Showing posts with label Robert Block. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Block. Show all posts

Friday, February 14, 2020

Learning from the Masters: Lawrence Block's Use of Metaphor as a Narrative Device

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman


According to his website, Lawrence Block started his writing career writing “midcentury erotica,” but is better known for his Matthew Scudder novel series and short stories. A Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America (MWA) and a former president of MWA, he has written other series of novels, some under various pen names, several non-fiction books; has contributed to several screenplays; has seen a number of his novels adapted to film; and maintains an occasional blog.


In his short story “Catch and Release” (Stories: All New Tales, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio), Block's metaphor, comparing fishing to killing, unifies the story's action, allowing the author, at the same time, to characterize his nameless first-person protagonist as a philosophical, if psychotic, serial killer.
The narrative's opening paragraph lays out the protagonist's modus operandi. A fisherman, he subscribes to the practice identified by the catchphrase “catch and release”:

When you spent enough time fishing, you got so you knew the waters. You had certain spots that had worked for you over the years, and you went to them at certain times of the day in certain seasons of the year. You chose the tackle appropriate to the circumstances, picked the right bait or lure, and tried your luck.

If they weren't biting, you moved on. Picked another spot (168).

Throughout the rest of the story, the fisherman employs this strategy. In terms of Block's metaphor, the fisherman (protagonist) is the serial killer; the “sport” of fishing is the killing; and the fish are the vulnerable young women for whom he fishes. The metaphor is extended by the narrator's exposition and dialogue and by Block's descriptions.

 
For example, the protagonist entertains violent fantasies after he catches (gives a ride) to a female hitchhiker whom he releases (lets her depart from his vehicle alive and well):

. . . he gave himself over to the fantasy she inspired. A lonely road. A piece of tape across her mouth. A struggle ending with her arms broken.
 
Stripping her. Piercing each of her openings in turn. Giving her physical pain to keep her terror company.

And finishing her with a knife. No, with his hands, strangling her. No, better yet, with his forearm across her throat, and his weight pushing down, throttling her (172).


Like the fisherman in the story's opening paragraph, the narrator also moves from location to location, visiting “certain spots that worked . . . over the years.” he cruises the interstate, selecting his prey as he seeks to catch “a girl all by herself” (178). Like “the true fisherman,” he is content to “fish all night and catch nothing” while he reminisces about previous fish he's landed (179).
His identification with the ideal fisherman extends to his description of a woman he sees in a roadhouse, as he describes “her full-lipped mouth” and explains how he “closed the distance between them,” as if he were reeling in a fish (173).


Alternating between talk of fishing and his stalking of young women keeps the story's metaphor alive. For example, in recalling a previous murder victim, he compares her murder to the gaffing, or impaling or clubbing, of a fish:

. . . He'd pulled up behind her just as she was about to put her groceries into the trunk of her car, and hopped out and offered his help. She smiled, and was about to thank him, but she never had the chance. He had a flashlight in one hand . . . and he took her by the shoulder ans swung hr around and hit her hard on the back of the head. He caught her as she fell, eased her down gently (178).

Concerning the gaffing of a fish, the narrator explains,

. . . Most people, they think of fishing and they somehow manage not to think about killing. They seem to think the fish comes out of the water, gulps for air a couple of times, and then obligingly gives up the ghost. Maybe he flops around a little at first, but that's all there is to it. But, see, it;s not like that. A fish can live longer out of water than you'd think. What you have to do, you gaff it. Hit it in the head with a club. It's quick and easy, but you can't get around the fact that you're killing it (179).


Although the woman he clubs in the head with his flashlight does not die from the blow (she's rendered unconscious, instead), he later kills her, after terrorizing and raping her. In fact, his telling her about the gaffing of the fish is part of the way he terrorizes her, before he mentions “the other unpleasant chores” that result from the killing of a fish, “the gutting, the scaling, the disposal of offal” (179). He stops talking only so that she can reflect upon the terrible things he's told her, “letting her figure out what to make of it” (179).

As the protagonist points out, for him, “fishing is not just a metaphor” (174). he is a fisherman; fishing is part of his life and the means of his livelihood (he sells fishing lures through a mail-order service) ((171-172).


Fishing is also something akin to a religion for him, a source of moral precepts and guidance for living. Instead of the Bible, he reads (and rereads) Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler and is familiar with Stephen Leacock's comment that “angling was the name given to fishing by people who couldn't fish” (177). Again and again, he repeats, “I am a fisherman.”

The act of fishing (capturing and killing young women) defines him: he is one who captures and kills, a serial killer. Even after he decides to “catch and release” women, he continues, occasionally, to kill his captives rather than releasing them. He remains, at the end of the story, what he was at the beginning of the tale: a fisherman, which is to say, a serial killer.


In the murder of a woman he encounters at a supermarket, the narrator describes himself as he appears to see himself (although his description, the reader sees, is not entirely accurate): he tells her that he is a “catch-and-release fisherman,” who enjoys fishing: “It does something for me that nothing else has ever done. Call it a sport or a pastime, as you prefer, but it's what I do and what I've always done” (178).

A narcissist who believes that women are no better than fish and can be used to satisfy his need to dominate, control, and decide their fate, as if killing is as much a “sport”—and as much a justified, morally correct “pastime”—as fishing, he captures and kills them with as much abandon as “most people” who “think of fishing” without associating it with “killing.”

In fact, the narrator derives his moral principles from the sport, an action that in itself suggests his madness:

. . . He had hooked and landed three trout. Each had put up a good fight, and as he released them he might have observed that they'd earned their freedom, that each deserved another chance at life.

But what did that mean, really? Could a fish be said to earn or deserve anything? Could anyone? And did a desperate effort to remain alive somehow entitle one to live?

Consider the humble flounder. He was a saltwater fish, a bottom fish, and when you hooked him he rarely did much more than flop around a little while you reeled him in. Dis this make him the trout's moral inferior? Did he have less right to live because of his genetically prescribed behavior? (175)


In his reflections, the protagonist moves from a fish to “anyone,” including, it seems, human beings or, more specifically, the young women for whom he routinely fishes. In conversing with the first young woman, the hitchhiker, whom the reader observes him to hook, or pick up, he tells her, “When [he releases them, and] they swim away . . . I get the sense that they're glad to be alive. But I may just be trying to put myself in their position. I can't really know what it's like for them” (170). He also wonders whether “they learn anything from the experience” of having been caught and struggles to free themselves and save their lives: “Are they warier the next time around?” When she replies, “I guess they're just fish,” he agrees: “I guess they are” (170).


These two passages, juxtaposed to one another, show that the narrator believes that the same moral principles, if any, that apply to fish also apply to his human victims. When it comes to morality, one precept fits all, regardless of species. If fish are undeserving of mercy, if they are undeserving of life, despite their valor, so, also, are young women. At least, that is true as far as anyone can know, because, to assume otherwise, requires a projection of one's own subjectivity upon creatures of the natural world. Whether fish or woman, the narrator says “I can't really know what it's like for them.” His inability to empathize aids his dehumanization of women.


Although the narrator may be right in asserting that we must presume that each of us must assume that others, like ourselves, are self-conscious entities capable of thought and emotion and belief and other subjective powers and processes and that we can, therefore, to some extent, at least “know what it's like for them,” he commits the fallacy of moral equivalency when he equates the value of a fish with that of a woman. A fish and a human being are not essentially the same, and there is no reason to value them equally. The comparison of them as equals is false and shows that the protagonist's thinking is deranged.

What type of “fish” captures the protagonist's attention, readers wonder (because the protagonist himself suggests this very question. While shopping at a grocery store, “he hadn't been looking for her,” or anyone else, but “then he looked up and there she was” (177). Although she is beautiful, he admits, “it wasn't her beauty he found himself responding to” (177). What was it, then, the reader wonders, that caught his eye?



Like the other young women whom he does not “catch and release,” she is killed by him. Perhaps, then, by recalling the other women he has killed already, we can glean the source of his attraction to this woman. One woman he recalls killing had passed out from drinking too many gandy dancers. Unable to terrorize her by suggesting his intentions to her before committing the outrages against her, “he let himself imagine that she was dead, and took her that way,” before breaking her neck (174). What seems to have excited him was her helplessness.

However, in considering the “many” women he's killed, the narrator states that “little of what he did ran to pattern” (175). In fact, he admits, “if anything, he'd deliberately sought variety, not for precautionary reasons but because it was indeed the spice of life—or death, if you prefer” (175-176).

Unlike many other serial killers, he does not take “trophies” and does not keep “souvenirs.” Moreover, he confuses memories of real victims with memories of imaginary victims about whom he has fantasized (176).

The woman he encounters in the grocery store is “beautiful, not young-pretty like the hitchhiker” he catches and releases, “or slutty-available like Marni the barfly,” whom he also catches and releases, “but genuinely beautiful,” so beautiful that 'she could have been an actress or a model” (177). However, he says, it is not to her beauty that he responded, and “it scarcely mattered what she wore” (177). After he hits her in the back of the head, knocking her unconscious, the woman is as helpless as the woman who'd drunk too many gandy dancers.


His victims' helplessness seems to be one of the elements that he finds attractive in his victims, which may be the reason he selected the drunken woman, but the grocery shopper was not helpless before he'd struck her. Like the gandy dancers victim, the protagonist snaps the grocery shopper's neck, after arranging “her on the ground on her back” and smashing “both her kneecaps,” but laving “tape on her wrists and across her mouth” (179). In other words, he renders her even more helpless, denying her the ability to run or scream or fight. Helplessness certainly seems one of the elements that the protagonist finds attractive, whether it is present when he kidnaps a victim or whether he himself causes her helplessness after the fact.


Toward the end of the story, the narrator recalls “the first time he'd departed from the catch-and-release pattern,” which was “less impulsive” and more planned. She was “the right girl,” and, like the other victims, had “turned up.” Thus, she was a target of convenience, as were most of his other victims. She was also physically attractive, “young, blond, a cheerleader type, with a turned-up nose and a beauty mark on one cheek” (180). 
The narrator does not tell what he did to this girl; he mentions only that “he'd thought long and hard about it.” However, his recollections of other victims' fates suggests that he also rendered her unconscious and, therefore, helpless, and dispatched her after terrorizing and raping her. Despite his claims to the contrary, there does seem to be a method to his madness, after all.

The protagonist finds justification for his killings in viewing himself as a fisherman and the women he kills as being prey who are of no more value than fish. However, he also cites the Bible or alludes to it on several occasions, leaving readers to wonder what might Block's purpose be in having his protagonist make such references.


The first reference to the Bible is actually a quotation of Luke 5:5: We fished all night and caught nothing. The Gospel verse is quoted out of context. The fisherman Simon (later, the apostle Peter), a fisherman, is suggesting to Jesus that it is pointless to continue to fish, as Jesus has instructed Simon and the rest of the ship's crew. However, when Simon obeys the command, Jesus performs a miracle, and the net is so full of fish that it breaks. When, with the assistance of the crew of a second ship, the fish are loaded aboard both ships, they are so heavy that they sink. Despite Simon's petition to Jesus to leave him, because Simon is a “sinful man,” Jesus tells the fisherman to follow him and that Jesus will make Simon “a fisher of men.”

Jesus calls his disciple to a very different sort of fishing expedition than that to which the protagonist of Block's story devotes himself. Instead of saving the souls of the unworthy, Block's narrator seeks to destroy the bodies and minds of his captives and to take their lives. The narrator of “Catch and Release,” as readers will learn, is too narcissistic, too sadistic, and too psychotic to understand the significance of the Bible verse he quotes or, perhaps, knowing the meaning of the scripture, perverts it by citing it in reference to his own monstrous deeds.


The protagonist seems to see himself and his victim, the grocery shopper he has bound and maimed, n the roles of Adam and Eve, describing them as “Adam and Eve in the garden . . . . Naked and unashamed” (180). Of course, Adam and Eve were only “naked and unashamed” before they disobeyed God, whereupon their innocence vanished, and, “the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Gen 3:7). They then “sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons,” aware and, it seems, repentant of their sin.

Once again, the narrator's reference to scripture is either intentionally ironic and blasphemous or misapplied. It seems, given his character, as it is revealed throughout the story, that the protagonist intends to mock Christian morality, which, after all, does not only conflict with his own, but censors it. In Christianity, the creature is not the equal of the Creator any more than the beast is the equal of the human. Women are not fish, and the fisherman is not a god.


Block leaves the reality of the protagonist's monstrosity before the reader; at the end of the story, the narrator continues to believe that he is doing nothing wrong, even when he kills, rather than releases, his victims. It is his position of moral equivalency that allows him to indulge his delusion that women, like fish, are expendable commodities in the satisfaction of his sadistic “sport” or (the metaphor changes) his appetite for flesh:

He was still a catch-and-release fisherman. He probably always would be. But, for God's sake, that didn't make him a vegetarian, did it?

Hell, no. A man still had to have a square meal now and then (180).


Sunday, July 15, 2018

Translating Images into Words

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman


Alive in Shape andColor: 17 Paintings by Great Artists and the Stories They Inspired, an anthology edited by Lawrence Block, is Block's “encore” to InSunlight and Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of EdwardHopper. This time around, the writers themselves picked the paintings (or, in a couple cases, the statues) upon which they based their contributions. Their choices vary from Norman Rockwell's The Haircut and Art Frahm's Remember All the Safety Rules to Rene Magritte's The Empire of Light and Vincent van Gogh's Cypresses. There are even a couple of nudes, Jean Leon Gerome's La Verite sortant du puits and Lilias Torrance Newton's Nude in the Studio.




Lee Child's “Pierre, Lucien, and Me” is the shortest of the shorts. The eight-page contribution, set in 1919 and based on Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Bouquet of Chrysanthemums, is told by its first-person narrator, the “Me” of the story's title. Having had a heart attack, he learns that a second, fatal one is inevitable within days, weeks, or months. He has no regrets and no need to put things right, except in the case of Porterfield, a wealthy young heir to a steel fortune, whom he'd duped. 

Through his roommate, Angelo, the narrator learns of Porterfield's love for Renoir's work. A waiter, Angelo had overheard Porterfield express to his dinner companions his desire to purchase a Renoir before the price of the famous artist's work rises due to Renoir's recent death, and Angelo had told the heir that the narrator, an art expert who works at the Metropolitan Museum, might locate some of Renoir's paintings for him. In fact, the narrator is an amateur artist who works at the museum “unloading wagons,” but he agrees to become Porterfield's agent.

In Paris, the narrator locates Lucien Mignon, a painter and friend of the late painter. His own unsigned works closely resemble those of Renoir, whose work is also available. One of the famous artist's unfinished canvases bears a separate painting in its corner: a vase of chrysanthemums. The narrator purchases the still life, and Mignon cuts it from the canvas, reluctantly agreeing to forge Renoir's name on it, since Renoir did, in fact, paint the chrysanthemums. The narrator also buys twenty of Mignon's own paintings, later forging Renoir's name on each of them as well, and ships Mignon's paintings to Porterfield, keeping the genuine Renoir for himself.

Now that he is dying, the narrator regrets having cheated the naive, trusting young man. To make things right, he takes the actual Renoir painting down from his wall, wraps it, and takes it to Porterfield's home, leaving it with the heir's “flunky,” telling him that he wants Porterfield to have the painting because Porterfield likes Renoir. Returning home, he sits, “waiting for the second episode,” the heart attack that will kill him. “My wall looks bare,” he observes, “but maybe better for it.”

Although Child's story is not a horror story, it's an entertaining, well-written piece. How might Renoir's painting inspire a horror story? The answer, clearly, is in any number of ways. Here, for example, is one possibility, a good title for which might be “Last Respects”:


After the wake that follows a lavish funeral in which hundreds of people paid their last respects, the decedent's widow, Chloe Sullivan, recalls moments of happiness she shared with her late husband: his proposal, their honeymoon in Naples, the elegant home they bought, the births of her children and how her husband had doted on them, the birthdays and holidays they enjoyed as a family. 

She is interrupted by her maid, Juanita, who asks her what she should do with “all the flowers” in the parlor, where her husband's body is laid out. It's a shame to toss them out, she laments. “They are so beautiful, especially the chrysanthemums the family sent.” Chloe snaps, “I'd throw those things in the garbage this instant if Salvatore's son, Guido, had attended the wake, but, even now, he has to screw things up, missing his damned plane! It wasn't bad enough his father put a hit out on my Brody?” The maid tries to console her employer, but Chloe shoos her away. “As soon as Guido pays his last respects, though, that bouquet of chrysanthemums will be the first to go!” she promises herself, as, alone in the parlor, she gazes on her husband's remains.




Block found that he was at a loss for his intended contribution to the anthology, until a friend emailed him a reminder that “Looking for David,” a story Block had written years ago, about Michelangelo's statute of David, would make a perfect addition to the volume. The painting in which Block had sought inspiration for an original story, Raphael Soyer's The Office Girls, serves as the anthology's frontispiece; at the close of his foreword to Alive in Shape and Color, Block invites readers to “come up with a story of your own” for Soyer's painting. “But don't send it to me,” he adds. “I'm done here.”



Joyce Carol Oates based her contribution, "Le Beaux Jours," on this painting, Les  beaux jour, by Bathus


Thomas Pluck based his story, "Truth Comes Out of the Well to Shame Mankind," on Jean Leon Gerome's La Veritie sortant du puits



Remember All the Safety Rules by Art Frahm inspired Jill D. Brock's "Safety Rules"

The volume contains seventeen muses, and there are, of course, hundreds, even thousands, of others available in museums around the world—and online—all waiting for a writer, of horror or other types of fiction, to tell the stories that they, the paintings, suggest. They await, in other words, the translation of images into words.


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.


Popular Posts