Showing posts with label Shirley Jackson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shirley Jackson. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Doppelgänger Plots: Double Your Horror, Double Your Thrills

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood . . . . 
 
—Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

Each choice that we make shapes us. Every alternative choice is an opportunity to take one path or another. Every decision is a sculpting of the hands over the present and future direction of our lives. We graft and prune and weed with each action we take. Yes, I have mixed my metaphors; life is too complex for a single trope, as are the many moments that demand we shape our lives, our selves, our beings.

 
Tweedledee and Tweedledum
 Click the image to enlarge it.
 
Sometimes, horror fiction allows readers to read about (or, in the case of horror as it is depicted in theater, television, and cinema, viewers) to “see” not only the culmination of the results of the decisions and actions that a character has made, but also those of the decisions and actions that he or she could have made, revealing not only the actual character, but also an alternative character—or even alternative characters—that the one could have become, were he or she to have made other choices and taken other actions than those he or she chose or took.

 Fiction that offers multiple potential versions of the same character is existential, suggesting that, as Jean-Paul Sartre declares, “existence precedes essence”; we are, or become, what we do. However, fiction of this sort, not the least of which, has often used mythical and psychoanalytical (some would say these are redundant terms) models to present the fictitious doubles, or doppelgängers by which such multiplicities of possibility are exhibited.


Perhaps one of the most familiar examples of the double, or doppelgänger, is Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The title of the novel suggests that there are two characters, but, there is only one: the good Dr. Jekyll and the evil Mr. Hyde are one and the same character.


  Oscar Wilde also explores the possibilities of alternative pathways; the protagonist of his novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray sells his soul to the devil so that he may remain young and beautiful while his portrait ages and takes on ever more hideous and deformed aspects each time Dorian sins.

 In a short story, “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,” Shirley Jackson's doppelgänger takes the form of a married couple who take turns aiding and afflicting strangers, the husband acting with charity toward all, while his wife acts with malice to everyone; later, they switch roles.

Hitchcock's Rear Window: The Well-Made Film
According to John Fawell, author of Hitchcock's Rear Window: The Well-Made Film, Alfred Hitchcock employs the doppelgänger with a vengeance in Rear Window.
 

  A fan of such writers as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Heinrich Heine. Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Guy de Maupassant, and Alfred de Masset, all of whom used the device of the double, Hitchcock also frequently uses “doubles . . . as the basis for his stories” (73). The double, Fawell says, is used in Strangers on a Train, Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and other films, including, of course, Rear Window.


Indeed, Fawell suspects “perhaps no other Hitchcock film has as many doubles in it as Rear Window, creating the effect that the neighbors of the voyeuristic photographer, protagonist L. B. Jefferies, who is laid up in his apartment with a broken leg, are merely images of himself, rather like the figures in one's dream (76): 

The windows [in the apartments through which, using his camera's telephoto lens, he secretly spies] can be seen either as a visualization of Jeff's dream or unconscious world as paraliterary devices, means of reflection and therapy for Jeff . . . . For [critic Robin] Woods, the windows “all in some way reflect his own problems,” whereas, for Hitchcock's biographer, Donald Spoto, “each of the spied-upon neighbors offers . . . a facet of his present psychic life or possibility of the future” (77).


Hitchcock makes his audience aware of Jefferies's thoughts, attitudes, feelings, and judgments concerning the things he sees his neighbors do. In fact, Jefferies nicknames some of them for the trait of each that stands out to him: Miss Torso, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Composer, The Newlyweds. His thoughts about them are his thoughts, so his views of his neighbors allow viewers to “see” the real Jefferies who resides behind the persona of the adventurous, rather arrogant photographer.
 

 His view of them, is his view of himself. Thus, the ideas and emotions he projects on them represent the different persons he himself might have been, had he made different choices and performed different actions than those he did. Perhaps impotent, perhaps homosexual or asexual, Jefferies wants to get rid of his girlfriend Lisa, a beautiful model; Lars Thorwald, his neighbor, does just this, when he murders, cuts up, and hauls away his nagging wife.
 

 There are many other similarities, too, between Jefferies, the voyeur, and the neighbors he spies upon. For example, as Fawell points out, “just as Miss Lonelyhearts made dinner for a man who literally was not there while Lisa made dinner for a man (Jeff) who metaphorically was not there, so Miss Torso literally waits for a man to return just as Lisa waits metaphorically for Jeff to return to her” (103).
 
Throughout several seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon and his stable of writers provided fans of the series with an extended sequence in which Buffy is flanked by two other characters who seem to represent possible alter egos for her: Kendra and Faith. In this context, these young women can be viewed as either mythical or psychoanalytic terms:

Apollo
Socratic Soul
Dionysus
Kendra
Buffy
Faith
Mythical Model
Superego
Freudian Self
Id
Kendra
Buffy
Faith
Psychoanalytic Model

Beset from both directions, by the demands of Kendra, representing Buffy's Apollonian tendencies (or the demands of her superego) and by those of Faith, embodying Buffy's own Dionysian impulses (or the demands of Buffy's own id), Buffy, as the Socratic Soul (or the Freudian Self), must decide in which direction to go (that is, which impulse or demand to follow). From both Kendra-Apollo-Superego and Faith-Dionysus-Id, Buffy-Socratic Soul-Self acquires strengths and weaknesses, enriching and complexifying her own character.
 

 She also learns the benefits and the dangers of both extremes, that of the Apollonian (or superego) and that of the Dionysian (or id). Kendra tells Buffy that Buffy that whatever is specified in The Watcher's Handbook must be done—that is, Kendra goes strictly by the book, obeying authority without thought or challenge. Faith, on the other hand, follows her own precepts; when it comes to sex, she says she “get[s] some, [and] get[s] gone.” Likewise, when Faith sees something in a shop window that she likes, she doesn't buy the item; she steals it: “want, take, have” is the credo that guides her actions.
 

 Kendra's sense of duty and her unquestioning obedience gets her killed; Faith's amoral lawlessness almost gets both Buffy and herself killed. At the end of the series, however, Buffy and Faith survive the Hellmouth; Kendra does not survive even the attack of the vampire Drusilla.

 
Ultimately, Whedon's series suggests that, although both the superego and the id are valuable to a warrior, over-reliance on the Apollonian (basically, reason) or the demands of the superego (essentially, one's conscience) could get a fighter killed, whereas over-reliance on the Dionysian (basically, instinct) or the demands of the id (again, essentially instinct) although potentially dangerous, might save a slayer.

 When the chips are down, Whedon suggests, go with the gut, not the head—certainly a debatable point.

 Whether the topic of concern to a writer is morality, one's unconscious perceptions of reality, or survival, the use of the double, or doppelgänger is a proven, time-honored device by which writers of any genre, including horror and the thriller, can investigate the perils, strengths, flaws, benefits, and disadvantages of extremes, Apollonian and Dionysian, psychoanalytic, or otherwise.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Plotting Board, Part 6

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman




In this post, I offer a few tips on plotting, many of which are implied, if not directly stated in Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to the X-Files by Zach Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff.

With a Little Bit of Bloomin' Luck

Our belief (or relative belief) in the influences of certain phenomena, including our feelings and attitudes, often affect our thoughts and our overt behavior, even when we deny that such is the case. In The X-Files, Mulder is frequently guided by his belief in the existence of paranormal phenomena, while his partner, Scully, is often led by her skepticism.



Other phenomena, real and imagined, also affect the characters, one of which, as VanDerWerff points out, is the concept of luck. “We all sort ourselves . . . into the categories of 'lucky people' and 'unlucky people'” (323), he suggests. FBI agents Mulder and Scully are no exceptions, which allows the series's episode “The Goldberg Variation” to explore “the ideas of luck” as “a giant system you pay into, then make withdrawals from” (323). By exploring other commonly held beliefs, communal or individual, writers acquire many ways to develop plots for short stories and novels, just as TV and movie writers do.



Religious fanaticism, as represented by a snake-handling cult in The X-Files episode “Signs and Wonders” is another example. According to VanDerWerff, the exploration of power of fanaticism to shape and manipulate religious fanatics has a lot to do with “the lure of complete commitment, of surrendering oneself to someone who claims to know all the answers” (328). It's an idea for plotting as contemporary and terrifying as Allison Mack's alleged involvement in the NXIVM cult, which, again, allegedly, included her branding other women as her and her master's property. (Religious fanaticism also has quite an influence on Pilgrim a character in the Punisher series.)

Such ideas as blessings and curses, optimistic and pessimistic attitudes, biases and prejudices, fetishes and phobias, the supernatural and the otherworldly, to name but a few such influences, also permit such stories as H. G. Wells's “Pollock and the Porroh Man,” “The Red Room,” and “The Apple”; Ray Bradbury's “Skeleton”; the effects of idols in Stephen King's Desperation; Rod Serling's “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”; Shirley Jackson's “Just an ordinary Day”; and W. W. Jacobs's “The Monkey's Paw,” to name but a few.

(Seemingly) Alternate Solutions

As Handlen notes in his commentary on “The Amazing Maleeni” episode of The X-Files, one way to spin a plot while maintaining suspense is to present a mystery which has—or at least seems to have—multiple possible solutions. As the characters (or readers) discover the solution they've figured out isn't the solution at all, they continue to pursue leads or watch (or read), hoping their next deduction may prove correct, only (hopefully) to be frustrated yet again, until, finally, the true, one-and-only solution is presented, by either Mulder or Scully, naturally:



Several times through the episode, our heroes believe they've solved the case only to come up empty-handed. The result is something that continually pulls us forward along with Mulder and Scully, promising new and greater mysteries with each new discovery” (326).

Ask the BIG QUESTIONS

Plots can be generated by simply asking the BIG QUESTIONS, as the “Sein und Zeit” (“Being and Time”) episode of The X-Files does. This installment, Handlen and VanDerWerff imply, asks what might happen to a character whose “very belief system” is “eradicated before his eyes” (330).



This is such a compelling question that its very asking is enough to make anyone want to stay tuned (or keep reading, as the case may be). It also parallels such events in the lives of historical figures and, indeed, the men and women of everyday life. What became of Jefferson Davis, the man, after the Civil War ended in the South's defeat? What did the ordinary Roman think and do after the Empire fell (or the average Brit, for that matter, after the fall of the British Empire)? What does one do the day after he or she has lost his or her entire family in a tragic accident? What happens to the citizens of a nation after the fall of their country? History records some of the answers, but never all.

The question that “Sein und Zeit” asks, implicitly, is what happens to Fox Mulder when his “very belief system [is] eradicated before his eyes”? The second part of this story is presented in the next episode of the series, “Closure.” BIG QUESTIONS, it's obvious, lead to longer plots. They also generate immediate and profound interest on the part of their audiences.

NEXT: A bit more.

Thursday, February 21, 2019

"When you paint, always think of something else"

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

When you paint, always think of something else.”—Salvador Dali

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Association-DIY-Diva-Mystery-ebook/dp/B07MQ73LJQ

Murder mysteries withhold the explanation of the event or events upon which their stories center—the crime (or what), the method of committing the crime (how), the identity of the criminal (the who), the motive (why) or some other element (when, where, how many, how much). Indeed, it is by withholding such information that a mystery is a mystery. 

In this regard, horror stories are mysteries, too, because they likewise withhold the nature of the threat (who or, in horror, what, since many horror villains are monsters or other inhuman beings), the cause (how), the quantity (number, usually, rather than volume) of the antagonists or their victims, or some other element.

Often, such withholdings are fairly straightforward, but, in the hands of accomplished writers, the mystery can be sophisticated, either in itself or in its execution. Shirley Jackson, who is surely a sophisticated writer of horror fiction (and other genres), is a case in point.


In one of her stories, unpublished until 2015, nearly half a century after her demise, her protagonist, Mr. Halloran Beresford prides himself on his appearance and congratulates himself for remembering his wife's birthday: he has bought a box of chocolates for her. However, he does not stand out from others in a crows. Nevertheless, he seems satisfied with himself and his mundane life. In fact, he seems a little smug. He interprets harmless, everyday actions, whether they are innocent in themselves or rude, as deliberate acts of aggression directed at him personally. An observant man, he notices details and, at times, obsesses about others—a “man in a pale hat,” a store clerk, a bus driver, even, at last, his own wife. At first, there is just enough sense in his interpretations of these details to make one wonder whether he is being stalked or harassed, but, ultimately, they don't add up. Why would strangers, unknown to him and to one another, conspire or act by sheer coincidence to abuse him? Why would the woman to whom he's apparently been married for years do so? None of them has a motive to join others to persecute him, save for the man in the pale hat, perhaps, who, Mr. Beresford supposes, might have been offended by Mr. Beresford's touching of his own upper lip as he noticed the other man's “small mustache”—a theory that seems unlikely, to say the least. Even if the man had been somehow offended by Mr. Beresford's gesture, would his annoyance have been sufficiently strong to motivate him to follow Mr. Beresford all over the city merely for the sake of badgering him? 

The story's title explains the cause of Mr. Beresford's strange behavior; his actions are due to his “Paranoia.” The story remains interesting because of its characterization of its protagonist and the twist at the narrative's end, when Mr. Beresford, suspecting his wife is one of the conspirators in the campaign of his bedevilment, overhears (or imagines) her reporting him to her supposed accomplices, from whose pursuit and surveillance he seems to have escaped: over the telephone, she informs one of them, “We have him.”


Without this title, the story's mystery would have been retained, but the story might have been too bizarre and, in a word, inexplicable for the market without such an explanation by way of title, so, it seems Jackson painted—or wrote—herself into a corner. Should she explain the story's bizarre incidents with the title or, delaying the explanation, postpone the revelation of the cause of Mr. Beresford's behavior, his paranoia and, in so doing, perhaps ensure the story's lack of marketability? She seems to have former course, which is all the more reason that her failure to find a publisher for her story during her own lifetime is dispiriting.


“With the addition of the one element of fantasy, or unreality, or imagination, all the things that happen are fun,” Jackson wrote. By substituting the phrase “made mysterious” for the word “fun,” we gain an insight into the technique Jackson often employed to strike an element of the bizarre, the fantastic, the eerie, or the uncanny into her stories. In “Paranoia,” it is paranoia itself that provides the “element of of fantasy, or unreality, or imagination.” The story is an example of how Jackson's use of this element can transform a series of mundane happenings into a unconventional tale of mystery.


Saturday, December 10, 2011

“An Ordinary Day, with Peanuts”: Shirley Jackson on The Problem of Evil


Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

One way to gain insight concerning horror writers’ fiction and the techniques that the writers of such literature employ is to study actual specimens of the genre. Chillers and Thrillers has already examined such stories in some detail, including H. G. Wells’ “The Red Room,” Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” and Charles Dickens’ “The Signal-man.” In addition, Chillers and Thrillers has considered the film The Descent and Stephen King’s novel Under the Dome in thorough detail. As a result of these studies (and others that are note quite as detailed), much concerning the art of writing horror fiction has been learned and shared. Perhaps these studies have also suggested the critical tools, techniques, theories, and approaches that one can take, on his or her own, to better understand the tricks of the trade. Chillers and Thrillers will continue to “murder” these stories in order “to dissect” them, so that this blog’s faithful followers and occasional readers can gain and share whatever insights Chillers and Thrillers may offer, beginning with Shirley Jackson’s masterful tale, “An Ordinary Day, with Peanuts.”

Her story opens as the omniscient narrator introduces the unlikely protagonist, Mr. John Philip Johnson, sharing with the story’s readers Johnson’s view of the world. It is unduly optimistic--naively optimistic, one might suggest--like that of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, whose view of the universe as representing, despite its moral and ontological limitations, “the best of all possible worlds,” an optimism that is attacked, quite effectively, each in his own way, by writers as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Young Goodman Brown”), Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire (Candide), and the Marquis de Sade.(Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue). Leibnitz’s view of the world is assailed, again, in part, by Jackson, in “An Ordinary Day.”

Mr. Johnson’s view of the world is (or, at least seems to be) much like that of Voltaire. Johnson, like the philosopher who wrote “Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil,” apparently believes that this is “the best of all possible worlds” (although, as readers will soon learn, appearances of belief, as of appearances otherwise, can be deceiving). Jackson, through her narrator, supplies hints that her protagonist’s ostensible optimism may not be supported by the actual state of the world. For example, he has had to have his shoes resoled, and this “resoling” suggests that the universe is not the perfect place that it may, at times, appear to be, for the fact that Mr. Johnson’s soles have worn out, needing to be replaced, suggests that good things even as trivial as the soles of shoes--and, perhaps, as significant as the souls of men and women--can degrade. This intimation of entropy, of erosion, of gradual degradation, if not of evil, is reinforced by the narrator’s reference to the sidewalk upon which Mr. Johnson steps as he leaves home as being “dirty” and by the narrator’s observation that only “some” of the people at whom Mr. Johnson smiles bother to return his smile.

Although his kindness wins them over, at first, other characters are not nearly as trusting of Mr. Johnson as he seems to be of them. When he offers a child the carnation he has bought for his lapel, the baby’s mother studies him “for a minute” before smiling at him, as her innocent child has done, upon the receipt of the flower, suggesting that she, having experience of the world, does not, unlike her child, automatically trust strangers bearing gifts. This mother’s initial distrust of Mr. Johnson is mirrored, a few moments later, by another mother’s suspicion of him when he offers to watch her child for her while she tends to the men who are moving her furniture. (The rest of the small crowd gathered at the scene are more interested in inspecting her worn furniture than they are in lending her a hand.) Her suspicion--she “turned and glared at him distrustfully”--prompts him to add, “We'll sit right here on the steps.” The child, a boy, is allowed to go to Mr. Johnson, who offers the lad a “handful of peanuts” from his pocket. The boy initially refuses the offered peanuts because “his mother did not allow him to accept food from strangers.” While the mother supervises the movers, Mr. Johnson reassures the boy that he will like his new home in Vermont. As he goes about town, having chosen a random route (“he did not follow the same route every morning, but preferred to pursue his eventful way in wide detours, more like a puppy than a man intent upon business”), Mr. Johnson does one good turn after another to all whom he encounters, including animals: he feeds a peanut to “a stray dog” he encounters on his way.

Jackson’s narrator frequently advises readers of how good Mr. Johnson himself feels, possibly as a result of his optimism and possibly as a result of the good deeds that he does. For example, as he sets out from home, at the beginning of the story, “Mr. John Philip Johnson shut his front door behind him and went down his front steps into the bright morning with a feeling that all was well with the world on this best of all days, and wasn't the sun warm and good,” and, after he watches the woman’s son, he steps “happily. . . Feeling the warm sun on his back and on the top of his head.”

He matches two young people who are too much in a hurry and too concerned with work to live their lives, paying them for the day they will miss by going on a date, the expenses of which Mr. Johnson pays in advance. He continues to offer peanuts to those whom he meets--a gull, a panhandler, a bus driver--and advises a couple who are seeking an apartment to rent of the vacancy left by the mother and son who have moved to Vermont. (This act is especially helpful in such big cities as New York, in which finding any apartment is difficult.) His good deeds continue until it is time for him to return home:
After his lunch he rested; he walked into the nearest park and fed peanuts to the pigeons. It was late afternoon by the time he was ready to start back downtown, and he had refereed two checker games, and watched a small boy and girl whose mother had fallen asleep and awakened with surprise and fear that turned to amusement when she saw Mr. Johnson. He had given away almost all of his candy, and had fed all the rest of his peanuts to the pigeons; and it was time to go home. Although the late afternoon sun was pleasant, and his shoes were still entirely comfortable, he decided to take a taxi downtown.
On his way home, he saves a taxi driver from losing money on a horserace. After the driver agrees to take the money home to his wife that a fare had given him to bet on a horse, Mr. Johnson gives the driver another ten dollars to bet on a different horse on another day, convincing the driver that astrological signs are against the horse winning the race that the driver has been tipped about the horse’s winning.

Finally, arriving back at his apartment, Mr. Johnson is greeted by his wife. They enquire as to one another’s day. He tells her that his has not been difficult; hers, she says, has been only “so-so.” She then recites the incidents of her day: she “accused” a woman at a department store “of shoplifting,” “sent three dogs to the pound,” “quarreled” with a bus driver and complained about his conduct to his supervisors. Based upon Mr. Johnson’s kind and considerate behavior throughout the day, readers are apt to think that Mr. Johnson would be horrified by his wife’s conduct. Therefore, his reaction comes as something of a shock. “Fine,” he says, and then, observing that she looks “tired,” suggests that they “change over tomorrow”--in other words, she will play the angel to his devil.

The story ends upon the same sort of commonplace note with which it began, as Mr. Johnson, enquiring as to what is for dinner and told “veal cutlet,” replies, “Had it for lunch.” The ordinariness of the lives of this couple, each of whom does good or evil in the course of their daily lives and is able, by a mere act of the will, to alternate between these modes of conduct enhances the story’s horrific quality, for it suggests that anyone and everyone--people as seemingly normal and ordinary as Mr. Johnson and his wife--can be either good or evil, or, indeed, both, and the duality of all human beings as agents, simultaneously, of both good and evil is the message of Jackson’s story. Men and women, Jackson suggests, are capable of choosing to be good or evil--or, at least, to act in good or evil ways. They have free will.

Her story suggests how much good or evil can be done by seemingly insignificant acts of kindness or malice. Mr. Johnson’s matching of the young couple might result in a happy, lifelong marriage between a young woman and a young man who, before, were in much too great a rush to earn a living to appreciate life or, indeed, themselves or other people, just as Mrs. Johnson’s accusation (perhaps unfounded) of a shopper’s theft could become a lifelong impediment to the individual, should a conviction result, in seeking employment or retaining a position. Obviously, most people would agree that it is better to do good than to do evil, but, Jackson’s story also suggests that, given the choice of behaving one way or the other, most people choose to behave both ways, either simultaneously or alternately, and that those who are suspicious of other people’s seemingly good intentions may, therefore, have good reason, indeed, to be suspicious. To choose to do good only at times is to choose to do evil, for to truly choose to do good would mean to renounce evil entirely--something that people do not seem to want to do or, perhaps, to be capable of doing.

Readers may be reminded of the lesson that Goodman Brown learns in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” that all men and women are both good and evil; that sin is innate and inescapable; and that all human deeds, therefore, are, even when good, tainted with evil. It is this theme, the idea of original sin, that Leibnitz’s optimistic philosophy ignores and that Jackson’s story, like “Young Goodman Brown,” Candide, and Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue ultimately underscores.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Sex and Horror, Part 7

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Although he employs psychoanalysis himself on rare occasions in his analyses of and commentaries upon horror fiction, Stephen King doesn’t seem to be a fan of Freudian thought. Critics who approach criticism from this point of view, he says, tend to conceive of “the writer’s books” as “Rorschach inkblots that will eventually reveal the author’s anal, oral, or genital fixation” rather than illuminate the literature they allegedly interpret (“Horror Fiction” from Danse Macabre in Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing, 190).

This is not to suggest, however, that horror fiction is devoid of sex; as I have demonstrated in previous posts, the genre is replete with examples of erotic behavior, especially of the perverted and deviant sort. It’s just that the sex is not sex for sex’s sake; it is not gratuitous, nor is it an expression of unconscious impulses. Often, when it occurs, it is presented within a context of social, or even sociological, significance.

According to Anne Rivers Siddons herself, the author of The House Next Door, she was careful to create a menace with which her sophisticated, upwardly mobile, middle-class suburbanite characters (and readers) could identify as relevant to their lives:
A traditional ghoulie would be laughed out of the neighborhood. So what would break and crumble defenses and penetrate suburban armors? It would have to be different in each case. Each person has his own built-in horror button. Let’s have a house that can isolate and push it, and then you’ve really got a case of the suburban willies (quoted in “Horror Fiction,” 98).
“The whole point of the book, of course, is not so much the house and its peculiar, terrible power,” she continues, “but what effect it has on the neighborhood, and on the relationships between neighbors and friends, and between families, when they are forced to confront and believe the unbelievable”:
This has always been the power of the supernatural to me. . . That it blasts and breaks relationships between people and other people and between people and their world, and, in a way, between people and the very essences of themselves. . . . For belief is everything; belief is all. Without belief, there is no terror” (quoted in “Horror Fiction,” 898-99).
King offers an example of Siddons’ implementation of her theory. During a party hosted by the haunted house’s first residents, Walter and Pie Harralson, guests come running to the bedroom in which the hosts have left their coats when they hear Pie screaming. King describes the scene, before offering his commentary concerning it:
Near the end of their housewarming party, Pie begins to scream. The guests rush to see what has happened to her. They find [her husband] Buddy Harralson and [his mentor at their law firm] Lucas Abbott embracing, naked, in the bedroom. . . . Pie’s Daddy has found them first, and he is in the process of expiring of a stroke on the floor while his Punkin Pie screams on. . . and on.. . . and on” (102).
King sees this scene as exemplifying Siddons’ use of the conventions of “the new American gothic to examine. . . . social codes and social pressures” (“Horror Fiction,” 168):
The essence of the horror in this scene. . . lies in the fact that social codes have not merely been breached; they have been exploded in our shocked faces. . . . It is a case of everything going just about as totally wrong as things can go; lives and careers are ruined irrevocably in the passage of seconds (“Horror Fiction,” 102).
King’s insights concerning horror are, as usual, spot-on, as is his further contention that this genre of literature has the dual purposes of exploring “taboo lands” before confirming readers’ “own good feelings about the status quo” (“Horror Fiction, 107).

At times, horror fiction crosses paths with erotic fiction; indeed, sometimes, the two merge, producing hybrid monsters that are half-sex and lust, half fear and revulsion. Even when they remain more or less distinct, however, the two genres have a lot in common--at times, at least. King suggests as much when he differentiates classic Gothic from new American Gothic horror fiction. “Once upon a time,” he observes, “the Bad Place was seen by critics as symbolic of the womb--a primarily sexual symbol which perhaps allowed the gothic to become a safe way of talking about sexual fears,” but, with the advent of “the new American gothic,” which depends more upon the use of a microcosmic setting and a narcissistic protagonist, “the Bad Place” now more often represents “interest in the self and fear of the self” (“Horror Fiction,” 106-107).

Although erotic fiction differs from horror fiction in that the former plays upon readers’ ideas, emotions, fantasies, and experiences concerning lust and sex and the latter relies upon readers’ ideas, emotions, fantasies, and experiences concerning fear and revulsion, they share the same purposes, at times, at least, as the dual purposes identified by King. After exploring social taboos concerning lust and sex, erotic fiction may or may not then confirm its readers’ “own good feelings about the status quo,” for after observing or participating for the first time in a sexual act of a usually deviant or perverted nature, a protagonist can either reject the sexual experience into which he or she has been initiated (a decision which reinforces the status quo concerning what is normal, permissible, right, or appropriate sexually); accept the sexual experience (a decision which rejects the status quo’s censure of such sexual behavior); or remain, for the time being, at least, undecided and confused concerning whether to accept or reject the sexual experience (a decision which suspends acceptance or rejection of the status quo’s censure of such sexual behavior). Unlike horror fiction, erotic fiction can, but need not, confirm readers’ “own good feelings about the status quo” and its censure of unusual sexual behavior.


Examples in which protagonists reject unusual sexual experiences after trying them or having them forced upon them, accepting the status quo’s censure of this behavior, are the Marquis de Sade’s satirical novel Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791), and James Dickey’s novel Deliverance (1970) and the movie version of it (1972), directed by John Boorman.


Examples of stories in which protagonists accept unusual sexual experiences after trying them; rejecting the status quo‘s censure of this behavior; include the Marquis de Sade’s novel, Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), and Ang Lee’s film, Brokeback Mountain (2005).


An example in which the main character seems to remain undecided as to whether to accept or reject unusual sexual experience, neither accepting nor rejecting the status quo’s censure of this behavior is Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992).

Another similarity between horror fiction and erotic fiction is the concern of each of these genres with power. For King, horror is a subdivision of fantastic literature, and fantasy, in turn, is comprised of “tales of magic,” which are, in turn, “stories of power”: “One word nearly defines the other. Power is magic; power is potency. The opposite of potency is impotence” (“Horror Fiction,” 184). Often, the concern with, and for, power takes a sexual form, especially for men: “I think that most men, even today, tend to identify the magic most strongly with sexual potency. A woman may not want to but she can; a man may want to and find that he cannot” (“Horror Fiction,” 186).

Drugs such as Cialis and Viagra, penile implants, and other products of technology may be enlisted as “magical” means by which to empower sexually impotent men and to level the playing field, as it were, between women who “may not want to but. . . can” and men who “may want to and. . . cannot.” In extreme examples of erotic--or pornographic--films, mechanical devices, or sex machines are shown as leveling the playing field, as it were, between women’s innately greater sexual capacity and men’s more limited sexual stamina, replacing flesh-and-blood male organs (and men themselves) with tireless contraptions of steel, rubber, and plastic that operate, fluidly and forever--or, at least, until the gasoline that powers them runs out. Never has even the most virile alien, beast-thing, or monster in horror fiction had such tireless staying power as these mechanical contrivances!

Another way in which horror fiction and erotic fiction parallel one another is that both invite audiences, whether readers or moviegoers, to become voyeurs. Audiences are invited to observe, or even to participate, vicariously, through identifying themselves with the stories’ protagonists, in all manner of sexual behaviors, many of them deviant or perverted.

It is important to understand that the reader or the viewer is invited, not forced, to observe and to participate in these sexual acts, for he or she (more commonly, he) is free to refuse the invitation altogether by not reading or watching the story at all; is free to stop reading or watching at any moment that he no longer wishes to accept the invitation; and is free to read or watch the story all the way through--several times over, if he likes. In any case, the reader or the moviegoer, if he does accept the invitation, does so on his own volition; therefore, he is complicit in the seduction, perversion, deviance, abuse, violation, and any other sexual behavior, even that which is immoral or even criminal, that is described on the page or depicted on the film that he, voluntarily, reads or watches.

For readers, viewers, and critics who accept the Freudian view of fiction, horror fiction is more or less an extravaganza of unconscious sexual drives centered upon anal, oral, and genital fixations, Oedipal conflicts, castration complexes, penis envy, and so forth, whereas readers, moviegoers, and critics who interpret horror fiction from a theological Judeo-Christian worldview understand such literature to assess and address human beings’ relationships to and interrelationships with one another, with nature, and with the Creator of both humanity and the universe.

This distinction between these two approaches to literary analysis and criticism points to yet another parallel between horror fiction and erotic fiction. There is a reason that, in horror fiction, as in erotic fiction, the sex that is described or depicted tends to be deviant and perverted.

King asserts that the fiction of fear--and, it might be added, of lust--is a disbelief in, or a rejection of, God--the same God, it should be remembered, who bade Adam and Eve “to be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” and not to experiment with their sexual organs and orifices just to have sex for sex’s sake:
All of these [horrible and absurd] things are mentally acceptable if we accept the idea that God abdicated for a long vacation, or has perchance really expired. They are mentally acceptable, but our emotions, our spirits, and most of all our passion for order--these powerful elements of our human makeup--all rebel. If we suggest that there was no reason for the deaths of six million Jews in the camps during World War II, no reason for poets bludgeoned, old women raped, children turned into soap, that it just happened and nobody was really responsible--things just got a little out of control here, ha-ha, so sorry--then the mind begins to totter (“Horror Fiction,” 144-145).
Perhaps King is right, but, as far as lust and sex are concerned, it appears that many men and women are happy to accept horrible and absurd behavior. Almost anything between two consenting adults is considered permissible by many and desirable by some. In erotic fiction, it is rare that an initiate rejects unusual sex in favor of accepting the status quo’s censure of it.

Much more often, it seems, the protagonist is apt to follow the example of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist of Brokeback Mountain or of Eugénie of The Philosophy in the Bedroom, who accept their perverted sexual experiences, rejecting the status quo’s censure of the deviant sex into which they have been initiated, or the example of the indecisive Jimmy Fergus of The Crying Game, who is reluctant to accept or reject either the deviant sexual experience into which he’s been initiated or the status quo’s censure of it.


Much less often, it appears, a protagonist rejects the perverted sex into which he or she is initiated, in favor of adhering to the status quo’s censure of the deviance, as do the lampooned Justine of Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue and the pathetic, ravished adventurers Bobby Trippe and Ed Gentry of Deliverance.

If this is true, and most erotic fiction shows acceptance--or, indeed, approval--of the perversions that are part and parcel of the genre, erotic fiction’s rakes and reprobates are atheists or apostates for whom, in the absence of God, nothing is too sordid or depraved and everything sexual is sexy. Whether, if there is a God, despite their unbelief or faithlessness, they are damned is another question; however, since the monsters in horror fiction are often prompt in slaying those who act in a lewd and lascivious manner, the welfare of the promiscuous sinners of erotic fiction appears none too certain!

Note: "Sex and Horror, Part 8" will present a gallery of images from a number of movies depicting sex and horror and some final thoughts concerning this topic.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The Haunting of a House

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman



More a fan of the idea of the haunted house, perhaps, than one who aspires to actually visit such places, even in fiction, I have, nevertheless, visited a few and written several-article series, available right here on Chillers and Thrillers, concerning “How to Haunt a House.”  The haunted houses I’ve visited are a dilapidated and apparently (but not, as it turned out, really) abandoned house in a field of tall grass, the Winchester Mystery House in Los Gatos, California (which was partly the inspiration for the haunted house in Stephen King’s Rose Red televisions series), and the Disneyland Haunted Mansion.


As a fan of the idea of the haunted house, I was particularly interested in reading King’s insights and observations concerning the haunted house stories he’s both written (The Shining and, in a way, Salem’s Lot) and read, two of which, the one in Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House and Anne Rivers Siddons’ The House Next Door, are standouts in the genbre, King argues.  The first, he believes, presents readers “with a history--a sort of supernatural provenance,” and the other “gives” readers “the provenance itself.”

After quoting the opening paragraph of Jackson’s novel, King dissects it to show just “how many things this single paragraph does.”

Jackson’s paragraph reads:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
King’s comments take up a paragraph about as long:

All I really want to do is point out is how many this single paragraph does. It begins by suggesting that Hill House is a living organism; tells us that this live organism does not exist under conditions of absolute reality; that because. . . it does not dream, it is not sane. The paragraph tells us how long its history has been, immediately establishing that historical context that is so important to the haunted-house story, and it concludes by telling us that something walks in the rooms and halls of Hill House. All this in two [sic] sentences (“Horror Fiction,” Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing, 91).
Siddons’ novel, which “could have been subtitled ‘The Making of a Haunted House,’” goes Jackson’s one better, King thinks. No human characters set foot inside Siddons’ haunted house until the novel’s last fifty pages, but its next-door neighbors, Walter and Colquitt Kennedy, are affected by the residence: “We see their lives and their way of thinking change as a result of their proximity to the house,” King observes (92).

At the outset of the novel, the house has yet to be built, but, as soon as the domicile is completed, “Dionysian change,” it is apparent, King says, “is coming to the Apollonian suburb where hitherto there has been a place for everything and everything [has been] in its place” (93). The house is introduced through its impression upon Colquitt:

I drew my breath in at it. It was magnificent. I do not as a rule care for contemporary architecture, [but] . . . this house was different. It commanded you, somehow, yet soothed you. It grew out of the penciled earth like an elemental spirit that had lain, locked and yearning for the light, through endless deeps of time, waiting to be released. . . . I could hardly imagine the hands and machinery that would form it. I thought of something that had started with a seed, put down deep roots, grown in the sun and rains of many years into the upper air. In the sketches, at least, the woods pressed untouched around it like companions. The creek enfolded its mass and seemed to nourish its roots. It looked--inevitable.
The book is divided into three sections, each one telling the story of a different family of the house’s residents, the Harralsons, Buddy and Pie; the Sheehans, Buck and Anita; and the Greenes, Norman and Susan. It would be unfair to share any more of the story’s plot, but it should go without saying, perhaps, that any haunted-house novel that captures the attention and earns the respect of a horror maestro of King’s reputation deserves a read.

What I’m more interested in, at the moment, is the introductions that the writers give their haunted houses. As I argue elsewhere, a grand entrance is important to establish new characters (and protagonists, especially); the same is true for places that, in effect, themselves become like characters--and a specific type of character, at that: the antagonist. Haunted houses are typically evil places, and, as such, they will pit themselves against those who are foolish enough to take up residence beneath their roofs and within their walls. King does a fine job of dissecting Jackson’s opening paragraph, but he doesn’t have much to say about the haunted house in Siddons’ novel. In its own way, the introduction of “the house next door” is  effective in seizing the reader’s attention as it also simultaneously spotlights the new house on the block.

The house, Colquitt implies, is breathtaking, not so much for its architectural style, but for its effect upon the viewer; the house makes Colquitt feel a certain way: “commanded,” yet also “soothed,” as if the house exercises, by its mere presence, a hypnotic or spellbinding effect upon anyone who would look upon it. It is “like an elemental spirit,” but, at the same time, it is also like a plant that, seeded by “hands and machinery”--that is by human design and technology, rather than by nature--establishes “deep roots” and seems one with the “woods” that surround it, even as it is “nourished” by a “creek.” The “elemental spirit” is, perhaps a dryad, and an evil one at that, which takes up residence in the strange vegetative abode. The dryad is the perfect entity to bring to “the Apollonian suburb” as King calls the haunted house’s setting “Dionysian change.”

Another example, justly famous, of a writer’s introduction of his story’s haunted house to his readers is the opening chapter of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”:

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium--the bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it--I paused to think--what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble ; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
So many critics have dissected and analyzed this paragraph that it need not be done again. Suffice it to say that Poe’s description of the place embodies it, for Poe, in writing of the dwelling’s “vacant eye-like windows,” and, indeed, what Walter Evans sees as the “‘bleak’ cheeks, huge eyes. . . ‘rank’ and slightly bushy mustache, and perhaps even ‘white trunks of decayed’ teeth” of the story’s protagonist, Roderick Usher himself (“‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and Poe’s Theory of the Tale,” reprinted in Short Story Criticism). The house not only looks like its owner, who will fall mentally, into madness, as the house has already begin to fall into physical ruin, but, like Siddons’ haunted house, it has an almost palpable effect upon those who encounter it: “with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit,” the narrator admits, adding, “There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it--I paused to think--what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?”

Like Jackson and Siddons, in introducing his haunted house, Poe both hooks his readers while, at the same time, making his haunted house forever--well, haunting!

Friday, September 3, 2010

Narrative and Dramatic Technique

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman



Lately, I have become more and more interested in narrative and dramatic technique, in the use of the more sophisticated, less apparent methods by which authors and filmmakers convey meaning and nuance in the tales they show and tell. Some of these techniques include incongruity, juxtaposition, symbolism, metaphor, and imagery. Indeed, on occasion, two or m ore of these techniques are combined, one as the vehicle of the other. For example, image or juxtaposition often conveys symbolism. In Deleuze and Horror Film, Anna Powell offers an interesting and insightful explication of Stanley Kubrick’s use of imagery both to set the tone of the movie and to symbolize the state of protagonist Jack Torrance’s mind:
Inflation and detachment shape the cerebral aesthetic of The Shining and its virtual experience by the viewer. The wide-angle lens and overblown strains of Berlioz plunge us sensorially into a world of inflated grandeur. Extremely wide vistas of the mountainous landscape induce a cold, detached and depersonalized perspective. Humans are unimportant in this vast physical, and metaphysical, terrain. The mechanic motion of an uncannily independent camera surveys the landscape in an omniscient gliding motion. We experience the perspective of an eagle’s eye, or a divine power, as we become-god. Mental detachment and ego-inflation key in the delusions of Jack Torrance. The disturbed writer’s deranged consciousness forms and is formed by the film’s mise-en-scene and cinematography.

The landscape, like the music, has a sublime grandeur yet the ominous chords and the dizzying, extra-human perspective render it sinister. It threatens to engulf the small, insect-like car, leading it ever upwards into a land of eternal snow. As the narrative moves inexorably onwards, it mobilizes a process of becoming-frozen. Jack undergoes a freezing of emotional warmth and empathy. His blood runs cold, both figuratively and literally, as he becomes one with the forces of winter and death (43-44).
Powell’s analysis is powerful and insightful, and Kubrick’s use of the external world to reflect the internal world extends beyond the mountainous countryside to the interior-exterior world of the Overlook Hotel as well, which, like the landscape without, also conveys, even mirrors, the unstable state of Torrance’s mind:

Shining as affective force dominates the mise-en-scene. The interior of the Overlook Hotel is lit and coloured preternaturally. No daylight can penetrate, and fire, candles and electricity replace natural light. Polished surfaces like metal, glossy paint and marble magnify their impact by varying degrees of reflection and refraction. These artificial light qualities objectify Jack’s derangement. They highlight the colours and tones of gold that express and modify the power of light itself. The hotel’s gold function room is the locus of vampiric energy. Its tonal quality spreads through the building to drain the human life force. Light grows brighter and colours grow richer enhanced by the psychic horror it generates.

A distinctive light quality reinforces the cold white of the larder / cold storage room, lit by a fluorescent tube that drains all other colours. This space is the cold heart of the building, where Jack is trapped until his final murderous apotheosis. . . . As well as the qualities and tones of colours, light evokes tactility, we virtually feel the snow’s bitter coldness. This is effected by Kubrick’s use of cold blue light and a back-lit mist that rises as the snow’s surface evaporates. In his dying, Jack becomes completely overwhelmed by blueness and light in a becoming-ice (45-46).
In a previous post, I explained how, in “Dracula’s Guest,” Bram Stoker’s inclusion of potentially hallucinatory perceptions as part of descriptions within descriptions of persons (characters), places (settings), and things, from the point of view of the story’s protagonist, creates almost-subliminal tension and anxiety in the reader as this device produces, in the reader’s consciousness, a cognitive double-take, so to speak. In another article, posted previously, I explain how H. P. Lovecraft’s various descriptions, always in different terms, of the same monstrous entity increases the horrific character of the monster in the reader’s imagination as he or she strives, in vain, to make sense of the puzzling series of differing descriptions of the same creature.  In yet another previously posted essay, I comment upon the disturbing effect of Stephen King’s offhanded inclusion of nonsense words and phrases in the otherwise-normal dialogue of a character, Junior Rennie, who is losing his grip on reality (and, as it turns out, is suffering from an as-yet-undiagnosed brain tumor).  All of these techniques are ways by which horror writers have conveyed both convey meaning and nuance as well as horror and repulsion in the tales they tell.

Writers have discovered or (more often) created yet other techniques, too, for suggesting subtle shades of horror and tones of terror. My essay, previously posted, concerning the symbolic nature of the ogre-like monsters in The Descent (they appear to represent aborted fetuses who torment the women who descend into the more extreme depths of feminist demands for “choice,” even when such exercises of free will result in haunting guilt concerning one’s decision to end the lives of children growing in the womb) indicates yet another authorial means of conveying horrific meanings within a text or, in this case, a film.  Ray Bradbury often effects horror through characterization. The protagonist of his short story “Heavyset“ is frightening, indeed, simply because of who he is. Shirley Jackson, like Flannery O’Connor, uses a measured cadence to march her readers ever forward, through her often absurd situations and past her usually grotesque characters; her matter-of-fact, somehow insistent rhythm keeps readers reading as much as if they were participants in a parade.  In “Bad Girls,” an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Faith accidentally kills Deputy Mayor Allan Finch; before this horrific incident, the viewer is warned about imminent danger as Faith and Buffy walk down a dark alley, splashed with crimson as, on a nearby construction sawhorse, an amber caution light flashes.

Horror writers can learn from authors of other genres of fiction, too, appropriating for their own purposes the narrative and dramatic techniques that their peers have developed in the service of their own storytelling ends. Images can bracket the action of a story, forming bookends, as it were, and transforming a narrative or a drama into a frame story, as the car wrecks that begin and end Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool do.


Imagery can provide an antithesis to the nature of a character, as do the thick glasses that the visionary Hollywood producer Stanley Motss wears in Wag the Dog. Images can symbolize the transcendent subhuman nature of a character, as the soulless Man With No Eyes’ mirrored sunglasses do in Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke or a character’s transcendent qualities, as the snapping turtle that “won’t let go” even when it’s “deader than hell” does, in the same film. The mirrored sunglasses prevent anyone from seeing the “walking boss’” eyes and suggest that he has no eyes to see--in other words, that he is inhuman. The eyes are the mirrors of the soul, but rather than mirroring the Man With No Eyes’ Soul, the sunglasses mirror only the eyes (and the souls) of those whom the walking boss’ sunglasses reflect. The turtle symbolizes Luke’s own refusal, as it were, to “let go” his hold on his fellow convicts, whom he inspires even more after he is “deader than hell” than he did when he was alive in their midst. Horror writers can use similar devices to frame stories or typify, or even deify, characters.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Shirley Jackson: Horror as a Slice of Life

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

I am reading The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson, and, as I do so, I am struck, again and again, by the strong similarity between her style and that of Flannery O’Connor’s. There is a directness to their sentences, a no-nonsense, straightforward cadence that marches resolutely forward, even as it describes and narrates unlikely stories typically involving grotesque characters. Despite the improbable tales and the fantastic characters, Jackson’s narratives are frequently slice-of-life stories, or narratives that involve mere segments of their characters’ lives without exposition, with little overt action, with minimal conflict, and with an inconclusive denouement. Her stories start in media res, characterizing their protagonists and antagonists as they go, seemingly on the fly. The incongruity, and, often, the irony, that results from this bare-bones approach in which realistic portrayal is juxtaposed to, or is the vehicle for, the grotesque and eccentric, is jarring. To get a sense of the meaning of any of Jackson’s stories, one must reread them, usually several times. The reward for one’s time and effort, however, is well worth the trouble.

Since most of her stories start, progress, and end the same way, an analysis of one is a sufficient introduction to Jackson’s method. I choose to illustrate her approach with an examination of “Trial By Combat,” which originally appeared, in 1944, in The New Yorker.
The plot is deceptively simple. Emily Johnson, a young woman working in New York City, while her husband is away in the Army, possibly at war, lives in a rooming house, where, during the past two weeks of her six-weeks’ residence to date, she begins to notice that someone is pilfering her belongings. Handkerchiefs, costume jewelry, perfume, and “a set of china dogs” have disappeared from her room.

One day, when she is returning to her room from the roof, where she has been sunning herself, she sees “someone come out of her room and go down the stairs,” and Emily recognizes her “visitor” as her downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Allen. (It is “an old house,”wherein the tenants’ skeleton keys fit one another’s, as well as their own, rooms.) Emily goes to Mrs. Allen’s room, where the two women have a cordial conversation about their respective husbands and their fondness for flowers and plants before Emily makes oblique references to someone’s having come repeatedly into her room and pilfered her belongings, declaring that the trespassing and theft “has to stop” or she will be obliged to “do something about it.”

Emily sees that Mrs. Allen’s room is almost identical to her own in its furnishings: “the same narrow bed with the tan cover, the same maple dresser and armchair; the closet. . . on the opposite side of the room, but [with] the window. . . in the same relative position” (42). Although Mrs. Allen is twice her own age, the widow’s late husband, “dead for nearly five years,” was a soldier. The couple was childless, although photographs of “several” children cluster about his photograph, his “nephews and nieces,” Mrs. Allen explains. When Emily expresses her fondness for flowers as a means of brightening her room, lamenting that they “fade so quickly,” Mrs. Allen tells her that she can prolong their color by adding an aspirin to the water so that “they last much longer” and “make a room look
. . . friendly.”

Despite her visit to Mrs. Allen’s room, the thefts continue: “The following evening, when Emily came home from work, a pair of cheap earrings was gone, along with two packages of cigarettes which had been in her dresser drawer” (45). Emily responds to these additional thefts by calling in sick to work and biding her time in her room until she hears Mrs. Allen go downstairs, at which point Emily goes to the elderly lady’s room. After looking “for a moment at the picture of Mrs. Allen’s husband,” Emily opens the top drawer of the widow’s dresser and finds her own belongings inside: “Her handkerchiefs were there, in a neat, small pile, and next to them the cigarettes and the earrings. In one corner the little china dog was sitting” (46).

Mrs. Allen returns, catching Emily in the act of rifling her drawers. And Emily tells herself, “now turn around and tell her,” but instead of accusing the widow of having stolen her belongings, Emily says that “I had a terrible headache and I came down to borrow some aspirin. . . . and when I found you were out I thought surely you wouldn’t mind if I borrowed some aspirin” (47). Mrs. Allen accepts Emily’s explanation, gives her the aspirin, and tells her that “I’ll run up later today. . . just to see how you feel” (47).
Much of the meaning of this seemingly simple, six-page story is derived from what is left unsaid rather than from what is directly stated. The similarities between Emily and Mrs. Allen bind them together. The widow is almost an older version of the protagonist, an embodiment of Emily’s own future. They both live in a rooming house, in Spartanly furnished, nearly identical rooms. Their husbands are both away--Emily’s in the Army, Mrs. Allen’s a soldier taken by death, perhaps (the story’s title suggests) as a casualty of war. They seem lonely (Mrs. Allen’s only “companion” is the Woman’s Home Companion she is reading when Emily visits her, and the widow tells the younger woman, “It’s so seldom one meets anyone really. . .nice. . . in a place like this” [42]).

The flowers and plants they purchase to “brighten up” their rooms and make them seem friendlier also suggest the loneliness and barrenness of their lives, as does Mrs. Allen’s (and, indeed, Emily’s own) childlessness, which is emphasized by the children’s photographs clustered around the dead soldier’s photograph, as if his nephews and nieces were his and Mrs. Allen’s surrogate children. As the story’s title indicates, both women have endured a “trial by combat,” and it is the commonality of their experience that appears to draw them to one another.

They lead pitiful lives, but their empathy allows them to pity each other. Moreover, both women are lonely and confide in one another that they have been eager to meet one another, which suggests that, in their misery, they seek company: “I’ve seen you, of course, several times,” Mrs. Allen tells Emily, “and thought how pleasant you looked.” Emily replies, “I’ve wanted to meet you, too” (42). Their common plight allows Emily to overlook Mrs. Allen’s thefts and to conspire with her in pretending that they are nothing more than neighbors, or even friends, not strangers, who are concerned about one another’s health and well being.

There seems to be a darker, somewhat horrific subtext to this story, too. It may be that Mrs. Allen practices a sort of symbolic cannibalism. Her kleptomania seems to be an attempt to secure for herself some of Emily’s “nice” and “pleasant” circumstances. By taking items that belong to Emily, the older widow seems intent upon becoming like Emily, at least in part, by performing a ritual similar to that of ancient and medieval warriors who ate the hearts of their vanquished foes in order to take into themselves their enemies’ courage and military prowess by literally ingesting the presumed seats of their souls. If such an interpretation is accepted (admittedly, it is controversial), the implication of Emily’s observation, addressed to Mrs. Allen, “You’ve made yours [i. e., Mrs. Allen’s room] look much nicer than mine” and Mrs. Allen’s rejoinder, “I’ve been here for three years. . . . You’ve only been here a month or so, haven’t you?” much more significant--and macabre--than this dialogue might seem otherwise. Has Mrs. Allen been stealing from other tenants’ rooms for “three years”? Are her thefts the reason that her room looks “much nicer” than Emily’s, and will Emily, who has already trespassed upon Mrs. Allen’s room, as Mrs. Allen has trespassed upon Emily’s, likewise become a kleptomaniac, whose thefts improve the appearance of her room, making it “nicer,” brighter looking, and friendlier? Will Mrs. Allen’s ways become Emily’s ways? Will the widow become the mentor and Emily the apprentice in cannibalizing the lives of other tenants, as it were, by stealing bits and pieces from their neighbors’ lives?

“Trial By Combat” is a much eerier story than the text which meets the reader’s eye, because its subtext opens itself to unusual, even grotesque, interpretations, largely because of the technique that Jackson employs in writing slice-of-life stories involving mere segments of their characters’ lives, told without exposition, with little overt action, with minimal conflict, and with an inconclusive denouement. Writers, aspiring or professional, can learn a lot by apprenticing themselves to such a master as Shirley Jackson, author of “The Lottery,” The Haunting of Hill House (which is one of the inspirations for Stephen King’s television miniseries Rose Red), and many other haunting tales.


Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery and Other Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982. Print.

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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