Anaphoric Allusions

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Kenneth Burke

No matter how we parse it, evil comes from but two sources (internal or external) and consists of only two types (natural or supernatural). (It may be suggested that there is a third type of evil, namely, paranormal, but a little reflection makes it clear that, by definition, paranormal phenomena are also natural, rather than supernatural, incidents; when their effect is injurious or damaging, they are, from a human perspective, also evil.) Misery, it would seem, is not nearly as “manifold,” as Edgar Allan Poe’s “Berenice” would have us to believe.

In Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror, Dennis R. Perry reminds his readers that Kenneth Burke

. . . listed several sources of the sublime, including power (fear of a superior force), difficulty (extremely complex predicament), obscurity (darkness, fogginess, confusion producing a sense of isolation and helplessness), and privation (isolation, silence, solitude, darkness) (12).

(In reference to horror fiction, “sublime” may be defined as “awe-inspiring,” “astonishing,” or as producing a sense of the uncanny, which includes experiencing a sense of terror; think Rudolph Otto.)

Certainly, Burke’s analysis is insightful and useful to writers of horror fiction, and it seems to expand (although it does not, really) the categories of evil phenomena we listed earlier. Perhaps what Burke’s explanation accomplishes, more than anything, is to characterize the elements of the sublime, or, as we call them here, the types of evil phenomena.

Having suggested the sources, the types, and the character of evil phenomena, we now turn our attention to the ways by which writers of this genre of fiction can, through the use of a limited number of synonyms, reinforce and perhaps even heighten the horrific character of a monster. (There are many other, more sophisticated and subtle ways to accomplish this same objective, of course, such as the use of literary allusions, metaphors, similes, images, irony, and so forth, but, in this post, we concentrate on one of the simplest means of reinforcing and highlighting the character of the monster.)

There may be a few others, but, listed alphabetically, these are the synonyms that come most readily to the mind, perhaps, as means by which to refer to an antecedent term that represents a monster of some kind:

animal, beast, being, demon, entity, fiend, grotesque, imp, it, monster, predator, thing

To this list of basic synonyms may be added one or two more unusual, hyphenated compound adjectives: “hell-beast” and “hell-spawn.” Stephen King (and no doubt others) has created an interesting spin-off, as it were, on the use of such compounds, the first part of which is comprised of the character’s name and the second part of which is made up of the noun “thing,” introducing the compound itself with the definite article “the.” Having forgotten King’s character, “Gary” is hereby substituted, by way of illustrating King’s technique: “the Gary-thing.”

Alfred Hitchcock

Although short, our list gives us simple, but effective, ways to smuggle in associations between our monster, whatever it is, and the fierce or bestial attributes of various other entities, thereby extending, in shorthand fashion, the ongoing sense of the monster’s monstrosity. Of course, some synonyms will be more appropriate to the type of monster stalking our story’s protagonist (and, vicariously, our reader as well) than others would be, and the author should give due consideration to the suitability and aptness of potential synonyms.

For example, if the monster is a natural force, “it” would be fitting, whereas “being” or “entity” would not be suitable, as a synonym. However, if the force were also sentient or intelligent, perhaps “being” or “entity” could be appropriate as a synonym for the monster. Paradoxically, “it” or “thing” might be appropriate even for a human being, suggesting that the person has devolved or otherwise been dehumanized and is more a monster, now, than the man or woman that he or she once was.

Edgar Allan Poe

It helps, too, to have described the monster in terms of the characteristics of the creature to which it will later be related before using a synonym to refer back to the monster thus described. For example, if, later in a sentence, paragraph, chapter, or book, an author uses the word “animal” or “beast” to refer to a monster that he or she has previously described, the effectiveness of the use of such a synonym is heightened if, when the monster was first described, it was characterized as having “sharp teeth,” “fangs,” “claws,” “talons,” “scales,” “wings,” and so forth, for the subsequent allusion to it as an “animal” or a “beast” will then be sufficient to recall to the reader these characteristics of the monster.

The use of nouns and adjectives to refer back to a monster that has been previously introduced and described may seem a slight matter, but, in the final analysis, a writer’s style, which consists, in large part, of his or her deliberate choice of this word or phrase over that, is what separates an author like Edgar Allan Poe from a lesser writer--or, as Mark Twain put it, lightning from the lightning bug, and horror, like all other genres of fiction, is built of words and the choices authors make in using them.

Source

Perry, Dennis. Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2003. Print.

Imagining Hell

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

The Christian Hell is named for the Norse goddess who ruled the Aesir’s underworld, Hel. The ancient Israelites did not have a hell in the sense that their underworld, Sheol, was a place of eternal punishment. Sheol was much more like the ancient Greeks’ Hades or, for that matter, the Norsemen’s Hel, a place of shadowy existence wherein ghostly “shades” went about the business of postmortem existence. Dante imagined his own hell, in The Inferno, and, for the atheistic French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, hell was “other people.” Perhaps the closest place to hell in the modern world is prison--or, possibly, Detroit, Michigan. (Michael Moore would have us think hell on earth is neighboring Flint.)

Hell is the garbage dump of eternity. It’s a cosmic prison. It’s the place of “wailing” and the “gnashing of teeth,” wherein the “fire is not quenched” and the “worm dieth not.” It’s the place that Mark Twain would go for “company,” preferring heaven for its “scenery.” For some, hell is a state of mind or a state of the soul, the opposite of the “kingdom of heaven,” which Jesus said “is within you.”

If anyone should be able to imagine hell, it is the writer of horror fiction. How to begin such a--well, hellish--task? Picture the condemned, which is to say, the types of individuals whose lifestyles or behaviors seem to warrant condemnation, banishment, and/or punishment, not just for a day, but for all eternity. Characterize them. What are the attributes of their personalities? What attitudes do they express? What do they believe? What do they imagine? What do they fear? What hopes, if any, do they have? What do they love, better than God or mankind--in other words, what idol do they worship? What is their besetting sin, and what lesser, but related, sins are associated with it, and why? What do they do all day?

Having imagined the denizens of your hell, picture the lay of the land, or “scenery,” that would be appropriate for such residents. Are there mountains and valleys, molten seas, volcanoes in endless eruption, frozen wastelands, deserts, underworlds within--or below--underworlds? Is your hell multileveled like Dante’s Inferno? Perhaps your hell is unlike anything familiar to mortal men and women, something like, but unlike, the mystical worlds of Marvel Comics’ Dr. Strange?

When you’ve finished peopling and landscaping your inferno, ask yourself what symbolic significance the landscape’s features have. In doing so, you might ask yourself what the images of the Christian hell represent figuratively. What is the symbolic significance of the “fire [that] is not quenched” and the “worm [that] dieth not”? Apply the same process of analysis and interpretation to the images of your own hell.

Remember this, too: now that you’ve gone to all the time and trouble of imagining a hell of your own, your stories may sometimes take place in this infernal abode, or its residents may occasionally escape and visit the world of humanity. Angels, by definition, are, after all, messengers of God, and, in the Bible, even “fallen angels,“ or demons, do sometimes visit--and afflict--ordinary men and women and, if The Exorcist is any guide to infernal behavior, children, too. Their chief, Satan, had the audacity to tempt even Christ! What “message” might one of your accursed bring to one or more of your story’s characters?

In another application of your hell, the residents may be seen as “inner,” rather than as outer demons--as psychological defects and disorders, or diseased elements of the soul, with lives of their own, so to speak, along the lines of BTK’s “Factor X” or Ted Bundy’s “entity.” Of course, they may also be both inner and outer demons, as any particular story’s plot dictates. By imagining a hell of your own, you will be more apt to put your own spin on the action you narrate, making an original contribution, perhaps, to the iconography of the damned and offer a few new insights into the hellish behavior of the demonic soul.

For those who are interested in more information about hell, “Hell in the Old Testament” offers quite a bit.

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.

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).

The Rhetoric of Emotion

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In one of his novels, Mark Twain, at the outset, swears off the use of weather to indicate or symbolize his characters’ emotional states, referring those who feel a need for such effects to the appendix of weather conditions descriptions he’s added for this purpose. As always, Twain wrote this notice with tongue firmly planted in cheek. However, his irony does call attention to screenplays’ dependency upon this cliché to accomplish the same effects as the writers in (and well before) Twain’s time--namely, to represent characters’ feelings. Seldom seen is the horror film that doesn’t feature, along with its creature, at least one terrific thunderstorm to make viewers tremble, and lightning remains the primary means, perhaps, by which revelation is indicated.

 

However, there are other, more subtle, ways by which to indicate terror and its fellow feelings. One is to use an emotive character. He (or, more often, she) will be not only sensitive and reactive but also very emotional. She will scream at the sight of a shadow, weep at the death of a fly, shriek at a drop of anything that even resembles blood, and gasp at the sudden appearance of anything from a moth or a bat to a ghost or a vampire. By keeping the reader apprised of this character’s emotional responses, the writer suggests that the reader should feel the same way about whatever has seized her attention at any given moment as she is said to feel.

There is no music in books. The best they can do is mention that there is music playing and maybe list the lyrics to a song, real or imagined (make the song fictitious to avoid copyright infringements!). Therefore, the use of melodies to suggest sorrow, joy, and all the sentiments and passions between these two extremes is impossible for the writer of fiction that depends upon the page rather than the screen for its display. The writer of fiction that appears upon the printed page must adopt subtler and more difficult tactics.

 

Symbolism is used. Metaphor is employed, and simile. Allusion is used. Description is employed. Juxtaposition is used. Contrast is employed, and comparison. Parallelism is trotted out. Ambiguity is unleashed. Readers are shown, rather than told, although, at times, they are told as well. Repetition is employed. Irony is made to strut the page. It is rhetoric to the rescue in service of the portrayal of perception, interpretation, and emotion. Anyone who wants to depict emotion in fiction, whether on the screen or on the page (but especially on the page) must master these rhetoric techniques. To start, one is well advised to know the meanings of these terms, which is the purpose of this post:

• Symbol = “any object, typically material, which is meant to represent another.”
• Metaphor = “The use of a word or phrase to refer to something that it isn’t, implying a similarity between the word or phrase used and the thing described, and without the words ‘like’ or ‘as.’”
• Simile = “a figure of speech in which one thing is compared to another, generally using like or as.” Allusion = “Indirect reference; a hint; a reference to something supposed to be known, but not explicitly mentioned; a covert indication.”
• Description = Concrete illustration of a person, place, or thing by an appeal to one or more of the five physical senses.
• Juxtaposition = “A placing or being placed in nearness or contiguity, or side by side, often done in order to compare/contrast the two, to show similarities or differences.”
• Contrast = difference.
• Comparison = similarity
• Parallelism = “agreement or similarity; resemblance; correspondence; analogy; likeness.”
• Ambiguity = “something liable to more than one interpretation, explanation or meaning, if that meaning etc cannot be determined from its context.”
• Repetition = “the act or an instance of repeating or being repeated.”
• Irony = “a statement that, when taken in context, may actually mean the opposite of what is written literally; the use of words expressing something other than their literal intention.”

Note: Except for the definitions of “contrast,” “similarity,” and “description,” these definitions are taken from Allwords.com, an “English Dictionary - With Multi-Lingual Search”

Of course, it is one thing to know the meanings of words; it is another thing entirely to learn to master the concepts to which they point. A dictionary cannot teach us to do that. To learn the techniques, we must apprentice ourselves to the masters and learn from observing them at work. For example, to learn to use symbolism effectively, we might study the works of Stephen Crane, Jonathan Swift, and Mark Twain. Ambiguity might be best learned from the example of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Proverbs can teach more than morality; Proverbs can also teach us how to employ parallelism, both complementary and antithetical. Poe is a master of symbolism, too, but he is also gifted in the art of juxtaposition and repetition. There are many masters from which to learn. We have already learned a preliminary lesson, however: a knowledge of the meaning of words is merely a beginning. To become adepts, we must become students of the adept.

Thinking of Seeing "The Happening"? Save Your Money

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Okay.

Someone has to say it.

(Actually, quite a few people--critics and moviegoers alike--have said it, and more are saying it every day.)

Still, I feel compelled to say it, too:

The Happening (2008) is horrible (and not in a good way).

Note to director Shyamalan (or is that Shambling?): The use of your middle name (“Night’) in lieu of your first name is not enough to make a movie scary. You need a plot. And characters. And a little atmosphere. And some scary scenes. And a worthwhile theme.

The Happening has none of these basic elements of the successful horror movie. Instead, it is a simple-minded, self-parodying example of how not to make a scary movie.

The movie begins with random acts of violence: in Central Park, people start clawing at themselves, and one young woman--a blonde, naturally--uses a screwdriver or something to poke a hole through the side of her neck and let a little blood out of her jugular vein; construction workers jump off the roof of a high-rise they’re building; individuals use a police officer’s revolver to shoot themselves (suicide by cop). Supposedly, it’s a terrorist attack on the Big Apple, but it’s really plants.

Psychic plants.

Or something worse (i. e., even stinkier).

The protagonist, a high school science teacher, escapes with his wife (she admits to two-timing him by having dessert with a coworker without clearing it with hubby ahead of time), the math teacher, and the math teacher’s cute-as-a-button-I’m-only-in-this-putrid-movie-to-help-wrench-your-heart little girl, after surmising that whatever the hell is going on is going on only in the northeastern corner of the United States. Ninety miles away, all is well.

Every time the plants conspire (telepathically?), the wind blows, and it’s kind of cool to watch the grass run and the trees writhe, but it’s not scary. What’s scary about the wind blowing, even hard, through a field of treetops? Not much.

At the end, after being trapped inside a woman’s house, the surviving science teacher, his almost-unfaithful, will-do-anything-for-dessert wife, and their math teacher’s daughter (the math teacher is one of the early victims of the plants’ attack) go outdoors to discover that the vegetation is no longer mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

However, it’s France’s turn next, apparently.

Adjectives that come to mind in describing The Happening:

• Amateurish
• Banal
• Boring
• Clumsy
• Derivative
• Loser!
• Stupid
• Uninteresting
• Unoriginal

--and those are the kinder ones.

Worst scene in the whole movie? The science teacher trying to apologize to a plant. (The fact that it turns out to be plastic was supposed to make this lame scene irresistibly funny instead of just plain stupid [but it didn't]). Discounting these problems, one might conclude, as Mark Twain did concerning "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," what remains is "pure art."

About the only good thing about The Happening is that it's so bad that it may forestall future politically correct diatribes about how we're ruining the environment.

Not recommended, even for a matinee.

Masters of the Macabre

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Genre fiction focuses upon the conveyance of one emotion. For science fiction, according to C. S. Lewis, the emotion is wonder, whereas, Edgar Allan Poe implies, horror fiction, as the genre’s name suggests, evokes horror. Why readers would want to be frightened out of their wits is taken up in another post, “Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear.” Other genres inspire other emotions, but this post is concerned simply with naming names--that is, with identifying authors who have written works of horror fiction. Many mined the mother lode of horror; others panned for the gold only once or twice. In every respect, though, each of the authors listed has written at least one satisfying poem, short story, novel, play, or motion picture that delves into fear, and, in this regard, may be considered a master of the macabre. When a writer has written many works in the genre, only his or her name is listed; when the author has written only one or two instances of the fiction of fear (or a truly seminal work* in the field), the title of the work is also listed. Some of the names on our roster are likely to surprise those for whom horror fiction is not one’s daily bread. We thought of listing the names chronologically, by sex, by the stature of the author’s literary reputation, by the volume of works that he or she wrote in the horror genre, and in various other ways, but decided, at last, upon an alphabetical listing.

• Adam, Richard, The Girl in a Swing
• Andrews, V. C.
• Anson, Jay, The Amityville Horror
• Barker, Clive
• Beaumont, Charles
• Benchley, Peter, Jaws
• Bierce, Ambrose
• Blackwood, Algernon

William Peter Blatty

• Blatty, William Peter, The Exorcist (seminal)
• Bloch, Robert, Psycho (seminal)

Robert Bloch

• Bradbury, Ray, Something Wicked This Way Comes
• Brandner, Gary, The Howling
• Brite, Poppy Z.
• Browning, Robert
• Campbell, Ramsey
• Clark, Mary Higgins
• Clegg, Douglas
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel (seminal)
• Dante, Alighieri, The Inferno
• De Felitta, Frank, Audrey Rose
• Dickens, Charles, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, “The Signalman”
• Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
• Du Maurier, Daphne, The Birds (seminal)
• Duncan, Lois, I Know What You Did Last Summer
• Eddy, Jr., C. M.
• Ehrlich, Max, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud
• Faulkner, William, “A Rose for Emily”
• Farris, John
• Finney, Jack, Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• Fowles, John, The Collector
• Gilbert, Stephen
• Golding, William, Lord of the Flies

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Hawthorne, Nathaniel (seminal)
• Irving, Washington, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
• Jackson, Shirley, The Haunting of Hill House (seminal), “The Lottery”
• Jacobs, W. W., “The Monkey’s Paw”
• James, Henry, “The Turn of the Screw”
• James, M. R.
• Kafka, Franz, The Metamorphosis
• Keene, Brian

Stephen King

• King, Stephen (seminal)
• Koontz, Dean (seminal)
• Laimo, Michael
• Le Fanu, Sheridan
• Levin, Ira, Rosemary’s Baby (seminal)
• Ligotti, Thomas
• Little, Bentley
• Lovecraft, H. P. (seminal)
• Machen, Arthur
• Marasco, Robert, Burnt Offerings
• Matheson, Richard
• McCammon, Robert
• Milton, John, Paradise Lost
• Oates, Joyce Carol

Flannery O'Connor

• O’Connor, Flannery (seminal)
• Onion, Oliver, “The Beckoning Fair One”
• Peck, Richard, Are You Alone in the House?
• Peretti, Frank E. (seminal)
• Perkins, Charlotte, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
• Pike, Christopher

Edgar Allan Poe

• Poe, Edgar Allan, Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque (seminal)
• Polidori, John William, The Vampyre
• Preston, Douglas and Lincoln Child
• Price, E. Hoffman
• Quinn, Seabury
• Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho
• Rice, Anne
• Rollins, James
• Saul, John
• Shakespeare, William, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet (seminal)
• Shan, Darren

Mary Shelley

• Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (seminal)
• Simmons, Dan
• Smith, Clark Ashton

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (seminal)
• Stine, R. L.

Bram Stoker

• Stoker, Bram, Dracula (seminal)
• Straub, Peter
• Tem, Steve and Melanie
• Tryon, Thomas
• Twain, Mark, “A Ghost Story” (seminal)
• Van Vogt, A. E., “The Black Destroyer”
• Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Faust
• Wakefield, H. Russell
• Wallace, Edgar, King Kong (seminal)
• Walpole, Horace, The Castle or Otranto (seminal)

H. G. Wells

• Wells, H. G. (seminal)
• Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (seminal)
• Wilson, Colin
• Wordsworth, William, the “Lucy” poems
• Wyndham, John, The Village of the Damned (seminal)

* Although what one considers to be a "seminal work" is apt to be controversial, the term as it is used in this post is attributed to literary works that have had a lasting importance upon the horror genre or that proved innovative in having established a new direction for succeeding works in the same genre or in expanding its subject matter.

A Dictionary of the Paranormal, the Supernatural, and the Otherworldly (S - U)

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

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

S

St. Elmo’s Fire--A visible electric discharge on a pointed object, such as the mast of a ship or the wing of an airplane, during an electrical storm. Also called corposant (Answers.com).

Saladin balloon--a government balloon that “shot up” into the sky with a passenger, Walter Powell, on board, becoming lost in the vicinity of a UFO (The Charles Fort Files).

Satan--in Judeo-Christian religion, the chief spirit of evil and adversary of God; tempter of mankind; master of Hell.

Satanic ritual abuse--“alleged systematic abuse of children by Satanists” (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Satanism--the worship of devils (especially Satan).

Satyr--one of a class of woodland deities; attendant on Bacchus; identified with Roman fauns.

Scapulimancy-- “a decision procedure used by the Naskapi Indians whereby the shoulder of a caribou is held over hot coals causing cracks in the bone which are then used to direct a hunting party” (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Scientism--“the self-annihilating view that only scientific claims are meaningful, which is not a scientific claim and hence, if true, not meaningful. Thus, scientism is either false or meaningless” (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Scientology--“the religion that was initially established as a secular philosophy in 1952 by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard” (Wikipedia). Actors Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and Karen Black and singer-actress Brandy Norwood are among its netter-known members, according to Famous Scientologists (Church of Scientology).

Scrying--“a type of divination” in which one seeks “to scry or descry is to spy out or discover by the eye objects at a distance”; crystal ball gazing is an example (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Sea serpents--monsters reported by sailors to inhabit the sea, some of which may have been kraken or other natural creatures that were unfamiliar to those who sighted them; Beowulf claims to have fought and killed many of them during a swimming contest against Breca (the author).

Séance--a meeting of spiritualists; "the séance was held in the medium's parlor."

Shamanism--any animistic religion similar to Asian shamanism especially as practiced by certain Native American tribes; an animistic religion of northern Asia having the belief that the mediation between the visible and the spirit worlds is effected by shamans.

Simulacra--A likeness; a semblance; a mock appearance; a sham.

Shelley, Mary--author of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus; wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley Sleep paralysis--“Sleep paralysis is a condition that occurs in the state just before dropping off to sleep (the hypnagogic state) or just before fully awakening from sleep (the hypnopompic state). The condition is characterized by being unable to move or speak. It is often associated with a feeling that there is some sort of presence, a feeling which often arouses fear but is also accompanied by an inability to cry out. The paralysis may last only a few seconds. The experience may involve visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations.” (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Soul--the immaterial part of a person; the actuating cause of an individual life.

Sorcery--the belief in magical spells that harness occult forces or evil spirits to produce unnatural effects in the world.

Spontaneous human combustion--the reported bursting into flame, possibly from an internal, but unknown cause, so that the body or part thereof is consumed by intense heat that does not destroy nearby objects, such as the chair in which the person is seated or other objects in near proximity to the body (the author).

Spirit guide--the spirit of a dead person or a supernatural entity that mediums claim to channel, during séances, automatic writing sessions, or at other times, and who often reveals occult information to the medium and otherwise offers guidance concerning various topics, personal and otherwise (the author).

Spirit photograph--the alleged production of images on photographic media by paranormal means such as psychokinesis or of paranormal phenomena such as ghosts or astral bodies (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Subliminal--below the threshold of conscious perception. Superstition--an irrational belief arising from ignorance or fear.

Stigmata--marks resembling the wounds on the crucified body of Christ.

Stonehenge

Stonehenge--an assemblage of upright stones with others placed horizontally on their tops, on Salisbury Plain, England,-- generally supposed to be the remains of an ancient Druidical temple.

Synchronicity--the relation that exists when things occur at the same time; "the drug produces an increased synchrony of the brain waves."

Synaesthesia--a sensation that normally occurs in one sense modality occurs when another modality is stimulated.

T

Talisman--a trinket or piece of jewelry thought to be a protection against evil.

Tantra--doctrine of enlightenment as the realization of the oneness of one's self and the visible world; combines elements of Hinduism and paganism including magical and mystical elements like mantras and mudras and erotic rites; especially influential in Tibet.

Tarot cards--cards used to tell fortunes (or, in Europe, more commonly, to play games); the deck consists of 22 cards of the major arcana (“secrets”) and 56 cards of the minor arcana. The major arcana includes such cards as the Fool, the Emperor, the Empress, the Hierophant, the World, the Star, the Sun, Death, and the Devil; their meanings can be reversed as well (the author).

Telekinesis--a the power to move something by thinking about it without the application of physical force.

Teleportation--the movement of material objects through space by the power of the mind alone (psychokinesis) or by other means.

Testimonial evidence--a type of anecdotal evidence based upon one’s own personal experience, such as is sometimes given by churchgoers concerning how God has affected their lives or changed them as people, although testimonial evidence may include any type of testimony, such as eye-witness courtroom testimony; such evidence is regarded as seriously flawed and unreliable by scientists (the author).

Theosophy--belief based on mystical insight into the nature of God and the soul.

Theurgy--magic performed with the help of beneficent spirits.

Third Eye--a metaphysical concept that symbolizes some people’s ability to experience paranormal or supernatural phenomena (visions, clairvoyance, poetic inspiration) that come from internal stimuli rather than external stimuli; also called the “inner eye” or the “mind’s-eye”; sometimes symbolizes intuition or the imagination (the author).

Tinnitus--a ringing or booming sensation in one or both ears; a symptom of an ear infection or Meniere's disease.

Twain, Mark--American author; wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and many other works combining humor and social satire; had a prophetic dream in which his brother, Henry, was killed (the author).

Trance--a psychological state induced by (or as if induced by) a magical incantation; a state of mind in which consciousness is fragile and voluntary action is poor or missing; a state resembling deep sleep.

Troll--in Scandinavian folklore, a supernatural creature (either a dwarf or a giant) that is supposed to live in caves or in the mountains.

Shroud of Turin

Turin, Shroud of--a burial cloth that is said to bear the likeness of the crucified Christ, perhaps as a result of radiation that was released by his body upon his death; carbon dating has cast doubt upon its authenticity as Christ’s burial shroud; see “holy relic” (the author).

Truman, President Harry S--U. S. president who supposedly signed a “Top Secret, Eyes Only” document recounting the discovery of extraterrestrial corpses at a UFO crash site near Roswell, NM, and establishing a secret committee for investigating these and other visitors from other planets; the committee was known as Majestic-12 and included well-known, well-respected government officials and scientists (the author).

U

Underworld--(in various religions) the world of the dead.

Unidentified flying objects (UFOs, flying saucers)--any object that moves under its own power and cannot be accounted for (by the observer) by reference to known phenomena; many such objects turn out to be natural objects (weather balloons, clouds, atmospheric effects, aircraft, planets, meteorites); some believe them to be extraterrestrial spacecraft visiting Earth (the author).

Urantia book--a book that alleges to have been written on the basis of information provided by “superhuman personalities,” although “Matthew Block. . . has identified hundreds of plagiarized passages” in the book (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Urban legend-- “An apocryphal story involving incidents of the recent past, often including elements of humor and horror, that spreads quickly and is popularly believed to be true” (American Heritage Dictionary); see “testimonial evidence.”

Urine Therapy, the book

Urine therapy--the drinking of one’s or another’s urine (or its topical use) to maintain health and cure disease; supposedly, Mahatma Gandhi was a practitioner (the author).

Everyday Horrors: Mummies

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Mummies appear in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845); in several horror novels, including Anne Rice’s The Mummy, or Ramses the Dead (1991) and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Book of the Dead (2007); in such movies as The Mummy (1932), The Mummy’s Hand (1949), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964), The Mummy’s Shroud (1966), Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), The Mummy Lives (1993), The Mummy (1999), and The Mummy Returns (2001); and in episodes in television series, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Inca Mummy Girl” and “Life Serial.”

Mummies--preserved corpses from whom internal organs have been removed and preserved in jars--have been found in many countries, including Chile, China, Egypt, India, and Italy (Sicily and Vatican City), Pakistan, Persia, Peru, and Russia.

When most people think of mummies (which we do all the time, right?), they tend to think of Egyptian mummies. The corpses of important people, usually pharaohs, were deliberately mummified by the ancient Egyptians so as to ensure that the resurrected ka (personality) and ba (life force) had a home in which to live. Were the body not preserved, these vital aspects of the deceased’s soul would be homeless vagrants, doomed to wander the earth.


To mummify a mummy, the internal organs, except for the heart, were removed and stored in canopic jars, or carved and painted funerary urns. These jars were made in the images of four of the Egyptians’ gods, each of whom, it was believed, guarded the organ that the jar in its likeness contained. The man-headed Imsety guarded the liver, the baboon-headed Hapi protected the lungs, the jackal-headed Duamutef looked after the stomach, and the falcon-headed Qebehsenuef watched over the intestines. The heart was left inside the body because it was believed to be the repository of the soul. The brain was relatively unimportant (by ancient Egyptians’ standards), for it was believed only to be the organ that supplied mucus. Therefore, it was smashed and extracted through the nostrils using a hook.

To preserve the body, salts were used to dry and preserve the corpse’s flesh and tissues, and the remains were covered in natron to assist in the dehydration and preservation. The body was then wrapped in linen strips to further protect it, and amulets were provided to ward off threats and other evils. As a finishing touch, the mummy was equipped with false eyes. The tomb was furnished and decorated, and the mouth was opened so that the resurrected body could eat and speak. The mummy was then laid to rest inside a sarcophagus within the burial chamber of its pyramid. The walls of the tomb were inscribed with incantations from the Book of the Dead that the resurrected mummy could chant to gain access to the upper world.

Mummies became merchandise. Ground into powder, they were sold as medicines, paints, and even fertilizer. Mark Twain claimed that mummies were also used as locomotive fuel, although this contention has never been substantiated. The linen in which mummies were wrapped may have been used, during the American Civil War, as a source for paper.

Often, mummies are associated with curses. These curses were often plot vehicles for horror movies. When a grave robber broke into a pyramid to steal a mummy or the jewels with which such corpses were often buried so that the resurrected pharaoh would have a little spending money in the afterlife, the curse was activated, causing much suffering, death, and destruction.


“Everyday Horrors: Mummies” 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.

Fear: A Cultural History: A Partial Review and Summary, Part 3

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In Fear: A Cultural History, Joanna Bourke distinguishes between fear, as a reference to “an immediate, objective threat” and anxiety, as a reference to “an anticipated, subjective threat,” but cautions her readers that, however useful psychologists may find this distinction, “historians must be extremely wary about imposing such distinctions on emotional states in the past,” because what may be feared by some may not be feared by others. In an interesting side note, she also suggests that scapegoating is a means of converting anxiety into fear, because, in creating a scapegoat, a society creates an “immediate, objective threat” as a substitute for their previously “anticipated, subjective threat,” thereby gaining an adversary whom they can confront. This is a tactic widely used in politics, Bourke says, “influencing. . . voting preferences against an ‘outsider’ group.” (It may be recalled that this was a frequent tactic during the American civil rights movements, during which representatives of the status quo referred to activists and protesters as “outside agitators” who had come to their towns to “stir up trouble.”) The opposite is also true, Bourke notes: “If anxiety can be turned into fear, and thus provide an enemy to engage. . . fear can, similarly, be converted into anxiety,” an effect of which is to reduce collective, participatory behavior and isolate individuals with their own misgivings: “Anxiety states tend to make people withdraw from one another, unlike fear states, which are more likely to draw people together, either for comfort or to defend themselves more effectively against the danger.” Once again, politicians use this tendency as a tactic, pitting one group against another:

The political implications of this are evident, with groups ‘playing off’ fear and anxiety, according to their aim. Between the 1950s and 1970s governments tried to convince people that their fears of nuclear war were ‘irrational’ anxieties rather than ‘rational’ fears, thus discouraging the impulse to unite with other fearful persons against the common threat.

The same tactic is at work in the invention of new “phobias,” such as “homophobia,” as a defense against debate by those--the statistical majority, as it turns out--who do not share the ideas, beliefs, and values of this community or in the labeling of those who oppose open borders as “racists” simply because they believe in and endorse national sovereignty and the integrity of their homeland’s borders.

The isolation of the individual from his or her larger society so that the person is alone with his of her fears and must cope with them as best he or she can is a characteristic of contemporary culture and society, Bourke observes, which seems to have increased anxiety:

Whereas in the past the frightened individual might turn to the community or a religious institution for advice and comfort--a process that often involved the delineation of an evil ‘other’--as the twentieth century progressed, the emotion became increasingly individualized, appropriated by the therapist or, in the most isolated fashion, the contemporary ‘self-help’ movement. . . . As a consequence, anxiety may have been higher. . . .

The information in this part of her book (and the chapter on “Combat”) are especially fertile for horror writers who wish to develop credible scenes in which the fear and anxiety derive from situations and behavioral tendencies that have been subjected to psychological scrutiny.

The “Combat” chapter of Bourke’s book offers these observations, many of which will help horror writers to create believable characters and realistic situations:

. . . [In combat] fear was beneficial, so long as it did not spill over into
hysteria or anxiety neuroses. . . .

. . . in battle ‘normal’ was always pathological. In the words of the author of ‘Psychiatric Observations in the Tunisian Campaign’ (1943): ‘A state of tension and anxiety is so prevalent in the front lines that it must be regarded as a normal reaction to this grossly abnormal situation. Where ordinary psychological signs of fear end, and where signs and symptoms of a clinical syndrome begin, is often difficult to decide.’

[Lieutenant Colonel Stephen W. Ransom considered] “it. . . perfectly normal for combatants to suffer muscular tension, freezing, shaking and tremor, excessive perspiration, anorexia, nausea, abdominal distress, diarrhea, urinary frequency, incontinence of urine or faeces, abnormal heartbeat, breathlessness, a burning sense of weight oppressing the chest, faintness and giddiness.”

. . . the technology of long-distance killing, with its emphasis on anonymous agency and random aggression, placed an intolerable strain on men’s physiological inheritance.

. . . this physiological crisis was exacerbated by a cognitive problem: too many modern soldiers were educated, and thus resistant to rationalizations and primitive conversions (such as the psychological process of ‘converting’ fear into a physical symptom like mutism or paralysis).

According to Bourke’s survey of fear in combat situations, officers were less likely to suffer from incapacitating cowardice, because they have a greater “ego ideal” and feel responsible for not only their own welfare but for that of many others as well. Women are less likely to suffer hysterical breakdowns in combat situations than men are likely to suffer because men fear exhibiting cowardice more than they fear death itself and because society allows women to express their emotions, including their fears, directly and openly; consequently, many discuss these feelings with their peers, whereas men, for the most part, deal--or try to deal--with their fears by themselves. There is also a racial element to white officers’ characterizing black men as being especially prone to fear, anxiety, and panic, despite these officers’ own admissions that black soldiers fight every bit as valiantly as the most gallant white soldier. Physically, blacks, as soldiers, are the equals of their counterparts, such critics contend, but they are weaker mentally and lack the white soldier’s confidence and autonomy.

The prolonged uncertainty, apparent randomness, and fear associated with military combat takes a toll on soldiers’ ability to think and act in a consciously purposeful manner, converting them to “automatons” who go through the motions of defensive and offensive operations. In addition, it was found that “if a combatant could not act, he was more susceptible to fear.” Likewise, soldiers feared most the advantages that indirect fire or long-distance enemy weapons gave them, for, again, it was impossible for the attacked to fight attackers that were not physically present before them and that they could not see: “It was a feeling of ‘inequality’--often described as ‘injustice’ by the men--which was at the heart of fear. When asked why they were afraid of a particular weapon, the ‘inability to retaliate,’ the ‘feeling of vulnerability,’ and the ‘speed and surprise of the attack’ were all as important as ’effectiveness’ or ’accuracy.’”

Recognizing that “The only difference between a brave man and a coward is the fear of the one is controlled whilst the fear of the other is uncontrolled,” as the author of Psychology and the Soldier declares, the military seeks to reduce this tendency in various ways. Since soldiers were found to fear most that which they couldn’t fight against directly, such as passivity (for example, “crew in medium bombers” that “were forced to keep to course irrespective of danger” or to take cover in trenches during enemy artillery attacks which sometimes buried them alive), officers were encouraged to assign their troops busy work to occupy them during breaks between combat and to keep their minds off their fears. They were allowed to expend ammunition even after a target had moved beyond the range of their weapons so as to expend their fear. Men were trained “to respond automatically to orders, to ignore rumours, to focus on the leaders and comrades and to be accustomed to the fog and noise of battle,” but “automatic training” was found to be “less important than training men to obey orders immediately. . . . realism training” being seen as “crucial. . . because it taught men to think under terrifying conditions and it developed their self-confidence” and because not every contingency could be imagined and rehearsed in advance: “only a limited number of routine actions could be taught.” Officers were expected to be models of confidence themselves, keeping any reservations or concerns about their missions to themselves and always exhibiting a calm sense of purpose, on basis of “the belief that people were innately imitative, so fear could be reduced through witnessing the fearlessness of superiors or comrades.”

Of course, the reality of war itself helped, gradually, to harden soldiers to combat and its lethal consequences. Eventually, the sights of massive casualties seemed commonplace, which helped to reduce soldiers’ fears of their own demise.

Anyone who has seen Alien has seen many of these principles dramatized on the silver screen, and anyone who has seen The Descent has seen their opposites on display. The information that Bourke supplies in her “Combat” chapter enables aspiring horror writers to characterize survivors in the former manner and to fashion victims in the latter’s mode. In addition, Bourke’s review of the literature pertaining to the effects of long-term combat on combatants offers a storehouse of other tips for maintaining and heightening suspense, characterizing various dramatic personae, and representing various themes associated with violence, death, and destruction. There are quite a few suggestions, too, concerning the psychology of terror and horror and the motivations of behaviors which, in normal situations, would be classified as psychotic but, in extreme situations, such as combat (or a monster’s attack) might well be simply normal. Perhaps this is the true horror of horror fiction--that we create such situations in the first place. Mark Twain once opined, “If the human race isn’t damned, it ought to be”; war in being not only hell, shows us, as such, that we are the damned.

On that note, we will pause, taking up the last of our review and summary of Bourke’s survey of the subject of fear again in the next post.

Everyday Horrors: Nightmares

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

We’re not sure why we dream or what, if anything, dreams mean. Some believe that they are nothing more than a venting of mental, or psychic, steam, so to speak. Others believe that they are attempts by a clumsy, rather inarticulate subconscious mind to communicate with the conscious mind, or ego, through such devices as figures of speech, symbolism, and puns. Still others believe that dreams are--or can be, at times--messages from God.

Dreams can be inspirational. The benzene molecule’s unusual structure came to a German chemist, Friedrich August Kekulé, in a dream in which he envisioned a snake forming a ring by biting its own tail. The dream showed him the circular structure of the molecule he’d long sought to decipher. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge claims that the poem--or fragment of the poem--Kubla Khan came to him, fully complete, in a dream--one of which, it seems, was induced by opium.

Sometimes, dreams prove prophetic. During a journey by steamboat, Mark Twain and his younger brother Henry paused in their journey to stay at their sister’s house for the night. Twain dreamed that Henry had died. He saw him lying in his casket, which rested upon two chairs. The coffin was topped by a bouquet of white roses, a single red rose at its center. Rushing downstairs, Twain saw that his dream had been just that--a nightmare--as Henry was fine.

A week later, Twain, a riverboat pilot was transferred from the Pennsylvania, which he‘d shared with Henry until now, while Henry continued his trip aboard the other riverboat. Three days later, word reached Twain that the Pennsylvania’s boilers had exploded, just after the steamboat had passed Memphis, injuring or killing 150 people. Henry had been among those injured.

Twain made it to Memphis in time to sit by his dying brother’s side. The next morning, Twain went to the room in which the caskets of the dead awaited burial, and saw Henry’s coffin, resting upon two chairs, only the bouquet missing. However, as the grief-stricken Twain watched, a volunteer nurse approached Henry’s casket and set a bouquet of roses atop the casket. At its center was a single red rose.

In “Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” Ward Hill Lamon describes a horrific prophetic dream that the president had:

About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible.

I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break?

I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered.

There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers 'The President' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin!' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream.

Soon thereafter, Lincoln, attending a production of the comedy Our American Cousin at the Ford’s Theater with his wife, Mary, was shot in the back of the head by the actor John Wilkes Booth. He was carried across the street to a private residence, where he died. His body, placed inside a casket, was placed upon a platform in the East Room of the White House and guarded by soldiers, just as Lincoln had dreamed.

Both the Old and the New Testaments of the Bible records dreams which it declares to have been heaven-sent. One of the more memorable is Joseph’s dream, which came to him while he and his family were living in Egypt, under the rule of the pharaoh. He said that he was “binding sheaves of grain out in the field” with his brothers “when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.” His brothers were jealous and angry, because they interpreted the dream to mean that Joseph would rule over them.

Joseph later had a second dream, in which “the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down” to him. This time, Joseph’s dream aggravated his father, for he interpreted the dream to indicate that both Joseph’s brothers as well as his parents would be subjects to Joseph’s reign.

At the age of thirty, the pharaoh made Joseph his second in command. Another memorable dream is that of Mary, Jesus’ mother, which was brought to her by the angel Gabriel. The angel informed her that the baby to whom she would give birth would be the Son of God. When Mary said that she was a virgin, and, as such, could not have conceived a child, the angel told her that the birth would be the result of a miracle. “With God, nothing is impossible,” the angel declared, and then told Mary that her elderly relative, Elizabeth, was pregnant with the baby who would be Jesus’ herald, John the Baptist. Gabriel, before visiting Mary, had already informed Elizabeth’s husband, Zacharias, that he would be the father of a boy named John.

Darker dreams--the dreams of terror and horror--are called nightmares, and they have inspired great literary art as well as adrenaline rushes and heart palpitations. Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, dreamed the idea for her novel’s plot. After reading Phantasmagoria, a book of ghost stories, to divert themselves on a holiday to Lake Geneva, Switzerland, during rainy weather, it was suggested that their party participate in a contest to see which of their number could devise the most frightening horror story. Of those present--Mary, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron’s personal physician, John Polidon--only Mary completed her story, which she published in 1831 as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Perhaps as a result of having read of Luigi Galvani’s use of electricity to animate dead frogs’ legs, Mary had a nightmare in which she dreamed of a young scientist’s use of electricity to bring life to a body composed of parts of human cadavers he’d sewn together. She’d reasoned that her nightmare had frightened her; therefore, it was likely to frighten others as well.

Stephen King likewise cites nightmares as the muses that have inspired some of his fiction, one of which was the novel Misery:

The inspiration for Misery was a short story by Evelyn Waugh called “The Man Who Loved Dickens.” It came to me as I dozed off while on a New York-to-London Concorde flight. Waugh's short story was about a man in South America held prisoner by a chief who falls in love with the stories of Charles Dickens and makes the man read them to him. I wondered what it would be like if Dickens himself was held captive.

One wonders what sort of novel King might have written had he read O. Henry’s short story “The Ransom of Red Chief” before nodding off.

Not only have literary artists received inspiration from nightmares, but visual artists have also been inspired by these dark dreams. An oil painting by Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, features a sleeping woman dressed in a white nightgown, her head and arms dangling over the edge of her bed, dreaming of a horse (the nightmare) and an incubus (a demon in male guise who has sex with sleeping women) seated upon the woman’s breast. Copies sold with the accompanying inscription, by Erasmus Darwin, which he later expanded and included in a long poem, The Loves of the Plants:

So on his Nightmare through the evening fog
Flits the squab Fiend o'er fen, and lake, and bog;

Seeks some love-wilder'd maid with sleep oppress'd,

Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.

Kathleen Russo believes that the painting may have been inspired by the painter’s own nightmares, which he related to folktales that claimed demons possessed lone sleepers, visiting them as hags on horseback, although the origin of the term “nightmare” is unrelated to horses, whether mares or stallions, having referred, originally, the Online Etymology Dictionary asserts, to “‘an evil female spirit afflicting sleepers with a feeling of suffocation,’ compounded from night + mare ‘goblin that causes nightmares, incubus,’ from O.E. mare ‘incubus.’”

One may agree or disagree with Freudians and neo-Freudians as to whether dreams have any actual significance. Perhaps they are nothing more than the effects of an undigested bit of potato, as Ebenezer Scrooge tried to claim, early on, at least. Maybe they are communications from the deeper self. Maybe they are divine messages, borne by angels. Maybe we will never know, for certain, what they are, but, it seems safe to say, whatever they are, we will be likely to remain fascinated by them and to find them inspirational to art if not to life.

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

Mark Twain's "Rules Governing Literary Art"

copyright by Gary L. Pullman

In "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," Mark Twain* identifies 18 of the 19 "rules governing literary art" that he mentions in his essay (keeping the remaining one to himself, it seems). Since horror fiction is literature, it's safe to say that these rules apply to this genre of writing as well as to any other, so aspiring writers of horror fiction would be well advised to learn from one of the literary giants of American--and, indeed, world--literature. These are the rules Twain identifies:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.


2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.


3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.


4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.


5. The require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.


6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.


7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven- dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.


8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," by either the author or the people in the tale.


9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.


10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.


11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.


12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.


13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.


14. Eschew surplusage.


15. Not omit necessary details.


16. Avoid slovenliness of form.


17. Use good grammar.


18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.

*Interestingly, Twain said that, as a boy, he'd read and enjoyed the work of Edgar Allan Poe but that, as an adult, he would read Poe "only for money."