Available NOW on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited: On the Track of Vengeance

The runaway action never stops in On the Track of Vengeance, the fourth book in An Adventure of the Old West series.
 
When outlaw gangs sabotage railroads, resulting in the deaths of innocent passengers and crew members, the president of the United States becomes directly involved, appointing Bane Messenger a U.S. marshal answerable to him alone.

Teamed with trustworthy deputies, Bane takes on the desperate men, who care only for vengeance and are willing to do anything to strike back at the railroads and the government they blame for their misfortunes.

But the stakes soar when Bane learns that the outlaws plan to sabotage a train carrying his wife and father. With their lives hanging in the balance and no way to warn them, Bane races to the scene. Can he stop the outlaws in time or will Pamela and Bradford become the latest victims of the cruel men who care for nothing but vengeance?

FREE short story introducing Bane Messenger, Bounty Hunter, the protagonist of the Western series An Adventure of the Old West!

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A prequel to the series An Adventure of the Old West, this action-packed short story introduces Bane Messenger, a Union veteran of the Civil War, who teams with former Confederate commander, Colonel Jake Miller, to become a bounty hunter. On the trail of a vicious outlaw wanted for kidnapping and murder during a series of robberies, Bane hones his tracking, reconnaissance, and fighting skills. His final showdown with his deadly quarry will show him just how good he is with a gun and launch his career as a man who makes his living bringing killers to justice, dead or alive.

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Meanwhile, these great novels are available, as e-books or paperbacks, on Amazon!

Learning from the Masters: Louis L'amour

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Aspiring horror writers can learn from both popular and mainstream writers, whether they write horror fiction, stories of other genres, or literature of unusually high quality. In other words, both Louis L’Amour and Mark Twain have much to teach any horror fiction author, which brings us to the topic of today’s post.

Louis L'Amour

L’Amour wrote 89 novels and 250 short stories, most about cowboys, lawmen, gunfighters, and other heroic figures of the American Wild West. His first, Hondo, was published in 1953; his last, The Haunted Mesa, in 1987 (although other of his works have appeared posthumously). Anyone with such a long career and such a prolific quantity of bestsellers is someone who has learned how to tell a tale that appeals to a large and loyal audience and is worth studying.

Many of his novels include hand-drawn maps that bring the territories that his stories cover to life for his readers, showing them the towns, drawn in three dimensions, or the hills and mountains or deserts, complete with sagebrush and cacti, through which his intrepid lawmen, outlaws, Indians, posses, and others ride or through which trains, covered wagons, buckboards, or stagecoaches wend their wary ways. By showing only certain towns or terrains in three dimensions, with care given to individual and unique elements and features, and leaving the rest of the maps in two dimensions that include relatively few details, L’Amour heightens readers’ interest in the towns and terrains he does show more realistically on the charts, mythologizing them, as it were, cartographically as well as through his storytelling. (A couple of horror writers who have used maps well to enhance the mystique of their own terrains of terror are Frank Peretti, author of Monster [2005] and Stephen King, author of Under the Dome [2009]. Others horror writers have also included maps of their novel’s terrain--H. P. Lovecraft springs to mind. My Chillers and Thrillers article “Mapping the Monstrous” suggests some of the ways that Peretti’s novel benefits from his decision to may its horrors.)

But let’s return to the topic at hand: L’Amour’s adept use of the opening sentences (“hookers,” as King calls them) of several of his novels and short stories. In the process, we can learn a thing or two concerning how to keep our plights tight, our monsters few, our settings apparent, our suspense high, and our identifications of our genres simple and straightforward.

Rather like an impressionistic painter, L’Amour indicates the scenes of his novels in a few, deft brushstrokes--or pen strokes--or keystrokes: “rocks,” “the Mohaves,” “sky,” and “buzzards,” in the opening sentence of his novel Callahan, paint an image of the desert: “Behind the rocks the Mohaves lay waiting and in the sky, the buzzards.” He accomplishes the same feat, setting his scene (and indicating the genre of his story) in the few choice words of his first sentence of The Burning Hills: “On a ridge above Texas Flat upon a rock shaped like a flame, a hand moved upon the lava.” His descriptions, even when actually static, reporting past deeds, seem active, recalling the past as if it is happening as his narrator speaks: “We came up the trail from Texas in the spring of ‘74, and bedded our herd on the short grass beyond the railroad” (“End of the Drive,” End of the Drive). Likewise, by including active meteorological conditions, L’Amour can, again, make otherwise static scenes seem active, even intense: “Heavy clouds hung above the iron-colored peaks, and lancets of lightning flashed and probed” (“The Skull and the Arrow,” End of the Drive).

He is just as adept at setting scenes, creating suspense, characterizing characters, and hooking his readers when he describes towns and townspeople as when he pictures solitary heroes in isolated or desolate landscapes far from civilization: “He lay sprawled upon the concrete pavement of the alley in the darkening stain of his own blood, a man I had never seen before, a man with the face of an Apache warrior, struck down from behind and stabbed repeatedly in the back as he lay there” (The Broken Gun).

L’Amour knows when to add a simile, a metaphor, a personification, an allusion, a rhetorical question, or another figure of speech to spice up writing about mundane things when the writing itself might, otherwise, be mundane: “The night brought a soft wind” (Brionne). “Dawn came like a ghost to the silent street, a gray, dusty street lined with boardwalks and several short lengths of water trough (Borden Chantry). “When it came to Griselda Popley, I was down to bedrock and showing no color” (“The Courting of Griselda,” End of the Drive). “Who can say that the desert does not live?” (“The Lonesome Gods,” End of the Drive). “The land lay empty around them, lonely and still” (Conagher).

The men in L’Amour’s fiction tend to be lean, mean fighting machines, as quick and effective with their fists as they are with their hands. They have hard-edged, flinty names like Hondo, Callahan, Brionne, Bowdrie, Borden Chantry, Malcolm Fallon, Orrin Sackett, Jim Colburn, and Conagher. Sometimes, they straddle the law, living by the code of the West or a code of their own, more antiheroes than heroes, as is the case, it seems, with regard to Malcolm Fallon, whom L’Amour introduces as “a stranger to the town of Seven Pines” who is fortunate enough to be “a stranger with fast horse,” especially since a drunken band of townsmen have invited him to a necktie party (i. e., a lynching). Out-and-out villains, however, may be violent men of action, but they are also passive products of their circumstances and environments: “They were four desperate men, made hard by life, cruel by nature, and driven to desperation by imprisonment” (“Desperate Men,” End of the Drive). It seems that, in L’Amour’s fiction, desperate men are made, not born; in other words, it is not their fault that they are desperate men; their past experiences have made them so. By contrast, L’Amour’s heroic protagonists defy their environments, take charge of themselves, and become the masters of their own fates, embodying free will.

Although no academic would ever mistake L’Amour for a literary author, he is a literate writer of popular fiction who has learned, of himself, many techniques for accomplishing narrative objectives in ways as interesting as they are succinct, and any aspiring writer, whether of horror or another genre, can learn much from the way that he uses carefully chosen words, phrases, clauses, and sentences to set his scenes, suggest action (even when there is none presently taking place), introducing his protagonists, identifying the time of the day and the season of the year, creating suspense, generating a sense of mystery, stating mundane facts in intriguing ways, describing weather, and spotlighting particular characters among other literary personae. He also shows an adept use of similes, metaphors, allusions, personifications, the rhetorical question, and the tall tale (“My Brother [sic] Orrin Sackett, was big enough to fight bears with a switch,” the narrator of The Daybreakers claims). Adapting L’Amour’s techniques and strategies to his or her own genre and work, the aspiring horror writer can do the same.

Learning from the Masters: Robert McCammon, Part 2

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Robert McCammon is the author of A Boy’s Life, Stinger, Swan Song, Gone South, and several other highly readable horror novels. He has also written his share of short stories, and it is to one of these that we turn in this post, that we may learn from another master of the genre in its rather abbreviated form.

For those who have not read his short story, “Black Boots,” which originally appeared in Razored Saddles (1989), a summary is in order:

Davy Slaughter is running from his nemesis, Black Boots, whom he has killed eight times. The problem is that his enemy keeps coming back, from the dead, and, Davy believes, he’s on his trail again now. The young gunfighter becomes so keyed up with the thought that he is being stalked by Black Boots that he challenges a distant figure, firing several bullets in its direction, before he realizes that “he was shooting at a cactus.” Davy also finds that his gun hand is stiff, the fingers aching. As he crosses the desert for Zionville, he spits and plucks white worms from his mouth. He runs out of water and drools blood.

In Zionville, Davy is greeted by a two-headed dog that runs circles around his mount, both mouths yapping, and Davy observes that the sheriff has been “long gone,” leaving the bank and its meager holdings easy pickings should Davy decide to go to the trouble of robbing it.

He bellies up to the bar in the town’s saloon and exchanges a few words with the bartender, Carl Haines, whose face, one moment seems covered in flies but the next moment is “clear again, not a single fly on it.” Davy asks whether the town has a sheriff. One is on the way, from El Paso, Carl tells him, asking whether Davy intends to cause any trouble.

Davy is disturbed to see the “snout of a rattlesnake” appear inside the “black, empty socket” of the one-eyed bartender’s face. Carl assures Davy that the Zionville populace are “peaceful folk” who “don’t quarrel with nobody.” As Carl speaks, Davy is “fascinated” to see that the rattlesnake’s head now completely extends from Carl’s eye socket. Davy feels as if his own skull may explode. The next moment, the snake is gone and Carl has two eyes again.

Davy asks whether anyone has been asking for him, and Carl assures him that no one has. He describes Black Boots, asking whether Carl has seen him in particular. When the bartender says he has not, and that no one else has been asking for Davy, the young gunfighter confides in Carl that he has killed Black Boots eight times and that Black Boots is, nevertheless, stalking him at the moment.

The saloon’s swinging doors open behind him, and Davy spins, gun drawn, and nearly shoots Joey, a youth who’s followed him to the saloon, fascinated by Davy’s appearance and demeanor. Carl and Davy tell Joey to go home, but the youth asks whether Davy knows how to use his gun. Davy sees Carl’s brain matter seeping through a wound in the bartender’s brow and thinks it an “interesting sight.” Davy asks, “Don’t that hurt?” and ventures to poke the wound with his finger when Davy discerns that Joey is really Black Boots in disguise, “wearing a kid’s skin.”

Davy kills Black Boots, watching him die as Joey’s mother, having come in search of her wayward son, finds Joey dying in front of the saloon and Davy standing over him. Where Black Boots had been, Davy sees, the body of a youth lies, dead.

From behind him, Black Boots, now armed with a rifle, shoots at the same time that Davy, alerted by the sound of the weapon being cocked, wheels and fires his own weapon, and Black Boots goes down, behind the bar. Davy shoots his adversary again, but, as he stares down at the body behind the bar, he sees that it is not Black Boots anymore; it is the bartender, Carl.

Davy staggers outside, where his horse is a skeleton, its heart and lungs visible and alive within its ribcage. He mounts the steed, but it resists his effort to turn it, and Black Boots dashes out of a store, gun in hand, and he shoots Davy three times, one of the bullets knocking him from his skeletal steed. Davy tries to return fire, but he’s out of ammunition. Black Boots shoots Davy twice more, killing him.

Davy is declared to have been “crazy as hell” and to have shot Joey for no reason.

Davy’s body is wrapped in a canvas sheet, stood against the wall and photographed for the new sheriff to examine upon his arrival from El Paso, and buried without benefit of a pine box, and “the man who,” burying his corpse, “threw dirt on the gunfighter's face wore black boots.”

Like others in McCammon’s body of short stories, “Black Boots” is based upon a stereotypical character, that of the itinerant young gunfighter who is haunted by the reputation that his speed and deadly accuracy have earned him. An obviously paranoid character, Davy’s fear of being killed by another gunfighter who is seeking a reputation of his own seems to have given form to his fear, creating Black Boots as a representative of the predatory wannabe killer who stalks him--in his own mind, if nowhere else. Davy claims to have killed Black Boots “eight times,” to no avail. His nemesis returns, a revenant reborn of his own imagination and fear. Black Boots cannot be killed, because he is a product of Davy’s own paranoia.

The opening paragraphs of the story show the reader that Davy’s thoughts are focused upon death. He imagines that his mouth is full of worms. Perhaps they are maggots. If so, their presence suggests that he is in a state of decay, and the blood in his mouth suggests that he has been wounded or injured, perhaps severely. However, his nonchalant demeanor suggests that he has suffered this condition for some time. Since his response--or near-non-response--to his discovery of worms and blood inside his mouth is not normal, he also appears to be, well, abnormal. Likewise, his belief that a dead man has returned to life (not once, but eight times) marks him as being a seriously disturbed individual--unless, that is, the context of the story, which is of the horror genre, after all, subsequently validates his belief as being, in the horrific and bizarre world that he seems to inhabit, possible. However, the reader, awaiting further evidence, as it were, is certainly apt to reserve his or her judgment concerning Davy’s sanity or the lack thereof. His thoughts about the mysterious Black Boots, whom he believes is stalking him with the intent to kill him, also establishes Davy’s fixation with death and dying.

Davy mistakes a cactus for Black Boots, firing several bullets at it, but this error can be attributed to his fear and need not mean that he is insane. However, when he arrives in Zionville and sees a two-headed dog, the reader is likely to place another tick mark in the “Insane” column. Still, it may be that the story takes place in a world of mutants, perhaps, for all one can know at the moment, following a nuclear holocaust. One thing is clear, though: Davy definitely bears watching!

The bizarre incidents keep coming, as Davy observes--or, hallucinating, imagines--the bartender’s face to change, undergoing extreme--indeed, impossible--transformations. First, it is covered in flies, next he loses an eye and a rattlesnake inhabits the vacant socket, and then his brain tissue starts to seep through a wound in his skull. Finally, he believes that his nemesis, Black Boots, can “wear a kid’s skin,” thereby disguising himself as someone else by actually becoming another person. The jury, in the form of the reader, is no longer out; the verdict is in: Davy is a stark, raving lunatic, completely established as an unreliable narrator. Much, if not all, of what he believes is the product of hallucinations, caused, it seems, by his psychotic paranoia.

The reader who guesses the plot twist is not surprised by the story‘s ending. McCammon offers many clues that all is not as it seems with the protagonist. However, the reader may, nevertheless, be amused by the tale. The same technique that piques the reader’s curiosity--Davy’s bizarre visions--gives away its secret. Still, it is interesting to hallucinate along with him. Like many other stories in the horror genre, “Black Boots” relies upon a confusion of the normal and the abnormal, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the everyday and the astonishing. The duality soon exhausts itself, though, and it would not work at all in a longer piece. Surprisingly, this split between the sane and the insane that results from a life lived in fear of a one-upmanship that is not merely unpleasant but, in fact, fatal, is slim, indeed, pointing, perhaps, to the inadvisability--the foolishness--of living one’s life on such terms. The thin plot ploy supports the narrative’s much deeper theme, making this slight tale worthwhile reading, after all.

There is one more thing to say about this story, too, which shows McCammon’s inventiveness all the more, especially since he relies upon such a slim story line: the last line of the story, referring to the “black boots” worn by the nameless, faceless man who buries Davy, suggests that Black Boots was not, perhaps, a phantom of his victim’s madness, after all. He may be, as Davy believed him to be, a supernatural being, capable not only of raising himself from the dead and assuming the forms of others but also of warping reality itself, making Davy believe that a cactus was his stalker, that a dog had two heads, that Joey and Carl and the shopkeeper were other incarnations of the predatory gunfighter whom Davy feared and fled, and that his horse had become a living skeleton. Perhaps in his shootouts with other gunfighters, Davy had, at last, met his match in a monster that is as much beyond life and death as he is beyond good and evil, a monster that wears black boots.

Frustrating Formulaic Fiction

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Genre fiction is formulaic fiction. It must be. There’s an unwritten law somewhere that requires it to be. (Or maybe it’s a written law.) Formulaic fiction fails to entertain after a while, because most people get tired of reading yet another variation on the same tired and tattered narrative formula, especially when the formula is fairly straightforward and simple. Formulaic fiction fails because it is predicable. A reader pretty much knows what to expect from the beginning and pretty much every time before something happens. Formulaic fiction is unimaginative, unoriginal, predictable, and boring. It’s a cliché. Actually, it’s a series of clichés strung together like so many faux pearls. There are no surprises, shocks, chills, or thrills because everything that happens is seen coming way before it actually arrives. Familiarity breeds contempt, and formulaic fiction, whether it’s adventure, detective, horror, fantasy, romance, science fiction, Western, or otherwise, is all too familiar to its readers. In a word, formulaic fiction is frustrating, but there are ways to frustrate formulaic fiction. In this post, we will consider a few techniques for doing so. Mostly, though, these methods boil down to this: become a Boy Scout. In other words, as a writer, expect the unexpected--from yourself and your characters. Formulaic fiction is formulaic largely because it is routine and repetitive rather than exploratory. It follows the same path over the same ground, leading around and around in the same concentric circles. To frustrate formulaic fiction, a writer must become a stranger in a strange land. He or she must choose the little-worn over the well-worn path. Better yet, he or she should choose from one of several other possible paths. Just as some moviemakers now make movies with one official ending, as it were, and several “alternative endings,” a writer should have several pathways (and possibly a few byways) from any major (or even minor) incident of the plot. Stories are, by and large, linear, but the any point from “B” to “Z” can end up as point “B.” Only after it is chosen, does it become the chosen one. Until then, several other incidents should compete for the honor and distinction of being this second incident. The same is true of incidents “C,” “D,” and so on, all the way to “Z” (or however many incidents make up the chain of actions, events, and situations that form the story’s plot). Let’s try an example. A man finds a love letter, in his wife’s hand, addressed to another man. Oops! What might he do?

• Confront his wife about the affair.
• Confront his rival about the affair.
• Confront both is rival and his wife about the affair.
• Leave his wife, without divorcing her.
• Divorce his wife.
• Kill his rival.
• Kill his wife.
• Kill himself.
• Kill both his rival and his wife.
• Kill both his rival and himself.
• Kill both his wife and himself.
• Kill all three parties--his rival, his wife, and himself.
• Show the love letter to his (and his wife’s) children.
• Show the love letter to his wife’s parents.
• Show the love letter to his own parents.
• Pretend he never found the love letter.
• Write a “love letter” of his own to his rival, signing his wife’s name (or using a photocopy of her signature).
• Do two or more of these options.

Of course, there are many other possibilities, some much more imaginative than any that we’ve listed, and some may suggest still others. The point is that, by listing these alternatives, the writer will have expanded his or her options considerably. If he or she chooses the more imaginative, even if it is also the more unlikely, option, his or her story will be correspondingly less predictable and, therefore, that much less formulaic.

Intriguing Chapter Titles

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Although it isn’t a horror story--at least not in the conventional sense--Ihara Saikaku’s short story, “What the Seasons Brought to the Almanac Maker,” a tale of adultery as a literally fatal attraction (based, it might be added, on a true story) offers a technique not seen often, if at all, in typical horror novels, but one which provides a simple, but interesting and effective, way of creating and maintaining suspense and of driving the story forward.

True, Saikaku’s choice of a true story as the basis for his story, his use of foreshadowing, and the situation itself, involving participants in an illicit affair against a background of sexual licentiousness and the concern of the protagonist’s society with superficial rather than meaningful matters create interest and suspense as well, but these are techniques already known to, and used by, writers of Western literature (by the use of which term, no, we do not intend to reference cowboy stories--or not only cowboy stories).

The technique we’re interested in is his use of cryptic, apt, and sometimes rather poetic titles for the segments--they are too short to be labeled chapters--of his story. Divided into five sections, these divisions are named:

1. The Beauty Contest
2. The Sleeper Who Slipped Up
3. The Lake Which Took People In
4. The Teahouse Which Had Not Heard of Gold Pieces
5. The Eavesdropper Whose Ears Were Burned

Western writers have named the chapters in their novels. That’s nothing new. However, such titles have more often than not been straightforward. (A memorable one that is both cryptic, appropriate, and somewhat poetic is the title of chapter thirteen of Ian Fleming’s novel, Live and Let Die, in which James Bond’s CIA counterpart, Felix Leiter, encounters a shark in a swimming pool: “He Disagreed With Something That Ate Him.” However, it is Fleming’s habit to extract a phrase or, more rarely, a sentence from the chapter and to let it stand as the chapter’s title. The title of chapter thirteen of Live and Let Die, for instance, appears, in the chapter itself, on a note attached to Leiter’s body.).

The key to the use of intriguing (as opposed to straightforward) chapter titles is to make the title both cryptic and poetic but apt. It should hint at, rather than directly state, the chapter’s plot, theme, or significance, and it should do so in a figurative, metaphorical, or symbolic manner. For example, the title of the third division of “What the Seasons Brought to the Almanac Maker” alludes to a lake in which the protagonist, Osan, and her illicit paramour, Moemon, pretend to drown themselves. Therefore, it alludes to the central point of the narrative segment, using the literary devices of (an apparent) personification and a play on words to do so. Read literally, as people are wont to read anything they peruse, “The Lake Which Took People In” suggests that a body of water will deceive someone, that it will take him or her or them in, or con them. The absurdity of such an idea, in turn, alerts the reader that he or she has misread the title, and that it should be understood differently. As it turns out, the reader will discover that the lake literally takes in people--those who enter its waters, to swim or, as Osan and Moemon pretend, to drown. Therefore, the title is appropriate. It is descriptive of the action that the story segment contains, and it also suggests the subterfuge of the characters who perform the actions, for it is by pretending to have drowned in the lake that Osan and Moemon intend to “take in,” or deceive Osan’s husband and others.

The chapter of the final section of the story, “5. The Eavesdropper Whose Ears Were Burned,” is also intriguing (as opposed to straightforward)--that is, cryptic, poetic, and apt. It suggests that a particular type of person, an “eavesdropper,” will be punished--in a fitting manner, by having his ears burned. In this case, the eavesdropper is Moemon, who, during a nostalgic return to his hometown, while disguised, overhears people insulting him. His ears, metaphorically, are burned. However, when he, Osan, and the servant who had served as an intermediary between them, helping them to cuckold Osan’s husband, the culprits are “burned” in quite a different manner. After being paraded before the townspeople, as a warning of the punishment that comes to adulterers, they are executed, dying “like dewdrops from a blade of grass.”

As a way of practicing this technique, one might name or rename the chapters of various horror novels or segments of horror movies, selecting titles which meet the three requirements we’ve identified as belonging to intriguing headings, so that the results are once cryptic, poetic, and apt. A good intriguing title takes some effort, but it should pay dividends in being another means by which to create and maintain narrative suspense and of driving one’s horror story forward, toward its inevitable crisis, its possible catastrophe, and its satisfying resolution.

By the way, these are the titles of the Live and Let Die chapters; note that, on the basis of our analysis, most are straightforward rather than intriguing:

1. The Red Carpet
2. Interview with M
3. A Visiting Card
4. The Big Switchboard
5. Nigger Heaven
6. Table Z
7. Mister Big
8. No Sensayuma
9. True of False?
10. The Silver Phantom
11. Allumeuse
12. The Everglades
13. He Disagreed With Something That Ate Him
14. Death of a Pelican
15. Midnight Among the Worms
16. The Jamaica Version
17. The Undertaker’s Wind
18. Beau Desert
19. Valley of Shadows
20. Bloody Morgan’s Cave
21. Good Night to You Both
22. Terror By Sea
23. Passionate Leave