Showing Off the Neighborhood

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Stephen King is known for the small-town settings of his horror novels, but other novelists also find plenty of horror in small-town settings, including Dan Simmons (Summer of Night), Robert R. McCammon (Boy's Life), Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Still Life with Crows), Dean Koontz (Phantoms), and, of course, Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes).

It's not hard to see the appeal of such stories.

Small towns are, in a way, an extension of home, as the term “hometown” suggests. In the past, especially, whether realistically or naively, many families left their doors unlocked at night and allowed their kids to roam the neighborhood at will, the single caveat “be home by dark.”

A community, we like to think, is a safe place, like home. It's a place full of friends, we like to believe. It's a place where everyone knows everyone else. There are, in small towns, interrelationships of many kinds: familial, romantic, friendly, neighborly, commercial.

One of the challenges that writers face when a small town is the setting of their novels is familiarizing readers with the community. Lots of people live in the town, people of various statuses, living on different streets, and performing different functions. Sometimes, those we think we know are actually strangers—perhaps dangerous ones—and those we don't know all that well turn out to be heroes. In a small town, anything is possible.

But how to introduce the town and its people, the townspeople? How to show their relationships to others? How to indicate their own hopes and dreams, fears and uncertainties?

In other words, how may readers be shown about town?

Writers tackle this task in several ways. Here are a few.

 

Still Life with Crows: The authors opt for description:

Medicine Creek, Kansas. Early August. Sunset.

The great sea of yellow corn stretches from horizon to horizon under an angry sky . . . .

One road cuts through the corn from north to south; another from east to west . . . .

A giant slaughterhouse stands south of the town, lost in the corn, its metal sides scoured by years of dust storms . . . .

The temperature is exactly 100 degrees . . . .

Twilight is falling over the landscape . . . .

A black-and-white police cruiser passes along the main street, heading east into the great nothingness of corn, its headlights stabbing into the rising darkness . . . 

Something Wicked This Way Comes: The author moves from character to character:

The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm . . . .

There's nothing n the living world like books on water cures, deaths-of-a-thousand slices, or pouring white-hot lava off castle walls on drolls and mountebanks.

So said Jim Nightshade . . . .

Watching the boys vanish away, Charles Holloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them . . . .

Phantoms: The author uses an eclectic approach, using description, and skipping from one character to another, but employing the dramatic, or “showing,” method rather than the expository (“telling”) method to bot introduce his town and townspeople and to generate and maintain suspense:

The scream was distant and brief, a woman's scream.

Deputy Paul Henderson looked up from his copy of Time. . . .

During the twilight hour of that Sunday in early September, the mountains were painted in only two colors: green and blue. The trees—pine, fir, spruce—looked as though they had been fashioned from the same felt that covered billiard tables. Cool, blue shadows lay everywhere, growing larger and deeper and darker by the minute.

Jenny Paige had never seen a corpse like this one.

The Santinis' stone and redwood house was of more modern design than Jenny's place, all rounded corners and gentle angles. . . .

Whichever technique an author uses—and the few above are but a tiny sample—he or she must make the setting seem “real” (i. .e, believable), provide a sense of “thereness,” create and sustain suspense, introduce the characters (townspeople), and, of course, establish a mystery that's rooted in horror. If, in the process, they can establish theme or symbolism or tone or point of view bigger than those of his or her characters' individual perspectives on life, those are pluses—and big ones.

In a later post, we'll consider how horror movies that feature small-town settings show viewers around their neighborhoods.

Robert R. McCammon's Bram Stoker Awards

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

It's unclear how prestigious the Bram Stoker Award is beyond the Horror Writers Association (HWA), whose members bestow the prize to writers (mostly among their own ranks) for “superior achievement” in the genre. The prizes were first awarded, in a variety of categories, in 1987. Winners receive a statuette made by Society Awards, the same firm that makes the Emmy Award, the Golden Globe Award, and the GLAAD Media Award.

Four HWA members have won multiple Bram Stoker Awards for the novel.

Robert R. McCammon took home the Bram Stoker Award for Swan Song (1983), which tied with Stephen King's Misery; for Mine (1990); and for Boy's Life (1991).

In the absence of HWA specific criteria for determining who should and should not receive a Bram Stoker Award for his or her novel, we'll take a look, backward in time, in this post, to see how the critics of the day assessed McCammon's prize-winning novels. In a future post, we'll consider Sarah Langan's “superior accomplishment.”

Either the book reviews of Swan Song written in 1983, the year of the novel's publication, are no longer available on the Internet or the novel was passed over by professional critics. There are a few reviews of the book online, but none by established, recognized critics or national publications of record and repute, so we must pass on to McCammon's 1990 Bram Stoke Award winner, Mine.

The Kirkus Review of the novel, after recounting details of the plot, which includes a series of events more typical of the thriller than a horror novel (e. g., “a ferocious chase that features, among other over-the-top attractions, a blizzard, enraged pit bulls, homegrown surgery, a mutilated FBI agent on a rampage”—suggests that Boy's Life tries hard to be a winner, but left the reviewer somewhat unimpressed.

Despite the novel's delivery of “prime suspense and explosive payoffs,” which made Mine a “maximum overdrive, page-whipping thriller,” it lacks originality (“nothing new here”) and has a “completely predictable resolution.” There are action and suspense, but nothing to get excited about with regard to innovation or surprises. Sounds like a grade of “B-,” which certainly wouldn't qualify for the receipt of a prize for “superior achievement.” Besides, isn't the book more a thriller than a horror novel?

For Gene Lyons, the secret of Boy's Life success as a novel is its nostalgic revisiting of the past and its “naive and sentimental” storytelling. The plot is complex, Lyons suggests, and a little rough around the edges, a sort of unevenly sewn patchwork of plots and subplots, “enough . . . to fill a half-dozen ordinary novels.” Despite these flaws, Lyons assigns the novel an “A-,” characterizing it as a guilty pleasure adults will enjoy reading despite themselves.

However, he points out that the book isn't really a horror novel; it's more like an “autobiographical fantasy,” or what McCammon calls “fictography.” Again, if this book isn't a horror novel, why was it awarded a Bram Stoker Award? Only the Horror Writer Association's judges could answer that question, but they will say only that the award is bestowed upon a writer whose work exhibits “superior achievement,” which Boy's Life achieves, according to Lyons, at least, albeit only barely.

Kirkus Reviews also praises Boy's Life. It tells a rich, evocative story of childhood in the deep South, constituting an “idyll of small-town America—an idyll that McCammon paints with a score of bull's-eye details.” Both a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, and a murder mystery of sorts, and a hybrid story mixing realism with fantasy—there's not only “a raging flood, a shootout, a showdown with bullies—but also . . . [such] often darkly, magical wonders as . . . a living dinosaur; precognitive nightmares; [and] the grotesque life after death of Cory's dog.”

Despite the novel's “few false notes,” the reviewer sees it as being on par with Stephen King's and ray Bradbury's “childhood-elegies,” but cautions prospective readers about the novel's “jarringly melodramatic climax.”

Although the Kirkus Review reviewer doesn't grade the book, as Lyons did, it seems likely, had a grade been awarded, it would have been an “A-” or a “B+,” as, overall, the assessment is much more positive than negative. For the sake of argument, then, let's say that Boy's Life does reflect the “superior achievement” that the HWA claims is the basis—the sole basis, perhaps—for winning the Bram Stoker Award for Novel. So far, of the thirteen books we've considered, only one seems to merit the HWA's award for “superior achievement,” which equates to just over seven percent.