Campbell and Rogers Press has just published my fellow author Michael Williams's Tales with a Twist III, the third installment in his Twisted Tales series. As someone who has followed Michael since his first book, I am delighted to recommend his series. I love the short, short form and the variety of his flash fiction, and I believe you will as well. Check out his interview, below. He is a man with an imagination and a vision that is on fire!
Interview with Michael Williams
Q: What interests you in the super-short genre of flash fiction?
A: Alfred Hitchcock once said that a movie shouldn’t be longer than the capacity of the human bladder. I find I agree. Edgar Allan Poe considered the effect of short fiction to be more intense than that of longer works, such as novels or—my apologies to Hitch—full-length motion pictures. I also tend to concur with Poe: shorter fiction can pack more of an emotional wallop than longer forms. In our modern, fast-paced world, I think shorter fiction is also more convenient for many. A lot of people want complete stories without having to spend hours or days to read them.
Q: It seems that you prefer fantastic to realistic stories. Why is that?
A: Actually, I enjoy reading and writing all forms of fiction, but I think that tales of the fantastic, marvelous, and uncanny—handy distinctions that Tzvetan Todorov makes—add an element of magic to mundane experience, the icing, so to speak, on the cake. I also believe that, as Flannery O’Connor once said, a writer sometimes needs to use hyperbolic techniques to communicate with readers, and the shock of the surreal; the astonishment of the weird; and the wonder of the otherworldly, the supernatural, the occult, and the mystical provide these rhetorical approaches.
Q: As the titles of your books suggest, your tales are rather “twisted.” I'm going to ask the question most writers hate to hear: Where do you get your ideas?
A: I'm an eclectic reader. I enjoy learning about a variety of subjects. I guess you could say I'm a generalist. Sometimes, when the stars are in alignment, a remembered fact here will meet up with a recalled fact there, and, out of this connection of one thing and another, an idea will emerge. I might combine one of Thomas Edison’s inventions with the spiritualistic belief in the ability of the living to communicate with the dead, or I could update an ancient myth or a modern horror movie. As Arthur Golding wrote, in translating John Calvin, “All is grist for the mill.”
Q: I know you're something of a mariner. Does the sea ever feature in your stories?
A: Not as often as I might expect, but, yes, there is a sea tale or two. In one, the ocean solves a murder, which is rather a novel notion, I think.
Q: By definition, according to the title of your series, Twisted Tales, and by the titles of the books in the series, each of your flash fiction narratives contains a plot twist. How do you think up so many of them?
A: Usually, the story suggests one. However, I also employ a couple of tricks, or techniques—three, actually. First, when plotting a story such as those in Tales with a Twist, Tales with a Twist II, or Tales with a Twist III, I keep in mind the idea that almost everything has a direct opposite: new, old; lost, found; hero, villain; reward, punishment; rich, poor; right, wrong. Then, I start with one polarity and end with its opposite. The second way is more concrete. I keep a list of the plot twists I see in novels, short stories, movies, and TV series. Then, I adapt them to fit the situation or circumstances of my own stories. My third technique is to remember that there is a fine line not only between good and evil and right and wrong, but between all such polar opposites. A person who is cautious may become distrustful or even paranoid; a man who's strict can become controlling; a woman who's concerned with her own health and that of others—a doctor or a nurse, perhaps—can become a hypochondriac; a trusting person may become gullible. Each of these possibilities is a source of plot twists.
Q: How many of your tales with a twist are autobiographical?
A: Many of them are fantasies in which I explore how something might be if a particular set of unusual circumstances were to apply. Many of my stories are thought experiments, of a sort. I place a certain type of character in a particular kind of environment and see whether he or she adapts and, if the character does adapt, how he or she manages to do so. Frequently, the environment is physical, but it need not be; some of my stories' environments are philosophical, or moral, or psychological, or political, or cultural, or otherwise. The autobiographical element, when there is one, may be small—a detail here or there, the description of a place I've been, desires I've experienced, wishes I may have wanted to fulfill, thoughts or feelings or impressions I've had, that sort of thing, embedded in the narration, the exposition, or the dialogue.
The equivalent of flash
fiction (or, in some cases, short stories), short films have simple,
linear plots; minimal characters, and a single conflict. However, the
use of symbolism and metaphor can enrich the possible interpretations
of many of these exercises in independent filmmaking.
Shhh
(2012) stars Sean Michael Kyer as asthmatic, stuttering Guillermo, a
young boy beset by a monster, and Ilze Burger, as his teenage sister
Helleana. Guillermo draws pictures of monsters, earning Helleana's
scorn.
She regards her younger
brother as a “freak” and goes out of her way to be snide,
insulting Guillermo about his drawings, his apparent incontinence,
his stuttering, and whatever else crosses her mind. Lately, he's been
cutting off his own hair, a lock or two at a time, and concealing the
results under a knit cap.
Although the children
share the same wash room, only Guillermo sees the monster. Of hideous
appearance, the monster is creepy, but its behavior is rather lame,
as the conduct of monsters goes: the goblin-like creature with an
extensible, tubular proboscis, eats hair, which explains why
Guillermo has been cutting off his own tresses.
Once he faces the monster,
feeding it hair from his sister's hairbrush, it disappears, and
Guillermo is able to set aside his inhaler, leaving it, with his
sister's brush, in the wash room. In bed, he holds his finger to his
lips and says “shhh!”
At the end of the picture,
half of a drawing that Helleana had torn in half, which shows the
monster in attack mode, has been taped to a picture of Helleana who
looks terrified as the attacking monster approaches her. In the
original drawing, the monster had been attacking Guillermo. By facing
down the monster and leaving his sister's hairbrush in the wash room
after promising the monster that he could provide more hair for it to
eat, Guillermo seems to have substituted Helleana for himself as the
monster's prey.
The filmmakers offer
several clues concerning the true nature of the monster that
confronts Guillermo, most of which relate to the boy's behavior.
However, the movie begins with a series of dark drawings, by
Guillermo, many of which are devoted to the monster.
The first two pictures
depict subjects Guillermo and his relationship with his family:
He lies supine on the
floor, apparently content, sketching Saturn, the sun, and a star. As
this picture is displayed, the narrator informs the audience, “This
is the tale of an extraordinary child . . . ”
The next picture
shows Dad, Helleana, and Guillermo. Dad tips a bottle to his lips,
and Helleana strikes Guillermo repeatedly on the head with a round object.
Dad and Helleana look slightly monstrous, while Guillermo looks
miserable. The narrator's commentary continues: “ . . . raised in
such a way that you would have thought he never smiled . . .”
Several of the next
drawings concern the monster:
Guillermo tells
Helleana about a monster in the bathroom. The narrator states, “.
. . for every night he fought a lurking fear.”
As he stands before
the toilet, a monster parts the shower curtain, lunging toward the
boy. The narrator, something of a poet, it appears, adds, “His
passage to the bathroom, [sic]
locked away a creature would appear.
Guillermo loses
control of his bladder, a sight that Helleana finds hilarious; she
laughs as she points to him, standing in a puddle of his own urine.
He dared not even
wonder [at] the horrors that await,” the narrator advises the
audience. The monster leans over Guillermo, its mouth gaping. “The
children who defied his terms, he could only imagine their fate.”
The next two drawings
focus on Guillermo himself:
Guillermo holds a
hand to his forehead. “And what you wonder were the terms asked of
our dear boy.”
As Guillermo takes a
pair of scissors to his head, the narrator answers his own question:
“Clumps of hair from off his head, the creature could enjoy.”
The final picture is text:
“Shhh . . .” as the movie begins.
During the movie's action,
we learn these facts about Guillermo:
He is neglected (left
alone) much of the time.
He is artistic and
imaginative.
He cuts his hair to
feed the monster.
His sister is
emotionally and abusive toward him.
He stutters.
He is incontinent.
He is asthmatic and
relies on an inhaler.
He finds the monster
both frightening and disgusting.
Earlier, when he
called to his father to rescue him from Helleana, she put her finger
to her lips and commanded, “Shhh!” At the end of the movie, he
does the same thing.
To understand the monster,
we must understand what Guillermo's behaviors represent.
Consulting psychological
theory, we discover that pulling (or, we assume, cutting) and
trichophagia,
or the compulsiveeating
of hair (we are also assuming that the monster represents a
psychological condition of some sort; as such, it is an inner state,
a dimension of the self) is a way of relieving stress, anxiety and
loneliness.
Although stuttering
can have physiological and genetic causes, it can also be caused by
“stress in the family,” “problems communicating with others,”
and “low self-esteem.”
Urinary
incontinence can also be caused by physiological issues, but
emotional stress that impairs the fight-or-flight response
precipitated by the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine
can also cause urinary incontinence.
Although asthma
is a physical condition, “research has also shown that the body’s
response to stress triggers the immune system and causes the release
of certain hormones,” thereby leading “to inflammation within the
airways of the lungs, triggering an asthma attack.” His ability to
discard his inhaler after overcoming the monster seems to underscore
the idea that his asthma attacks are attributable to the severe
stress he experiences on a regular basis.
It appears that the
alcohol and general unavailability of his father and his sisters'
emotional and physical abuse of him accounts, in large measure, for
Guillermo's heightened stress. These traumas, which affect a young
child, are obviously severe, giving rise not to one expression but to
a number of severe symptoms: trichophagia,
stuttering, urinary incontinence, and asthma. Possibly, he also has
low-self esteem as a result of being neglected and abused.
There
seems to be another cause of Guillermo's heightened stress. In none
of the pictures he draws does his mother appear. She is neither seen
nor heard in the movie, and no one speaks of or otherwise refers to
her. The disappearance of the mother, possibly as a result of her
demise, could explain not only Guillermo's stress but also the
alcoholism of his father and the abusive behavior of his sister. Each
in his or her own destructive manner, the surviving family members
appear to be attempting, largely unsuccessfully, to cope with the
grief and loss of the adult female member of the family.
The monster appears, then,
to be a personification of the stress, low self-esteem, loneliness,
and fear that Guillermo experiences as a result of his father's
emotional abandonment of him, his father's alcoholism, his sister's
emotional and physical abuse of him, and, quite possibly, his
mother's “abandonment” of him through her death and the grief he
feels for her passing and his loss of her, the presumed nurturer of
the family.
The narrator tells the
audience that Guillermo is “extraordinary.” What makes him so,
the film suggests, is his artistic ability. The dark drawings he
creates objectify his fears, allowing him to put into pictures what he
may not be able to put into words. He can picture himself contented;
he can picture his father's alcoholism and his sister's violence and
cruelty; he can picture his helplessness, his humiliation, and his
fear.
He can also picture an
adversary, the monstrous form upon whom he projects the harsh
treatment of his father and his sister; they, as much as his own low
self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and
grief, are the monster he sees in the bathroom, or the wash room, the
place to which he goes to divest himself of waste and dirt, to relive
himself and to cleanse himself.
His artistic ability
allows him to project an enemy, to imagine an adversary. Having
accomplished this feat, he can now devise a way to attack and conquer
his foe and all that it stands for, all that it represents. By
overcoming the monster, he rids himself of his low self-esteem,
stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief. By gaining
confidence in himself, he overcomes his sister's power over him and
he does not need his father's love and protection. In vanquishing the
monster, he becomes a hero. He does not need his inhaler. He does not
need his scissors. He can enjoy, but he does not need, the refuge of
his room.
He overcomes the part of
the monster that is Helleana by imagining her as the monster's
victim. In restoring the drawing she'd ripped in half, he replaced
his own image with an image of her as the monster's prey. Henceforth,
she is the one who must feel low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust,
humiliation, loneliness, and grief. He is no longer the scapegoat
that she had made him. Without him in this role, she herself must
bear the weight of her own problems, without him as her whipping boy.
Instead of picturing
himself as the monster's prey, he escapes this fate by imagining his
sister in the role of the monster's victim. She who was his tormentor
becomes the tormented, the tortured victim of the monster that she
helped to create. His father, meanwhile, is the victim of the monster
he embraces, the bottle of whiskey that suppresses the low
self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and
grief that he feels, even as he feeds it not the hair of his head,
but the essence of his soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche warns,
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he
does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the
abyss also looks into you.” This cautionary declaration also seems
to inform the short film.
In the final analysis,
there is more than a bit of the monster in Guillermo, too, for he is
willing to sacrifice his own sister to the monster, even going so far
as to deliberately leave her hairbrush in the bathroom before telling
her just where to go to find it. Then, as he lies in bed and she,
presumably having gone to get her brush, begins to scream, he holds a
finger to his lips and says “shhh.” There is an emotional abyss
as deep, apparently, as that of a sociopath, for he seems to feel no
qualms about having sent his sister to the same fate as that which
had been his own.
Whether his father and his
sister helped to make him the monster he has become, the fact remains
that he himself has had a part in the making of the monster, for he
has contributed to its creation, both by his own actions and through
the exercise of his imagination.
Shhh
is not without flaws (what is?). The verse in which the narrator speaks is
amateurish, at best, and it's often an unnecessary distraction. The
drawings, although well executed, are a bit too didactic. The
psychology, although suggested, rather than overtly stated, is
alternately implausible and too broad. The horror is tepid.
Nevertheless,
the short film, overall, is intriguing and offers a lot to discern,
analyze, and appreciate.
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’ Dictionarycontends 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.
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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