Showing posts with label extraterrestrial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label extraterrestrial. Show all posts

Monday, May 11, 2020

A Monster Scale

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman


One way to energize a genre of fiction is to introduce into it a hierarchy, or some other type of analytical or descriptive scheme, that is commonly used in a different type of narrative literature.


As Don Lincoln, author of Alien Universe: Extraterrestrial Life in Our Minds and in the Cosmos, observes, science fiction employs the scale “popularized” in J. Allen Hynek's “1972 book The UFO Experience,” which identifies three types, or “kinds,” of “close encounters” with extraterrestrial spacecraft or beings:


1st Kind: UFO sighting


2nd Kind: UFO sighting supported by "physical evidence"

 
3rd Kind: Encounter with alien beings

These original “kinds” of “close encounters” have been extended, says Lincoln, by four other types, although these additional levels “are “not universally accepted”:



4th Kind: Abduction with "retained memory"


 
5th Kind: "Regular conversations"


 6th Kind: "An encounter" resulting in a human's "death or injury"


7th Kind: Hybrid progeny resulting from human-monstrous mating

Although hybrid horror-science fiction narratives or dramas sometimes include extraterrestrial beings (e. g., Stephen King's Dreamcatcher and such films as Alien, The Thing from Another World, and Invaders from Mars), space aliens are primarily a staple of sci fi fiction. Monsters, on the other hand, are more often antagonists in horror fiction.

Hynek's scale, and its extension, provide a means of re-imagining monsters:


1st Kind: Monster sighting


2nd Kind: Monster sighting supported by "physical evidence"


3rd Kind: Encounter with monster(s)


4th Kind: Monster's abduction recalled (or recovered through the discovery of a lost film or video

5th Kind: Periodic communications with the monster, vocally or otherwise (e. g., through mental telepathy)


6th Kind: "An encounter” with the monster which results in a human's “death or injury”


7th Kind: Human/monster mating resulting in a hybrid progeny

Many of these types of “close encounters” with monsters have already been depicted in horror novels, short stories, or movies. There have been many sightings of monsters, as in Frank Peretti's 2006 novel Monster; encounters with monsters (as in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein), periodic communications with the monster (as in Anne Rice's 1976 novel Interview with a Vampire), encounters with monsters that end in human's deaths (so many there's no need to cite an example), and even matings between women and monsters that result in births of hybrid human-monster children (as in Ira Levine's 1967 novel Rosemary's Baby).

However, an imaginative use of this extended scale of “close encounters” with monsters, rather than with aliens—which, it could be argued, represent simply another type of monster) can still introduce innovations into the horror genre. For example, the scale could be used to structure a novel or, for that matter a heptalogy, or series of seven works, each of which is inspired by one of the seven types of “close encounters” with monsters listed in the “monster scale” adapted from Hynek's hierarchy.

Sunday, January 13, 2019

A Monster Scale

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman, author of Good with a Gun

One way to energize a genre of fiction is to introduce into it a hierarchy, or some other type of analytical or descriptive scheme, that is commonly used in a different type of narrative literature.


As Don Lincoln, author of Alien Universe: Extraterrestrial Life in Our Minds and in the Cosmos, observes, science fiction employs the scale “popularized” in J. Allen Hynek's “1972 book The UFO Experience,” which identifies three types, or “kinds,” of “close encounters” with extraterrestrial spacecraft or beings:


1st Kind
2nd Kind
3rd Kind
UFO sighting
UFO sighting supported by “physical evidence”
Encounter with alien beings

These original “kinds” of “close encounters” have been extended, says Lincoln, by four other types, although these additional levels “are “not universally accepted”:


4th Kind
5th Kind
6th Kind
7th Kind
“Abduction with retained memory”
“Regular conversations”
“An encounter” resulting in a human's “death or injury
“Human/extraterrestrial mating that produces an offspring, often called a 'star child'”


Although hybrid horror-science fiction narratives or dramas sometimes include extraterrestrial beings (e. g., Stephen King's Dreamcatcher and such films as Alien, The Thing from Another World, and Invaders from Mars), space aliens are primarily a staple of sci fi fiction. Monsters, on the other hand, are more often antagonists in horror fiction. Hynek's scale, and its extension, provide a means of re-imagining monsters:



1st Kind
2nd Kind
3rd Kind
Monster sighting
Monster sighting supported by “physical evidence”
Encounter with monster(s)


4th Kind
5th Kind
6th Kind
7th Kind
Monster's abduction recalled (or recovered through the discovery of a lost film or video)
Periodic communications with the monster, vocally or otherwise (e. g., through mental telepathy)
“An encounter” with the monster which results in a human's “death or injury”
Human/monster mating resulting in a hybrid progeny


Many of these types of “close encounters” with monsters have already been depicted in horror novels, short stories, or movies. There have been many sightings of monsters, as in Frank Peretti's 2006 novel Monster; encounters with monsters (as in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein), periodic communications with the monster (as in Anne Rice's 1976 novel Interview with a Vampire), encounters with monsters that end in human's deaths (so many there's no need to cite an example), and even matings between women and monsters that result in births of hybrid human-monster children (as in Ira Levine's 1967 novel Rosemary's Baby).


However, an imaginative use of this extended scale of “close encounters” with monsters, rather than with aliens—which, it could be argued, represented simply another type of monster) can still introduce innovations into the horror genre. For example, the scale could be used to structure a novel or, for that matter a heptalogy, or series of seven works, each of which is inspired by one of the seven types of “close encounters” with monsters listed in the “monster scale” adapted from Hynek's hierarchy.


Thursday, September 30, 2010

Area 51

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman



The Soviets took this picture of Area 51 from an orbiting satellite.

According to its website, Rachel, NV is home to 98 humans. The count of extraterrestrials, or aliens, is unknown. Rachel is also home to the A’Le’Inn, which serves ale (actually, hard liquor and beer) and boasts an inn of sorts (a group of trailers that vistors can rent for the night or longer). The name of the combination restaurant-bar-and-souvenir shop is a play on words. It is also the last local business in the town.

Situated alongside State Road 375 (“Extraterrestrial Highway”), Rachel is the nearest civilian community to Area 51, where top secret projects are conducted on behalf of the Air Force. It is rumored that some of this research may involve extraterrestrial spacecraft, or UFOs, many of which, people claim, have been sighted over the skies above Rachel.



Sorry, but I'm no videographer, especially while driving!

A friend of mine, Paula, and I made a recent trip to Rachel, to visit both the A’Le’Inn and to drive down Groom Lake Road to the signs that flank the entrance to the top secret facility.


 

The exterior of the front door and the front wall.

Outside the A’Le’Inn, an extraterrestrial visitor and his or her spacecraft, a UFO, are painted on the front wall, and the front door bears the message, “All Species Welcome.” A wrecker equipped with a crane supports a captured or recovered disc-shaped UFO. 20th Century Fox, the film studio that produced the movie Independence Day, donated a time capsule encased in or buried beneath a large block of stone. Behind the bar-restaurant-gift shop trailer are other trailers that, collectively, make up the “inn” portion of the A’Le’Inn.



The entrance side to the A'Le'Inn.

At the A’Le’Inn, my friend ordered an Alien Burger with cheese, and I ordered a green chili omelet and home fries, which came with buttered toast and home fries. Although we ate a late breakfast (or an early lunch; it was about 11:30 AM), we ordered diet Pepsis to wash down our respective meals. The food was fairly good, as was the service.



"Proof" that we are not alone!

The souvenir shop sells alien items of all kinds: tee shirts, ashtrays, banks, mugs, glasses, plaques, masks, and sundry other items. One wall bears numerous photographs of UFOs on a bulletin board sandwiched between the ladies’ room and the men’s room. An “Evidence Room” is decorated with a poster warning of the penalty (death) for trespassing. Also along the wall are three dummies tricked out to resemble aliens. Along the front wall, tee shirts and jackets are available for purchase. The front of the bar is painted with planets and suns protected by panels of Plexiglas.

Perusing a book for sale in the gift shop, I learned that the road to Area 51, Groom Lake Road, is situated about halfway between mile markers 34 and 35. Going back toward U. S. Highway 93, east from Rachel, one comes to mile marker 35 before mile marker 34. The marker is approximately 20 miles east of Rachel. Turning right (heading south) on Groom Lake Road from the Extraterrestrial Highway, one travels for approximately fifteen miles along the unusually wide, well-paved gravel road before reaching the warning signs that flank the road and mark the entrance to Area 51. On the way, one passes a couple of intersecting gravel roads and a lot of cacti and Joshua trees in the uneven desert terrain.


Maybe the source of the alien stories?

The signs have changed. In fact, the new ones have been placed over the old ones. The latter once warned that the installation commander had authorized personnel to shoot trespassers on sight. The newer signs have toned down the rhetoric considerably, warning only of a fine and/or a prison sentence for anyone who crosses the line into Area 51. (There is no gate, but one is apt to see the camouflage-uniformed security guards in their black reconnaissance vehicle atop a hill overlooking the boundary between civilian and military terrain, which is an eerie sight.)

Overall, my trip (actually, it’s my second) to Rachel and Area 51 (or the warning signs at its border, anyway) was enjoyable. However, it also deflates the mystique of the place. It’s not at all like Hollywood (or UFO fans) picture it. I mean, there’s not even a gate or an armed guard at the entrance to the place! If you plan a drive to Rachel, fill your gas tank in Ash Springs (60 miles east of Rachel) or Tonopah (110 miles northwest of Rachel). Otherwise, you might be walking . . . through alien territory!


Not really part of the A'Le'Inn, but everyone wants to get on the act. . . .

Friday, July 30, 2010

Disappointment "Under the Dome"

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman


To say that the ending to Under the Dome is anticlimactic is an understatement. To say, moreover, that it is sophomoric is to put the matter mildly. It is both a letdown and a disappointment.
King’s characters have suffered, most of them greatly; many of them have died. Were they real, flesh-and-blood people, the survivors would be traumatized, probably for life, by the death and destruction they have seen. Their friends, neighbors, and families, children included, are dead; their homes and businesses have been destroyed; their lives are in ruins. Why? What has caused this wholesale loss?

It could be argued that much of the death and destruction stems from the machinations of the greedy, self-serving, power-mad, criminal Big Jim Rennie and his cohorts. In the guise of doing what is best for the town, Big Jim has caused more than a good deal of mischief. He has abused his constituents, neglected the community’s real needs, and capitalized by pandering to the townspeople's weaknesses and fears. He has profited from the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine; he has ordered others to commit arson and violence; he has encouraged the incitement of a riot; he has murdered people with his own hands and has covered up the murders of others by his son. He has set friend against friend and neighbor against neighbor. His ordering of a raid against the drug addicts who hold hostage the propane tanks that he stole from the local hospital and other businesses to fuel his illegal drug operation resulted in a conflagration that decimated the homes and businesses of the thousands who also perished in the inferno, burned alive. Throughout the crisis that began with the descent of the dome and the many others that he himself created, Big Jim prospered while others suffered and died.

The townspeople are not blameless; both as children and as adults, they, too, have participated in the evils that befall themselves and others. Even the heroes and heroines of King’s novel have past sins for which to atone.

There are few true innocents under the dome, apart from infants such as Little Walter Bushey and the canines Horace, Clover, and Audrey.

Some citizens are guiltier than others: Big Jim Rennie, Junior Rennie, Pete Randolph, Georgia Roux, Frank DeLesseps, Melvin Searles, Carter Thibodeau, Stewart and Fern Bowie, Roger Killian, Joe Boxer, Phil Bushey, Lester Coggins, and Sam Verdreaux.

A few, the children, are innocent or relatively innocent: Joe McClatchey, Norrie Calvert, Benny Drake, Judy and Janelle Everett, Ollie and Rory Dinsmore, Alice and Aidan Appleton. However, as Julia Shumway’s account of the “watershed moment” in her own girlhood indicates, even children are capable of cruelty and evil.

Other characters are not developed enough for the reader to determine their guilt or innocence: Rose Twitchell, Anson Wheeler, Marty Arsenault, Rupert Libby, Stacey Moggin, Ron Haskell, Ginny Tomlinson, Dougie Twitchell, Gina Buffalino, Harriet Bigelow, Jack Cale, Johnny Carver, Lissa Jamieson, Claire McClatchey, Alva Drake, Tony Guay, Pete Freeman.

Finally, still other characters are guilty not because of corruption or meanness, but because of personal weaknesses or a significant, but lone, moral failure: Andréa Grinell, Andy Sanders, Dale Barbara, Angie McCain, Dodee Sanders, Freddy Denton, Piper Laurie, Rusty and Linda Everett, Romeo Burpee, Samantha Bushey, Stubby Norman, Brenda Perkins, Thurston Marshall, Carolyn Sturges.

King is careful, in most cases, to indicate his characters’ various moral offenses or failings, which include drug addiction, alcoholism, child abandonment, sexual promiscuity, adultery, henpecking, negligence, a reluctance or unwillingness to involve oneself in social and political conflicts and the duties of citizenship, assault (physical, sexual, and verbal), murder, malfeasance, theft, arrogance, a greater concern for economic advancement than for ending human suffering.

King suggests a practical means of distinguishing good from evil. Moral actions help others (or, presumably, oneself); immoral actions hurt others (or, presumably, oneself). In addition, in quoting Jimi Hendrix, the author suggests another, more nebulous criterion for determining what behavior is good and desirable and what behavior is bad and undesirable: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the earth will know peace.” For the most part, his characters’ deeds and misdeeds fit into one or the other of these classification systems. Clearly, Big Jim’s actions are motivated by a love of power rather than by the power of love; likewise, his behavior has a harmful, more than a helpful, effect on others, including his son (and, ultimately, himself). In other cases, the classifications are not as clear cut, but the moral theory that King suggests seems applicable to their conduct, nevertheless. Human behavior’s effects, whether good or evil, desirable or undesirable, right or wrong, continue beyond individuals' lives, effecting the lives of their posterity. Police Chief Howard Perkins’ collection of evidence against Big Jim certainly influenced the events that transpired in the town long after his own demise. Likewise, the lesson in humility that Julia Shumway learned when she was abused as a child by her classmates at the Commons’ bandstand had a definite effect upon her behavior in begging the alien child for mercy at the end of the novel and was critical in the salvation of the remnant of the townspeople.

In his exploration of moral and immoral behavior and the effects of both upon the human community, both present and future, King’s novel offers penetrating insights and a good deal of food, as it were, for thought and is a rewarding read. The story itself is also a fairly suspenseful, almost always intriguing, and entertaining experience. Like most of King’s other novels, this one is apt to stay with the reader, to become part of who he or she is. This is certainly a test of effective, even of good, literature.

The test, perhaps, of which characters King finds worthy of salvation is indicated in his catalogue of final survivors, which appears on page 1066 of his novel. If this is true, one can extrapolate from what the omniscient narrator and the characters themselves have revealed concerning these characters’ past deeds and misdeed:

(On page 997, according to the omniscient narrator, “on Saturday morning. . . “just thirty-two” survivors remained of the town’s population:
  1. Aidan Appleton
  2. Alice Appleton
  3. Dale Barbara
  4. Harriet Bigelow
  5. Gina Buffalino
  6. Romeo Burpee
  7. Little Walter Bushey
  8. Ernest Calvert
  9. Joanie Calvert
  10. Norrie Calvert
  11. Ollie Dinsmore
  12. Alva Drake
  13. Benny Drake
  14. Linda Everett
  15. Janelle Everett
  16. Judy Everett
  17. Rusty Everett
  18. Pete Freeman
  19. Tony Guay
  20. Lissa Jamieson
  21. Piper Libby
  22. Thurston Marshall
  23. Claire McClatchey
  24. Joe McClatchey
  25. Big Jim Rennie
  26. Julia Shumway
  27. Carter Thibodeau
  28. Ginny Tomlinson
  29. Dougie Twitchell
  30. Rose Twitchell
  31. Sam Verdreaux
  32. Jackie Wettington
By page 1066, seven others (Aidan Appleton, Ernest Calvert, Benny Drake, Thurston Marshall, Big Jim Rennie, Carter Thibodeau, and Sam Verdreaux) have died, bringing the total number of survivors to twenty-five. 
  1. Alice Appleton (child)
  2. Dale Barbara (Army colonel; cook)
  3. Harriet Bigelow (elderly woman)
  4. Gina Buffaloing (volunteer nurse)
  5. Romeo Burpee (department store owner)
  6. Little Walter Bushey (baby)
  7. Joanie Calvert (mother)
  8. Norrie Calvert (child)
  9. Ollie Dinsmore (child)
  10. Alva Drake (mother)
  11. Linda Everett (police officer)
  12. Janelle Everett (child)
  13. Judy Everett (child)
  14. Rusty Everett (physician’s assistant)
  15. Pete Freeman (news photographer)
  16. Tony Guay (sports reporter)
  17. Lissa Jamieson (librarian)
  18. Piper Libby (pastor)
  19. Claire McClatchy (mother)
  20. Joe McClatchy (child)
  21. Julia Shumway (newspaperwoman)
  22. Ginny Tomlinson (nurse)
  23. Dougie Twitchell (nurse)
  24. Rose Twitchell (restaurant owner)
  25. Jackie Wetting ton (police officer)
Barbie did not stop the torture of war prisoners that his team was interrogating in Fallujah. Romeo is an adulterer. Initially, Linda was willing to believe false testimony and bogus evidence against Barbie. As a boy, Rusty tortured ants, burning them alive. Piper still preaches, although she has become an atheist. As a child, Julia was arrogant toward her classmates, thinking herself superior to them. The other adults are unlikely to be blameless (what adult is?), but the narrative does not provide enough information concerning their backgrounds to identify any specific wrongdoing on their part. As the abuse that Julia suffered at the hands of her classmates shows (and as the torture of the residents of Chester’s Mill by the young alien also indicates), children can also be guilty of wicked, cruel behavior, but, again, the reader is not made privy to enough information regarding the children who survive to know exactly what wrongs they may be guilty of having committed. Because of Julia’s humiliation, she learned humility, and she pleads with the young alien who has imprisoned her and the other residents of Chester’s Mill under the dome to release them so that they may live out their “little lives” in a scene reminiscent of both her own abuse (as punishment for her arrogance toward her fellow students) and Rusty’s realization that ants have “little lives” that should not be wantonly destroyed any more than any other life. The alien’s sparing of them may be regarded as a sort of redemption for them, a pitying, if not a forgiveness, of them. Just as one of Julia’s tormentors returned and gave her a sweater to wear home, the extraterrestrial child removes the dome to allow her and her fellow survivors to live out their “little lives,” an act that the novel’s protagonist attributes not to love, but to pity: “Pity was not love, Barbie reflected. . . but if you were a child, giving clothes to someone who was naked had to be a step in the right direction” (1072).

King’s morality (helping others = good; hurting others = evil) is a survivors’ morality. It does not depend upon God or love or anything else but the assumption that helping others is morally proper, whereas hurting them is morally improper. All of the survivors, despite the horrific experiences they have undergone and whatever their faith, if any, may be, or their philosophy of life, may agree to accept this most basic definition of righteousness. It is virtuous to help and depraved to hurt others. King’s characters pass or fail the morality test depending upon whether they help or hurt their friends, neighbors, and families. In quoting Jimi Hendrix (“when the power of love overcomes the love of power, the earth will know peace”) and in suggesting that, while it is not love, pity for another is “a step in the right direction,” King implies that, beyond the simple morality of survivors, there is a deeper, more mature standard for determining right and wrong, or good and evil, which is whether one loves and is loving; he also suggests that, for the majority of human beings, who are morally immature, such an understanding awaits the humility and wisdom that may follow from horrific and traumatic suffering.

The disappointment is the cause of the dome or, at least, of its descent. Earlier in the novel, several possible causes for this phenomenon were suggested, including that the dome was a living entity, that it is the invention of rogue scientists, that it is a means of terrorist attack, that it is a government experiment using the Chester’s Mill residents as guinea pigs, and that it is the work of extraterrestrials possessed of superior technological sophistication. It turns out to be a toy of sorts, and the ones who use it, children. Granted, they are children of extreme intelligence, but children, nevertheless, with no more compassion or love for the human beings whom they torture than children who set fire to anthills have for the ants they thereby kill. The problem with this premise is that it creates a context--a dome, if one pleases--in which adult behavior is perceived by immature, alien beings. They are cosmic creatures, but without the wisdom and love of the omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent God in whose existence Piper Libby comes to disbelieve and, finally, to deny, accepting, in its stead, a belief in the aliens:
Piper Libby. . . was thinking of all those late-night prayers to The Not-There. Now she knew that had been nothing but a silly, sophomoric joke, and the joke, it turned out, was on her. There was a There there. It just wasn’t God (934).
The absurdity of a pastor rejecting the traditional idea of God for one in which the deity is a group of extraterrestrial “kids” is ludicrous. For greater minds than that of King’s own, such as those of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, Soren Kierkegaard, and Paul Tillich, to mention but a few, such a revision of faith would be not only ludicrous, but also blasphemous. By reducing the complexity of human behavior, predicated as it is, to some degree, upon free will, to conduct that parallels the simple, instinctive, and probably completely determined behavior of ants is itself ridiculous, but then to make human existence a plaything of amoral and sadistic (albeit cosmic) children is to vacate any suspension of disbelief the reader is capable of extending to the author’s work. A belief in the God of the Jews, the Christians, or the Muslims is a basis for understanding human nature; substituting extraterrestrial children for such a deity is simply incredible and silly. Under the Dome is an entertaining novel, to be sure, but, one may be confident in the belief that neither William Golding nor T. S. Eliot need fear having their work confused with King’s novel, the master of horror’s allusions to their respective novel and poem notwithstanding.


NOTE:  Be sure to visit Chester's Mill's website!

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Survivors “Under the Dome”

Copyright 200 by Gary L. Pullman


The “Survivors” section of Stephen King’s latest novel, Under the Dome, starts on an ominous note:

Only three hundred and ninety-seven of The Mill’s two thousand residents survive the fire. . . . By the time night falls. . . there will be a hundred and six.

When the sun comes up on Saturday morning. . . the population of Chester’s Mill is just thirty-two (997).
Ollie Dinsmore, equipped with a tank of oxygen and an oxygen mask takes refuge inside his farm’s potato cellar from the firestorm sweeping through the dome.

Sam Verdreaux, also equipped with oxygen, makes his way toward the McCoy cabin atop Black Ridge, lamenting his role in initiating the riot at Food Town and breaking Georgia Roux’s jaw.

Big Jim Rennie and Carter Thibodeau wait out the firestorm inside the Town Hall’s bomb shelter. Carter’s fawning admiration for the selectman has changed. Although the special deputy doesn’t voice his defiance, he thinks it. In the wake of the disastrous raid on the methamphetamine lab and the firestorm it has caused, a definite rift has opened between the politician and his surrogate “son” and bodyguard.

Sam joins Barbie and his party. Dialogue between Barbie and his newfound girlfriend Julia Shumway reveals that the military intends to try a “pencil nuke” against the dome on Saturday.

While policing the area outside the dome near the Dinsmore farm, PFC Clint Ames hears someone knocking on the interior of the dome and relays the news to his superior, SGT Groh that “There’s somebody alive in there!” and calling for fans.

Sam tells the group of people atop Black Ridge that he’d fainted as he approached their location, but, upon awakening, he was attracted to the McCoy cabin by the “fans” and :lights” (1017) he saw there. While he was unconscious, Sam dreamed of Julia, naked, but “covered with. . . . issues of the Democrat,” as she lay “on the bandstand in the Commons,” crying (1017-1018). Colonel Cox, on the other side of the dome, is interrupted by the news that the Army has found “a survivor on the south side” (1018) of town.

Carter decides to kill Big Jim so that the bomb shelter’s oxygen supply will last him, the sole survivor, longer than it would if he had to continue to share it with the selectman. After replacing a spent canister of the propane that fuels their air supply, he upholsters his Beretta.

At the McCoy cabin, Ernie Calvert dies of a heart attack. Colonel Cox calls with bad news: the pencil nuke “melted down” before it could be deployed to Chester’s Mill. A replacement won’t be ready for deployment for three or four days. The Everett girls’ golden retriever, Audrey, also dies. These deaths are reminders that many others will also expire under the dome, as this section of the novel indicated in its opening paragraph.

Before killing Big Jim, Carter allows the politician a final prayer. When Big Jim starts to sob (or pretends to do so), he asks Carter to turn out the lights, claiming that it is unfitting for Carter to see him cry. Carter places the muzzle of his pistol against the selectman’s neck and extinguishes the light. “He knew it was a mistake the instant he did it,” the omniscient narrator remarks, “but by then it was too late” (1028). Big Jim stabs Carter, “pulling the knife upward s he rose” from his knees, “eviscerating the stupid boy who had thought to get the best of Big Jim Rennie” (1028). Carter falls to his knees and then onto his face, and Big Jim finishes Carter off with a bullet to the brain stem--delivered by Carter‘s own dropped Beretta--after imparting a final bit of advice: “Never give a good politician time to pray” (1029).

Ollie’s condition is much worse, despite the fan’s forcing of air through the dome, and SGT Groh believes him to be near death. He and PFC Ames keep a death vigil. Word comes that another child, on the north side of the dome, has died: Aidan Appleton.

At the McCoy cabin, Benny Drake and Joe McClatchey’s mother Claire seem feverishly hot, and Joe shares his concern with Barbie that they--and the rest of them as well--will die. There is no deliverance for them from outside the dome, he says. Julia, half-asleep, wishes that the extraterrestrial children who the party believes created and maintain the dome as a sadistic game, wishes the aliens would tire of their pastime or be called away by their parents to ear. The others raise some disturbing possibilities: maybe the aliens don’t eat and don’t have parents ands maybe “time is different for them” (1033), moving much quickly, so that, for them, the week the town has spent under the dome seems only seconds.

Atop Black Ridge, Thurston Marshall dies, and almost all the members of Barbie’s group are near death. Their condition is juxtaposed to an earlier catalogue of the everyday activities they and other residents of Chester’s Mill routinely performed on Saturday night, the normal and customary making the horrible all the more horrific and life, measured against death and dying, all the more precious. In an earlier scene, King’s omniscient narrator implies that Julia may be devising some sort of solution to their predicament, a resolution being pieced together, as it were, by her unconscious: “Julia was looking toward the box with its flashing purple light. Her face was thoughtful and a little dreamy” (1033). The narrator repeats this suggestion in this scene: “Julia . . . is once more looking in the direction of a box which, although less than fifty square inches in area and not even an inch thick, cannot be budged. Her eyes are distant, speculative” (1035). The author ends this scene with paraphrases of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (“October is the cruelest month, mixing memory with desire” and “there are no lilacs in this dead land. No lilacs, no trees, no grass” (1035). It is obvious that King wants to associate his novel’s apocalyptic theme with the faithlessness of godless modern life that Eliot’s poem depicts. The question of whether he succeeds in doing so by making a couple of allusions to the poet’s work is a matter for each reader to decide for him- or herself, as is the question of whether King’s allusion to William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies has any more significance than its representing a rhetorical device.

In the next scene, Big Jim’s heart goes haywire again, just as the generator’s alarm sounds, indicating that the canister of propane that fuels it has become depleted. Struggling, the politician arises, stumbles over Carter’s corpse, imagining that his former aide’s sightless, staring eyes move. Shocked and frightened, Big Jim feels for a pulse in the special deputy’s throat, finding none. Reassured, he moves forward in the bomb shelter, toward the generator. Behind him, he hears a sound, imagining that it may be “the whisper of a hand, perhaps, slipping across the concrete floor” (1037). As Big Jim removes “one of the four remaining tanks” of propane from the “storage cubby, his heart went into arrhythmia again. It subsides, but Big Jim drops his flashlight (a second time) and the lens breaks, leaving him in total darkness. The generator refuses to restart, and Big Jim fights down the panic that threatens to rise inside him. His prayers seem to go unanswered. Disoriented in the darkness as he searches for batteries for the flashlight or a book of matches, Big Jim stumbles over Carter’s corpse and bangs his head. He crawls onto the couch and calms himself. As he experiences pain along his left arm, he fears he may be having a heart attack, and his sanity begins to slip away as he imagines that Carter is breathing--that several others are breathing as well: his other victims, Brenda Perkins, Lester Coggins, and his son Junior. The dead begin to speak to him, recalling the omniscient narrator’s declaration, earlier in the novel, that the dead coexist with the living but most living people cannot discern the presence of the dead. Terrified, Big Jim flees the bomb shelter. The stagnant air outside is too much for his failing heart, and he dies of a heart attack. This scene includes both humor and horror. One of the humorous portions is King’s omniscient narrator’s description of Big Jim, which compares the selectman to one of the used cars that he sells:

Big Jim jumped and cried out. His poor tortured heart was lurching, missing, skipping, then running to catch up with itself. He felt like an old car with a bad carburetor, the kind of rattletrap you might take in trade but would never sell, the kind that was good for nothing but the junk heap. . . (1036).
On Sunday morning, Julia awakens Barbie with the news that Benny Drake has died. Julia says she wants to go to the dome generator, but Barbie reminds her that the air is so stale away from the fans that they can’t travel more than “fifty feet” (1043) and the dome generator is a half mile from them. However, Sam tells them that he knows a way they can take, offering to show them.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Party Politics “Under the Dome”

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman


For quite a few pages, ever since Joe McClatchey, Norrie Calvert, and Benny Drake discovered what they (and physician’s assistant Rusty Everett) believe is the dome generator, King has been building suspense concerning the device. Finally, Rusty not only sees it firsthand, but conducts a couple of tentative experiments with it. The device is odd: although the radiation level has been just shy of the danger zone all the way up Black Ridge, from McCoy’s Orchard, the Geiger counter now reads the threat as zero, and the condition of a hale and hearty squirrel, living (or, at least, foraging) in the area testifies to the safety of the area--from radiation, at any rate. Unwisely, Rusty, perhaps emboldened by the zero reading and the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed rodent, “bent and touched the surface of the generator--if it was a generator.” Although he is wearing protective gloves, the result of his contact is immediate:

A strong shock immediately surged up his arm and through his body. He tried to pull back and couldn’t. His muscles were locked up tight. The Geiger counter gave a single bray, then fell silent. Rusty had no idea whether or not the needle swung into the danger zone, because he couldn’t move his eyes, either. The light was leaving the world, funneling out of it like water going down a bathtub drain, and he thought with sudden clam clarity: I’m going to die. . . (736).
However, Rusty doesn’t die. Instead, he has either a hallucination or makes a telepathic connection, albeit one way, with him as the receiver, with an extraterrestrial race--or so, at least, he believes, seeing “faces.” but not “human faces, and later he would not be sure they were faces at all. They were geometric solids that seemed to be padded in leather” with “diamond shapes on their sides” that “could have been ears.” These “heads--if they were heads--turned to each other. . . In [apparent] discussion,” and Rusty thinks he “heard laughter,” picturing children at play at the local grammar school his daughters attend (735)

Rusty removes his iron apron and lays it over the generator. The metal catches fire, blisters, and disintegrates Despite witnessing the apparent defensive capability of the device and having himself been shocked by it, Rusty, having removed his gloves, seizes the generator in his bare hands, anticipating another shock, a burn, or another telepathic connection to the aliens. Instead, “there was nothing” (737). Despite its relatively small size--a little bigger than the proverbial breadbox--the generator refuses to budge. As Rusty wonders what to do next, he hears a tremendous explosion, looks up, and sees that another airplane, this one a large passenger jet, has crashed into the dome.

As a result of the jet’s crashing into the barrier, the townspeople unite more and more, wearing blue armbands as a sign of their solidarity. This solidarity is necessary, of course, to secure Big Jim Rennie’s political base and power, and it happens just before the selectman gives his speech to the townspeople. In including this scene, King also takes the opportunity to philosophize about human behavior, suggesting that, for approximately fifty percent of a population, long-term trauma encourages acceptance in place of denial. Acceptance, in turn, succumbs to dependency, and dependency gives way to resignation:

Earlier that morning, perhaps fifteen percent of the town was wearing blue “solidarity” armbands; by sundown on this Wednesday in October, it will be twice that. When the sun comes up tomorrow, it will be over fifty percent of the population.
Denial gives way to acceptance; acceptance breeds dependence. Anyone who’s ever cared for a terminal patient will tell you that, too. . . .

They need someone to sit with them when the night is dark and the hours stretch out. They need someone to say, Sleep now, it will be better in the morning. I’m here, so sleep. Sleep now. Sleep and let me take care of everything.

Sleep
(740).
For years, the townspeople of Chester’s Mill have been more or less content, most of the time, to let Big Jim Rennie take charge of their affairs, to look out for the supposed good of the town, to take care of them, both individually and collectively. Now that they are involved in a crisis beyond human reckoning, the townspeople seem prepared to accept his dictatorial leadership, depending upon his strength and courage, despite his corruption. King has set the stage for Big Jim’s gathering of greater and greater power unto himself during his upcoming speech before the accepting, dependent, and resigned citizenry of Chester’s Mill. Big Jim himself knows as much. As he stands outside Town Hall, having hurried forth to see what caused the great explosion that occurred as he was working on his speeches--”one to the cops tonight. . . [and] one to the entire town tomorrow night”--he observes the townspeople “staring up into the sky with their mouths gaped open,” and he thinks, “they looked like sheep dressed in human clothing. Tomorrow night they would crowd into the Town Hall and go baaa baaa baaa, when’ll it get better? And baaa baaa baaa, take care of us until it does. And he would” (741).

Meanwhile, since page 533, Colonel Dale (“Barbie”) Barbara has been in jail on trumped-up assault, rape, and murder charges. Apart from drinking from his toilet bowl, eating cereal upon which his jailers have spat and deposited nasal mucus, and bantering with his captors while he waits for Deputy Jackie Wettington to rescue him, he does precious little. Even before his incarceration, he didn’t do much other than cook at the local restaurant, get into a fight, and quell a riot. All in all, to say that Barbie is a passive protagonist is putting it mildly. Perhaps the fictional version of President Barack Hussein Obama erred in selecting Barbie as his official representative inside the dome. Alternatively, King may be saving Barbie’s heroic feats for the resolution of his massive story. If so, though, one has to wonder, at this point, whether the reader will care.

It is no longer either acceptable to readers from either an artistic standpoint or from a politically correct perspective to characterize dramatic personae on the basis of their physical appearance, so that physically unattractive characters are villains and beautiful people are heroes or heroines, as was the stereotypical practice of days gone by. However, King uses a similar approach, which is both aesthetically and socially acceptable (so far): he uses references to physical organs (his male characters often exhibit fear, for instance, by a tightening of, or a crawling sensation in, their testes and scrota, and, throughout Under the Dome, King references Big Jim’s heart condition--an Achilles’ heel, no doubt--as a means of suggesting his emotional state. An example occurs when he fears that the crashing jet may have been the detonation of an atomic bomb that could destroy the dome before Big Jim would like to have the barrier obliterated and the townspeople rescued. It is only when he understands that the explosion was that of an aircraft rather than a bomb that he begins to relax and his heart rate slows: “Big Jim felt a cautious sense of relief, and his triphammering heart slowed a bit. It was a plane. . . just a plane and not a nuke or some kind of super-missile. . . “ (740). However, when Colonel Cox is slow to get back to him in confirmation of the airliner’s identity, his heart rate again increases: “Big Jim’s heart had been slowing toward its normal speed (if a hundred and twenty beats per minute can be so characterized), but now it sped up again and took one of those looping misbeats. He coughed and pounded his chest. His heart seemed almost to settle, then went into a full-blown arrhythmia” (741). Since the heart symbolizes the spiritual, moral, and emotional aspects of the personality, King has chosen wisely in using Big Jim’s heart condition as a metaphor for his personal, political, and spiritual corruption.

Once again, although King cites George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (who, like Big Jim, has a bad heart) as his models for Big Jim, there are strong parallels in the selectman’s behavior to both President Obama and his chief advisor, Rahm Emmanuel. Like Emmanuel, Big Jim believes in never letting a crisis go to waste, and, like Obama, he uses such situations to further his own political base and personal power, acting in a tyrannical and self-righteous manner, believing that not only does he know what’s best for the town he governs but also that he is doing God’s will in doing so. The arrogance of Emmanuel, Obama, and Big Jim is another striking parallel between the situation “under the dome” and that in present-day America. Big Jim, who sees his fellow townspeople as “sheep,” thinks “Sheep need a shepherd,” and he believes that, “under certain circumstances, panic could be good. Under certain circumstances, it could--like food riots and acts of arson--have a beneficial effect.” (So might such conditions as a worldwide economic meltdown, worsened by runaway spending; a seemingly endless war in Afghanistan; the Gulf oil spill; international terrorism; a porous border and massive illegal immigration; and whatever “crisis” exists or can be invented next, it seems.) Like Obama, who seldom speaks without a carefully prepared speech projected onto a teleprompter, Big Jim also knows the value of prepared speeches. When Colonel Cox pleads with the selectman to make sure that the people of Chester’s Mill understand that the jetliner’s crash was “just an accident,” Big Jim thinks, “They’ll know what I tell them and believe what I want them to” (742).

Are such parallels intentional, showing that King’s political thought processes have matured beyond black-or-white, either-or fallacious form of partisan politics and the playing of an “us” liberals/Democrats against “them” conservatives/Republicans blame game, or are these parallels the result of mere coincidence, suggesting that King remains more an ideologue than an independent thinker? Is it possible that one of the world’s most popular writers hasn’t stretched his own political perspective beyond that of his college years when it was all the rage to “STICK IT TO THE MAN,” as young Joe McClatchey would have had his fellow students do in response to the descent of the dome? Is it possible that King, who shows himself to be fairly astute in his analysis and understanding of human behavior, could be so superficial and stereotypical in his perception of politics? It is possible, of course, but it’s not desirable. According to his own statements, Big Jim is modeled upon President Bush (the son) and Vice-President Chaney. That the same character could easily have been modeled upon President Obama and Rahm Emmanuel should teach King something, if it hasn’t already: the two-party system is more corrupt than Big Jim Rennie, offering little difference between the platforms and, therefore, voters’ alternatives. That’s what the Tea Party and the increasing ranks of moderates and independents without political party affiliation are all about. If it’s not what Under the Dome is all about, let’s hope that, in his next novel, King is sadder but wiser in the ways of the world.

News reaches Rusty from the hospital: both Big Jim, suffering from arrhythmia, and Junior, diagnosed with having a possible brain tumor, have been admitted to the medical facility. On their way back to Chester’s Mill from Black Ridge, Rusty swear his companions to silence concerning his discovery of the dome generator.

Rose Twitchell takes sandwiches to Barbie and, despite Melvin Searles’ presence, Barbie succeeds in relaying a message to his former employer: “Tell her [Deputy Jackie Wettington, who plans to break Barbie out of jail] I said you’re all right” (747), meaning that it’s all right for Jackie to share her secrets with Rose.

Andy Sanders and The Chef smoke methamphetamine while the latter lectures the former, based upon a wild interpretation of the book of Revelation., concerning their roles as “Christian soldiers” in the apocalypse that is to come on Halloween, if not earlier. Both men also vow never to let Big Jim and his cronies shut down their meth lab, as Big Jim has said he will do to get “rid of the evidence” of his illegal operation ((751).

As Barbie was drafted back into the Army as a colonel by presidential order, so is Deputy Jackie Wettington, a former sergeant, who’s been “stop-lossed” and assigned the “twofold” mission of rescuing Barbie from jail and of ousting Big Jim from his office as selectman-become-dictator. King loses this section of his novel by setting the stage for future developments involving a conflict between Barbie and Wettington and their followers and Big Jim and his camp. With Halloween coming early, perhaps, to Chester’s Mill and Rusty Everett’s discovery of the dome generator, things are likely to be lively, despite a relatively passive protagonist, Big Jim’s arrhythmia, and Junior’s glioma. After all, the reader has been warned, “that dead band song” is about to “play.”

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Pink Stars and Theories “Under the Dome”

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman


The military has a new approach to taking down the dome: “an experimental acid” that is powerful enough to “burn a hole two miles deep in bedrock.” At 9:00 PM, the “hydrofluoric compound” is to be poured over the dome “where Motton Road crosses. . . Into Harlow,” Colonel Cox tells Julia Shumway, asking her to deliver his message to Colonel Dale (“Barbie”) Barbara.

Unwisely, the Reverend Piper confronts Samantha Bushey’s attackers, Frank DeLesseps, Carter Thibodeau, Melvin Searles, and Georgia Roux, who dislocate her shoulder and shoot her dog, Clover. The commotion attracts diners, including Colonel Dale (“Barbie”) Barbara, who arrive just in time to see the pastor being arrested. Barbie yanks Piper’s arm back into its socket, and the Chief of Police allows her to go to the hospital, ordering her to return tomorrow for questioning: those whom she confronted have accused her of assault, just as she has accused them of raping Samantha Bushey (or in Georgia’s case, accessory to rape).

Physician’s assistant Rusty Everett, meanwhile, confronts Big Jim Rennie concerning how a hospital propane tank has come to be installed in the town hall’s supply shed. Probably, Rusty’s confrontation of Big Jim is no wiser than Piper’s confrontation of Samantha’s attackers. In any case, it gains nothing, for Big Jim says he has no knowledge as to how the propane tank ended up in the town hall’s supply shed, any more than he knows where the rest of the hospital’s surplus propane might be. He interrupts his meeting with Rusty to answer a summons from the police chief, promising to “investigate” the matter that Rusty has raised.

The fall of streaming pink stars occurs, just as the children, during their seizures, foresaw, and King devotes several scenes to this phenomenon, presenting it from the perspectives of various characters to ensure that the event is as spectacular and awe-inspiring to the reader as it is to the residents of Chester’s Mill who witness it. First, the town librarian, Lissa Jamieson, and the newspaper owner and editor Julie Shumway see the fall of the stars, reporting what they observe to Colonel Cox, with whom they are in contact through the dome as the military prepares o douse the barrier with the world’s strongest acid: “they had smeared out of clear focus and turned pink. The Milky Way had turned into a bubblegum spill across the greater dome of the night (433). Twitch grabs Rusty Everett as the physician’s assistant is getting apple juice for his latest patient, the Reverend Piper Libby, and drags him outside the hospital to observe the heavens: “It was filled with blazing pink stars, and may appeared to be falling, leaving long, almost fluorescent trails behind them” (435). Rusty feels a chill along his spine as he recalls that “Judy foresaw this. . . ‘The pink stars are falling in lines’” (436). Likewise, in their borrowed house, Thurston Marshall and Carolyn Sturges, who have assumed custody of the Appleton orphans, Alice and Aidan, witness the falling pink stars that Aidan had also foreseen during his seizure: “Alice and Aidan Appleton were asleep when the pink stars began falling, but Thurston Marshall and Carolyn Sturges weren’t. They stood in the backyard of the Dumagen house and watched them come down in brilliant pink lines. Some of the lines crisscrossed each other, and when this happened, pink runes seemed to stand out in the sky before fading” (436).

The phenomenon might seem paranormal, or even supernatural, but, both Colonel Cox and Thurston Marshall assure their listeners, Julia Shumway and Carolyn Sturges, respectively, that the incident has a natural explanation. “As it comes north,” the colonel tells Julia, “the jet [stream] passes over a lot of cities and manufacturing towns. What it picks up over those locations is collecting on the Dome instead of being whisked north to Canada and the Arctic. There’s enough of it now to have created a kind of optical filter. I’m sure it’s not dangerous” (434). The reader may not be as certain, especially since King touts his novel as a cautionary tale concerning the effects of unbridled environmental pollution. Julia isn’t as certain, either, for she says, “Not yet,” asking, “What about in a week, or a month? Are you going to hose down our airspace at thirty thousand feet when it starts getting dark in here?” Carolyn is also concerned about the falling pink stars. “Is it the end of the world?” she asks Thurston. He assures her that it is not, and that there is a perfectly natural explanation for the phenomenon: “it’s a meteor swarm” that they are “seeing. . . through a film of dust and particulate matter, Pollution, in other words. It’s changed the color” of the swarm. Uh, oh!

There’s one thing that Thurston is unable to answer, though. Carolyn asks him how Aidan could have foreseen this event during his seizure, to which question “Thurston only shook his head” (436). To emphasize the mystery of Aidan’s prophetic vision, Carolyn repeats her question, not once, but twice: “How could he know this was coming? How could he know?”

She gets no answer.

Of course, no one knows where the dome comes from, either, or why it has descended.

King includes two additional scenes in which characters observe the fall of pink stars. Most, if not all of the residents of Chester’s Mill observe the strange phenomenon, including Leo Lamoine, “a faithful member of the late Reverend Coggins’ Holy Redeemer congregation,” who interprets the event as the advent of the Apocalypse; Sloppy Sam Verdreaux, who has been discharged from jail; police officer Rube Libby; Willow and Tommy Anderson; Rose Twitchell and Anson Wheeler, of Sweetbriar Rose’s; Norrie Calvert, Benny Drake, and their parents; Jack Cale, “the current manager of Food City” and Ernie Calvert, “the previous manager”; Stewart and Fernald Bowie, of the local mortuary; Henry Morrison and police officer Jackie Wettington; Chaz Bender, a high school history teacher; Second Selectman Big Jim Rennie; Chief Randolph; First Selectman Andy Sanders; Special Deputies (and rapists) Carter Thibodeau, Melvin Searles, Frank DeLesseps, and Georgia Roux; and widower Jack Evans. Other townspeople sleep through the meteor storm: Rusty Everett’s “Little Js,” Piper Libby, Third Selectman Andrea Grinnell, The Chef, and Brenda Perkins. Curiously, the omniscient narrator informs the reader that “the dead also do not see” the phenomenon, so Myra Evans, Duke Perkins, Chuck Thompson, Claudine Sanders, all of whom are “tucked away in the Bowie Funeral Home”; Dr. Haskell, Mr. Carty, and Rory Disnmore, who are “in the morgue of Catherine Russell Hospital; and Lester Coggins, Dodee Sanders, and Angie McCain, who “are still hanging out in the McCain pantry,” with Junior Rennie seated “between Dodee and Angie, holding their hands” miss the fall of the pink stars,

King’s catalogue of the townspeople, the waking, the sleeping, and the dead alike, is unusual. Not only does it remind the reader of the novel’s larger cast of characters, but it also suggests that the story has reached its turning point. Assembling the entire cast intimates that something portentous looms just ahead. There is an eerie sense of change and doom, created largely through the mentioning of the names of both those the reader has met and those who are yet unfamiliar, as if the narrator were calling the reader’s attention to those who will live, those who may die, and those who have already met their deaths. It is as if the reader is given a final glimpse of Chester Mill’s populace, right before a major cataclysm takes place. Something ominous is about to happen, the falling stars suggest, as does the naming of the names of the townspeople and the suicide of Jack Evans, whose self-inflicted death, the reader is told, “will not be the least” (439).

Suspense is high.

While the stars fall, the military douses the dome with the experimental acid. The dome “eats” the acid, and leaves no residue other than “trace minerals. . . soil and airborne pollutants’: according to the scientists on the scene, “spectrographic analysis” indicates that the dome “isn’t there” (441). The government entertains a number of possible theories as to the barrier’s origin, however, despite their ignorance of its composition: it could be the “creation” of extraterrestrial beings, a genius, “the work of a renegade country,” or even “a living thing,” such as “some kind of E. coli hybrid” (441-442). Julia Shumway offers another possibility: “‘Colonel Cox,” Julia said quietly, ‘are we something’s experiment? Because that’s what I feel like’” (442).

Suspense remains high.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Retake

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman



One of the things I enjoy reading about is how businesses solve problems. When the business involves storytelling, the reading is, for me, all the more interesting.

Consequently, reading about how Merian C. Cooper, the executive producer of Son of Kong (he had also produced King Kong, of course) was told that he had to limit himself to a budge to a budget of $250,000 (originally $238,000), solved the problem of making the movie on a shoestring, as it were, was fascinating.

What he did was to “scale the project back considerably,” Ray Morton recounts in King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson. This scaling back required Cooper to revise “the script, condensing and simplifying all the way through,” so that some scenes were eliminated altogether and the film’s action sequences were combined or juxtaposed without the originally intended transitions. For example, Morton writes:
To save money on recreating the native village and the Great Wall, the scenes set in the village were eliminated--the natives would nor confront the landing party on the beach and refuse to allow them to come ashore, forcing them to row around the island looking for a landing spot. When Denham’s party finally did land, it would be right near the site of the temple, eliminating the need for any lengthy treks through the jungle. The remaining jungle and temple scenes were all consolidated so that they would take place in just two primary locations. . . (95).
Short story writers and novelists don’t face such restrictions, because they don’t have to film their stories. However, by imagining that they are forced, by the vagaries of the economy, the whims of studio executives, or other unanticipated problems, to make similar changes to their plots, settings, or cast of characters, such writers could learn (or hone) their skills in plot development, description, and characterization, which is always a good thing.

Imagine that you are plotting a story about a radio talk show host, while operating a metal detector, which he does as a hobby, finds an artifact in the Nevada desert. It is inscribed with odd characters. Suspecting that the piece may be worth a fortune (and that it may even be of an otherworldly origin), the man attempts to decipher the strange characters inscribed upon the relic. He is unable to find the characters in any of the sources he consults at a major university. Finally, he decides to copy them onto a sheet of paper and take the paper to an anthropologist at the same university. Unable to identify or decipher the characters, the anthropologist consults a linguist. The linguist is a consultant for a secret government project which is recording a history of an alien species in its own language--the strange characters on the artifact that the talk show host found--and the linguist alerts the government that the talk show host has discovered the object that was lost decades ago. The talk show host is taken for a ride by government agents who inform him that the government has confiscated the artifact and threaten him not to divulge anything about his discovery. After going into hiding, the talk show host tells everything to his audience during a show and promises to share the characters with the world in the hope that someone somewhere can decipher them and interpret the message on the artifact that the government has confiscated.

So far, so good, you think.

But, then, out of the blue, you are told that your story cannot feature either an alien species or the government. You have to shoot a retake, as it were, to provide another explanation for the mysterious characters.

Perhaps you come up with something like this: a radio talk show host, while operating a metal detector, which he does as a hobby, finds an artifact in the Nevada desert. It is inscribed with odd characters. Suspecting that the piece may be worth a fortune (and that it may even be of an otherworldly origin), the man attempts to decipher the strange characters inscribed upon the relic. He is unable to find the characters in any of the sources he consults at a major university. Finally, he decides to copy them onto a sheet of paper and take the paper to an anthropologist at the same university. Unable to identify or decipher the characters, the anthropologist consults a linguist. The linguist identifies the characters as belonging to a lost tribe of ancient mystics. Finally able to interpret the characters, the linguist says that they are the words to an incantation that supposedly summons The Nameless One, which he believes is the tribe’s guardian daemon. On his show, the radio talk show host recites the linguist’s “wild story” and reads the translated text aloud, joking that he hopes he hasn’t thereby summoned the tribal daemon.

You’d now have two explanations for the origin and significance of the characters. As a result, you can create a more sophisticated plot. For example, perhaps the linguist’s account of the artifact’s characters is a deliberate falsehood, told to deceive the talk show host as to the true origin and significance of the inscription, which is that it really is a history of an alien species, written in their own language, which the government wants to cover up. When he subsequently learns the truth, the host can then tell everything to his audience during a show and promise to share the characters with the world in the hope that someone somewhere can decipher them and interpret the message on the artifact that the government has confiscated.

By further tweaking the original storyline, you can add more twists to the plot. Maybe your imaginary studio executive says he wants the host to advertise the characters on billboards before he announces the truth bout his discovery on his radio show, and, in major market areas across the country, the strange symbols appear on billboards, without explanation (ore perhaps with the caption, “Curious? Listen to KXYZ radio’s Hot Talk.” At first, you may think the exec’s demand asinine, but what can you do but humor him. You revise your plot, incorporating the billboards. In the process, you must explain why the talk show host posted the message on billboards rather than just explain things on his radio show.

Maybe his show is local, but he wants a national audience. Maybe he wants to protect himself against possible reprisals by the government or the aliens (or both). Maybe he is trying, as it were, to smoke the extraterrestrials out of their hideout, wherever it may be.

In this manner, by forcing yourself to plot and revise, shooting “retakes,” as it were of scenes and acts that you’ve already filmed (that is, written), you may facilitate your creativity as a writer, develop less straightforward (and predictable) plots, heighten suspense, and compose more sophisticated and complex plots.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Quick Tip: Let Your Setting Suggest Your Characters

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

A middle school literature textbook presents three lines of dialogue between two characters, asking students to imagine the words spoken in several very different settings, thereby hoping to impress upon them the importance of setting in establishing a context for how what is said is said. This is an interesting approach, and one that can also work for horror writers (or authors of any kind). For example. Imagine these lines of dialogue spoken in a cemetery:

Character A: Where’s Henry?
Character B: He has to be here, somewhere!
Character A: Yeah, it’s not likely he’s wandered off anywhere.

Is Henry a corpse?
Now, imagine the same lines of dialogue spoken in a supposedly haunted house:

Character A: Where’s Henry?
Character B: He has to be here, somewhere!
Character A: Yeah, it’s not likely he’s wandered off anywhere.

Did a ghost get Henry?

In a lifeboat on the open sea:

Character A: Where’s Henry?
Character B: He has to be here, somewhere!
Character A: Yeah, it’s not likely he’s wandered off anywhere.

Did Henry, perhaps delusional, leap overboard while the others slept?
In a spaceship:

Character A: Where’s Henry?
Character B: He has to be here, somewhere!
Character A: Yeah, it’s not likely he’s wandered off anywhere.

Did an alien stowaway capture or kill Henry?
Remember that almost every situation that involves more than one character (and some scenes which involve only one character) is likely to have at least two, and sometimes more, points of view, which allows at least two lines of development for the dialogue. For example, visitors to a cemetery (or even grave robbers) might enquire as to Henry’s whereabouts--or the whereabouts of his grave--concluding that he must be somewhere nearby, since corpses cannot “wander off anywhere,” or Henry could be another of their group, a third visitor (or grave robber). For that matter, Henry could be the son, or even a pet dog ,of one of the characters. Likewise, in the haunted house, Henry could be a ghost hunter or a ghost. He could be one of a group of homeless men who has suddenly somehow disappeared or a police officer who had been, a moment ago, investigating the place with his partner and a couple of backup police officers. Maybe Henry isn’t a delusional shipwreck survivor; instead, maybe he is a character in the delusion of one or more of the survivors and, as such, exists only in their fevered dreams. Likewise, Henry may not be a member of the spaceship’s crew or a passenger aboard the spaceship; he could be a live specimen of an extraterrestrial species that the astronauts have captured and are bringing home to earth for study. He could be a criminal who is being transported to a prison planet. He could be the one and only mechanic who is able to repair the ship’s faulty impulse-drive before the craft falls into the planet it’s orbiting.

By exploring other possibilities than the one that comes first to mind, a writer can perhaps surprise, shock, or even horrify, the reader. The writers of The Others do just this, suggesting to their audience that the protagonist, Grace Stewart, and her children and servants are being haunted, whereas, in fact, as incidents toward the end of the film show, it is she, her son and daughter, and the servants who are the ghosts who are haunting the house’s mortal residents. Imagining the same lines of dialogue spoken by characters in different settings is a way to accomplish similar sleights of mind.

Friday, September 26, 2008

The Form and Function of the Alien Menace

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman
 
Everything has a past, but not everything has a history. To have a history, something must have occurred within the scope of people’s self-conscious awareness of themselves and their world and must have been of sufficient interest for the historians among them to record and interpret these events.
Strangely enough, UFO’s and extraterrestrial creatures, often called aliens, have a history. In fiction (mostly science fiction, but some horror fiction as well), aliens have made appearances, usually as the enemy of humanity (but sometimes as its friend and would-be guru) as early as the seventeenth century. The idea that the moon might be inhabited was introduced in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) when an angel implies that the lunar satellite may be inhabited by lunatics similar to Adam and Eve, and Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle made a case for alien civilizations in his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686). Aliens appear in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) as villains who meet their match in their encounter with Earth’s lowly bacteria. The recent discovery of rather large quantities of water on Mars makes the idea of life’s reality or possibility on other planets more feasible to many scientists than it seemed before this discovery. Like Wells and other nineteenth-century novelists, many contemporary writers have featured aliens as characters in their novels. Stephen King (Dreamcatcher, The Tommyknockers) and Dean Koontz (The Taking) are examples. However, Hollywood loves aliens even more than novelists, and many films, both of the science fiction and the horror variety, have featured extraterrestrials. This post is concerned not so much with the appearance of extraterrestrials in science fiction and horror stories but with the means by which such creatures seek to accomplish their goals or missions. Form is limited by what nature exhibits. Therefore, as one might suspect, most aliens are either bipedal or humanoid in form, if not function, because it is difficult to imagine a creature that is otherwise, unless a writer takes (as some have done) one of our four-legged animal friends, one of our six-legged insect friends, or one of our eight-legged arachnid friends as his or her model. A few writers have looked to supernatural entities for their inspiration. Star Trek: The Next Generation’s allasomorph, in its true form, for instance, resembles nothing so much as it does a ghost. Although no such inspiration has been confirmed, it seems that George Lucas’ muse for his many extraterrestrial creatures could have been the demons with which Hieronymus Bosch populated the canvases of his Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. One of the more interesting aliens is The Blob, a gelatinous mass similar to an ameba that has been magnified several millions of times. Although a giant jelly-like mass may seem silly, it seems less so if one imagines what it would be like to be engulfed by such a blob. One would no doubt twist and thrash about, kicking (if not screaming), panicked and terrified, as he or she began to suffocate within the gelatinous mass. If mere suffocation is not enough to frighten and annoy the victim, one is not to worry: the creature also digests its prey, dissolving him or her into a nutritious protein stew. Meanwhile, the terrified face of the struggling victim is visible through the blob’s membranous, gelatinous form. King’s Dreamcatcher aliens resemble legless red weasels. Spawned by the ingestion of an infectious mold called a byrus, the aliens, known as byrum, incubate within their hosts’ abdomens and exit through their rectums. The byrum is linked telepathically with the byrus, with which the alien creatures maintain a symbiotic relationship that is hazardous to human health. King said that his aliens symbolize cancer, which is the title that he’d originally given his work in progress before deciding upon Dreamcatchers instead. The aliens of King’s Tommyknockers are more human in their appearance, although with a bit of crab and dog thrown in, for good measure. Unusually tall, they have claws instead of feet and canine countenances. Gray of skin, they are milky-eyed and have apparently foregone sex and gender in favor of sexless androgyny. They have also given up spoken and written language, it seems, preferring to communicate telepathically. (In King’s novels, the ability to use telepathy is one of the necessary attributes, it seems, for aliens.) In other ways, however, the aliens are severely limited, if not actually mentally handicapped. Unable to reproduce sexually, the aliens resort to transforming humans into semblances of themselves in an apparent attempt (King is never too clear on this point) at colonizing the Earth. Many critics see these aliens as representing the effects of substance abuse, from which King was allegedly suffering at the time that he wrote this novel. Koontz’s aliens are so much like spaceships that the human characters mistake the extraterrestrials for such. (In fact, though, the creatures aren’t aliens at all, as it turns out; they’re fallen angels, led by Satan). When they pass overhead, one feels as if he or she is mentally radiated, as it were, and known, completely and instantly. To facilitate their conquest of the Earth, an advance team of the extraterrestrials is undertaking a reverse-terraforming of the planet to create an atmosphere that is hazardous to humans but agreeable to the extraterrestrials. It is only toward the end of the novel that the protagonist learns that the aliens are actually an army of demons who have come to destroy the planet. In this novel, Koontz inverts the old idea that the demons of myth and legend were inspired by aliens who visited the Earth in days long past, making the belief in aliens a consequence of the actual existence of demons. This plot ploy allows Koontz’s novel an unusual theological significance that King matches in his own demon-haunted novel Desperation. Form is one of the limits that nature imposes upon writers who want to write about alien creatures, for people, writers included, are limited by nature as to what they can know and, consequently, about what they can write. Nature, although varied, is finite, and, sooner or later, minerals, plants, insects, and animals are going to run out of characteristics and abilities that can be imposed, in more or less disguised fashion, upon supposedly extraterrestrial creatures. This is a given. Therefore, writers are well advised, if they want their monster to be an alien, to take a leaf from King and Koontz and give them a non-human (and possibly an inhuman) means of carrying out their (more or less human) motives for visiting Earth to begin with and for whatever mission or endeavor they undertake after they get here. Despite some problems with his plots, King’s Dreamcatcher and Tommyknockers do impart more-or-less alien means of accomplishing his extraterrestrials’ more-or-less human purposes, although he uses a biological concept (symbiosis), a paranormal cliché (telepathy), and a centuries-old political purpose (colonization) to do so: his aliens are here to invade the Earth (Dreamcatcher) and to colonize our planet (The Tommyknockers); the way they go about doing so--spreading a disease in which they are symbiots and transforming humans into themselves with a gas--are more-or- less alien methods. Koontz’s motive for his aliens’ presence is even more intriguing: they are merely wearing disguises; the aliens are actually demons who wear their extraterrestrial appearances as fleshly costumes. Affecting a disguise isn’t all that unusual, especially for humans, but the means by which the demons in his novel accomplish their purpose--taking upon themselves an extraterrestrial likeness--is beyond the scope of anything that human beings can accomplish--at least this side of hell. If a writer can’t get past the restrictions of form in creating aliens, he or she should at least try to imagine a way to bypass function, giving his or her aliens a non-human method by which to accomplish their purposes. As in so many other matters relating to horror fiction, King and Koontz have shown the way by which writers can do so.

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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