Showing posts with label hero. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hero. Show all posts

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Heightened Horrors--and Heroes: Ourselves, Writ Large

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Watching children watching cartoons that contain moments which, to their audience, are frightening reveal that youngsters are often frightened by much the same things as oldsters: sudden attacks, distorted faces and figures, eerie sounds, and the like. One cannot plan to defend oneself against sudden attacks. A distorted face or figure suggests that something terrible may have happened to another person and that something just as terrible could therefore happen to oneself. Eerie sounds suggest the unfamiliar, and that which is unknown may be fraught with menace. In “Killed By Death,” vampire slayer Buffy Summers assures the children in a hospital in which youngsters are dying (and are possibly being killed) at an alarming rate that she knows, as they do, that monsters, but, she declares, there are those who fight monsters, too, and that she is one.


Children are not reassured by promises that the monsters they fear--the monsters in the closet or under the bed--are not real, but imaginary, because kids don’t yet have enough of a handle on the world to tightly compartmentalize “real” and “unreal,” or “imaginary”; the wall between these realms in thin, and, sometimes, the fantastic bleeds through, into the real world. Therefore, Buffy gains credibility by admitting to the kids to whom she speaks that the monsters they fear are real. Because she is believable about this concern, her declaration that she, a hero who fights monsters, is also real is also believable to the children.


In the real world, adults know that monsters are real, too: there are serial killers, rapists, and thieves. There are backbiters and toadies--and even politicians. But there are heroes, too, who fight these monsters: cops and firefighters and emergency medical technicians and soldiers and everyday men and women who are willing to risk their own lives to save others who are in trouble and need help. The everyday hero, however, is too mundane to celebrate for more than a day or two. Horror fiction (like other literary genres) create villains who are larger than life--Pennywise the Clown, Dracula, Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, Der Kinderstod--so that there can be larger-than -life heroes, both extraordinary and ordinary--the Losers, Count Van Helsing, Sam Loomis, Clarice Starling, Buffy Summers.

The phrase “head and shoulders above the crowd” derives from the custom of ancient Greek and Roman sculptors of indicating heroism by creating statues of heroic individuals that were a head length taller than the statues of ordinary mortals. The ordinary figure, ancient artists determined, is equal to seven and a half head lengths; therefore, the statue of a heroic individual would be eight and a half head lengths in stature. In a similar way, writers make both villains and heroes larger than life, so that they embody, in a heightened manner, the villainous and the heroic in ordinary men; the villains and heroes of horror (and other genres) are ourselves, writ large.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

The Final Girl: Transsexual? Homoerotic? We Report; You Decide

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman


Note: In this and a few subsequent posts, I summarize and comment upon essays concerning horror fiction that appear in Gender, Language, and Myth, edited by Glenwood Irons (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). Although some of the claims in these essays seem far-fetched (to me, at least), others appear to have some validity and even some practical application. In any case, readers of Chillers and Thrillers are likely to find that these synopses offer unusual takes on the theory and practice of writing horror fiction.

Transgender, especially transsexual, images disturb many because such pictures suggest that not only one’s sexual orientation, but also his or her very gender--and, therefore, a person’s identity as an individual--may be more fluid and flexible than people generally suppose.

Horror fiction plays with notions of both gender and sexual orientation. For example, traditionally, women, not men, have been the victims of the monster’s or the madman’s misogynistic rage, in part as Edgar Allan Poe implied, decades ago, because “the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” (“The Philosophy of Composition”).

In “Her Body, Himself,” Carol J. Clover summarizes a number of loosely related “figurative readings” (283) of “slasher films,” which “present. . . a world in which male and female are at desperate odds with one another but in which, at the same time, masculine and feminine are more states of mind than body” (Gender, Language, and Myth: Essays on Popular Narrative, 252).

When directors film death scenes from the perspective of the monster or the madman, the moviegoer sees what the antagonist sees; arguably, to some degree, the audience also thinks and feels as the monster or the madman thinks and feels. Such a perspective certainly invites the viewer to identify with the killer, but, according to Clover, it also invites the viewer to identify with the killer’s victim: “Just as attacker and attacked are expressions of the same self in nightmares, so they are expressions of the same viewer in horror films. . . . We are both Red Riding Hood and the Wolf; the force of the experience, the horror, comes from ‘knowing’ both sides of the story” (258).

In slasher films, defined by Clover as movies in which “a psycho-killer. . . slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is himself subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived” (252), the antagonist himself is often a victim of “gender confusion” and arrested development, or “infantile fury” (260-261), and “even killers whose childhood is not immediately at issue and who display no overt gender confusion are often sexually disturbed” (261). It is with this confusion, this arrested development, and this disturbance that horror films are concerned, Clover suggests.

The “gender confusion” that is often at the heart of male slashers is an effect and a reflection, perhaps, of the psychologically, socially, and, indeed, politically plastic, even protean, nature of culture itself, of culture’s own accidental (as opposed to necessary) and constructed (as opposed to given) character. Just as gender, if not sexuality, is not biologically determined but is culturally shaped, so are the other elements of civilization, such as its psychology, social communities and nations, and political structures and institutions.

The protean, variable, mutable, and, above all, synthetic nature of culture allows horror not only to exist but to shift its shape and to take on new forms--in a word, to transform. The transformative nature of culture benefits the fantastic as it is represented in cinema, too: “If the fantastic depends for its effect on an uncertainty of vision, a profusion of perspectives, and a confusion of subjective and objective,” Clover contends, “cinema is pre-eminently suited to the fantastic” (256). The transgender themes discernable in horror fiction, both printed and filmed, dovetail with the transformative nature of culture and fantastic art. Moreover, either sex is able to identify with itself or its opposite because both males and females share the “threat function and the victim function,” which “coexist in the same unconscious, regardless of anatomical sex” (276). Regardless of an individual’s sex, transgender perception, like “gender confusion,” is rooted, it seems, as much in nature as it is in the individual’s nurturing..

With the introduction of the “Final Girl,” who “alone looks death in the face. . . [and] finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B)” (266), Clover sees a transformation, rather than a mere development, of the formula that Alfred Hitchcock established in his 1960 movie Psycho, a forerunner, of sorts, to the slasher genre:


With the introduction of the Final Girl. . . the Psycho formula is radically altered. It is not merely a question of enlarging the figure of Lila [Marion Crane’s sister] but of absorbing into her role, in varying degrees, the functions of Arbogast (investigator) and Sam (the rescuer) and restructuring the narrative action from beginning to end around her progress in relation to the killer. In other words, Psycho’s detective plot, revolving around a revelation, yields in the modern slasher film, to a hero plot, revolving around the main character’s struggle with eventual triumph over evil (270-271).
Like the monster or the madman, the “final girl” is also apt to blend gender. She is, Clover says, “a “boyish” figure (266), and “lest we miss the points,” she adds, “it [her masculinity] is spelled out in her name: Stevie, Marti, Terry. . . Stretch, Will” (270). If the viewer is invited to see him- or herself as both the “attacker and [the] attacked,” as both “Red Riding Hood and the Wolf,” then he or she is also invited to see him- or herself as both masculine and feminine, as both male and female, or, in a word, as transgender. In short, Clover says, “filmmakers seems [sic] to know better than film critics that gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane” (275).

Clover sees a Freudian dynamic at work in the cross-gendering of the final girl. This character, she contends, is a stand-in for the adolescent male who is progressing, via the Oedipal complex, from the latent to the phallic stage of his psychosexual development. The killer represents the father, the final girl the son who fights for both his own life and his emerging manhood:


It is the male killer’s tragedy that his incipient femininity is not reversed but completed (castration) and the Final Girl’s victory that her incipient masculinity is not thwarted but realized (phallicization). . . . The moment at which the Final Girl is effectively phallicized is the moment that the plot halts and the horror ceases. Day breaks, and the community returns to its normal order (279).
Although Clover’s tone, as she summarizes these “figurative readings” of slasher films is objective to the point that the reader may assume that she herself shares these interpretations, she makes it clear, toward the end of her essay, that she finds fault with some of their assertions. She questions whether the basically “homoerotic” interpretation that views the final girl as a surrogate male adolescent struggling to realize her--or his--phallic promise in the Oedipal murder of the killer (father) can account for the enjoyment of these films by female moviegoers. Perhaps some other dynamic accounts for young women’s pleasure in witnessing “a psycho-killer. . . [as he] slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is himself subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived.” However, Clover’s questions suggest that “gender confusion” is certainly an element of such movies and, probably, among such moviegoers:


Some such notion of differential understanding underlines the homoerotic reading. The silent presupposition is that reading is that there can be no male identification with the female as female, and that the male viewer/reader who adjoins feminine experience does so only by homosexual conversion. But does female identification with male experience then similarly indicate as lesbian conversion? Or are the processes of patriarchy so one-way that the female can identify with the male directly, but the male can identify with the female only by transsexualizing her? Does the Final Girl mean ‘girl’ to her female viewers and ‘boy’ to her male viewers? If her masculine features qualify him as a transformed woman (in which case the homoerotic reading can be maintained only by defining that ‘woman’ as phallic and retransforming her into defining that ‘woman’ as phallic and retransforming her into a male)? (283)
Nevertheless, Clover agrees that slasher films are basically about “gender confusion”: “The gender-identity game. . . is too patterned and too pervasive in the slasher film to be dismissed as supervenient. It seems instead to be an integral element of the particular brand of bodily sensation in which the genre trades” (286). Instead of the transsexual or homoerotic readings that are typical among Freudian film critics in their discussions of slasher films, Clover simply suggests that the final girl’s feminine-masculine characterization reflects the contemporary understanding of sex as being both fixed and determined (“a less-than interesting given,” Clover says) but gender as fluid and flexible (“theater,” Clover says):


Abject fear is still ‘gendered’ feminine. . . . By 1980, however, the male rescuer is either marginal or dispensed with altogether. . . . At the moment that the Final Girl becomes her own saviour, she becomes a hero. . . . [and] the willingness of one immensely popular genre to re-represent the hero as an anatomical female seems to suggest that at least one of the traditional marks of heroism, triumphant self-rescue, is no longer strictly ‘gendered’
masculine . . . .(298)

. . . The fact that we have in the killer a feminine male and in the main character a masculine female--parent and Everyteen, respectively--seems, especially in the latter case, to suggest a loosening of the categories, or at least of the equation ‘sex = gender’ (292).
Moreover, Clover believes that she knows what sociopolitical upheaval has caused the phenomenon of the hermaphroditic final girl; she is the product of the feminism of the 1960s and the societal changes that this movement effected:


The fact that the typical patrons of these films are the sons of marriages contracted in the 1960s or even the early 1970s leads us to speculate that the dire claims of that era--that the women’s movement, the entry of women into the workplace, and the rise of divorce and woman-headed families would yield massive gender confusion in the next generation (292).

Sunday, June 27, 2010

The Monster as (Straw) Bogeyman

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Symbolically, cannibals already represent several more mundane horrors. In “What Libertarianism Is,” John Hospers offers another meaning for them. In writing of “moral cannibalism” (his emphasis), he argues:

A cannibal in the physical sense is a person who lives off the flesh of other human beings. A moral [again, Hospers’ emphasis] cannibal is one who believes he has a right to live off the “spirit” of other human beings--who believes that he has a moral claim on the productive capacity, time, and effort expended by others.
There is no free lunch (pathetic pun intended), however, and moral cannibals’ appetites for the results of others’ hard work must be borne, Hospers points out, by those whom these cannibals devour:

It has become fashionable to claim virtually everything that one needs or desires as one’s right. Thus, many people claim that they have a right to a job, the right to free medical care, to free food and clothing, to a decent home, and so on. Now if one asks, apart from any specific context, whether it would be desirable if everyone had these things, one might well say yes. But there is a gimmick attached to each of them: At whose expense? [Italics are Hospers’.]
In a politically correct period, Hospers’ argument might not go down well with some. Indeed, many might find his assertions a bit hard to swallow--which is why, in fiction (and, in this case, since we’re talking cannibals, most likely horror fiction, at that) often uses fantastic creatures as metaphors for more mundane (and possibly more horrible) threats, dangers, risks, and menaces.

The entitlement mentality is alive and well and living in a neighborhood near yours. However, powerful social and political forces have a vested interest in muddying debate about how much, if any, of one’s time and resources should be taken from one person, a producer (or host), and given to another, a consumer (or parasite). Therefore, fiction creates a sort of straw man, upon whom the painful truth can be unleashed.

Sure, a cannibal may want to eat someone else out of house and home (and heart and brain), but, in depicting such monsters, authors of horror stories are talking about rarities among men and women, not the reader’s friend, neighbor, or brother-in-law (or, for that matter, the reader him- or herself). After all, it’s one thing to want to devour another person’s entrails and quite another to want “a job. . . free medical care. . . free food and clothing. . . a decent home, and so on.” Right?

In times past, the “all-licensed fool,” as Shakespeare calls the court jester in King Lear, could speak freely of matters that, were others to mention them, would cost their heads, under the pretense that, as a fool, the jester was speaking nonsense, after all. Today, our modern fools, the comedians, likewise enjoy fairly wide leeway (although not as wide as that which his or her medieval counterpart was afforded). In addition, writers and other artists, once believed to be madmen and women, possessed of wild muses, or daemons, were granted similar privileges, or “license.” To some extent, they still are, largely because they have, quite wisely, adopted the stratagem of creating the straw man--or the straw bogeyman--as a surrogate for their real targets, whether these targets are those with an entitlement mentality or otherwise.

By unmasking the monster, reader and critic alike are, more often than not, likely to come face to face with a protected minority, attitude, value, or bias of the ruling class or, in America, the reigning political party of the moment. The entitlement mentality, as represented by the “moral cannibal” of whom Hospers speaks, is a conservative bogeyman.

Liberals have their own versions and counterparts, one of which is the ecological philistine who not only refuses to believe in global warming but who also persists in driving gas-guzzlers; in setting the temperature to a comfortable level, regardless of the amount of fuel that is required to maintain such comfort; in championing drilling for oil; and even in displaying the unmitigated audacity of believing that human beings have--or should have--as much a right to the land as the least snail darter. Such threats appear in such movies as Godzilla, Toxic Avenger, and The Happening and such novels as Bentley Little’s The Vanishing and Stephen King’s Under the Dome, about which King declares:

From the very beginning, I saw it as a chance to write about the serious ecological problems that we face in the world today. The fact is we all live under the dome. We have this little blue world that we've all seen from outer space, and it appears like that's about all there is. It's a natural allegorical situation, without whamming the reader over the head with it. I don't like books where everything stands for everything else. It works with Animal Farm: You can be a child and read it as a story about animals, but when you're older, you realize it's about communism, capitalism, fascism. That's the genius of Orwell. But I love the idea about isolating these people, addressing the questions that we face. We're a blue planet in a corner of the galaxy, and for all the satellites and probes and Hubble pictures, we haven't seen evidence of anyone else. There's nothing like ours. We have to conclude we're on our own, and we have to deal with it. We're under the dome. All of us.
There are plenty of bogeymen for both the left and the right ends of the socioeconomic-political continuum, but, in an age of intolerant political correctness, in which freedom of speech (and the freedom of thought which it expresses) is threatened on all sides, in lieu of the medieval fool whose time has come and gone, writers, especially of horror, must disguise the real horrors about which they write by dressing these fiends in the teeth and nails of cannibals or the hidebound fur of ecological cavemen. That way, readers on both ends of the political spectrum can pretend that the movies and novels with which they disagree are really just about fiends who eat the flesh of their own kind (and not men and women possessed of an entitlement mentality) or are about nothing more than subhuman barbarians (and not traitors to the environment).

Democrats, however, know the truth about Republicans. Likewise, no Democrat can pull the wool over a Republican’s eyes. Both parties know which is beast and which is hero. The monsters in the movies they watch in the dark and about which they read in novels, long past midnight, tell them. In doing so, such stories both confirm their worst fears and validate their favorite biases.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Vladimir Propp’s 31 Dramatic Situations and 7 Character Types

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman


Russian formalist scholar Vladimir Propp analyzed his country’s fairy tales to identify their simplest narrative constituents, which, following the linguistic approach that breaks language into its smallest elements, he called “narratemes.” Using this method, he catalogued the thirty-one dramatic situations, several of which, following a story’s opening situation, appear, in various combinations, again and again in such tales. Occasionally, a situation is inverted. Typically, each is played out three times, the first two occurrences ending in failure or negation.

Based upon his analysis of fairy tales, Propp also contends that their characters can be grouped into seven categories.

Although his theories have attracted some criticism, especially by Claude Levi-Strauss, an advocate of structuralism, Propp’s views remain influential among readers, writers, and critics and have been applied to both narrative fiction and drama in general, rather than just to fairy tales in particular. Therefore, his theories may also be applied to horror fiction.

According to Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928), the thirty-one dramatic situations are:

  1. ABSENTATION: A family member leaves the security of the home or community. This may be the hero or the heroine or another family member whom the hero or the heroine later needs to rescue. This division of the family creates conflict. The hero or heroine, if introduced here, is often shown to be an ordinary person, which allows the reader identify with the this character as someone who is similar to the reader him- or herself.
  2. INTERDICTION: An interdiction is addressed to the hero or heroine (he or she is told not to go somewhere or not to do something).
  3. VIOLATION of INTERDICTION: The interdiction is violated (the villain enters the tale, although the villain does not necessarily confront the hero or heroine). If the villain stalks or spies on the hero or heroine without (yet) attacking him or her, the villain’s presence nevertheless heightens suspense through dramatic irony: the reader, unlike the hero or heroine, is aware of the villain’s threatening presence.
  4. RECONNAISSANCE: The villain reconnoiters, seeking children, jewels, or other valuables or the intended victim questions the villain). The villain (often disguised) seeks information. He or she may speak to a family member who innocently divulges information. The villain may also seek to meet the hero or heroine, perhaps knowing already that the hero or heroine is special in some way. The introduction of the villain adds suspense to the story, particularly when the villain is in proximity to the hero’ or heroine’s family or community. The villain’s eloquence or power may also add suspense through dramatic irony: the reader knows that the persuasive rhetoric is false its speaker dangerous, but the intended victim or the hero or heroine may not.
  5. DELIVERY: The villain gains information about the victim. This information may be acquired in the form of a treasure map or the location or the intent of the hero or heroine. As the villain obtains this intelligence is obtained, his or her fortune improves as the hero’s or heroine’s declines. This change is the characters’ respective fortunes creates suspense concerning the ultimate outcome of the story: will the villain triumph, after all?
  6. TRICKERY: The villain attempts kidnap the victim or steal his or her belongings through trickery, such as the wearing of a disguise and the gaining of the victim’s confidence. The villain’s treachery shows conclusively that he or she is truly evil and again heightens suspense as the reader is left to wonder whether the hero, heroine, or victim will come to harm through the villain’s duplicity.
  7. COMPLICITY: The victim, deceived, unwittingly helps the villain, perhaps by supplying the villain with a map or a magical weapon or by working against good characters whom the villain has convinced the victim are actually wicked. The reader is apt to despair as the hero, heroine, or victim acts in a villainous manner.
  8. VILLAINY and LACK: The villain causes harm or injury to a family member by abduction, theft of magical agent, the spoiling crops, plunder, kidnapping, the casting of a spell on someone, the substitution of an object for a child, murder, imprisonment, forced marriage, or torment. Alternatively, a family member lacks something or desires something, such as a magical potion. There are two parts to this stage, either or both of which may appear in the story. In the first stage, the villain causes some harm. In the second stage, a physical or emotional lack is identified.
  9. MEDIATION: The misfortune or lack is made known and the hero or heroine is dispatched, responds to a summons, is sent away, or freed from imprisonment. The hero or heroine discovers the act of villainy or the lack
  10. BEGINNING COUNTER-ACTION: The hero or heroine agrees to, or decides upon, a counter-action as a means of obtaining what he or she lacks.
  11. DEPARTURE: The hero or heroine leaves home.
  12. FIRST FUNCTION OF THE DONOR: The hero or heroine is tested, interrogated, or attacked, which incident prepares the way for his or her receipt of the magical agent or helper (donor).
  13. HERO'S REACTION: The hero or heroine reacts to actions of future donor: he or she passes or fails a test, frees the captive, reconciles a dispute, performs a service, or uses the villain’s powers against him or her).
  14. RECEIPT OF A MAGICAL AGENT: The hero or heroine acquires the use of a magical agent which is directly transferred, located, purchased, or prepared, or which spontaneously appears, is eaten or drunk, ort appears in the form of help that another character offers).
  15. GUIDANCE: The hero or heroine is transferred, delivered, or led to the whereabouts of an object of the search.
  16. STRUGGLE: The hero or heroine and the villain join in direct combat.
  17. BRANDING: The hero or heroine is branded (wounded or marked, or receives a ring or a scarf).
  18. VICTORY: The villain is defeated by being killed in combat, defeated in a contest, killed while asleep, or banished.
  19. LIQUIDATION: The initial misfortune or lack is resolved as the object of search is discovered, a spell is broken, a slain person is revived, or a captive is set free.
  20. RETURN: The hero or heroine returns home.
  21. PURSUIT: The hero or heroine is pursued, as the pursuer tries to kill, eat, or undermine the hero or heroine.
  22. RESCUE: The hero or heroine is rescued from the pursuit as obstacles delay the pursuer, the hero or heroine hides or is hidden, the hero or heroine transforms into an unrecognizable form, or the hero or heroine is saved from an attempt upon his or her life.
  23. UNRECOGNIZED ARRIVAL: The hero or heroine arrives home unrecognized or arrives in another country.
  24. UNFOUNDED CLAIMS: A false hero or heroine presents unfounded claims.
  25. DIFFICULT TASK: A difficult task is proposed to the hero or heroine, such as a trial by ordeal, riddles, or a test of strength or endurance.
  26. SOLUTION: The hero or the heroine accomplishes the difficult task.
  27. RECOGNITION: The hero or heroine is recognized by a mark, a brand, or an artifact that has been given to him or her.
  28. EXPOSURE: The false hero or heroine is exposed.
  29. TRANSFIGURATION: The hero or heroine receives a new appearance as he or she is made handsome or beautiful or receives new garments.
  30. PUNISHMENT: The villain is punished.
  31. WEDDING: The hero or heroine marries and ascends the throne (is rewarded or promoted).

    These dramatic situations are not usually all present, and the order in which they occur may change from one narrative or drama to another.

Propp identifies these seven character types:

  1. VILLAIN: struggles against the hero or heroine.
  2. DONOR: prepares the hero or heroine or gives the him or her some magical object.
  3. MAGICAL HELPER: helps the hero or heroine in the quest.
  4. PRINCESS and her FATHER: gives the task to the hero or heroine, identifies the false hero or heroine, marries the hero or heroine, often sought for during the narrative. Propp notes that, functionally, the princess and the father can not be clearly distinguished.
  5. DISPATCHER: makes the lack known and sends the hero or heroine off.
  6. HERO/HEROINE or VICTIM/SEEKER: reacts to the donor, weds the princess or prince.
  7. FALSE HERO OR HEROINE: takes credit for the hero’s or heroine’s actions or tries to marry the princess or prince.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

The Monsters and Heroes of Fiction (Are The Monsters and Heroes of the Self)

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman
Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. -- James 4:7

Anything goes wrong in one’s life, from birth to death, can, if properly represented, become a monster, for horror fiction, as we explain in a previous post, is really about suffering and, usually, surviving, loss:

  • The death of a baby = horror; what kills the baby = the monster.
  • The loss of a limb = horror; what causes the loss of the limb = the monster.
  • The loss of an eye or another organ = horror; the cause of the loss of the eye or other organ = the monster.
  • Starvation = horror; the cause of starvation--maybe it’s bulimia or anorexia nervosa--or, more specifically, the emotional roots of such a disease = the monster.
  • Loss of self-esteem = horror; the cause of the loss of self-esteem (abuse, abandonment, rejection?) = the monster.

A monster can produce offspring, many of which will not look like or act as their parents. The monster that kills a baby may cause a mother or a father--or both--to go insane, perhaps transforming a loving parent into a murderer or a suicide--or both. If the monster was a killer, perhaps the parent or parents will become a monster who takes the law into his, her, or their own hands. The abusive mother or father, or the parent who abandons or rejects his or her child may produce a serial killer when the abused, abandoned, or rejected child him- or herself becomes an adult and starts to slaughter and destroy. Perhaps, such a child will become an arsonist instead, or a sadist, or a master manipulator whose violence is subtle and psychological and all the more devastating because unexpected and unperceived. The sins of the father (and mother), the Bible tells us, are visited upon the children, unto the fourth generation. Monsters have parents; they also have progeny. But monsters can be overcome; they can be defeated; sometimes, they can even be killed. Eventually, they meet their match, and they are neutralized or destroyed. The destroyer of monsters is the hero within, the self that is bold enough and strong enough to meet the monster on his, her, or its own terms, on its home turf, and, single-handedly or aided by friends, go hand to hand and toe to toe against the beast. Gilgamesh is such a hero. Hercules is such a hero. Beowulf is such a hero. King Arthur is such a hero. Frodo Baggins is such a hero. Luke Skywalker is such a hero. Buffy Summers is such a hero. Fiction is replete with such heroes, as is life itself, for we--you and I--are potential heroes, just as it is you and I, as often as not, who are also the monsters. The monster is overcome by the hero’s gaining what he or she lacks. The acquisition of this need constitutes his or her transformation, and this transformation indicates his or her victory over the monster. There is no chance of victory for the murdered baby, but there is for the surviving parents; if they resist the temptation to become monsters themselves, they have, despite the loss of their beloved child, defeated the monster. If a person lives the fullest life possible, without self-pity, seeking his or her own welfare and happiness and the welfare and happiness of others as well, despite the loss of a limb, this person has overcome the monster that has lain in ambush for him or her and is a hero rather than a victim. The same is true of the man or woman who loses an eye or another organ. Resisting the demons of despair and self-pity, of helplessness and bitterness means defeating them. Starvation--which can be spiritual or emotional as well as physical--can be defeated if one is able to find the nutrients, whether of the soul or the flesh or both, that he or she lacks or can find the strength of character and will to defeat the monster of bulimia or anorexia nervosa, whatever hell their emotional roots may be planted in. Learning to love and trust others--and oneself--despite having been abused, abandoned, or rejected means overcoming the monster. There are many monsters. They are everywhere. There are many heroes, too, though, for the monster’s nemesis, its slayer, resides within.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Write What You Know (But What Does That Mean?)

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman


Aspiring writers are often advised to write about what they know. This is sound advice. However, those who would heed it often put too narrow an interpretation upon this counsel. By “write about what you know,” the advisor is not suggesting that, for example, a bricklayer write only about laying bricks or that a chef write only about preparing meals. Let me quote from a not-always-reliable source that many would advise you (and well) not to use, Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopedia the fault of which lies in the fact that anyone is allowed to “edit” almost any article at any time, concerning Hans Christian Andersen.

Plain in appearance and painfully shy, especially around women, this ugly duckling longed for a life of love, but had to settle for one of fame. I quote the article concerning Hans Christian Andersen and the pathos of his life:

Andersen often fell in love with unattainable women and many of his stories are interpreted as references to his sexual grief. The most famous of these was the opera soprano Jenny Lind. One of his stories is “The Nightingale”, [sic] was a written expression of his passion for Lind, and became the inspiration for her nickname, the “Swedish Nightingale”. [sic] Andersen was often shy around women and had extreme difficulty in proposing to Lind. When Lind was boarding a train to take her to an opera concert, Andersen gave Lind a letter of proposal. Her feelings towards him were not mutual; she saw him as a brother. . . . A girl named Riborg Voigt was the unrequited love of Andersen's youth. A small pouch containing a long letter from Riborg was found on Andersen's chest when he died.

At one point he wrote in his diary: “Almighty God, thee only have I; thou steerest my fate, I must give myself up to thee! Give me a livelihood! Give me a bride! My blood wants love, as my heart does!” Other disappointments in love included Sophie Ørsted, the daughter of the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, and Louise Collin, the youngest daughter of his benefactor Jonas Collin.

Unlucky at love, Andersen was happy to find friendship with Charles Dickens, but, alas, during a visit to the English author’s residence, he overstayed his welcome, and Dickens never answered his fellow writer’s and former houseguest’s subsequent letters:
In June 1847, Andersen paid his first visit to England and enjoyed a triumphal social success during the summer. The Countess of Blessington invited him to her parties where intellectual and famous people could meet, and it was at one party that he met Charles Dickens for the first time. They shook hands and walked to the veranda which was of much joy to Andersen. He wrote in his diary “We had come to the veranda, I was so happy to see and speak to England's now living writer, whom I love the most.”
Ten years later, Andersen visited England, primarily to visit Dickens. He stayed at Dickens’ home for five weeks, oblivious to Dickens’ increasingly blatant hints for him to leave. Dickens’ daughter said of Andersen, “He was a bony bore, and stayed on and on.” Shortly after Andersen left, Dickens published David Copperfield, featuring the obsequious Uriah Heep, who is said to have been modeled on Andersen. Andersen quite enjoyed the visit, and never understood why Dickens stopped answering his letters.

As unlucky in friendship as he’d been in the pursuit of love, Andersen was a lonely man who longed for continuous companionship, which led, perhaps, to the many hours he spent in writing the stories for which he was famous, many of which deal with characters who, like Andersen, made unhappy attempts to establish lasting and meaningful, if not intimate, relationships. In other words, in a larger sense than our bricklayer would write only of laying bricks or our chef who would write only of preparing meals, Andersen wrote what he knew: the heartache of loneliness and rejection such as make up the themes of such of his tales as “The Angel,” which is “about an angel and a dead child gathering flowers to carry to Heaven where one flower will sing when kissed by God”; “The Fir Tree,” which “was cut down for a Christmas tree. . . . bought and decorated” and “expected the festivities to go on,“ but, instead, “was was burned and the happiest day of its life was over”; “The Match Girl,” which is “about a girl who dies selling matches on a wintry New Year's Eve,” soon after seeing “a vision of her deceased grandmother, the only person to have treated her with love and kindness”; “The Little Mermaid,” which is “about a young mermaid willing to give up her life in the sea and her identity as a merperson to gain a human soul and the love of a human prince”; “The Nightingale,” which is “about an emperor who prefers the tinkling of a music box to the song of a nightingale“ and “is believed to have been inspired by the author's platonic relationship with opera singer and fellow Scandinavian, Jenny Lind”; “The Ugly Duckling,” which is about “a cygnet” who is “ostracized by his fellow barnyard fowl because of his perceived homeliness,” but “matures into a graceful swan, the most beautiful bird of all”; and others in the same vein. It is not difficult to see how these stories might be derived from the author’s own feelings of rejection and loneliness.


Another example of a writer who seems to have written many of his short stories, if not so much his novels, from what he knew is that of H. G. Wells, who, John Hammond, founder and president of the H. G. Wells Society and the author of the “Introduction” to The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells tells us, suffered “several ‘false starts’ in life” before winning “a scholarship to the Normal School of Science at South Kensington (now part of Imperial College) where he studied biology under T. H. Huxley,” graduating in 1890, only to have “his subsequent career as a teacher. . . cut short by ill health” and “a breakdown” that occurred in 1893. While “convalescing” from this “breakdown,” Wells “began articles and short stories and was soon earning his living as a journalist.” The victim of ill health and other setbacks, Wells wrote stories that followed a set pattern, or formula, Hammond observes:

In each case the central character is an ordinary person whose life changes in an unforeseen way and who finds it difficult to return to normality.
. . . [His] stories are undoubtedly entertaining and are meant to be read for pleasure, but of course Wells had a more serious intent in mind. They are designed to stimulate thought, to suggest possibilities of behaviour and to alert the reader to the immense role of chance in human affairs. The typical Wells hero is a person going about his everyday affairs whose life is turned upside-down by a random event or
encounter. . . .
--much in the same manner, we might add, as his own life was turned topsy-turvy by his “ill health” and “breakdown,” which diverted his career from one of science to one of “journalism” and the writing of fiction. In other words, like Andersen and many other writers, both of horror and other genres, Wells wrote about that which he knew--about “an ordinary person whose life changes in an unforeseen way and who finds it difficult to return to normality” and about “the immense role of chance in human affairs.”

In most people’s lives, there is a defining moment, “a random event or encounter,” as Hammond characterizes such a time, that transforms one, making him or her what he or she becomes. If one aspires to write, it is of this moment that one should write, letting it give shape to narrative after narrative. It is this that is meant by those who counsel aspiring writers to “write about what you know.”

Sources
“Angel, The,” Wikipedia
Complete Stories of H. G. Wells, The, ed. John Hammond. J. M. Dent, 1998.
“Fir Tree, The,” Wikipedia
“Hans Christian Andersen,” Wikipedia
“Little Match Girl, The,” Wikipedia
“Little Mermaid, The,” Wikipedia
“Nightingale, The,” Wikipedia
“Ugly Duckling, The,” Wikipedia

Monday, May 26, 2008

Frazetta: Work That Is Beautiful Even When Horrific

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Artists are imaginative people. Most of us are, but few of us, unless we are artists ourselves, are as imaginative as those who make their livings by exercising--and, in the case of those artists who illustrate horror fiction, perhaps exorcising--their imaginations on a regular, if not routine, basis. In previous posts, we have considered the art of Rene Magritte (a superb surrealist), H. R. Giger (whose biomechanical art was accomplished with airbrushes), and the pen-and-ink illustrations of such Weird Tales artists as Margaret Brundage and Virgil Finlay. In this post, we turn our gaze upon Frank Frazetta, a pioneer in, and master of, contemporary fantasy, science fiction, and (occasionally) horror art. The purpose of cover art, we argue, is to sell the magazines upon which it appears. For the male adolescents who made up most of the readership of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines devoted to horror, scantily clad or nude women, often in perilous situations, accounted for a lot of the images that appeared on the covers. Occasionally--especially when technique outweighed theme--such masters as Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, and Julie Bell departed from imperiled, half-naked maidens to depict other themes. Sometimes, a sexual--or a sexualized--undercurrent remained--but the direct appeal of this type of art was the physical and martial prowess of the hero, depicted as a sinewy, usually lone, adventurer who represented a law unto himself and just happened--most of the time, at least--to fight on the side of right. In other words, he was fantasy and horror’s answer to the knight in not-so-shining armor (who later was transfigured into the Western’s laconic sheriff or gunfighter). If the nude or semi-nude damsel in distress represented the type of woman whom the adolescent male (or those adolescent males who read Weird Tales and its ilk, at any rate) wanted to meet, if not necessarily take home to mom, the barbarian as lone-wolf avenger and righter of wrongs represented this reader’s alter ego, the man whom he would like to be or, perhaps, to become. In Frazetta’s artwork, the two archetypical characters--imperiled damsel and anti-heroic rescuer--often were depicted together. In fact, there were often several nude or half-naked damsels in distress, all at the same time, for the hero (or anti-hero) (frequently, a barbarian) to rescue. When Frazetta’s paintings weren’t suggesting to boys that real men rescue women (who, it seems, had a penchant for imperiling themselves), they created a mood that is consistent with mystery, if not always horror. A case in point is his painting, The Moon’s Rapture, the title of which is obviously a pun upon the use of “moon” as a slang term for the buttocks. In the painting, there are two moons--one lunar, the other anatomical. It goes without saying which of the two is the source of the adolescent male’s “rapture.” 

The painting is interesting for more than its subject matter, however, as it demonstrates several features common to Frazetta’s artwork in general. A full moon, not featureless--shaded patches in green, purple, orange, and gray suggest craters--appears in a blue-gray sky, its upper hemisphere veiled, as it were, by the mossy branches of a great tree. The back of the female figure’s head overlaps the bottom arc of the moon, and her right arm is raised as she clutches one of the tree’s branches to support herself as she stares, presumably enraptured, at the moon. Nude, she stands upon one of the thick, serpentine boughs of the tree, one of her ankles crossed over the other, her left arm at her side. Except for the moss-covered, mostly brown and gray limbs in the painting’s lower foreground, the muted blue-gray sky, and the dappled colors that signify the moon’s craters, the only other color in the painting is that of the female’s figure, which, since she is naked, is more extensive than it would be were she clothed. The effect of the darkness across the top of the painting, down its right edge, at its left edge, and at its bottom is to frame the female figure, drawing the viewer’s attention to her body and, since her buttocks are projected back, toward the viewer, as it were, as a result of her stance, focusing the viewer’s concentration upon her derriere. The title’s play on words, The Moon’s Rapture, is hard to miss. As the female figure is enraptured by the moon upon which she gazes, the viewer--likely to me male, since Frazetta illustrated the covers of magazines purchased largely by adolescent males--is enraptured by her own “moon.” This painting associates women and femininity with nature in general and with the moon in particular, as do many myths, legends, and literary traditions. Archetypes serve the painter’s purpose, giving the images a depth that they might not have otherwise, showing women to be forces as enchanting to men as the beauty and mystery of the natural order is, or can be, to women. The Barbarian is typical of Frazetta’s depiction of the lone wolf who fends for himself, seeking vengeance or, more rarely, justice for others (usually an imperiled woman). Lean and mean, the barbarian stands, muscles bulging, his left hand resting upon the hilt of his unsheathed sword, which has penetrated the hill underfoot. His garb is slight, but exhibits his machismo. Pirate fashion, he wears earrings and sports a necklace that appears to have been fashioned of animal fangs or claws. His chest and abdominal muscles are as individually distinct as if they were sculpted from flesh instead of marble, and the wide, leather wristband and matching belt are both decorated with metal studs. An ornate scabbard hangs, empty, at his waist, from which dangles the lengths of a chain. On his right forearm, he wears a simple bracelet. He also wears boots with large cuffs. At first, because of the fiery yellow background against which he, an imposing, dark-haired, sun-darkened figure, stands, and the darkness of the mound upon which he is, as it were, rooted by his sword, it is not apparent that the hill is built not of soil alone but also of the body parts--an arm and a skull are visible--and a battleaxe--of enemies he has vanquished. The fiery yellow sky behind him has an almost subliminal quality as well. After discerning the body parts in the hill, skulls, a castle upon a mountainside, vague suggestions of tree branches, and a bird--an eagle or maybe even a phoenix--emerge, as it were, from the wavering flames, representing, perhaps, the memories of the barbarian and the souls of the dead or both.

At the barbarian’s feet, her flesh of a hue similar to that of the fiery yellow sky, and looking as if she herself is emerging from the hill, a woman, nude but for the armbands that adorn her left biceps, rests her head against the barbarian’s left calf. Has she been rescued from the hands of the dead who lie beneath the victor’s feet? It seems that she is the only spoil of battle that he has seen fit to spare and, therefore, the only one that he regards as having any value. What is important in the barbarian’s world, Frazetta’s portrait of this pagan warrior suggests, is his physical and martial prowess, his memories of vanquished foes (or, it may be, his possession of their spirits), and women (albeit as little more than sex objects that may be acquired as possessions, or as part of the victors’ spoils of battle). Part of the appeal of Frazetta’s work is that it is often based upon these archetypal, if sexist, images of the masculine and the feminine, suggesting that men are loners who wage war with one another, with beasts, and with the occasional monster, exhibiting their strength, stamina, and fighting skills, and, to the notion that, to the victor, go the spoils, including ubiquitous half-naked damsels in distress. In other words, his depictions of men and women fit the idealized, if adolescent, ideas of the sexes that are typical of the readers of the types of magazines upon the covers of which Frazetta’s work was apt to appear. The rest of the appeal of the artist’s illustrations and paintings lies in the superb talent and the accomplished technique with which Frazetta draws and paints. Even when he depicts horror, the result is, in its own peculiar way, a thing of beauty.

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Beowulf: The Prototypical Monster Killer

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman


In “Killed By Death,” an episode of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, Buffy tells a hospitalized boy that monsters do exist, as the boy suspects, but that there is also good news: heroes who slay monsters also exist. In English literature, the prototypical monster killer is Beowulf, the protagonist of the Anglo-Saxon poem that’s named in his honor. As a hero, Beowulf possesses the characteristics that typify such a character:


  • He represents a nation or a community.

  • He’s willing to risk danger or sacrifice himself for others.

  • His actions benefit humanity or a nation.

  • He fights for a greater cause.

  • He behaves in a chivalrous manner, especially toward women.

  • He lives according to the dictates of a social code of conduct.

  • He often represents the nobility or upper class.

  • He behaves honorably at all times.

  • He has a strongly developed sense of right and wrong.

  • He’s praised and rewarded by society.

These characteristics are opposite to the traits of personality that typify the anti-hero:


  • He represents himself.

  • He’s willing to risk danger or to sacrifice himself for wealth or egoistic satisfaction.

  • His actions benefit him or only a select few.

  • He fights for his own principles.

  • Chivalry is dead to him.

  • He lives according to his own code of conduct.

  • He often represents the middle or the lower class.

  • He will let the end justify the means at times.

  • He’s often amoral or acts according to a highly individualized moral code.

  • He may be condemned or punished by society.

In Beowulf, the monster Grendel and his mother, the descendents of the God-cursed Cain, represent anti-heroes of a sort, and the heroic culture of Beowulf stands in opposition to the anti-heroic culture of the monsters. Two ways of life vie against one another for survival. The pagan society of Beowulf is becoming Christian; it is being Christianized. The society of Grendel and his mother remains not only pagan but also uncivilized, savage, and barbaric. The former society, the poem implies, gives rise to the hero who is concerned about others as well as himself, whereas the latter maintains a narcissistic world view in which only the desires of the self and those whom it values are important. It is this self-centered, anti-heroic world view, Beowulf suggests, which threatens society and is wicked because sinful: Grendel is opposed not only to human civilization, as represented by the Danes he attacks and by their defender, Beowulf the Geat, but also to God, who has cursed the monster’s race and made them exiles in the earth, cut off from human fellowship. Grendel is inspired by his envy for human companionship. It is because he is an outcast who cannot enjoy such friendship that he attacks the Danes. He would destroy that which God has denied to him. His mother is motivated by vengeance, but it is a vengeance restricted to her own offspring; it does not extend to the members of a whole society of her peers.

The prototypical hero serves his community. Those who serve only themselves and their immediate families, by contrast, represent evil threats to community that the hero must confront and vanquish.

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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