The First Three Closing Paragraphs in “Gideon’s Sword”: A Study in Motivation

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

An earlier series of posts examined Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s use of opening chapters in their latest Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast novel, Fever Dream. In this series, I will take a look at the authors’ use of the first three closing paragraphs in their first Gideon Crew novel, Gideon’s Sword. Since I won’t be providing more than the most cursory and pointed chapter synopses, readers who are interested in how this thriller arrives at these closing paragraphs will have to read the book, which is unlikely to be the best thing that ever happened to them, but will likely be a fairly satisfying experience.

Here’s the closing paragraph of chapter 1:

“Dad!” he screamed into the grass, trying to claw back to his feet as the weight of the world piled up on his shoulders, but he’d seen those feet move, his father was alive, he would wake up and all would be well (7).

At this point in the novel, Gideon is twelve years old; he has just seen his father shot, numerous times--has seen him, in effect, assassinated by soldiers as he sought to surrender, hands up, having released his hostage. His screaming of “Dad” reinforces the father-son relationship that the chapter established earlier, and young Gideon is portrayed almost as though he is an animal: he is belly down, in the “grass,” screaming as he seeks to “claw” his way “back to his feet.” A pitiful figure, the boy is made even more so by his hope (vain hope, readers will surmise) that his father, who has been shot multiple times, will survive. This paragraph brings the chapter’s action to a climax and motivates readers to read on. It also characterizes Gideon, showing his love for his father, his desperation, and his naiveté.

As chapter 1 ends with the dying of Gideon’s father, chapter 2 concludes with the demise of his mother, who has extracted from her son, who is now twenty-two years old, the promise that Gideon will avenge his father’s murder:

Those were her last words, words that would resonate endlessly in his mind. You’ll figure out a way (13).

Her words, reiterated by the omniscient narrator in italics, become important to the authors’ characterization of Gideon as a young man who can and does perform the impossible, not only in avenging his father’s murder, but also in saving the world--or, at least, the United States. His love for his parents motivates him to plan, to scheme, to strategize, long-term and on the fly, persevering against all odds until he succeeds in attaining his objective. The deaths of his parents, whom he loves, fuels his resourcefulness, his perseverance, and his occasional ruthlessness.

Chapter 3 ends with a single-sentence conclusion:

There was only one way to find out (17).

Gideon has developed a specialized search engine that tracks hits concerning the classified document that his father had written for the government, and, during this chapter, he discovers that a hit has occurred “in a table of contents released to the National Security Archives at George Washington University” concerning his father’s “still-classified” report, “A Critique of the Thresher Discrete Logarithm Encryption Standard EVP-4: A Theoretical Back-Door Cryptanalysis Attack Strategy Using a Group of y-Torsion Points of an Elliptic Curve Characteristic y.” To most readers, myself included, this title is apt to sound impressive, despite its unintelligibility, and this effect, perhaps, is all that Preston and Child intend. For his part, despite his own mathematical aptitude, Gideon is unable to understand all of the document, although he realizes that “this [may] be the memo that General Tucker had supposedly destroyed” and the one that his father had been authored in criticism of the “Thresher” logarithm that got him killed. Given the motivations of his love for his parents and his desire to honor his mother by avenging his father’s murder, readers are likely to be convinced that Gideon will do whatever he needs to do to accomplish his mission now that he has what may be the lead he has long sought. If there is “only one way to find out” whether this is the “brass ring” he’s been seeking, readers will likely believe that Gideon will do it, whatever it is.

Note: To further strengthen Gideon’s motivation to serve his country, even after he has avenged his father’s murder, he is informed that he has but one year left to live, for he is dying of a “vein of Galen aneurismal malformation,” or “an abnormal tangle of arteries and veins in the brain involving the great cerebral vein of Galen,” a “usually congenital and usually asymptomatic” condition which is both inoperable and fatal, usually within a year or two (72-73). Given this veritable death sentence, Gideon is told, he can either “spend your last year amusing yourself, living life to the fullest, cramming it in till the end” or “working for your country” (75). That Gideon chooses the latter alternative ennobles him to readers and reinforces his motivation to do whatever it takes to accomplish his goals and to serve his country.

Quick Tip: The Importance of Setting

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In “‘Closer Than an Eye’: The Interconnections of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Colin N. Manlove does a great job of reminding his readers of the importance of the setting to a story. “The Gothic novel,” he writes, “usually employs as its setting some remote land, castle, tarn or wilderness: but here [in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde] the hideous events take place in the midst of the relatively populated streets of London. . . because the purpose of this novel is to show the dark side of one peculiar man’s respectable and citified self.” Moreover, the setting, common to both the novel’s protagonist and the other residents of the city, show him to be of the same sort as they; “they are seen in some way to share in his situation. . . . All in the story tread the same streets, inhabit the same fog” (The Dark Fantastic, 3). In the same article, Manlove points out the way that Robert Louis Stevenson creates, through description, a link between his main character and a row of buildings along a street:

The street of shops looks outward to a public; it is concerned with putting on a fine front and drawing people in. The building that juts forward has only an unopened door, no windows, and neither bell nor knocker on the door. Its preoccupation is with exclusion. . . . Yet it is part of the street, even if it is not integrated with it and thrusts its way forward. Both the street and the house are personified: the street drives a thriving trade, the shop fronts invite “like rows of smiling saleswomen” and veil their more florid charms on Sundays. The “sinister block of building. . . thrust[s] forth its gable on the street,” had “a blind forehead of discoloured wall” and bears “the marks of negligence in every feature.” It is not much of a leap to see the shops as suggestive of the respectable, ambitious civil area of mind--in short, all that Jekyll is to seem to be . . (6).

Chillers and Thrillers’ articles have likewise stressed the effectiveness of appropriate settings to horror, one example of which is the essay concerning Bram Stoker’s short story “Dracula’s Guest.”

Review of "American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction"

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

One’s home is not only one’s castle, it has been argued, but one’s self. Writers of horror fiction from Edgar Allan Poe (“The Fall of the House of Usher”) to Jay Anson (The Amityville Horror) have capitalized upon this metaphor. Both the house itself, whether Roderick Usher’s ancestral mansion with its “vacant, eyelike windows” or the Lutzes’ Dutch Colonial with its own eyelike windows, glinting with obvious madness, and its inhabitants are haunted. Indeed, the spirits which afflict the residents’ domiciles are the very demons (the situations or the conditions) which torment the denizens of the houses themselves. In horror fiction which involves a haunted house as its setting, the setting is the destiny of the residents, and, whatever they do, whether they escape or are doomed, their actions constitute their working out of their fates.

In “Middle-Class Nightmares,” a chapter of Dale Bailey’s excellent critical assessment of American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction, the protagonist of Robert Marasco’s novel Burnt Offerings, dreams of what she can make of the apartment into which she moves. The novel critiques, Bailey notes, what “historian Daniel Bell” calls “a consumption society” which is “undermining the traditional value system with its emphasis on thrift, frugality, self-control, and impulse renunciation”:

Her glossy apartment is a virtual shrine to consumption, simultaneously mirroring her aspirations and their failure. . . . Marian simply loves to buy things, good things— not a buffet but a “French Provincial buffet,” not a desk but a “mahogany and bronze dore desk”. . . not an ashtray but a Belleck astray, not chairs but Bergere chairs (72).

This equation of material wealth to personal worth is reinforced and, in fact, made explicit in subsequent passages of the novel. Whereas Marian’s husband Ben sees, in “the Allardyce estate,” into which Marian wants to move, in order that she might, at last, fulfill her dreams, “a house disintegrating into decay,” Marian herself perceives “a house that might be made perfect again.” The mansion represents a new chance at realizing her version of the American Dream:

If the apartment suggests the failure of Marian’s dreams and aspirations, the Allardyce estate embodies her desires come to fruition. . . . She no sooner walks in the door then [sic] she begins to catalog the Allardyce’s possessions—Waterford crystal
chandeliers. . . an Aubusson carpet, a Chippendale mirror. . . . She assumes a proprietary air. . . . and she blushes when Roz Allardyce recognizes her state of mind: “you’re thinking of what you could do with it, aren’t you?” Roz asks her, and Marian cannot help asking herself, “Did she look that hungry?”. . . She does, of course, for she desires nothing more than to live in such a house— to be the kind of person who could possess (and be possessed by) such a house (73).

However, as Bailey points out, there is an insurmountable problem, of course, with such an attempt to validate one’s personal worth:

If Marian’s conception of the American Dream reminds us of the kitschy bumper sticker— Whoever has the most bumper stickers when he dies, wins— Marasco’s novel reminds us of that bumper’s subversive subtext. All the toys in the world don’t change one central fact:

Dead is dead (73).

Marasco himself likewise points out the futility of Marian’s desire to express her value as a person through her acquisition of the material wealth, as represented by her possession not merely of things, but also of valuable things, of the right sorts of things. As if a “wall of photographs” in the mansion’s parlor were the pesky “subtext” of the bumper sticker to which Bailey earlier alludes, the images they contain likewise undermine the text about one’s collection of toys’ making one a winner (or a loser) in the competitive game of contemporary America’s “consumption society.” As Marian and Ben examine a set of framed photographs on a wall of the palatial home’s parlor, “Marian is quick to rationalize” an eerie, potentially revelatory fact: “none of the faces was smiling, not one of them. The expressions were uniformly, and chillingly, blank. And one of the faces, an old man’s, was looking at her with what had to be outright terror. Like that boy’s. And the child near the edge” (73).

In part 2 of my six-part series of articles concerning “How to Haunt a House,” I argue that not only the house itself is a representation of the inner state of its occupants, but that each room— and, indeed, even the furniture— of a haunted house can represent the resident’s own thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and values:

The furniture and décor in a haunted house also often reflect the resident’s state of mind. Bizarre images in a mirror which are seen only by one character suggest that these images are not real. Rather, they are likely to be but the contents of his or her own mind, projected onto his or her environment--the looking glass sees within, rather than reflecting that which truly exists.

Therefore, only the one who sees such images can perceive them. The mirror mirrors his or her own thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. If a character ascends a staircase (or, for that matter, descends one), what type of revelation does he or she experience as a result? What happens at the top or the bottom of the stairs is indicative of what this character believes, feels, or thinks, and it is likely to be either transcendent or reductive in nature, depending upon whether the stairs lead upward or downward. An ascent into the attic is apt to represent an elevation to consciousness and knowledge; a descent into the basement is likely to symbolize a decline into the subconscious and the unknown.

Rooms can also represent specific roles that characters play and their thoughts and feelings about these roles. For example, the kitchen may represent one’s capacity for, and interest in, nurturing, since it is the room in which meals are prepared. Likewise, the bathroom is apt to suggest one’s attempts to cleanse him- or herself not only of the dirt that one has accumulated as a result of going about the day’s business, but also of the spiritual “dirt” with which one has soiled his or her soul, either during this same period of time or throughout his or her lifetime. In such cases, problems with the stove, the sink or the shower, or even the toilet can be telling, indeed! The smoke that pours from the oven, the black goo that drips down the walls of the shower stall, the serpent that emerges from the toilet bowl, as representations of the protagonist’s problems, real or imagined, with one or another of the roles that he or she plays, as either a single person or as a family member, are nasty enough in themselves; they are nastier still because of what they may represent in philosophical, psychological, sociological, or other terms that relate to the inner man or woman— or, rather, to his or her inner demons.


Bailey, Dale. American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. Bowling Green, OH. Bowling Green University Popular Press. 1999. Print.

Stephen King’s Horrific Fairy Tales; Dean Koontz’s Variations on a Formula

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Stephen King has claimed that he buys his ideas for stories at an out-of-the-way, secondhand bookstore.

However, in Archetypes in 8 Horror and Suspense Films, Walter Rankin identifies the fairy tales that he believes underlie several of Stephen King’s novels:

"Little Red Riding Hood" is the basis of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, in which a young girl is lost in the woods and encounters a monster.

"Sleeping Beauty" is the basis for Christine, in which a teenage boy falls in love with his car.

"Rapunzel" is the basis of Carrie. In the former story, “a girl is locked away in a high room by a woman who fears the girl’s maturity and interest in men, which are symbolized by remarkable changes she can’t control.” Carrie is locked away by her mother, a religious fanatic who bore her daughter as a result of having been raped, fears and hates men and sex, and, like the woman in the story of Rapunzel “fears” he daughter’s “maturity and interest in” boys, in not “men.”

"Snow White" is the basis for “Apt Pupil,” in both of which stories “an older, seemingly normal person is revealed as an evil, deadly foe by a younger person with remarkably similar policies,” and the older person dies, survived by the younger one, his or her protégé. In “Apt Pupil,” the older person is a Nazi war criminal, while his protégé is a sadistic American teenage boy.

"Cinderella" is the basis of Firestarter. In both stories, a girl is exploited by a group who adopt her as their own, but, aided by a fairy godmother (in Cinderella’s case) or her own developing pyrokinesis (in Charlie’s case), vanquishes her foes.

"Hansel and Gretel" is the basis of Silver Bullet. In the former, siblings alone in an enchanted realm must fend off the attacks of a “villain who appears in two forms, one normal and one otherworldly and powerful.” In the latter, a brother and sister, aided by their uncle, resist the assaults of a character who is the parish priest by day and a werewolf by night.

"Rumpelstiltskin" is the basis for Storm of the Century. In both stories, a mysterious man appears demanding that he be given children before he will leave the townspeople in peace. The citizens seek to uncover the stranger’s secret and prevent him from abducting their children.

According to Rankin, the fairy tale’s prohibition-violation premise structures the plot. The audience understands (and expects) the character or characters to violate a prohibition and to suffer the consequences of their doing so. The prohibition may involve almost anything--opening a closet, investigating a strange noise, believing that a killer is dead when he or she is not, wandering off alone, opening a locked door. The consequences, at some point, will likely include one or more (or all) of the characters’ meeting an untimely and gruesome end.

What about the West Coast Stephen King, Dean Koontz? Where does he get his storylines?

In Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, edited by Stefen Hantke, Richard John Hauser is credited with having identified the “five basic plots [that] Dean Koontz uses over and over ad infinitum. Actually, it seems that Koontz uses but one plot and four variations on one of its parts. The blank indicates the part that changes (slightly) from one employment of the formula to another: “Guy meets girl and they stumble across _________________. The _______________ tries to kill them. They survive and fall in love.” With this in mind, these are the five plots that Hantke identifies; the parenthetical examples are his as well; the underlining is added:

1. Guy meets girl and they stumble across a government experiment gone wrong. Government forces try to kill them. They survive and fall in love (Watchers, Strangers).
2. Guy meets girl and they stumble across a non-government experiment gone wrong. Non-government forces try to kill them. They survive and fall in love (Midnight).
3. Guy meets girl and they stumble across a supernatural horror. The supernatural horror tries to kill them. They survive and fall in love (Twilight Eyes, Darkfall).
4. Guy meets girl and they stumble across a psychopathic killer. The psychopathic killer tries to kill them. They survive and fall in love (Watchers, Strangers).
5. Guy meets girl and they stumble across a horror that doesn’t quite fit one of the above categories. The horror that doesn’t quite fit one of the above categories tries to kill them. They survive and fall in love (Watchers, Strangers).

Sources

Fairy Tale Archetypes in 8 Horror and Suspense Films by Walter Rankin; McFarland and Company, Inc., NC, 2007. Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, Stefen Hantke, ed.; 2004.

Presto! You Have a Plot!

Copyright Gary L. Pullman

 

It’s fairly easy to plot a contemporary horror novel if you know the formula, which is also fairly simple--quite simple, in fact, consisting of three phases:

1. A series of bizarre incidents occurs.
2. The main character discovers the cause of the bizarre incidents.
3. Using his or her newfound knowledge as to the cause of the bizarre incidents, the main character (usually assisted by others) puts an end to them (often by killing a monster).

With this formula in mind, all a writer has to do is to:

1. Establish the cause of the series of bizarre incidents; if the cause is human or humanoid (for example, a monster with a will and personality), give it a plausible motive for its actions.
2. Make a list of the bizarre incidents that will occur.
3. Establish the means by which the main character learns the cause of the bizarre incidents.
4. Have the main character use this knowledge as to the cause of the bizarre incidents to put an end to them.
5. It helps (but is not mandatory) to associate the monster or other cause of the bizarre incidents with a real-life horror.

In a nutshell, that’s all there is to plotting the contemporary horror novel.

Let’s conclude with an example (Stephen King's Desperation):

1. Establish the cause of the series of bizarre incidents. The demon Tak escapes from the caved-in mine in which he has been imprisoned for several decades and battles God, seeking to demonstrate its superiority to the Christian deity.
2. Make a list of the bizarre incidents that will occur. In Nevada, a dead cat is seen nailed to a highway sign. An abandoned recreation vehicle (RV) sits alongside a lonely stretch of highway, its door flapping in the breeze. A sheriff, acting crazy, arrests a couple on trumped up drug charges, threatening to kill them on their way to jail. The nearest town, Desperation, seems abandoned, except for the corpses that litter the streets. The sheriff has arrested several other individuals, also on false charges; among his prisoners are the members of the RV family, whom he supposedly rescued from (non-existent) gunmen. Vultures, scorpions, wolves, and other animals, under the sheriff’s telepathic control, attack people. A preteen prisoner, David Carver, miraculously escapes from jail, afterward performing additional miracles (using a cell phone with a dead battery and multiplying a supply of sardines and crackers). The demon Tak, who is behind the series of bizarre incidents, serially possessing the sheriff and others as he wears out their bodies, fears the preteen. Strange idols cause sexually perverse thoughts and feelings in those who touch them.
3. Establish the means by which the main character learns the cause of the bizarre incidents. A character who has witnessed several of the bizarre incidents that befall his town tells David and the others in their party about the demon that has escaped from the caved-in mine and how it possesses one person after another.
4. Have the main character use this knowledge as to the cause of the bizarre incidents to put an end to them. Assisted by others, David reburies Tak inside the collapsed mine.
5. It helps (but is not mandatory) to associate the monster or other cause of the bizarre incidents with a real-life horror; for example, the monster of cause may symbolize such a real-life horror. Tak could represent social anarchy and its consequences.

Presto! Flesh out the skeleton of your story, possibly adding a related subplot or two, and you have the plot for one scary horror novel (especially if you happen to be Stephen King.)