Theme as the Springboard to a Story's Plot

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Dorothy Gale discovers she's not in Kansas anymore

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

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

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

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

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

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

Job, in better days

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

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

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

The Metaphysics of Horror

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

From a religious point of view, the problem of evil, as philosophers call the idea that a loving, omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal God allows evil and suffering, seems to suggest one of these possibilities:

• There actually is no God.
• God is less than he is believed to be (for example, not loving, omniscient or omnipotent).
• God does not intervene in nature or human affairs.
• The devil (or chief evil entity) is equally as powerful as God.

Sooner or later, if only implicitly, horror fiction must grapple with this philosophical conundrum.

Dean Koontz wrestles with the problem of evil in The Taking, Stephen King in Desperation.

In the former’s novel, the arrival of Satan and his minions, mistaken for an extraterrestrial invasion of alien spacecraft, occurs when these dark forces seek to usher in Armageddon. The nature of the problem of evil is not directly assessed, although Koontz’s novel suggests that, despite its opposition to God’s goodness, evil does have a divine purpose, unintended though that effect may be on the part of the devil. Rather as in the book of Genesis (crossed, perhaps, with the Norse concept of Ragnarok, in which a man and a woman, surviving the destruction of Middle-earth, repopulate the planet at the beginning of a new age), a remnant of humanity is preserved against the wholesale destruction that ensues the hellish invasion. In place of Noah’s ark, the protagonist, having been impregnated by her husband, bears the seed of humanity’s hopes for the future within her womb. The old world dies that a new one may be born.

If Koontz’s novel is informed (by way of Norse mythology) by the Genesis account of the flood and the survival of Noah and his family (and two of every other species on the planet), King’s story seems to take, as its foundation, the Old Testament story of Job.

In King’s novel, God has summoned protagonist David Carver and several others to stop the demon Tak, who has recently escaped from a caved-in mine. In the process, David loses his entire family and concludes that “God is cruel.” However, another character, writer John Marinville, gives the teenager a note that he, Marinville, found while he was in the demon’s lair, a get-out-of-school-early pass that David had left nailed to a tree in his backyard, hundreds of miles away, before he and his family undertook the vacation that ended in Desperation. On the note is a message that wasn’t on the note originally, a message that, presumably, is from God himself: “God is love.” To effect the greater good, love must, at times, take a harsh and unbending stand toward evil, even at the cost of great sacrifice. David is too young to know the ways of God, but, King suggests, like longsuffering Job, the protagonist must trust in the goodness of God and take the deity at his word that he is a God of love who intervenes in human affairs for purposes which are inscrutable to human beings but are just, nevertheless, and, on some greater scale, probably merciful as well.

Koontz, a Roman Catholic, and King, who grew up in the Protestant tradition but claims to subscribe to no “traditional” religious faith and to have a non-traditional idea of God, both offer a view of the problem of suffering which is rooted, at least in part, in the Judeo-Christian faith (and, in Koontz’s case, perhaps Norse mythology), as it is expressed, respectively, in the book of Genesis (and the Eddas) and the book of Job. Although neither author presents an original thesis concerning the problem of evil, each draws attention to the issue in an entertaining and inventive fashion. (A recent film, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, also enquires as to the basis of evil and suffering, leaving the answer open.)

The mystery of iniquity is perhaps unsolvable, but it clearly still retains a powerful interest upon the imaginations of writers and readers today, just as it has for several millennia now.

Quick Tip: Theme As Lesson

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

The theme of a story is frequently defined as the point, meaning, or moral of the story, the lesson that the story imparts, explicitly or (more often) implicitly. This definition is true enough, and helpful, but I prefer to think of the story’s theme as the lesson that the main character, or protagonist, learns as the result of his or her experience as this experience is related in the story.

For example, the theme of The Wizard of Oz, which Dorothy Gale learns as a result of her being whisked off to Oz, encountering the enchanted land’s various residents, and defeating the Wicked Witch of the West, is “There’s no place like home.” The theme of The Exorcist is similar to that of the book of Job, that true faith in God persists despite the existence of evil and human suffering. The theme of ‘Salem’s Lot is that, by banding together, a community can defeat a force far greater than any single individual.

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.

The Vagabond Menace

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The Ancient Mariner relates his tale to the Wedding Guest.

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the character of the same name is presented as a world-weary old man who has the uncanny, perhaps supernatural, ability to hypnotize his listeners, to whom, as an act of penance demanded by a deity, he must recount the cautionary tale of what befell him and his fellow sailors after he shot and killed an albatross for no reason. Many critics consider the bird to represent a symbol of God’s grace, making the ancient mariner’s act similar to the crucifixion of Christ and the mariner’s fate like that of the proverbial, anti-Semitic Wandering Jew, who was punished, as the story goes, for having mocked Jesus as he was hanging upon the cross by having to wander the earth until Christ’s second advent.

This type of character, the vagabond menace, although not necessarily common in horror fiction, has appeared in several stories of this genre. Often a male, this character has no home of his own. Instead, he travels from place to place, under an assumed name, causing havoc and misery (or, less often, averting the same), sometimes as a result of a curse (or as the result of having been assigned a mission). He is not the same as another type of itinerant character, the herald, for he does not go before another, greater character, announcing or otherwise preparing the latter’s way, as, for instance, the Silver Surfer scouts planets for his master, Galactus, to consume. Many times something of a trickster, the vagabond menace almost always has specialized, usually occult, knowledge or wisdom, which he uses to effect his covert plans or, less often, enlighten or rescue others, saving them from the same or a similar doom as that which has befallen them. He may be a force of good, but, more frequently, he is an agent of evil. He may represent a higher power, but he often acts merely in his own interest, according to his own plans, which usually remain unshared until the end of the story if they are revealed at all, although the reader may surmise the motives for the vagabond menace’s actions from clues provided by the writer.

For example, he appears as a houseguest in W. W. Jacobs’ short story “The Monkey’s Paw.” In this tale, he is a traveler who has come to visit parents who have recently lost their son Herbert. He has with him the monkey’s paw of the story’s title, a talisman, or charm, that grants its user three magic wishes.

The wise (or at least knowledgeable) traveler also appears in Stephen King’s novel Needful Things as a shopkeeper who offers customer’s their hearts’ desires--in exchange, if not for their souls, a steep spiritual price that involves both sin and cruelty to their fellow townspeople. That this stranger may be the devil himself is hinted at rather strongly by his past and present, especially his ability to perform supernatural feats. Of course, he is also a wedge between the residents of Castle Rock, Maine, where, in the novel, he most recently sets up shop.

Another King story, Storm of the Century, features a villain of supernatural powers who, again, it is hinted, may be something on the order of a demon, who, getting along in years, visits the island town in search of a protégé who can, when properly trained, take his place.

The vagabond menace also makes an appearance in Shirley Jackson's quirky short story "An Ordinary Day, With Peanuts." This character goes about her day creating as much havoc as possible in as many individuals' lives as she can. At the same time, her husband does the opposite, playing, as it were, the angel to his wife's demon. They discuss their respective days when they get home, and the husband reminds his wife that, the next day, it's his turn to play the loving, caring role and hers to play that of the hateful, malevolent part. (Or maybe it's the opposite; it's been some time since I've had the pleasure of reading this clever tale, and it's not easily found, but the point is that the spouses switch roles, alternately playing the angel and the demon every other day.)

Even Mark Twain makes use of a vagabond menace in his short story “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” a tale that has suspiciously strong similarities to King’s Needful Things. In Twain’s story, the vagabond menace is a stranger who, in passing through Hadleyburg, which has a reputation as an “incorruptible town,” is offended by the deeds of one of its residents. To avenge himself, he offers a bag of gold worth $40,000 to the person who gave him $20 in a time of need and some invaluable advice. To claim the gold, one need only to submit, in writing, to Hadleyburg’s Reverend Burgess, the advice that he or she offered to the traveler. Unknown to the others, each and every resident receives an anonymous note from the stranger that reveals the advice that he was given, and they all submit the same remark to the minister, thereby claiming to be the rightful claimant of the stranger‘s reward. They all run up enormous debts, buying merchandise on credit, knowing that they can easily repay the debts once they have been awarded the gold.

At a public meeting, the townspeople are shamed when Burgess, reading the submitted slips of paper, reveals that all the residents of Hadleyburg have submitted the same bit of advice, but that none of them has submitted the entire statement that the stranger says he was told. They have submitted only the first half: “You are far from being a bad man--go, and reform.” The complete statement is “You are far from being a bad man--go, and reform--or, mark my words--some day, for your sins you will die and go to hell or Hadleyburg--try and make it the former.” Finally, another note in the sack of gold is opened and read. It offers some advice of the stranger’s own to the townspeople whom he has duped and humiliated. They should not be so quick to claim incorruptibility, he suggests, because it is easy to do so when one’s virtue has gone untested. The gold turns out to be lead.

One couple, the Richardses, submitted the same note as all the others in Hadleyburg, but theirs is never read, and they receive the money that the sale of the sack of lead earns at an auction, but they are unable to enjoy their newfound wealth, as they live in constant fear that their duplicity will be revealed. However, their note is never read aloud, the stranger claiming to have prevented this occurrence in honor of a favor the couple did for him long ago. Before the old couple die, Mr. Richards confesses their guilt in hiding the secret that they, too, like all the other residents of their town, lied as to their advice to the stranger. They never gave him any advice or money, but merely wrote the same statement on the slip of paper they submitted in claim of the gold as everyone else had done. Twain ends his tale with the ironic statement, “It is an honest town once more, and the man will have to rise early that catches it napping again.”

The prototypical vagabond menace is Satan himself, the slanderer who appears before God, arriving from his wanderings in the earth, to accuse Job of false piety and devotion to God and afflicts God’s “good and faithful servant, Job” with a series of distressing conditions, including the loss of servants, livestock, and offspring and painful boils all over his body:

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.

And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down
in it.

And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?

Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?

Hast not thou made a hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.

But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face (Job 1: 6-11).