Characterization via Emotion

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Characterization operates by means of depicting emotion. Literary characters are, in fact, embodiments of emotion. Some emotions may be negative, either in the sense that they are unpleasant or in the sense that they cause problems, personal, social, or otherwise. Emotions can also be positive because they are pleasant or because they alleviate or resolve problems, personal, social, or otherwise.

Characters’ responses to incidents--that is, their feelings concerning events--motivate their actions. In other words, characters are often reactive: they respond to internal or external stimuli. Internal stimuli are their own attitudes, beliefs, desires, fantasies, hopes, thoughts, and, of course, emotions, such as fear, love, and self-respect. External stimuli are persons, places, things, qualities, and ideas that elicit characters’ passions, and can include threats, money, beauty, and death.

The overall, consistent pattern which underlies and is discerned in an individual’s behavior over an extended period of time suggests his or her basic personality traits and causes him or her to be regarded as just, wise, kind, ruthless, arrogant, vain, or whatever. However, many lesser, secondary traits also comprise most fictional people at any time of his or her literary life.

Hamlet is driven by his sense of duty to avenge his murdered father, but he is also hesitant, wanting to make sure that he acts justly in killing his father’s true killer--if, indeed, his father was killed, as the spirit who alleges to be the ghost of his father contends the late king was. These traits are the primary ones that motivate Hamlet, both to act and to refrain from acting. Therefore, he can be said to be a dutiful and just, but hesitant, character. In short, we might regard him as being a man of valor.

His antagonist, who is also his uncle and his step-father, King Claudius, is shown to be cold, calculating, and unrepentant, and he is driven by lust, both for power and for sex, having married Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, shortly after Hamlet’s father died. Therefore, Hamlet can be read as a dramatization of a conflict between these two sets of emotions: Hamlet’s dutifulness, justice, and hesitation collide with Claudius’ coldness, calculation, unwillingness to repent, and lust for power and sex.

Horror fiction is primarily about fear, but its characters are motivated by other emotions as well. Beowulf’s hero wants to prove his mettle as a warrior. Although The Exorcist’s Father Damian Karras has begin to doubt and, perhaps, to lose his faith, he remains a man of God who loves humanity, as it is represented in the possessed soul of young Regan MacNeil, enough to risk his own life in an attempt to exorcise the devil’s victim. Many of Stephen King’s characters are motivated by their need to bond and by their need to belong to a community, or by brotherly love, one might say.

Not only the protagonists of horror fiction are motivated by their emotions; their antagonists are as well. In Beowulf, the monstrous outcast, Grendel, attacks the Danes because he envies their camaraderie. In The Exorcist, the devil possesses Regan in an attempt to get Father Karras to renounce his faith and thus be damned. Many of King’s villains (‘Salem’s Lot’s Barlow, Andre Linoge in Storm of the Century, and the protean monster of It, for example) prey upon the weaknesses of small communities and their residents, motivated by their narcissistic desire to perpetuate themselves. The emotional conflicts in Beowulf, The Exorcist, and ‘Salem’s Lot can be represented this way:

Valor vs. Envy
Love vs. Condemnation
Brotherly Love vs. Narcissistic self-perpetuation

By motivating your characters to act according to their passions, you will make your fiction seem more realistic, and you will show what’s at stake, on a personal level, as it were, in the struggle between the story’s protagonist and antagonist. The nature of the struggle, in turn, may suggest your stories’ themes. For example, The Exorcist suggests that love casts out condemnation, just as Beowulf implies that valor vanquishes envy and King's novels indicate that brotherly love is more important than narcissistic self-perpetuation.

Surrealism and Horror

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman 

 

Michael Gould’s Surrealism and the Cinema (Open-Eyed Screening) offers several insights concerning surrealism that apply not only to movies, but also to products of the horror genre, whether in print or on film. He says, “The image is the basic element of surrealism for it is an image-conscious sensibility (21).” Seeing represents consciousness; to be is to be perceived, and to see is to perceive. However, surrealism is interested in challenging accepted perceptions, interpretations, understandings, and meanings. To do so, it must dissociate or expunge familiar readings and views, that it might make the familiar strange and novel again; it is only by alienating the viewer from the things that he or she views that the surrealist can renew the objects of perception. For this reason, surrealists are generally more concerned with the representative, or the type, rather than with the individual, because the type is a distillation of individuals which stands for the essence, as it were, of the group that the type represents. In this sense, types are symbols, and symbols obliterate the perception of new truths, or understandings, of the things that, collectively, constitute the world or “reality.” This seems to be Gould’s meaning, when he writes:

For Rene Magritte. . . the bowler hat is the symbol of the bourgeois European man, and Magritte’s men in bowlers are all types, without individual personalities. It is the man-in-the-bowler-hat image that excites Magritte, not the man himself (21).

Surrealists deal with types because the artists want to subvert their meaning in order to make them potentially meaningful again, to make them, as it were, pregnant with meaning. Flannery O’Connor suggested something similar, in a different context, when she wrote, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures,” as did Walker Percy, in his use of a dung beetle, in The Moviegoer, to awaken his protagonist Binx Bolling to the wonder of things when they are no longer taken for granted and overlooked. When the world becomes too familiar to us, it is as if it is lost to sight. We have eyes, but we do not see. To be is to be perceived, but we have forgotten how to perceive; therefore, much of the world’s being is lost to us. Surrealists attempt to restore our sight by making the familiar world appear strange again to us, as it is to a young child who lacks adults’ experience:

Surrealism. . . seeks always the. . . revelatory. . . . This calls for a child-like sense of wonderment. Children are so easily surprised because they have so little experience in life. . . (28-29).

How does horror serve the same end? How does horror renew our perceptions of the things of this world, so that we see again that which has become invisible to our jaded eyes? It does so in at least three ways, by offering readers (or viewers) a parade of the bizarre, by confronting them with the monstrous Other, and by whisking them off to a remote, often confining, unfamiliar place.

As we have remarked in previous posts, most horror stories start with a series of apparently unrelated, bizarre incidents. This series comprises a break with the ordinary and the everyday, immersing the reader in a topsy-turvy world in which he or she, along with the protagonist, is alienated from the mundane and the familiar. Everyday objects, scenes, and experiences are juxtaposed to the wild, the incongruous, and the bizarre, which shakes up one’s world--or, at least, one’s experience of the world. The alien alienates; the strange estranges; the weird cuts one off from the familiar and the complacency that often derives from an immersion in the ordinary. The world is no longer safe; it has become dangerous, because, suddenly, the old rules don’t apply, and anything is possible. In a previous post, we cited, as an example of the opening parade of the bizarre, the incidents that comprise the beginning of Stephen King’s novel, Desperation, which we repeat here:

In Nevada, a dead cat is seen nailed to a highway sign. An abandoned recreation vehicle (RV) sits alongside a lonely stretch of highway, its door flapping in the breeze. A sheriff, acting crazy, arrests a couple on trumped-up drug charges, threatening to kill them on their way to jail. The nearest town, Desperation, seems abandoned, except for the corpses that litter the streets. The sheriff has arrested several other individuals, also on false charges; among his prisoners are the members of the RV family, whom he supposedly rescued from (non-existent) gunmen. Vultures, scorpions, wolves, and other animals, under the sheriff’s telepathic control, attack people. A preteen prisoner, David Carver, miraculously escapes from jail, afterward performing additional miracles (using a cell phone with a dead battery and multiplying a supply of sardines and crackers). The demon Tak, who is behind the series of bizarre incidents, serially possessing the sheriff and others as he wears out their bodies, fears the preteen. Strange idols cause sexually perverse thoughts and feelings in those who touch them.

This parade of the bizarre--this freak show, comprised of incidents as well as performers--takes us as fully out of the normal, everyday world as the tornado removed Dorothy Gale from the comforts of home, dropping her in Oz. King lets us know, by exposing us to the uncanny and the eerie, apparently unrelated events that have begun, for no apparent reason, that, in having entered Desperation, we are no more in Nevada than Dorothy was in Kansas after she landed in Oz. In other words, the series of bizarre incidents that begin his story alienate us from our ordinary lives and estrange us from our everyday selves. As if we were inside a gigantic existential kaleidoscope, reality has shifted and sifted, and the mundane world is fragmented and redistributed into unrecognizable shards that are no longer known and familiar. Reality, as we have understood it, has become unreal; therefore, it has become pregnant with the possibilities that result from a renewal--or a newness--of perception.

If a confrontation with a series of bizarre incidents reawakens us to the things of the world by shocking us into awareness as a result of a transformation of the familiar into the strange, a confrontation with the monstrous Other reawakens us to the astonishment of things--or of some things--in themselves, without first making them strange. We tend to ignore most of the sensations and perceptions that our bodies and senses relay to our minds. Otherwise, we would be overwhelmed by the experience of life that inundates us from every direction at every waking moment. We become not only selective, but highly selective. Therefore, our chances of survival may be heightened, but at the cost of losing sight and sound and scent and taste and touch of many of the things that comprise our environment. We reduce the size of our perceived world so that we can deal with it; in doing so, we obliterate from our consciousness most of existence. However, certain things are undeniable; they have presence, even when other things are absent, and they demand to be perceived and, therefore, to be (to be is to be perceived). No one ignores the sight or sound of a rattlesnake, for example, or a bear or a shark. Threats have immediate and vivid presence, a quality that Emily Dickinson captures well in her poem about a snake; the narrator’s shock is evident in her twisted syntax:

A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides-- You may have met Him-- did you not His notice sudden is-- The Grass divides as with a Comb-- A spotted shaft is seen-- And then it closes at your feet And opens further on-- He likes a Boggy Acre A Floor too cool for Corn-- Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot-- I more than once at Noon Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash Unbraiding in the Sun When stooping to secure it It wrinkled, and was gone-- 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--

Whatever its shape, the monster is always the snake; it is insistently and undeniably present, demanding to be seen and heard (and, possibly, to be smelled and touched or even tasted). Threats stand out to us when nothing else does. By associating the monster with the Other (who is always some rejected aspect of the Self), horror writers confront readers (or viewers) with repressed aspects of their inner selves, with the inner demons of injurious attitudes, self-destructive beliefs, and harmful behaviors. We do not want to look, afraid of what we may see; by embodying those aspects of our inner beings in the forms of monsters that will not be denied, we are confronted with our inner demons; we see them again, and, face to face with the ghost of childhood trauma or a guilty past, with the beast of adulterous desire, or with the vampiric lust for others’ blood, we have the opportunity to see ourselves anew and, perhaps, to overcome the monster within.

The horror film, like surrealist art, breaks the world into fragments in order to make it present and visible to us as something strange and wonderful (or terrible). A series of bizarre incidents leading to a monstrous Other are two ways by which writers of such stories accomplish this feat. The third is the use of a remote, usually confining, setting, which has the effect of cutting the protagonist off from the security of his or her greater community, whether this community is represented by the character’s home, neighborhood, region, nation, or even planet. The protagonist is alone (or possibly with members of a small group), cut off from the police, from military forces, from medical personnel, from fire and rescue teams, from supplies of food and utility services, from communication equipment. He or she is on his or her own, with no one to advise, assist, or intercede. Whether the protagonist lives or dies depends exclusively upon what he or she believes, chooses, thinks, knows, learns, and, in short, does. Moreover, if the isolated space is also sparsely furnished, it may represent a state of existence akin to death, for “clutter,” according to Gould, suggests the opposite state, that of the abundance that is associated with life. In this context, the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, in “Parega und Paralipomena,” as quoted in Surrealism and the Cinema, are extremely evocative:

To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few moments so completely that the commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence (36).

According to Gould’s assessment, the effects of such isolation will result in the isolated surrealist’s attempt to “fill” the resulting “void” in his or her knowledge with his or her own “subject-being”:

Once our old attitudes to the reality around us are removed, the confronting pablum of their presence is also gone, leaving us with new fears, which appear in the form of a lack of definitive answers (a fear of the unknown). It is with his own subject-being that the surrealist tries to fill that void. . . (37).

The fragmentation of, and estrangement from, ordinary, everyday “reality” that surrealism accomplishes is only its first, preliminary work; its task, like that of horror fiction, is completed when it then allows the reader or the viewer to synthesize his or her experience, creating a new interpretation, a new impression, or a new understanding of his or her world and of his or her place in the world, or, as Gould puts it:

Because surrealism makes the mind puzzle and search, it is basically a constructive sensibility, which is bent on tearing down old values and opening up new horizons, and as such, it is a political sensibility (38).

Source:

Surrealism and the Cinema (Open-Eyed Screening) by Michael Gould, A. S. Barnes and Company, New York, 1976.

Some Thoughts on Horror

If a man harbors any sort of fear, it makes him landlord to a ghost. -- Lloyd Douglas

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Where there is no imagination, there is no horror. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror. -- Carlos Fuentes

Jennifer Love Hewitt

I'd never watch a horror film, but after I found out I was going to be in one, I watched, like, four of them, including The Shining. I was terrified--I couldn't sleep for days. But I wanted to get myself used to things I was going to see on the set. -- Jennifer Love Hewitt

Eric Hoffer

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. -- Eric Hoffer

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. -- Victor Hugo

Terror. . . often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment: that things are in the unmaking. -- Stephen King

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music. -- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on. -- River Phoenix

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience by which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ -- Eleanor Roosevelt

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth--more than ruin, more even than death. -- Bertrand Russell

Civilization is hideously fragile [and] there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish. -- C. P. Snow

He's not stupid; he's possessed by a retarded ghost. --Unknown

One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses and oppresses. -- Robin Wood

What’s So Scary About. . . .

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Too often, writers write the way people too often speak: without thinking or, more specifically, without planning. They hope for inspiration as they put pen to paper or (more typically fingertips to keyboard). However, a bit of forethought could go a long way, in horror writing or in the writing of any other genre of fiction. By brainstorming as to what’s so scary about a potential or chosen setting, the horror writer is better able to capitalize upon features of the locale that are uniquely or especially eerie, frightening, or repulsive. Here are a few key settings for horror stories. The aspiring horror writer can add more of his or her own and update the list as new elements of the horrible and the terrible occur to him or her concerning such places.

Attic

It is seldom visited, and its contents, to some extent, are apt to be forgotten; therefore, the attic is more or less unfamiliar and may house dangers, such as bats, rats, spiders, rabid squirrels, or human intruders.

It is unlit or dimly lit and full of shadows in which dangers may lurk or be concealed.

Its contents may be old or unused and may, therefore, represent mementos of death.

It is not spacious, and it lacks headroom, making one feel trapped.

Depending upon the weather, it could be hot, humid, musty, or damp.

It could smell of mold decay (if the body of an animal that has died in the attic’s walls or elsewhere has begun to rot).

Because of the boxes, crates, and other containers it often contains, the attic features many potential hiding places from which one may be ambushed.

It may lack continuous flooring, which impedes movement and escape.

Its being little visited and kept locked suggests that the attic is a “forbidden” place.

It seems unnaturally quiet.

Noises, lights, and smells, in a closed or locked attic suggests that something is amiss (i. e., that the attic is occupied by an animal, a human intruder, or a ghost, perhaps).

The ladder or the narrow, steep flight of steps leading to the attic suggests the unusual character of the attic.

It is isolated from the rest of the house and, therefore, from the rest of the family.

Its floorboards and hinges may creak.

It is likely to be unfurnished, undecorated, and unadorned; it may be unfinished as well, suggesting a place that has been abandoned and lacks the typical comforts of home.

Note: Flowers in the Attic is set, in large part, in an attic.

Basement

Many of the eerie elements associated with an attic are also associated with a basement, making a basement scary for the same reasons that an attic may be frightening. In addition, these other eerie elements are often specifically associated with a basement:

The knowledge that, in descending a ladder or a flight of steps, one is going underground (where things are often buried) enhances the uneasiness one may feel
in entering a basement.

Its windows, if any, are apt to be small, perhaps mere vertical slits, which obscures one’s vision to the outside world and makes escape impossible.

It may contain a furnace, the fiery grate or interior of which, in the otherwise relative darkness, may appear eerie or even hellish.

Its cupboards, if any, may contain unusual odds and ends or “secrets” that are better left unknown.

Its walls may be stained or discolored or in disrepair.

Note: The movie The People Under the Stairs is set mostly in a family’s basement.

Crawlspace

Many of the eerie elements associated with an attic are also associated with a basement, making a basement scary for the same reasons that an attic may be frightening. In addition, these other eerie elements are often specifically associated with a basement:

It is even more cramped and inspires claustrophobia even more than an attic or a
basement, reducing movement to a slow, even potentially painful, crawl.

It is dirty and may be stuffy or musty.

Its pipes, joists, beams, and other obstructions impede movement and/or escape.

Animal carcasses could be present or their bones may be scattered inside the crawlspace. (John Wayne Gacy buried the bodies of many of his victims in his house’s crawlspace, and a lesbian stalker lived in her victim’s crawlspace.)

Tunnels from the crawlspace could lead elsewhere.

Note: As its title implies, the movie Crawlspace featured this setting.

Hotel

It is large, both in space and in the number of rooms, allowing multiple possibilities of ambush, for being trapped, or for having one’s escape cut off.

It is full of strangers, some or all of whom may be hostile or untrustworthy.

As a guest, one is in a dependent role.

Others have keys to one’s room or suite.

It could be haunted.

It operates on a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week basis, even while one is asleep and, therefore, vulnerable).

One could get stuck in an elevator, between floors.

Who knows what extra ingredients could be added to a drink in the hotel’s cocktail lounge or to a meal served in the hotel’s restaurant or delivered by room service?

One or more of its employees could be replaced by imposters.

Any weakness in its security could be exploited.

Its surveillance cameras are watching guests all the time, everywhere.

It could be isolated; even when it is not, it is a self-contained and relatively self-sufficient world unto itself (a total institution) of great resources.

It can feature fountains or statues in its lobby and courtyards or grounds.

It can harbor strange sights and sounds (and smells).

Its floor plans could be like a mazes, and, behind each door, a possible threat could wait to ambush a guest.

Power may fail.

Fog or other atmospheric or meteorological effects may occur.

Insects, animals, or humans may intrude.

Note: Stephen King’s short story “1408” takes place in a hotel, as does the movie, 1408, based upon it; King’s novel (and the movie based upon it), The Shining also takes place in a hotel.

Mansion

Many of the eerie elements associated with a hotel are also associated with a mansion, making a mansion scary for the same reasons that a hotel may be frightening. In addition, these other eerie elements are often specifically associated with a mansion:

Things look different in the dark than they do in the light.

It is isolated behind walls and iron gates, obscured by trees and other vegetation.

Its ornamentation and decoration may be odd (demon doorknockers, gargoyles,
bizarre statues or portraits).

It is associated with an ancestry and heirs (in other words, the house has a past, as it were, which may be filled with guilty secrets).

Its library may contain forbidden books.

“What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?” What, indeed!

It may have an evil-looking façade or aura (as does the House of Usher, the
Amityville house, and Ed Gein’s house).

Its grounds may contain the family’s private cemetery.

It can be personified (“if these walls could only talk!”).

Almost by definition, abandoned houses are scary (they suggest the fragility of life, or relationships, of stability, and a person, too, as a former resident, may be fragile, unstable, or abandoned.)

It could be really haunted or it could become “haunted” (e. g., as a Halloween fund-raiser), attracting real ghosts or demons.

Its various rooms symbolize various aspects of the personality, as dream dictionaries indicate.

An ascent can become a descent.

What was left behind in an abandoned mansion (a mirror, a birdcage, a cabinet, an organ) could be demonic.

Abandoned and in a state of disrepair, it is apt to be unsafe because of weak floors or stairs or crumbling ceilings or walls.

Note: Many horror stories, both in print and on film, including The Amityville Horror, Rose Red, ‘Salem’s Lot, Psycho, and The Haunting of Hill House being but a few of the better known among them, are set, in full or in large part, in mansions.

Island

It is remote and inaccessible.

It may be inhabited by “savages” and/or strange and dangerous plants and animals.

It is at the “mercy” of the sea.

It may contain caverns, mountains, or forests that are habitats for unusual, or even bizarre, and threatening menaces of a vegetative, animal, or human nature.

It may have an odd shape (Skull Island) that is frightening in itself.

It may have been used for nefarious purposes.

It may be volcanic.

It may suggest an alternative evolutionary origin.

Note: The Island of Dr. Moreau, King Kong, Jurassic Park, and many other novels and movies take place upon islands.

Aphoristic Horror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Aphorisms, as themes, can give rise to story ideas. Consider the possibilities with regard to such a maxim as “Be careful what you wish for.” This adage could well have been the basis of W. W. Jacobs’ classic tale of terror “The Monkey’s Paw” (see the column to the right), in which a mother wishes for something she believes she wants, even though it is likely to be horrifyingly monstrous. (The same proverb, incidentally, could have been the basis for Stephen King’s novel, Pet Semetary, a sort of expanded and updated version of Jacobs’ story.)

Could “Two heads are better than one” have inspired Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”?

When the antagonist is dealing agonizing death, the saying, “It’s better to give than to receive” certainly springs to mind as a basis for any number of horror stories, especially of the slasher variety.

Had the alien shape-shifting protagonist of a Ray Bradbury story hearkened to Polonius’ advice to Laertes, “To thine own self be true,” he wouldn’t have suffered the fatal fate that he did.

The cruel king and the courtiers upon whom Hop-Frog takes revenge in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “Hop-Frog” would have done well to remember, if they had ever learned, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” because it was the king’s insult to the protagonist’s girlfriend Tripetta that initiated her lover’s plan to avenge her honor.

Unworthy Books

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Robert McCammon refuses to let his four earliest books be published because they are unworthy of him; as he explains on his website:

I always hear about writers who've written four books that end up in a drawer, and their fifth book is the one that gets published. The first book I ever wrote was published, flaws and all. For better or worse, I was allowed to learn to write in public. I think those books are simply early efforts. You have to take them as they are. I don't think they're very deep or anything; I think they're okay, but they simply represent where I was at that particular time.

(At least he’s honest. Dean Koontz has a different approach; he rewrites his earlier stinkers and foists them upon the public again, usually with a different cover so they appear, to the unwary or the forgetful, to be new novels rather than recycled trash.)

The books of which McCammon is too ashamed to let see the light of day ever again are Baal (1978), Bethany’s Sin (1980), The Night Boat (1980), and They Thirst (1981). A summary of them is sufficient, perhaps, to indicate the soundness of his judgment in this matter:


Baal:

A woman is ravished. . . and to her a child is born. . . unleashing an unimaginable evil upon the world! And they call him BAAL in the orphanage, where he leads the children on a rampage of violence...in California, where he appears as the head of a deadly Manson-like cult...in Kuwait, where crazed millions heed his call to murder and orgy. They call him BAAL in the Arctic's hellish wasteland, where he is tracked by the only three men with a will to stop him: Zark, the shaman; Virga, the aging professor of theology; and Michael, the powerful, mysterious stranger (from the back cover of the Avon paperback edition of Baal).

Bethany’s Sin:

Even God stays away from the village of BETHANY'S SIN. For Evan Reid, his wife Kay, and their small daughter Laurie, the beautiful house in the small village was too good a bargain to pass up. Bethany's Sin was a weird name, but the village was quaint and far from the noise and pollution of the city. But Bethany's Sin was too quiet. There were no sounds at all...almost as if the night had been frightened into silence. Evan began to notice that there were very few men in the village, and that most of them were crippled. And then there was the sound of galloping horses. Women on horses. Riding in the night. Soon he would learn their superhuman secret. And soon he would watch in terror as first his wife, then his daughter, entered their sinister cabal. An ancient evil rejoiced in Bethany's Sin. A horror that happened only at night. . . and only to men (from the back cover of the Avon paperback edition of Bethany's Sin).

The Night Boat:

From the living hell of her watery grave she rises again. . . THE NIGHT BOAT. Deep under the calm water of a Caribbean lagoon, salvage diver David Moore discovers a sunken Nazi U-boat entombed in the sand. A mysterious relic from the last war. Slowly, the U-boat rises from the depths laden with a long-dead crew, cancerous with rot, mummified for eternity. Or so Moore thought. UNTIL HE HEARD THE DEEP HOLLOW BOOM OF SOMETHING HAMMERING WITH FEVERISH INTENSITY. . . . SOMETHING DESPERATELY TRYING TO GET OUT! Beneath the waves she will seduce the living and devour the dead...THE NIGHT BOAT (from the back cover of the British Sphere paperback edition of The Night Boat).

They Thirst:

A MASS MURDER. A DISAPPEARANCE. A CEMETERY RANSACKED. It looked like another ordinary day in Los Angeles. Then night came. . . . Evil as old as the centuries has descended upon the City of Angels--it comes as a kiss from the terrifying but seductive immortals. Slowly at first, then by the legions, the ravenous undead choke Los Angeles with bloodthirsty determination---and the hordes of monstrous victims steadily mount each night. High above glitter city a deadly contest begins. In the decaying castle of a long-dead screen idol, the few remaining human survivors prepare to face the Prince of Evil and his satanic disciples. Whilst the very forces of nature are called into play, isolating the city from the rest of the world and leaving it at the mercy of the blood-hungry vultures of the night. . . . THEY THIRST. Theirs is a lust that can never be satisfied (from the back cover of the British Sphere paperback edition of They Thirst).

When the blurbs are better than the novels they promote and the covers all look pretty much alike, it’s not a good sign; it may be evidence, however, of McCammon’s wisdom in “retiring” such tripe and in deciding to turn his attention and talents, such as they are, to “writing novels that” are “not as easily categorized,” to employ the explanation that his webmaster supplies for the master’s newfound aversion to the genre on which he cut his authorial teeth. Like Dean Koontz, and, more recently, Stephen King, McCammon seems intent upon putting distance between himself as a serious artist and the fecal matter that first bore his name in the cesspool of horror fiction. To be taken seriously as a writer, one must not write humor or horror, it seems. Even the few who occasionally beat the odds and enter the illustrious and glorious, gilt-edged canon of Western Literature, such as Edgar Allan Poe, are sometimes said to be only “three-fifths. . . genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,” as James Russell Lowe (now largely forgotten) remarked concerning the still-remembered Poe.

Horror writers are not frequently considered great writers because, well, the field, fertile though it may be, seldom attracts the most sober, talented, and brilliant authors, except, besides Poe (and yours truly, of course), a few who have made an occasional foray into the cemeteries of darkness, such as Charles Dickens (“The Signal-man”), Henry James (The Turn of the Screw), William Faulkner (“A Rose for Emily”), and Mark Twain (“Cannibalism in the Cars,” “A Ghost Story,” and “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”).

The genre is helped by the astute, well-read, well-educated, and thoughtful reader (a species rapidly approaching extinction, alas!) who can bring to bear upon these slight narratives the world of his or her own knowledge, experience, interests, and more-or-less well-cultivated tastes. Robert Block could learn from H. P. Lovecraft the same way that Lovecraft could learn from Poe--because all of these masters of the form had in themselves the capacity to be taught and to gain skills.


Some were formally instructed; others were not, but all were autodidactic and interested in the darker and hidden aspects of their lives and those of others, past, present, and, mayhap, future as well. Because of who they were and what they had inside themselves, they were able to create masterpieces of horror fiction, the genre to which their own inner demons drew them. They would have been just as likely to have been able to write so-called mainstream, or literary, novels and short stories had their hearts and minds and souls been in it. Fortunately, for the horror aficionado, these authors’ hearts and minds and souls were in horror instead.


Until such as a Hawthorne, a Poe, or a Lovecraft appears again in this “goodly realm of gold,” we shall have to be content with the Koontzes and the McCammons. At least, unlike the former, the latter cares enough about himself and his work to be properly ashamed of the worst of it and refuses to foist it off upon the public again in a supposedly new and improved edition.


Others, like King, follow a middle road, rewriting the same tired stories again and again, calling Christine, for example, From a Buick 8 the second time around, or simply recycling the tales of terror that others have told, as King does with his retelling of Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House as Rose Red or H. G. Wells’ “The Red Room” as “1408.” At least, King “borrows” from the masters and, when he regurgitates previous stories, they have the semblance of something new, if not improved, rather than being slightly edited re-releases of previously released--well, you can supply your own epithet.

Saturday’s Child: A Prequel to Mystic Mansion

Synopsis

Edgar Allan Poe High School, Home of the Ravens, was a normal academic institution, populated by normal teenagers--or was it? Once the new principal took over, things quickly went from normal to bizarre, and Crystal Fall’s and her friends’ lives were in danger. But the teens had a secret ally: God was on their side! For readers who've graduated from R. L. Stine but aren't quite ready for Stephen King, this novel and its sequel, Mystic Mansion, are perfect reads!

For more, visit Saturday's Child

Sample

Prologue

Amy Black nodded. Her head dropped, and she woke with a start. Mr. O’Brien was droning on, something about a bare body or a bear named Bodkin or some other such Shakespearean nonsense. Why couldn’t Shakespeare have written his plays in English? she thought drowsily.

She closed her eyes.

Her head fell forward again, and she saw the gun--

It was there, in her locker, under her gym bag.

She reached in, took the cold hard steel in her hand.

Him! That jerk!

She watched him enter the boys’ rest room. Her legs carried her down the hallway, and she pushed the door open.

He was at one of the sinks, washing his hands. He turned, saw her, his mouth and eyes wide with surprise.

“What are you doing in here?” he demanded.

He was always demanding something.

“Can’t you let me have even a moment’s privacy? Do you have to--”

There was a sound of thunder, a flash of lightning, and the gun kicked hard in her hand.

Somewhere, someone was screaming.

She sat bolt upright in her chair, barely able to distinguish her dream from the commotion around her and the ringing bell.

The other kids were gathering their books. They left their seats and hastened toward the door, toward a few minutes of freedom, toward a five-minute rendezvous with their friends. Mr. O’Brien called after them, reminding them of their homework. Amy grabbed her book, too, stuffed it into her book bag, and strode from the classroom, the deafening sound of the gunshot still in her ears.

In the hallway, outside Mr. O’Brien’s English Lit class, Amy paused to lean against the wall. She was breathing fast. She was shaking, and she felt faint. The dream, the vision, the hallucination, whatever it was--it had been so vivid, so real! And this was the third time in two weeks that she had had the nightmarish vision.

Why did she keep seeing herself shooting Ed Warner?

She may not love him, exactly, not anymore. But she still had some feelings for him. Certainly, she didn’t hate him. And, most definitely, she did not want to hurt him, least of all to see him dead. After all, he was her boyfriend, for the time being, anyway.

Sure, sometimes Ed could be a little too pushy--all right, a lot too pushy, demanding even, but, hey, that wasn’t any reason to have such violent fantasies.

Maybe I need help, Amy thought. Maybe I’m going crazy.

The thought frightened her. What would Ms. Martin, the counselor, do if Amy dared to confide in her about her “dreams”? Call the cops? Have her arrested? Or put her into a mental institution? Amy shuddered, feeling even weaker. She couldn’t bear being torn from her home, from school, from her parents and friends, and she didn’t think that the understanding Ms. Martin would, in fact, be all that understanding. Maybe no one would, not doctors or her mom and dad or even her friends. She didn’t understand it herself. How could anyone else?

No, Amy decided, she couldn’t risk telling anybody about these strange hallucinations. She would just endure them and maybe, eventually, they would no longer plague her.

She bent over the water fountain and drank deeply of the ice-cold water. Her head hurt. There was a dull ache behind her eyes that threatened to explode at any moment.

“Hi, Amy!”

She straightened, forcing a tight smile.

Her friend, Dee Dee Dawkins, looked at her, an expression of concern on her face. “Are you all right?” Dee Dee inquired.

“Not bad for a Monday,” Amy lied. “Just a little headache.”

“Yeah,” Dee Dee replied, with a giggle. “A headache by the name of Ed Warner.”

Amy gasped.

Dee Dee’s eyebrows lifted. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Sure,” Amy said.

She didn’t sound too convincing, Dee Dee thought. Then Dee Dee said, “Duh!” and smacked herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand. “It’s because you’re breaking up with him today, right?”

Amy smiled. This time, the smile looked more genuine. “Well, maybe not today, not with this headache,” she said, “but soon.”

“I’m glad,” Dee Dee said.

Amy arched an eyebrow, looking pointedly at her friend.

“Well, I am,” Dee Dee insisted. “He’s become such a jerk!”

The girls came to a junction in the hallway. “See you at lunch,” Dee Dee said.

“See you at lunch,” Amy repeated mechanically, her thoughts elsewhere.

Dee Dee, looking at her friend as Amy walked slowly down the other hall, shook her head. “Boys!” she said, exasperated.

Amy thought about lunch, about Dee Dee, about the test coming up in Biology, about what a mess her room was and how she’d promised her mom she’d clean it up after school, about the new teen club that she and her friends were considering visiting tonight--about anything and everything she could think about to keep her mind off Ed Warner and the awful visions she had had of the smoking gun in her hand and his lifeless body on the bloody rest room floor.

For more, visit Saturday's Child

Anthology Ideas

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

There are probably as many ways to come up with an anthology idea as there are editors who come up with anthology ideas. In the brief head notes to his stories in his own anthology of twice-told tales, The Collection, Bentley Little mentions a few of them. For any who imagined that the innards of the publishing industry are as confused and messy as those of a dissected high school biology class frog, his comments on the matter suggest that such cynics are pretty much right on the money.

The ecology movement gave rise to the notion for one anthology: The Earth Strikes Back was to be a collection of tales concerning “the negative effects of pollution, overpopulation, and deforestation” upon the planet, or so Little supposed, at least, “judging by the title of the book.”

Another anthology, Cold Blood, was also to be centered on a “theme” and its stories were to have been written to “specific guidelines.”

A third anthology was to have included “stories based on titles the editor provided,” all of which “were. . . clichéd horror images.” This one, Little says, “never came to pass.”

According to Stephanie Bond, author of “Much Ado About Anthologies,” these collections “are assembled in various ways,” sometimes as the result of a group proposal by several authors, sometimes at the suggestion of an editor, sometimes as a way to test the marketability of an idea, and sometimes to capitalize upon a specific author’s unusual success. Usually, they come together because “editors formulate ideas for anthologies to fill holes they perceive in the market.”

I submitted a story for an anthology myself. It (the anthology, but my story also) concerned animals. My story was accepted, but I declined the invitation, because it was to have appeared in an electronic magazine and the editor wanted to pay via PayPal. I prefer payments by check, the old-fashioned way.

Anthologies have a common theme, of course, provided by a timely or evergreen topic, a holiday, an intriguing situation, or any other reasonably good excuse for a score or more (or fewer) stories by the same or different authors of the same genre.

Horror movies have also gone the anthology route. Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye and Creepshow are only two among many. Most follow the simple convention of sandwiching three of four short movies between an opening prologue that sets up the theme to be followed and an epilogue that rounds out the series and provides an appropriate sense of closure.

Verizon’s Version of Horror: The Dead Zone Advertisements

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Advertisers are a creative bunch. They use all sorts of persons, places, and things to sell us everything from aardvarks to zoo trips. Well, maybe not aardvarks. Not yet, anyway. More-or-less captured audiences hate most “commercial breaks,” although they are somewhat fond of a select few “messages from our sponsors.” One commercial that is apt to be tolerable, if not actually fun, for horror fans is Verizon’s latest series of advertisements that feature areas of poor or non-existent cellular telephone transmission and reception, known, in the commercials, as “dead zones.”

In one such ad, as a man heads from his apartment to the laundry room in his building, basket in hand, walking along a dimly lit hallway, a pair of young boys, dressed in nineteenth-century-style suits, speak in an eerie monotone: “Hey, mister, are you going to the laundry room?"

Looking hesitant, he replies, "I was."

The boys then say, "It’s a dead zone. Reception is terrible."

The man replies, “I have the Verizon network,” whereupon a host of the company’s employees appears behind the man, one assuring their customer, “You’re good.”

The boys exchange an uneasy look before turning, they walk away, down the corridor.

The text, “Don’t Be Afraid of DEAD ZONES” appears over the backs of the retreating boys.

The scene is reminiscent of The Shining, and its use of the phrase “dead zone” recalls another of Stephen King’s novels, The Dead Zone.

The host of Verizon company’s employees plays on the idea of there being safety in numbers. Their service neutralizes the threat of “dead zones.” Who wouldn’t want such heroes around in such a threatening environment?

A number of similar ads, using horror themes or allusions to horror movies, appear as installments in the series. A family moves into a creepy neighborhood, only to be warned by their neighbor (a woman who looks as if she’s just stepped out of her coffin) that they’ve moved into a “dead zone.” The last occupants of their new house, she warns them, “went crazy trying to find a signal there.” The Verizon team appears, and she looks frightened. All she can warn them against, now, is the crabgrass growing in their yard.

The ads are designed, it seems, to resemble theatrical trailers, which certainly gets television viewers’ interest, especially if such audience members also happen to enjoy horror movies.

Sex, it has long been established, sells. So, apparently, does horror.

Kudos to a company for creating ads that are both eerie and enjoyable.

Contemporary Horror Fiction Bookshelf

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In other posts, we have dropped the names of several of the horror genre’s greatest authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and H. P. Lovecraft. In addition, in his 10-part series concerning “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft himself lists many additional big names among the masters of the genre. What’s missing is a roster of the names of horror fiction’s contemporary masters. This post fills this gap on the horror fiction bookshelf by naming the names of many of those who are missing in action, so to speak.

A word or two of explanation is in order, though, for those who are new to this type of reading. First, contemporary horror fiction tends, more so, in many cases, than its predecessors, to mix various other genres with its own, so that science fiction, fantasy, detective, adventure, folklore, myth, legend, and even romance and Western elements become part and parcel of the bogeyman stories. That’s quite a literary stew, but anyone who follows any literary genre long enough will find that, along the way, whatever path it takes, it will include, from time to time, not only elements from other types of fiction, but also a good many themes and topics from such academic disciplines as theology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, geography, geology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, botany, zoology, astronomy, history, art, and a host of others. Fiction’s value lies, largely, in fact, in its capacity to impinge upon all these territories, bringing together in dramatic or narrative form, the whole experience of humanity. Horror fiction is no exception. For this reason, expect to find, in the works of the authors whose works belong to the contemporary horror fiction bookshelf many of these other literary genres and academic disciplines. Second, even a list of contemporary horror fiction won’t likely to be exhaustive. This one certainly won’t be. Rather, it offers a roster of many of the names of writers who are writing today whose names would show up on almost anyone’s list of such authors. Once one becomes a fan of horror fiction, he or she will no doubt find additional writers to add to his or her own contemporary horror fiction bookshelf. The names in this post are a start, and a good and reliable one at that. (The works listed are novels; short stories, although, in some cases, they are numerous, are not included in the list.) As with all writers, some of their works are better than others; I have indicated the ones I found to be superior in red font.

Stephen King: Bag of Bones, Black House, Blaze (written as Richard Bachman), Carrie, Cell, Christine, The Colorado Kid (detective, rather than horror), Cujo, Cycle of the Werewolf (illustrated), The Dark Half, The Dark Tower series (seven novels), The Dead Zone, Desperation (companion novel to The Regulators), Dolores Claiborne, Dreamcatcher, Duma Key, The Eyes of the Dragon, Firestarter, From a Buick 8, Gerald’s Game, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Green Mile, Insomnia, It, Lisey’s Story, The Long Walk, Misery, Needful Things, Pet Semetary, The Plant, Rage, The Regulators (companion novel to Desperation), Roadwork (written as Richard Bachman), Rose Madder, The Running Man (written as Richard Bachman), ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Talisman (written with Peter Straub), Thinner (written as Richard Bachman), Tommyknockers. (King’s official website).

Dean Koontz: Odd Hours, The Good Guy, Brother Odd, The Husband, Forever Odd, Frankenstein (three-book series; two have been written to date), Velocity, Life Expectancy, The Taking, Odd Thomas, The Face, By the Light of the Moon, One Door Away from Heaven, From the Corner of His Eye, False Memory, Seize the Night, Fear Nothing, Sole Survivor, Tick Tock, Intensity, Icebound, Strange Highways, Dark Rivers of the Heart, Winter Moon, Mr. Murder, Hideaway, Cold Fire, The Servants of Twilight, Shadowfires, The Bad Place, Midnight, Lightning, Watchers, Twilight Eyes, The Mask, Whispers, The Funhouse, The Voice of Night, The Key to Midnight, The Vision, Face of Fear, Night Chills, Invasion, Dragonfly. (Koontz has also written a number of science fiction novels, the genre with which he started his career. He wrote some of these novels and others under various pen names: David Axton, Brian Coffey, Deanna Dwyer, K. R. Dwyer, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Anthony North, Richard Paige, Owen West, Aaron Wolfe, and Leonard Chris. Although Koontz denies it, some researchers contend that, much to his current regret and dismay, under the Leonard Chris pen name, Koontz wrote a 1970 erotic potboiler, Hung, and, according to Stu Weaver, Koontz may also have written “13 other erotica titles under as many as 5 other pseudonyms.”). Koontz and his dog Trixie maintain a website.

Bentley Little: The Academy, The Vanishing, The Burning, Dispatch, The Resort, The Policy, The Return, The Association, The Walking, The Town, The Ignored, The House, The Store, Dominion, University, The Summoning, Death Instinct (written as Phillip Emmons), The Mailman, The Revelation. Little does not maintain a website.

Robert McCammon: The Queen of Bedlam, Speaks the Nightbird, Gone South, Boy’s Life, Blue World, MINE, The Wolf’s Hour, Stinger, Swan Song, Usher’s Passing, Mystery Walk, They Thirst, The Night Boat, Bethany’s Sin, Baal. (McCammon’s official website is robertmccammon.com).

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child: Relic, Reliquary, Cabinet of Curiosities, Still Life with Crows, Brimstone, Dance of Death, Book of the Dead, Wheel of Darkness, Mount Dragon, Riptide, Thunderhead, The Ice Limit. (Both Preston and Child have also written both novels and non-fiction separately, under their own individual bylines--Child has written Death Match and Deep Storm; Preston has written Monster of Florence, Blasphemy, Tyrannosaur Canyon, The Codex, Cities of Gold, Ribbons of Time, The Royal Road, Jennie, and Dinosaurs in the Attic). The authors maintain a joint website, located at Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child).

James Rollins: Amazonia, Deep Fathom, Excavation, Subterranean, Ice Hunt, Sandstorm, Map of Bones, Black Order, The Last Oracle. (Rollins maintains a website at jamesrollins.com).

Dan Simmons: Carrion Comfort, Song of Kali, Summer of Night, Children of the Night, Fires of Eden, A Winter’s Haunting. (Simmons, who also writes science fiction, thrillers, and mainstream novels, maintains an official website at dansimmons.com).

A Dictionary of the Paranormal, the Supernatural, and the Otherworldly (J - L)

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

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

J

Joan of Arc (or, possibly, Leelee Sobrieski)

Joan of Arc--a Roman Catholic saint, formerly burned by the church as a heretic, who successfully led the French army against the English invaders and the Burgundian rebels to enthrone King Charles IV (the author).

Juggernaut--originally, an embodiment of the Hindu god Vishnu; now, any unstoppable force (the author).

Jung, Carl--a psychoanalyst and a one-time follower of Sigmund Freud; Jung developed the theory of a racial, or “collective unconscious” in which archetypes are stored (the author).

K

Kabbalah--A body of mystical teachings of rabbinical origin, often based on an esoteric interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures (American Heritage Dictionary).

Karma--in Hinduism and Buddhism, Hinduism and Buddhism, the effects of a person's actions that determine his destiny in his next incarnation.

Ketamine

Ketamine anesthetic--a dissociative anesthetic that may cause so-called near-death experiences (the author).

King, Stephen--a contemporary best-selling author of short stories, novels, and screenplays in the horror genre. He has also written non-fiction articles and books.

Kirlian photography--the photographing of objects which exhibit a halo, or aura, effect as a result of the images created on a photographic plate due to high-voltage electric fields, pressures, moisture, and other natural conditions (the author; The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

L

Lamarckian evolution--“A theory of biological evolution holding that species evolve by the inheritance of traits acquired or modified through the use or disuse of body parts” (“Lamarckism: Definition and Much More from Answers.com”).

Lamia--a monster capable of assuming a woman's form, who was said to devour human beings or suck their blood; a vampire; a sorceress; a witch.

Ley lines--“alignments of a number of places of geography interest, such as ancient megaliths” (Wikipedia).

Lie detector--a device that, by monitoring various physiological processes and conditions, such as blood pressure, heart rate, and muscle contractions, is said to be able to detect whether a person is telling the truth or lying; its results are not admissible as evidence in court proceedings and are controversial among scientists and other experts (the author).

Life after death (afterlife)--existence is some state that extends beyond the death of the physical body, as is a matter of faith in many religions (the author).

Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln, Abraham--16th president of the United States, whose term occurred during the American Civil War; Lincoln had a prophetic dream in which he foresaw his assassination, which followed several days later (the author)

Loch Ness monster--a sea-serpent-like animal, perhaps a plesiosaur, said to inhabit Scotland’s Loch Ness (the author).

Logical positivism--“a 20th century philosophical movement that holds characteristically that all meaningful statements are either analytic or conclusively verifiable or at least confirmable by observation and experiment and that metaphysical theories are therefore strictly meaningless —called also logical empiricism” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary).

Lucid dreaming--a dream during which the dreamer recognizes that he or she is asleep and dreaming and in which he or she may consciously interact with the dream images (the author).

Lycanthropy--in folklore, the magical ability of a person to assume the characteristics of a wolf; in medicine, a kind of erratic melancholy, in which the patient imagines himself a wolf, and imitates the actions of that animal.

Everyday Horrors: Castles and Hotels

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Gothic romance is a product of the European imagination and of the European landscape. Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) was one of the earliest novels to combine elements of horror with elements of literary romance. (The novel may be downloaded free from Project Gutenberg.) Other important Gothic romances include The History of the Caliph Vathek (1786) by William Beckford, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe, The Monk (1796) by Gregory Lewis, Wieland (1798) by Charles Brockden Brown, Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley, Melmouth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin, Carmilla (1872) by Sheridan le Fanu, Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker, and Gormenghast (1946-1959) by Mervyn Peake. Many of these books are set in gloomy castles in which supernatural incidents occur.

Occasionally, the castles in such novels are modeled upon, in part, at least, actual castles, and the one in Peake’s novels, Gormenghast, is comprised of a mixture of features from various actual castles as well as cities, mansions, and universities: its walls are like those of Normal castles and those of ancient Chinese cities, while the buildings resemble those of Gothic and Regency mansions and English country houses. The professors’ living quarters and the courtyards within Gormenghast are similar to those at Oxford and Cambridge.

Bran Castle (Dracula's Castle)

In other instances, the castles are based upon a single actual fortress. Frankenstein’s castle is modeled upon eighteenth-century Lord Konrad Dippel Von Frankenstein’s residence near the small village of Muhltal, not far from Darmstadt, Germany, and Dracula’s residence, is derived from Bran Castle (now a museum), which stands near Bran, Romania, on the Transylvania-Wallachia border.

Castle Frankenstein

Because of their antiquity, the privileged lives of the nobles who dwelled within their walls, the horrible punishments endured in their dungeons, their remote locations, and their vast, dark and dank interiors, many castles are said to be haunted, including, in England alone, Arundle Castle (Sussex), Bamburgh Castle (Northumberland), Berkeley Castle (Berkeley Gloucestershire), Berry Pomeroy Castle (Berry Pomeroy Devon), Bramber Castle (West Sussex), Castle Rising (Castle Rising, Norfolk), Chillingham Castle (Northumberland), Corby Castle (Cumbria), Corfe Castle (Wareham Dorset), Dacre Castle (Cumbria), Dunstanburgh Castle (Northumberland), Dunster Castle (Somerset), Featherstone Castle (Northumberland), Hever Castle (Kent), Lowther Castle (Cumbria), Morton Corbet Castle (Shropshire), Muncaster Castle (Cumbria), Okehampton Castle (Devon), Pevensey Castle (Sussex), Pontefract Castle (West Yorkshire), Raby Castle (County Durham), Tamworth Castle (Tamworth, Staffordshire), Tintagel Castle (Tintagel Cornwall), Tower of London, Warkworth Castle (Northumberland), and Windsor Castle (Berkshire). Castles in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and mainland Europe are also said to be haunted. For example, Windsor Castle, built by William the Conqueror to “guard the western approaches to the capital,” is believed to be haunted by several ghosts, among them Queen Elizabeth I, who favors the library and a boy’s ghost, who favors the chapel. The grounds and nearby forest are also rumored to be haunted, the former by a band of interlopers, the latter by King Richard II’s favorite huntsman, Herne the Hunter. Likewise, the Tower of London, which was also built by William the Conqueror, as were many other English castles, is reportedly haunted by the ghosts of Saint Thomas a Becket, the murdered sons of King Edward IV, Anne Boleyn, one of King Henry XIII’s wives, Catherine Howard, Sir Walter Raleigh, and many commoners who were tortured and executed in the Tower’s dungeons and torture chambers.

Oddly, the castles in the United States (yes, there are several, in addition to the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California) seem quiet and restful in comparison to their European counterparts.

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

The White House is said to be haunted, though, by no less illustrious a ghost than that of its former occupant, President Abraham Lincoln. In yet another example of our tax dollars at work, the official White House website shares videos in which staff members relate stories of their encounters with Lincoln’s ghost.

Stanley Hotel, Estes Park, Colorado

Despite the availability of American castles, Stephen King has preferred to locate some of his more contemporary ghost stories in hotels. The action of The Shining takes place in the Overlook Hotel, which is based upon the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. The movie 1408, based upon King’s short story of the same title, which appeared in Everything’s Eventual (2002) used exterior shots of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City to depict the exterior of the film’s Dolphin Hotel and shots of a London hotel’s lobby to depict the Dolphin Hotel‘s lobby, but the short story was inspired by stories of parapsychologist Christopher Chacon’s investigation of a supposedly haunted room in the famous San Diego, California, inn, Hotel Del Coronado. In America, where everyone’s a king or queen, hotels seem the logical--or, at least, the democratic--alternative to castles and manor houses for traveling or long-term guests of the ghostly variety.

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

Everyday Horrors: Plants

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Plants are our friends. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to breathe--or eat. Only they can convert carbon dioxide and water into chemical energy (sugars and starch) using ultraviolet energy (sunlight). Without them, all animal, including human, life would die. Actually, without them, there would be no life to live or die.

Plants themselves, in fact, are food. Their ripened ovaries are hard to beat when one craves a sweet and succulent treat. Plants are also the source of hundreds of products that we sometimes take for granted, but, without which, we wouldn’t live nearly as well as we’re accustomed to do: paper, lumber, fabrics, fuel, medicines, plastics, dyes, soaps, paints, shampoos, perfumes, and a host of others. Without plants, men wouldn’t be able to bribe women into forgiving them or put them in the mood for romance with the gift of a dozen roses or a bouquet of flowers, either, and, of course, gardens would be rather colorless affairs.

So, what’s so horrible about plants?

Like people, many are good eggs, but, to torture a metaphor, there are a few bad apples among them as well. In most cases, the horrible plants are poisonous. Some are horrible for other reasons, though.

Let’s start with the poisonous ones. According to Live Science, the “Top 10 Poisonous Plants,” in descending order, are:

10. Narcissus
9. Rhododendron
8. Ficus
7. Oleander
6. Chrysanthemum
5. Anthurium
4. Lily-of-the-valley
3. Hydrangea
2. Foxglove
1. Wisteria

In no particular order, for pets, these are the five deadliest plants:

• Azalea
• Castor bean plant
• Lily
• Oleander
• Sago palm

The stinging tree is an interesting plant. Indigenous to tropical rainforests, it has thick, hair-like structures on its leaves and stems that, when brushed against, deliver a painful sting. The tips of the leaves and stems penetrate the skin, in which they break off, releasing a poisonous irritant, the effect of which may last for months. There’s no antidote. However, stick insects, weevils, chrisom lid beetles, and even opossums enjoy the taste of them.

In horror fiction, plants can be dangerous--or even deadly--even when they’re not poisonous. In Dean Koontz’s The Taking, demons use a hellish fungus to help to prepare the earth for conquest. In Stephen King’s “The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verril” segment of Creepshow, an extraterrestrial fertilizer, delivered by the courtesy of a meteorite, causes an alien fungus to overrun everything--and everyone--in its past, Jordy Verril (played by King himself) included. In Seed People, alien seeds turn humans into zombies. The campy Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978) has mutated tomatoes turning into mad killers.

As “Man-eating Plants”points out out, no carnivorous plant is large enough to threaten humans. These plants’ largest victim, according to this article, was a rat that, dead, was found, partially digested, inside a pitcher plant. However, “Man-eating Plants” suggests that the legends of such plants as the one in Little Shop of Horrors might have been inspired by an actual plant, the Amorphophallus titanum, or corpse flower, which is definitely not recommended for milady’s (or yours) bridal bouquet:

Amorphophallus titanum, which is said to be the biggest, smelliest flower in the world, looks like something that could eat a human being. When it blooms it can reach at height over nine feet in height and smells like a mixture of rotting flesh and excrement. . . .

. . . Although the Amorphophallus titanum looks a lot like you would imagine a man-eating plant to look like, and it even smells like somebody is dead inside, it is not carnivorous.

As horrible as man-eating plants might be (were they to exist), intelligent plants might be even more appalling. For a long time, scientists maintained that animals are not able to reason, and philosophers have always excluded them from such abilities, defining humans alone as “thinking reeds” or res cogitans. If animals were to be denied anything more than sentience, plants certainly weren’t likely to be considered potential Nobel laureates any time soon.

However, this bias may be changing. If Professor Stefano Mancuso has anything to say about the issue, it may not be long before plants are his tenured colleagues. He operates the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology (LINV) near Florence, Italy, where he hopes to demonstrate that plants are not only intelligent, but are also capable of solving problems. According to Mancuso, “If you define intelligence as the capacity to solve problems, plants have a lot to teach us. Not only are they ‘smart’ in how they grow, adapt and thrive, [but] they [also] do it without neuroses. Intelligence isn't only about having a brain.”

According to “Smarty Plants: Inside the World’s Only Plant-Intelligence Lab,” the laboratory is exploring a variety of research topics: “In addition to studies on the effects of music on vineyards, the center's researchers have also published papers on gravity sensing, plant synapses and long-distance signal transmission in trees.”

Plants have been found to be able to distinguish between siblings and strangers, and, perhaps as xenophobic as people, among them, sap apparently is thicker than water. According to Live Science’s “Plants Recognize Siblings”: “Plants can recognize when they are potted with their siblings or with strangers. . . . When strangers share a pot, they develop a competitive streak, but siblings are more considerate of each other.”

In science fiction, plants have demonstrated intelligence for years. As far back as Dante and Virgil, humans dreamed of communing with greenery. However, the desirability of doing so, at least as far as William Hope Hodgson is concerned, might be questionable. In “The Lands of Lonesomeness” chapter of his novel, The Boats of Glen Caring, “evil trees are prone to wrap their branches round the unwary traveller,” and “human souls are somehow sucked into the trees and then beckon for more to join them.”

Intelligent plants also betray evil designs on humans in Murray Leinster’s “Proxima Centauri,” Clark Ashton Smith’s “Seedling of Mars,” and Raymond Z. Gallun’s “Seeds of the Dusk.” Bizarre, threatening plants also appear in H. G. Wells’ short story, “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.”

Until the discovery of the euglena, scientists believed that there was a hard and fast differences between plants and animals. The main difference was that the former could photosynthesize, while the latter could not. The discovery of the euglena changed this view. Like animals, they can move under their own power, by means of a flailing flagellum, engulf and ingest food using a “phagotrophic. . . apparatus,” “sense light using a red pigmented eyespot,” and change color to match their red or green environment. The euglena also has chloroplasts that enable it to do what only plants can do--photosynthesize. So is it a plant or an animal? Neither--and both. It’s a euglena!

Swamp Thing could be the lowly euglena, writ large. He’s a humanoid vegetable or, if one prefers, a vegetative humanoid, who lives in a swamp and, in the 1982 movie named for him, dated Adrienne Barbeau (a. k. a. Alice Cable).

There’s something else eerie about plants. They’re quiet. They loom. They seem to wait, if not to lurk. They appear to be biding their time, awaiting their chance. To do what? We don’t want to know. What may go on inside those leafy branches and green stems? We don’t even want to guess. Plants are so different from us that, in their majestic, grand silence and their seeming indifference to us, they seem, at times, as when the wind is in the treetops, to whisper of plans that may be not as cool and green and comforting as their stoic postures suggest they are.

If science fiction and horror stories featuring plant-monsters teach us anything worthwhile, it’s to listen to Mom and eat our vegetables--before they eat us!

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