Showing posts with label Ray Bradbury. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ray Bradbury. Show all posts

Sunday, September 19, 2021

Interview with Michael Williams

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman and Michael Williams

Michael Williams is the author of Twisted Tales, a superb series that consists, at present, of three volumes of flash fiction, Tales with a Twist, Tales with a Twist II, Tales with a Twist III, Tales with a Twist IV, and Tales with a Twist V. Besides writing, Michael especially enjoys sailing and “cultural exploration.” We're happy to share this interview on Chillers and Thrillers.


Q: What interests you in the super-short genre of flash fiction?

A: Alfred Hitchcock once said that a movie shouldn’t be longer than the capacity of the human bladder. I find I agree. Edgar Allan Poe considered the effect of short fiction to be more intense than that of longer works, such as novels or—my apologies to Hitch—full-length motion pictures. I also tend to concur with Poe: shorter fiction can pack more of an emotional wallop than longer forms. In our modern, fast-paced world, I think shorter fiction is also more convenient for many. A lot of people want complete stories without having to spend hours or days to read them.


Q: It seems that you prefer fantastic to realistic stories. Why is that?


A: Actually, I enjoy reading and writing all forms of fiction, but I think that tales of the fantastic, marvelous, and uncanny—handy distinctions that Tzvetan Todorov makes—add an element of magic to mundane experience, the icing, so to speak, on the cake. I also believe that, as Flannery O’Connor once said, a writer sometimes needs to use hyperbolic techniques to communicate with readers, and the shock of the surreal; the astonishment of the weird; and the wonder of the otherworldly, the supernatural, the occult, and the mystical provide these rhetorical approaches.

Q: As the titles of your books suggest, your tales are rather “twisted.” I'm going to ask the question most writers hate to hear: Where do you get your ideas?

 


A: I'm an eclectic reader. I enjoy learning about a variety of subjects. I guess you could say I'm a generalist. Sometimes, when the stars are in alignment, a remembered fact here will meet up with a recalled fact there, and, out of this connection of one thing and another, an idea will emerge. I might combine one of Thomas Edison’s inventions with the spiritualistic belief in the ability of the living to communicate with the dead, or I could update an ancient myth or a modern horror movie. As Arthur Golding wrote, in translating John Calvin, “All is grist for the mill.”


Q: I know you're something of a mariner. Does the sea ever feature in your stories?


A: Not as often as I might expect, but, yes, there is a sea tale or two. In one, the ocean solves a murder, which is rather a novel notion, I think.


Q: By definition, according to the title of your series, Twisted Tales, and by the titles of the books in the series, each of your flash fiction narratives contains a plot twist. How do you think up so many of them?

 


A: Usually, the story suggests one. However, I also employ a couple of tricks, or techniques—three, actually. First, when plotting a story such as those in Tales with a Twist, Tales with a Twist II, or Tales with a Twist III, I keep in mind the idea that almost everything has a direct opposite: new, old; lost, found; hero, villain; reward, punishment; rich, poor; right, wrong. Then, I start with one polarity and end with its opposite. The second way is more concrete. I keep a list of the plot twists I see in novels, short stories, movies, and TV series. Then, I adapt them to fit the situation or circumstances of my own stories. My third technique is to remember that there is a fine line not only between good and evil and right and wrong, but between all such polar opposites. A person who is cautious may become distrustful or even paranoid; a man who's strict can become controlling; a woman who's concerned with her own health and that of others—a doctor or a nurse, perhaps—can become a hypochondriac; a trusting person may become gullible. Each of these possibilities is a source of plot twists.


Q: How many of your tales with a twist are autobiographical?

A: Many of them are fantasies in which I explore how something might be if a particular set of unusual circumstances were to apply. Many of my stories are thought experiments, of a sort. I place a certain type of character in a particular kind of environment and see whether he or she adapts and, if the character does adapt, how he or she manages to do so. Frequently, the environment is physical, but it need not be; some of my stories' environments are philosophical, or moral, or psychological, or political, or cultural, or otherwise. The autobiographical element, when there is one, may be small—a detail here or there, the description of a place I've been, desires I've experienced, wishes I may have wanted to fulfill, thoughts or feelings or impressions I've had, that sort of thing, embedded in the narration, the exposition, or the dialogue.


Q: Let's talk a bit about some of the individual stories themselves. “Empty Pockets,” in Tales with a Twist, the first volume: where did that come from?

 


A: I remember reading about the childhood of Jeffrey Dahmer. By his own admission, he had nurturing parents and a good childhood. I never read anything that contradicted his assessments. Nevertheless, he turned out to be both a serial killer and a cannibal. I also remembered how, growing up, my brothers and I and the rest of the boys in our neighborhood carried a collection of odds and ends, some living, others inanimate, in our pockets. As a boy, what would a serial killer the likes of Dahmer of Ted Bundy be apt to carry in his pockets? What would his mother think if she discovered the contents of her son's pockets?


Q. To paraphrase someone we both know, out of a connection between a remembered fact here and a recalled fact there, a story arises, right?

A: Precisely.


Q: “A Living Hell,” in Tales with a Twist II, seems to be a satire on life insurance companies. Is that what you intended?

A: Partly, yes. But I also wanted to touch upon the narcissism of some who indulge in high-risk activities as well as examine the potential consequences of insuring oneself against hazardous escapades. It's as much a spoof on the behavior of those who pursue an adrenaline rush as it is a lampoon of insurance companies that will insure anything if the price of the premium is high enough.


Q: “Love Bite,” in Tales with a Twist III, is a neat take on the vampire tale. Can you give us an idea how it originated?

 

 

A: I wanted to start with the my-boyfriend-is-a-vampire trope, but in reverse, so the vampire is the girlfriend, and I added to that the additional trope of the boy's being an unpopular geek—not a literal geek, mind you, who bites heads off chickens, à la Ozzy Osbourne with the bat, but in the sense of being a nerd. So that raised the question, for me, of what this hot chick is doing with him as her boy toy. I thought of a couple of angles, but I think the one I decided on gives the story both its twist and its kick.


Q: It's certainly a story readers can sink their teeth into.

A: Wow! What a great blurb! Do you mind if I use it?


Q: (chuckles): Help yourself, Michael. “Spirits,” in Tales with a Twist IV, seems to be a cautionary tale. Do you intend it to be such?

A: I suppose it is, yes. Its theme, although not overt, or explicit, is discernible in the fact that the culprit’s addiction survives his death. On a figurative level, this situation suggests not how difficult it is to overcome one’s dependence on a drug, but also the degree to which such dependence can affect someone; the effects can persist beyond the person’s own existence, affecting the lives of others, including even people who are strangers to the deceased. I’m not sure all that was there, the meaning, before I wrote the story, but it is embedded in the finished tale.


Q: The epigraphs of some of the stories in the fourth and fifth volumes of Tales with a Twist mention other writers: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frank R. Stockton, Emily Dickinson, Ovid, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, for example; a couple of other stories’ epigraphs mention philosophers or artists as well: Paracelsus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Johan Wolfgang Mozart. Would you consider these individuals a major influence in your own work?

A: Let’s not forget Jonathan Edwards; he’s mentioned, too, indirectly, by way of the title of one of his sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” I’d say that each of them, in his or her own way, has been, and remains, more or less influential and inspirational, as have many others, including H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Shirley Jackson, Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker, Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming, Daphne du Maurier, Lawrence Block, Bentley Little, Joyce Carol Oates, James Patterson, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert Sheckley, Mark Twain, and, of course, William Shakespeare. (Laughs.) I could go on and on. Each of them has taught me something vital about writing.


Q: Could we have an example, please?

 



A: I’ll give you a couple. Bradbury, a consummate wordsmith, taught me that poetry need not be restricted to verse, that prose itself can be poetic. His diction, but also his images, his metaphors, and his other figures of speech, give his writing cadence and rhythm, nuance and color, magic and wonder. Wells and Poe, at least equally adept in painting landscapes and interiors of horror, are also excellent practitioners of the both the art and craft of writing, painting in words what Edvard Munch, Hieronymus Bosch, H. R. Giger, Frida Kahlo, and Renee Magritte, to name a few, captured with pigments. From Poe, Sherwood Anderson, and Shirley Jackson, I learned the nature and the use of the grotesque.


Q: One final question, if I may?

A: Please.


Q: Will your Twisted Tales series have more Tales with a Twist?

A: I'm working on the next one now.


Saturday, March 21, 2020

The Thrill of It All, Part 3

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman



Writers are often encouraged to “show” rather than to “tell,” as if their novels and short stories are motion pictures.


It can't be done, of course, any more than Las Vegas, Nevada (famous for its miniaturized reproductions of such world-famous landmarks as the Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and the Statue of Liberty), can reproduce an actual beach (although Mandalay Bay certainly makes an attempt to do so.)

The closest a novelist or a short story writer can come to “showing” action is to describe it in active voice (of course), using action verbs and lots of figures of speech. (Three masters of descriptive writing who come readily to mind, by the way, are the late Ray Bradbury, the late H. G. Wells, and the very-much-alive Frank Peretti. The late William Peter Blatty isn't bad, either, although his descriptions tend to be a bit on the weighty, even rather tangible, side.)


In addition, writers can be, and often are, inspired by movies, just as screenwriters often adapt novelists' books to the big screen or allude to them, more or less directly, in their films. Quentin Tarantino pretty well summed up the state of affairs when he said, “I steal from every movie ever made.” (He meant, of course, that he is inspired by the work of other moviemakers.)

Writers are a bit handicapped, dealing in words, rather than moving images. Nevertheless, a few techniques can help a writer translate other people's ideas, words, and images into the writer's own ideas, words, and images.

Some horror movie posters use red letters to attract viewers' attention. This device works best, perhaps, when the red letters are integral to the movie's plot. Think of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel the Scarlet Letter, Stephen Crane's novel the Red Badge of Courage, or Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The Masque of the Red Death”: posters for any movie version of these literary classics would almost certainly feature red letters in the posters' titles or captions.

One way that writers can accomplish a similar feat is to describe bloody graffiti. Here's an example:

Except for the peeling paint, the long, high wall of the building forming the left side of the narrow alley was featureless and nondescript—well, except for the peeling paint and the ominous word, spelled out in foot-tall, dripping, crimson letters: MURDER.


(Yes, a novel can include red letters, in all caps, bolded and italicized.)

 Some horror movies' titles include effective plays on words. A couple, Shutter and Shutter Island, use a homonym for “shudder,” a word that alludes to a reaction to fear: when one is sufficiently frightened, he or she is apt to tremble, or shudder. Although “shutter” means something quite different than “shudder,” the words sound enough alike that the connotative associations of “shudder” are transmitted to “shutter.”

Obviously, writers can use homonyms and other plays on words in their writing, but they shouldn't overdo it; the “punch” of a play on words comes from its unexpectedness coupled with its curious appropriateness. By overusing wordplay, writers defeat their own purpose.

Here's an example:

The reporter's use of “cereal” instead of “serial,” whether a puerile attempt at wit or an honest mistake that somehow escaped the proofreader's review of the article, was both shocking and ghastly: the report was about a killer who preyed upon children, after all.


The poster promoting Intruder prominently displays severed human body parts. One way that a writer can do the same thing, while avoiding plagiarism, is to describe the parts as realistic-looking props in a novelty shop's display window:

Scattered among the playthings spilled from the children's toy box in the novelty shop's display window were a man's “bloody” severed head and a dismembered forearm bearing a tattoo of a woman's name surrounded by a bloody pink Valentine heart.


Several horror movie posters depict skulls. In a few such posters, the skulls are composed of a variety of smaller images that, together, make up the image of the skull. It would be difficult for a writer to describe such a composite image (and it might take several pages). Instead, the shape, as a whole, could be described, supported by descriptions of only a few of the smaller pictures that make up a couple of the parts of the skull. Perhaps the skull could be a mosaic or a collage:

For the final exam, Jason's art teacher, Ms. Fenway, had assigned her students to create a collage, which had given him the perfect excuse to buy a dozen magazines devoted to horror. Unfortunately, now he had to cut them to pieces, excising pictures that, together, he could assemble so they'd form a giant skull. He'd already glued down the coronal suture, using the stitches from the back of one of Frankenstein's monster's hands. How, he cut out a decapitated head, a loop of intestines, a nest of vipers, and a seductive incubus, dark images all, to form the left ocular orbit; its twin would be made up of a single picture: a jack-o-lantern bearing part of Michael Meyers's face. When the collage was complete, Ms. Fenway would (a) have a heart attack, (b) give him an “A,” (c) suggest his parent hire a psychiatrist, or (d) all of the above.


Pictures similar to those which appear on posters for Halloween, Black Christmas, or other holiday-themed horror movie posters could be described as posters in pop-up stores devoted to particular holiday sales:

Santa looked especially old as he faced off against the demonic snowman. The human head on the Christmas tree was a novel, if rather grotesque, ornament. The blood leading up to the chimney on the snow-covered rooftop suggested that Santa had come to a bad end. The snow globe didn't replicate a blizzard, but a deluge of blood. Thaddeus Gorman smiled, as he set the hammer aside. The posters he'd hung by the chimney with care created a festive, if eerie, air to his pop-up Christmas shop. He was ready, now, for business!

Possibilities are virtually endless, but two things are required:
  1. Avoid plagiarism. A horror movie poster can inspire, but it shouldn't be copied, even in words. Instead, let the design, the use of color, the images, the text, and the other elements of the poster suggest similar (or even opposite) ideas. It's the ideas you want. Ideas cannot be copyrighted; specific creations based on ideas can, and usually are, copyrighted.
  2. To describe the pictures you have in mind, don't use the same devices as the posters use. Change the ways you use and “display” word pictures. Instead of a poster's use of red letters in a string of text, describe only a single word, written as graffiti on a wall; in place of a poster's display of body parts next to a cash register, describe them as items among a child's toys; rather than employing a poster's exhibition of a skull made up of images (possibly of characters and settings and actions in the movie the poster promotes), show them as pictures cut out of a magazine as material for a collage: pictures similar to those on horror movie posters can be altered and appear as posters in a pop-up Halloween or Christmas shop. Use your own ideas (not the movie posters' or mine, as described here). How? Use your imagination.
There's more to learn from analyzing thriller (and horror) movie posters. We'll do just that in a future Chillers and Thrillers post.

Friday, October 25, 2019

Ambrose Bierce's Puddle-Jumper, "The Flying Machine"

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Recently, I've become more and more interested in flash fiction. To my delight, Fight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales contains such a story: Ambrose Bierce's “The Flying Machine” (79).


The tale, which consists of 110 words, describes a prototypical flying machine's unsuccessful maiden flight. Despite the machine's failure, its inventor's assurance to the crowd of onlookers that the machine's “defects . . . are merely basic and fundamental” is enough to get them to invest in the construction of “a second machine” (79).


The editors, Stephen King and Bev Vincent, see the witnesses' willingness to subscribe to the second machine's construction as evidence of their gullibility. In their opinion, the spectators are duped by the inventor, a con artist who claims to have built a machine that is able to fly. King and Vincent could be right. As they point out, Bierce was both cynical and misanthropic, after all. Perhaps “The Flying Machine” is merely a literary expression of the declaration, sometimes erroneously attributed to showman P. T. Barnum, that “there's a sucker born every minute.”


A comic book version of Ray Bradbury's short story "The Flying Machine"

Another possibility—one that the late optimistic Ray Bradbury might have preferred—is that, despite the flying machine's failure, people are willing to finance the apparently impossible; in doing so, they often find that they have financed the next technological marvel, whether a flying machine, artificial intelligence, or a cure for the common cold.

Sunday, September 22, 2019

Ray Bradbury's Muralism

Copyright 2019 by Gary > Pullman


Another of the better stories in Ray Bradbury's collection The Cat's Pajamas is “Ole, Orozco! Siqueros, Si!”

The narrator, an art gallery expert, is invited to a wake for Sebastian Rodriguez, “an unknown artist” who died while painting murals on a freeway. As Sam Walter explains, “He was hanging upside down over the edge of the freeway overhang, painting, a pal holding his legs, when the pal sneezed, God yes, sneezed and let go.”

His untimely demise cut short a promising career; Cardinal Carlos Jesus Montoya, who'd spied the genius in the graffiti Rodriguez had painted, saw his promise, as does the narrator, who suggests that Rodriguez's work is reminiscent of that of Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco.

To promote and to protect the late artist's reputation, Montoya arranged to exhibit photographs of Rodriguez's graffiti at a gallery; “then,” Sam explains to the narrator, “when it was too late” for people “to . . . change their minds and ask for their money back,” the cardinal would tell them about Rodriguez's freeway murals.

The artist's death, however, could have “endangered Rodriguez's reputation,” had a group of critics not conspired to hide the truth from the public. As a result of their efforts, Rodriguez's death was attributed not to his fall from the freeway overpass, but to “a bike accident, though no bike was found.” When the cardinal approved of Rodriguez's art, “prices . . . skyrocketed.”

Now, to prevent the public from discovering the fact that Rodriguez was a graffiti artist, the narrator holds Sam's legs while Sam paints over Rodriguez's freeway art.

Bradbury seems to satirize the commercial aspects of art that is created, exhibited, bought, and sold in a capitalistic economy. Rodriguez, although talented by all accounts, was “unknown.” The fact that he painted murals on freeway surfaces marked him as a graffiti artist, which would have besmirched his budding reputation as a legitimate artist, necessitating the conspiracy on the part of Cardinal Montoya, Sam, the narrator, and those who attended Rodriguez's wake, to suppress the truth concerning the origin of Rodriguez's art.

If the truth of the origins of the photographs in the gallery becomes known, the narrator suggests, Montoya will be left “with a gallery of useless photo art,” or, Sam counters, “a gallery full of priceless relics from an artful dodger's life, dead too soon.” If marketing doesn't make all the difference in the perception of the value of an artist's work, it certainly does count, Bradbury suggests.


David Alfaro Siqueiros: Self-Portrait (1945)

The irony is deepened by the narrator's comparing the late, unknown painter's style to that of the celebrated Mexican muralists Siqueiros and Orozco. Although Rodriguez's art resembles theirs, showing “genius” in its own right, his paintings, because they began as graffiti, would be scorned, were the truth known, whereas the murals of Siqueiros and Orozco are celebrated and cherished.


David Alfaro Siqueiros: The New Democracy (1944) 

Irony is also effected by Rodriguez's having spent “a few hours in jail,” presumably for defacing public property by painting his murals on the freeway, because Siqueiros was also incarcerated, but in a Mexican prison, rather than an American jail, for criticizing Mexican President Adolfo Lopez Mateos and leading protests on behalf of teachers and artists on strike. Although Bradbury doesn't describe Rodriguez's murals, it's possible that he painted murals as politically sensitive, in their own way, as those of Siqueiros, one of which, Burial of a Worker, showed a funeral procession in which workers bore an oversize casket “decorated with a hammer and a sickle.”

 


Jose Clemente Orozco: Man of Fire (1938)

Orozco painted satirical political murals, many of them critical of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). A supporter of Venustiano Carranza and General Álvaro Obregón and against Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, the conservative Orozco was more pessimistic about the effects of the revolution than some of his colleagues, including Diego Rivera.


José Clemente Orozco: Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1936)

In Rodriguez's art, the narrator sees something of the style, and perhaps the spirit, of both Siqueiros and Orozco. Perhaps Rodriguez's work suggested a middle political stance between the more extreme, polarized positions of these famous muralists. By not directly stating why the narrator views Rodriguez's work as promising and important, Bradbury leaves open this and other possibilities.

The online article “Mexican muralists: the big three—Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros” provides information on the background of the Mexican Revolution; the rise of muralism as a means of communicating with citizens of “a mostly illiterate country,” a discipline that was dominated by Orozco, Siqueros, and Rivera; and the styles and themes of these three artists. Some of this material could enhance the reading of Bradbury's Story, but also important is an understanding of the community in which Rodriguez lived, the “Mexican-Hispanic-Jewish Boyle Heights” the narrator mentions as the setting for Rodriguez's wake.


Often, though, murals depict the personal concerns of their artists, which may or may not be political concerns as well, and the murals' themes are apt to change from one generation to the next. For example, “Many of the murals depicted the 1960s movement for Chicano equality.” However, a fifteen-year-old girl's mural, painted in 2017, illustrates her idea of “women of influence” and includes depictions of a U. S. Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor; a royal, Princess Diana; and a comedienne and talk show host, Ellen DeGeneres.

In his description of Montoya, the narrator of Bradbury's story suggests the types of themes that would be likely to attract the cardinal's interest; perhaps Montoya discovered these or similar interests in the images Rodriguez painted. The narrator sees Carlos Jesus Montoya as “priest, poet, adventurer in rain forests, love assassin of ten thousand women, headliner, mystic, and now critic for Art News Quarterly,” who surveys “the walls where Sebastian Rodriguez's lost dreams were suspended,” “lost dreams” which Montoya is keen to preserve.

By avoiding descriptions of Rodriguez's murals in any but the most general terms, Bradbury allows his readers to envision the artist's work however they please, in effect creating for themselves the very paintings they imagine the artist has painted and allowing them to become their own muralists, painting their own dreams, “lost” or present, a community of artists in which each reader paints an expanse of the same canvas to which everyone else also contributes, just as actual murals are sometimes painted.

Saturday, September 21, 2019

The Incomplete Completist

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

In The Cat Pajamas's “Introduction: Alive and Kicking and Writing,” Ray Bradbury offers a clue to the meaning of his short story “The Completist.”

First, he recounts the story's inspiration. He and his wife Maggie, he says, met a “book collector and library founder” during “a voyage across the Atlantic” (xv).

After listening for to him hours, the Bradburys learned of the shocking incident with which Bradbury concludes his story (xv). The story, he adds, wasn't written for twenty years, when Maggie's death prompted him to write it (xv).

The narrative is based upon his recognition that the gentleman he and Maggie had met on their voyage represents a metaphor of sorts (xv), and this connection between the metaphorical significance of a particular person offers us a clue as to how Bradbury, the writer, wrote, or sometimes wrote.

If something is a metaphor, it shares certain characteristics with something else, the tenor, that is not otherwise like it. In doing so, the metaphor conveys a likeness between certain aspects of the otherwise different things.

Although there is no equivalency between the metaphor and the tenor, it is sometimes helpful to pretend that there is, so that a metaphor-tenor relationship may be written, as Bette Midler declares in her song “The Rose”:

Love = river
Love = razor
Love = hunger
Love = flower

She also declares how the metaphor and the tenor are alike: as a “river,” love “drowns the tender reed”; as a “razor,” love “leaves your soul to bleed”; as “hunger,” love is “an endless aching need”; and, as a “flower,” love is the product of a unique seed—the “you,” or listener, to whom Midler sings.

For Bradbury, as a metaphor, the book collector and library founder, the “Completist,” seems to personify culture.

Concerning the traveler's fictional counterpart, the story's narrator informs the reader, “At no time did he allow us to speak.” The Completist tells the couple that he travels the world, “collecting books, building libraries, and entertaining his soul (221-222).” He is the very embodiment of art and culture, collecting and distributing it, even as he himself enjoys it (222). Funded by his law firm, he has just “spent time in Paris, Rome, London, and Moscow and had shipped home tens of thousands of rare volumes” (222). Moreover, the Completist has constructed a vast repository of medical texts, novels, and books devoted to art, history, philosophy, and world travel (222-223).

In doing so, it seems that the lawyer seeks to reinvent the world as he would have it to be, a place of culture, education, and entertainment; he tells his listeners that Sir John Soane, “the great English architect” did something similar, reconstructing “all of London in his mind and in the drawings made according to his specifications” (222-223).

The Completist, having discovered some of Soane's “library dreams,” used them as the bases to build his own “university” on more than “a hundred acres” of his own property, where physicians, surgeons, and academics from around the world congregate every weekend.

His estate's “multitudinous centers of learning” allow its visitors to explore the cultural “treasures” of the world, as they stroll its meadows, amid “grand lanterns of education” and “read in an environment that [is] conducive to vast learning” (223-224).

As Bradbury warns in his book's introduction, the story ends with a shocking incident. The Completist, a man of culture, education, and refinement, a world traveler who has delved deeply into the world's cultural “treasures,” seeks to know “only one last thing”: “Why did my thirty-five-year-old son kill his wife, destroy his daughter, and hang himself?”

The couple (stand-ins, perhaps, for Bradbury's readers) is at a loss for words, not that it matters; the Completist does not wait for a response, nor does he appear to expect one. The horrific fates of his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter seem to represent the dilemma known to philosophers as the problem of evil, except, in Bradbury's story, it has more of a secular, than a religious, dimension. 
(In philosophy, the problem of evil is a counterargument to the assertion that the universe is ruled by a God who is both loving and just, and asks how the fact of the existence of evil be reconciled with belief in the existence of a God who is both loving and just.)

The Completist seems to seek his answer in culture and education, in medicine, literature, art, history, philosophy, and world travel, but despite his many superb and expensive “collections,” he still has no answer to the question of why his son killed his wife and destroyed his daughter before taking his own life. It is a mystery as unanswerable as it is consuming, and no amount of cultural “treasures” can compensate for these losses, both of family and of purpose.

Perhaps this is why he calls himself “The Completist.” The term refers to not to a connoisseur of art, but instead, to “an obsessive, typically indiscriminate, collector or fan of something.” Perhaps the story's Completist seeks to fill a void that cannot be filled. By filling himself and his estate and as many others as he can with culture and education, he may suggest that, if not now, if not today, then at some time in the future, the void within himself may be filled, that his thirst for knowledge in general and of one thing in particular may be quenched.

Or perhaps he collects the riches of culture simply to pass the time, merely to have something to do that others believe is significant, even if he himself does not. Until one's own demise, it is best to keep busy, he may think; it is best to pretend to believe that, despite unanswerable questions and horrific events, there is a reason to live and a purpose to perseverance.

It is also possible, of course, that the Completist actually does believe that, despite the absurdity of existence, there is, indeed, still a reason to live. Bradbury's statement, in his introduction, suggests that the story may be interpreted in this manner. Following Maggie's illness and death, he says, “for the first time in seventy years, my demon has lain quiet within me. My muse, my Maggie, was gone, and my demon did not know what to do.” As time went by, he started to question whether he'd “ever write again.” Then, he thought of “The Completist gentleman,” and he found himself eager to write the story of the metaphor with which, for two decades, he'd done “nothing.”

Like other writers, Bradbury writes about his own experiences, but he seems , frequently, to do so by introducing the intermediary of a metaphor. He says what he says by speaking about something else that is similar in some respects but different otherwise. The Completist is a metaphor for the absurdity of existence, it seems, but also a metaphor for the angst that Bradbury felt when the light of his life, his Maggie, was extinguished. For Bradbury, the “university” that the Completist built is the author's return to writing fiction, his stories the works of art and other cultural artifacts that make up the author's own collections, including the stories collected in The Cat's Pajamas.

Bradbury's writing fills, or attempts to fill, the great abyss within him that the death of his muse, his wife, his Maggie, created. Like the Completist, he offers it to the world, for the entertainment and edification of those who desire or need diversion and enlightenment.

Friday, September 20, 2019

Ray Bradbury's "The Island"

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman
 

Although The Cat's Pajamas, published in 2004, may not be one of Ray Bradbury's finest collections of short stories, it does contain some good ones.

“The Island,” in which a family of four (Mrs. Benton, her daughters Alice and Madeline, and her 15-year-old son Robert) live in a large house, isolated from the larger world and imprisoned by their paranoia, may not be an altogether successful story. It does, however, show Bradbury's talent for indirection.


It seems that Mrs. Benton's fears have infected her children. Bedridden, the matriarch fears that her home may be invaded, either by robbers seeking to steal the $40,000 she's hidden beneath her bed, to rape her and her daughters, or to do both before killing them all. The children share her fears. Their defenses are to arm themselves and to ensure that “the house was locked and bolted” (15).

They have also discontinued their telephone service, except for a battery-powered “intercommunication phone circuit” (18) that lets them talk to one another in their separate rooms. Preferring not to rely upon the world beyond their own house, they've also discontinued the electric service, opting for “oil lamps” and the light and heat of logs blazing in the house's fireplaces (20). To protect themselves, each of the family members, except Mrs. Benson, keeps a pistol at hand in his or her bedroom. These decisions add to their jeopardy after they hear one of the downstairs windows break and fear that a stranger has invaded the sanctuary of their isolated home.

 
Their maid does not live in the family home, and she does not share the family's fears: “She lived but a few hours each day in this outrageous home, untouched by the mother's wild panics and fears. [She had been] made practical with years of living in the town beyond the wide moat of lawn, hedge, and wall” (20).

According to the omniscient narrator, everyone hears the breaking of the window. The family responds as the reader might predict, based upon Bradbury's characterization of them: “Rushing en masse, each [to a] room, a duplicate of the one above or below, four people flung themselves to their doors, to scrabble locks, throw bolts, and attach chains, twist keys” (20). (Bradbury makes a mistake in having his omniscient narrator declare that “ four people flung themselves to their doors,” etc., since Mrs. Benton is bedridden. Confined to her bed, she would not be able to rush back to her room or lock her door; indeed, she would never have gotten out of bed to begin with.)


By contrast, the maid does the sensible thing, as she performs “what should have been a saving, but became a despairing gesture”: she rushes from the kitchen, where she'd been cleaning and putting away “the supper wineglasses,” and “into the lower hallway,” where she calls the family members' names (20). After the family hears her “one small dismayed and accusing cry,” the mother and her children wait “for some new sound” (21).

They seem to want to confirm their worst fear (the invasion of their home) the same way that they earlier confirmed, to their own satisfaction, that their house had been invaded, by taking the sound of “metal rattling” as proof that the earlier sound of a breaking windowpane was not due to “a falling tree limb” or to a snowball (19). In other words, the residents interpret a succession of incidents as confirming one another (or as failing to do so), whether the incidents have anything to do with one another or not.

The Maid as Killer

Has the maid been killed by an intruder, someone who'd entered the house, perhaps to steal the money hidden under Mrs. Benton's bed, to rape her and her daughters, or to kill the family?

Or is the maid really dead? Has she only faked her own murder? Is she herself the killer?

The maid might have a motive: the $40,000. As the person who cleans the house, she might have found the cache, although, since Mrs. Benton is bedridden, it seems unlikely. The maid could have heard of the money, perhaps when, “in the years before,” Alice and her mother debated the wisdom of locking the house and of keeping the large sum of money on hand:

“But all a robber has to do,” said Alice, “is smash a window, undo the still locks, and—”
 
“Break a window! And warn us? Nonsense!”
 
“It would all be so simple if we only kept our money in the bank.”
 
“Again, nonsense! I learned in 1929 to keep hard cash from soft hands! There's a gun under my pillow and our money under my bed! I'm the First National Bank of Oak Green Island!”
 
“A bank worth forty thousand dollars?!”
 
“Hush! Why don't you stand at the landing and tell all the fishermen? Besides, it's not just cash that the fiends would come for. Yourself, Madeline—me!” (17)

All the maid would have to do is to break a window. Then, as panic ensues among the members of the family, she could visit the room of each, individually, and murder them, one by one. Neither Mrs. Benton nor Robert is said to fire a weapon at their killer. Madeline does and miss her aim. Alice also fires at her attacker—three times, in fact—but with her eyes closed, so it is easy to imagine that Alice misses her target, as the omniscient narrator verifies for the reader, stating that one bullet penetrates “the wall, another . . . the bottom of the door, [and the] third . . . the top” of the door (26).

The failure to fire a gun or poor aim protects the maid. As a result, the money is hers, and she can retire from the “outrageous home.” In 1952, the year in which Bradbury wrote this story, $40,000 was a lot of money, after all. As a suspect, the maid has the same three requisites for murder that a stranger would have: means, motive, and opportunity.

Alice as the Killer


Three of the family members are attacked and killed (or otherwise dies) in their respective bedrooms. Alice, who is in the library, alone survives. Shooting three times at the stranger who seeks to enter the library—and missing each time—Alice falls from the window she's opened, the sill of which she straddles, and makes good her escape through the snow. Was the maid also murdered? Is Alice, the sole survivor, the killer?

Because of the indirect style that Bradbury employs, which often describes actions, frequently in fragments without much context, and offers only snippets of conversation, while flitting from one character to another, either possibility seems to exist: either the maid or Alice, it appears, could be the killer.

Either could have broken a downstairs window, thereby precipitating the family's panic, and picked the victims off, one by one.

If Alice is the murderer, she certainly has the means (her gun) and the opportunity (she lives in the same house as the victims, her family), but what about the motive? What reason would she have to kill her mother, her sister, and her brother? After all, as a member of the family, she already enjoys the benefits such status confers upon her: food, clothing, shelter, even luxury.


However, she also must suffer the isolation, the deprivation (there is neither telephone service beyond the house nor electricity; nor is there much companionship, and there is no normalcy) in the “outrageous house,” which is occupied by eccentric and paranoid family members. With $40,000, she might start life anew. She alone is in the library, which suggests she has an interest in the wider world and in art and culture, articles which are in short supply in the madhouse in which she lives.

At the end of the story, objectivity appears in the figure of “the sheriff and his men” (26). Finally, there are individuals from the wider world, authorities trained to respond to emergencies and to solve crimes. Alice has been away; she has escaped; now, “hours later,” she has returned “with the police” (26).

The sheriff, observing the open front door, is surprised by the audacity of the intruder: “He must have just opened up the front door and strolled out, damn, not caring who saw!” (27)


The sheriff and his men also confirm the second set of footprints leading “down the front porch stairs into the white soft velvet snow.” The footprints are “evenly spaced,” suggesting “a certain serenity” and confidence (27).

Alice is amazed at the size of the footprints and the implication of their dimensions: “Oh, God, what a little man” (27).

But are the footprints those of a man?

Could they be the maid's footprints? Alice thinks they are the footprints of a man, but Alice never saw the person at the door to the library who'd sought to get to her; she'd fired at the library door with her “eyes shut” when she'd observed the doorknob turning, and all three of “her shots had gone wide” (26).

If the maid faked her own death, prior to killing the other family members, maybe the footprints are the maid's and not those of a male intruder. Maybe Alice has merely supposed the footprints are those of a man. After all, her mother often warned that rapists could assault them: “Besides, it's not just cash that the fiends would come for. Yourself, Madeline—me!” she'd told Alice (17). In this case, the maid left the footprints descending the front porch stairs and parading from the house “neatly” and “evenly spaced, with a certain serenity,” and Alice left the other set of footprints, those that begin outside the library window and run “away from silence” (26-27).

The first set of footprints could also be those of Alice herself. But what about the other set of footprints that Alice sees when she returns with the police, those “in the snow, running away from the silence” of the house? They are not the same set of footprints that she sees and calls to the attention of the sheriff and his men, those which lead down the front porch's stairs and across the lawn, “vanishing away into the cold night and snowing town” (27). Does this second set of footprints constitute an insurmountable problem for the idea that Alice is the killer?

After opening the front door, she could have left it open and run down the porch stairs and across the lawn to notify the police of the alleged intruder's dastardly deeds. This would be the reason that the footprints are small for a man; they were not left by a male intruder at all, but by Alice herself. The footprints that Alice sees fleeing from the library's open window could be imaginary footprints, which only she alone sees, possibly as a means of supporting her fantasy that an intruder, rather than she herself, murdered her family.

If this is the case, it makes sense that, suffering guilt, she would try to obliterate the only set of footprints at the scene, those of the “little man” (Alice herself): “Alice bent and put out her hand. She measured then tried to cover them with a thrust of her numb fingers.” And it makes sense that she stops crying only after “the wind and the winter and the night did her a gentle kindness. . . [by] filling and erasing” the incriminating evidence “until at last, with no trace, with no memory of their smallness, they were gone” (27).

Interestingly, the omniscient narrator states only that Alice saw the set of footprints leading from the open library window, but acknowledges that both she and the police see the footprints descending the front porch stairs and heading across the lawn, toward the distant, “snowing town.” Is one sight a hallucination, the other a reality?


Thanks to Bradbury's indirect communication, maybe not. The omniscient narrator does not tell the reader that the police see this second set of footprints. The omniscient narrator states only that “she [Alice] saw her footprints in the snow, running away from silence.” If Alice is the killer, after dispatching the maid, her mother, her brother, and her sister, she could have “fallen” out the library window and run to the front porch, covering her footprints as she went, the same way the wind eliminates the “small” footprints of the presumed intruder, by “smoothing and erasing them until at last . . . they were gone” (27).

An Intruder as a Killer

Alternatively, the killer could be a stranger, an intruder, come to rob or rape the women of the house, as Mrs. Benton has long imagined and feared might happen. This is the story's straightforward interpretation, and, despite a few incredulities, such as the intruder's remaining alive despite being the target of several shots fired by different individuals, the small footprints said to be his, the unlikelihood of his knowing about the cache of cash, and his breaking and entering without knowing what he risks he might face from the family inside the house, is a plausible—and perhaps the most plausible—interpretation of the plot.

Thee Family Are the Killers

Finally, another interpretation is possible concerning the killer's identity—or identities.


Maybe neither an intruder, the maid, nor Alice is the murderer. Perhaps the family members each killed him- or herself or died of fright. They are paranoid. Each has a loaded gun at hand. Although panicked by the breaking of a window, they allow (at first) that the broken window could have resulted from nothing more sinister than “a falling tree limb” or a thrown snowball. It's only after they hear a second sound, that of “metal rattling,” that they irrationally conclude that a window has been raised and that an intruder has entered their home (19). Their frantic telephone calls to one another fan the flames of their panic, as do the sounds of each successive gunshot, as the family members suppose one of their own seeks to defend him- or herself against the intruder.

While such defenses are possible, it's also possible that the disturbed, terrified mother and children, afraid of being robbed or raped and murdered, dispatch themselves, preferring a bullet to the savagery that the intruder might unleash upon them. Certainly, Bradbury's omniscient narrator impresses their terror upon the story's readers. Each is shut up alone, behind a locked door, separated from each other and from society at large.


Mrs. Benton sees (or imagines) her door opening, and she does not respond thereafter to Alice's frantic pleas over the telephone (24). Did she somehow take her own life?

Robert expires with a groan, perhaps dying of fright: “His heart stopped” (24).

Madeline says the intruder is at her door, “fumbling with the lock,” and the others hear “one shot and only one” (25). Has Madeline shot at the intruder—and missed? Or has she killed herself?

Only Alice now survives (unless the maid faked her own death and is, in fact, the killer). When Alice sees the knob to the library door turn, she also shoots, with her eyes closed—three times—and also misses the intruder (if there is an intruder).

How unlikely is it that two armed, terrified, paranoid people—Madeline, and Alice—would fail to kill their attacker or that Madeline would fire only once at someone she feared was trying to rob, rape, or kill her? Yet precisely this happens!

But what about the maid? In this scenario, how is her death explained? She is not like the family for whom she works. She does not share their paranoia. She is not isolated by choice, but lives in the town and works only a few hours each day in the family's home. She is “practical.” As far as we know, she is unarmed. Besides, even if she has a gun, why would she kill herself? The story is all but silent as to her demise (if she does die). All the omniscient narrator tells readers is that the maid has entered the “main lower hallway,” calling the names of the family members, apparently trying to get them to assemble.


Previously, however, readers have learned that Mrs. Benton objects to and discourages shouting, afraid that it could attract the attention of “fiends” (17). Alice thinks, as, in their panic, the others begin to scream, “I hear . . . . We all hear. And he'll hear . . . too” (22). Using their intercommunication phone service, Alice tells Mrs. Benton, “Quiet, he'll hear you” (23). Later, she is more direct: “Mother, shut up” (24). After her mother's death, Alice thinks, “If only she hadn't yelled. . . . If only she hadn't showed him the way” (24). Alice is downstairs, as is the maid. Could Alice have shot the maid to silence her and protect herself and her family?

As we've seen, there are at least four possibilities for interpreting Bradbury's story. So, what does happen in “The Island”?

Does an intruder actually enter the house and kill its occupants?


Does the maid fake her own death and then execute the members of the family, except Alice, who escapes?

Does Alice kill everyone else, the maid included, before she “escapes” an imaginary killer?

Do the family members kill themselves, while Alice kills the maid?

Thanks to Bradbury's indirect style, the possibilities multiply. While some may seem less likely than others, each is apt to have its own subscribers. 



 
Among the other stories in The Cat's Pajamas that I found particularly interesting are “Ole, Orozco! Siqueiros, Si!” and “The Completist,” each of which will be murdered and dissected in future Chillers and Thrillers posts.

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Todorov:

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

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

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

My Cup of Blood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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