Truly Monstrous: The Leopard

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

According to The Complete Book of Southern African Mammals (178-180), in hunting, the leopard relies mostly upon two of its senses: hearing and sight, both of which are keen.

The leopard has a number of natural “enemies and competitors,” including the tiger, the lion, the cheetah, the spotted hyena, the striped hyena, the brown hyena, the African wild dog, the dhole, the Nile crocodile, the Burmese python, and several species of bear. However, it remains an apex predator in its habitats in Sri Lanka, Central Asian and Middle Eastern “preserves,” and African rainforests.

The leopard has, on occasion, eaten people. In hunting, it employs hiding, stalking, and ambushing, which is aided by its camouflaged fur pattern, and, according to big game hunter Jim Corbett, has been known to terrify a herd of elephants into stampeding, despite the pachyderms' indifference to the presence of the larger tiger (The Temple Tiger and More Man-Eaters of Kumaon). It is possible, also, that the leopard is a predator to the gorilla: “Gorilla remains have been found in leopard scat, but this may be the result of scavenging.”

The male tiger is a lone wolf, so to speak, rather than a pack or herd animal, associating only with the opposite sex during mating season. Its solitary nature benefits it by reducing the leopard's need to feed an entire group, but weakens its survivability by preventing both the safety that comes with numbers and the multiple  defenses that a group provides. The female tiger, on the other hand, maintains a relationship with her cubs even after they have been weaned. Adept at climbing trees, the leopard can run at a rate of fifty-eight miles per hour and will distance itself from a threat by up to forty-five miles.

Like the other predators we've considered in earlier posts, the tiger's abilities make it an apex predator in various habitats:

• Acute hearing and vision
• Great speed and agility
• Climbing skill
• Ambush and stalking skills
• Camouflage
• Independence
• Avoidance of threats

 Its own predators have superior physical size and strength or numerical superiority.

Freaks of Nature (and Applied Science)

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror movies of the 1950s often feature bizarre freaks of nature, in the films' titles as well as in the movies themselves: The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), giant ants (Them!) (1954), Godzilla (1954), Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), Tarantula! (1955), The Mole People (1956), Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), The Alligator People (1959), The Wasp Woman (1959), The Return of the Fly (1959), and on and on . . . and on.

Victims include scientists' assistants, the expedition ship's crew members, and scientists, (The Creature from the Black Lagoon); a store owner, a state trooper, an FBI agent and most of his family (Them!), ships' crews, islanders, and residents of Tokyo (Godzilla), a diver (Monster from the Ocean Floor), a scientists and a laboratory assistant (Tarantula!), an archaeologist (The Mole People), an adulteress and her lover (Attack of the Giant Leeches), a hermit handyman and a newlywed bridegroom (The Alligator People), a cosmetics company owner (The Wasp Woman), a spy, and a scientist (The Return of the Fly).

Although some victims are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, others are attacked because, as investigators or scientists, they play integral roles in the campaigns to stop the monsters or support such individuals, as the ships crews and lab assistants do. They are troops, as it were, in the perpetual war of science vs. nature.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon succumbs to massive gunfire. Sub-machine guns and flamethrowers dispatch the giant ants in Them! Godzilla is asphyxiated by a secret weapon that destroys oxygen molecules. A napalm attack, courtesy of a squadron of Air Force fighters, kills the giant tarantula of Tarantula. The Mole People find it difficult to withstand the debilitating effects of natural sunlight. Dynamite explosions end the menace of giant leeches. A faceful of carbolic acid and blunt trauma from a fall from a height is too much for the wasp woman. The Return of the Fly's human fly reverts to being only a human after the process that transformed him into a human fly is reversed. Only the fate of the alligator people is ambiguous.

These films suggest that freaks of nature are overcome—that is, annihilated—in one of two ways. Nature kills them, or they are destroyed by an application of human technology. While the Mole People are subdued by nature, the Creature of the Black Lagoon, Godzilla, the giant tarantula, the giant leeches, and the human fly are destroyed by human technology. The wasp woman is destroyed by both human technology (carbolic acid) and nature (gravity).

Interestingly, these films' freaks of nature are the spawn both of nature itself and of human technology. More often than not, the latter both produces and destroys these freaks. The theme of these movies seems to be that, yes, technology can backfire—it can produce monsters—but so can nature itself. In either case, though, technology can be counted on to destroy monsters, whether they are of natural or technological origin (or both). Through technology, even when meddling with nature itself causes monstrous results, science saves!

Scientists may not be gods. They err, because, well, to err is to be human. But they also know how to fix their mistakes. That's not ideal, these films imply, but it's the best we can do, and being a demi-god isn't half bad.

Darwinian Horror

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Frankly, no, I've never wondered what's in a Navy SEAL's survival kit until I saw Time's online article, “You're a SEAL Stranded in Hostile Territory: What's in Your Survival Kit?”

If you're a Navy SEAL, this is what's in your survival kit (contents change on occasion):

• Mini-multi tool
• Button compass
• lED squeeze light
• Fire-starting kit
• Water-storage device
• Water-purification tablets
• Electrolyte tablets
• Signal mirror
• Thermal blanket
• Kevlar line
• safety pins
• P-38 can opener
• Stainless-steel wire
• Duct tape
• Fresbel magnifying glass
• Waterproof notepaper
• Ink pen
• Broad-spectrum antibiotic ointment
• Cotton pad
• Hacksaw blade
• Ceramic razor blade
• Moleskin adhesive patch
• Kevlar thread
• Fishing leader and downrigger cable
• Suspended navigation magnet
• ferro cerium rod
• Cotton ball
• Bobby pins
• Handcuff shim (pick)
• Universal handcuff key

Of course, each item must conform to Navy specifications. To give you an idea of the nature of such specifications, here are the ones for a few of the items listed above:

Mini-multi Tool

• Stainless-steel mini-multi tool that can function as pliers, wire cutters, a file, or an awl in a rattle-proof package.
• A quality AA, 14-millimeter, liquid-dampened button compass with at least eight hours of luminous capability.
• LED squeeze light equipped with a red lens and a switch that allows selection between continuous and momentary use.
• A fire-starting kit which includes a ferro cerium rod no longer than three inches and no wider than eight millimeters packaged in a reclosing bag.
• A two-inch by three-inch signaling mirror with an aiming hole, the non-mirrored side of which is covered with an infrared-reflective material and the mirror side of which is protected against scratches; the mirror's protective cover must be removable with one hand.

What goes into a survival kit depends on what sort of enemy, terrain, or other type of threat the kit's carrier is expected to encounter. Although the Navy SEALs' survival kits are doubtlessly helpful in assisting them in surviving the threats they are likely to encounter in the performance of their missions, the contents of their kits wouldn't probably be much aid for, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Instead her survival kit would likely contain such items as the nineteenth-century vampire kits that really did (and, in some cases, still do) exist. Although the contents varied somewhat from one kit to another, these items would have appeared in a fully stocked kit:

• Wooden stakes
• Mallet
• Crucifix (for Roman Catholic vampires)
• Cross (for Protestant vampires)
• Bible
• Derringer
• Vials of garlic
• Vials of holy water (again, for Roman Catholic vampires)
• Knife or sword (presumably for beheading vampires)

Buffy, although as dutiful as any Navy SEAL, is sometimes lax in keeping rules, so, instead of a vampire kit, she often makes do only with a wooden stake or two, carried in her purse, or with whatever weapon she happens upon, conventional or not, during the course of a fight, and, instead of using a mallet, she simply stabs her prey, driving the stake into its heart with nothing more than her own superhuman strength. She is, after all, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (The stabbing tactic didn't work too well, at first, against Kakistos, though.)

Although Charles Darwin never used the term—Herbert Spencer introduced it, based on Darwinian concepts—“survival of the fittest” has been used to summarize the gist of evolution as it pertains to the continuance of species competing with one another for survival. Just as clarification concerning who originated the phrase is often needed, so is the definition of the phrase itself: “Survival of the fittest doesn’t mean ONLY the physically or mentally strongest survive. It means the organism with traits most fit for survival in a given environment survives, thrives, and procreates regardless of what trait makes it most fit.” (Notice the phrase “traits most fir for survival in a given environment”? This is a key qualification; upon it are many horror movies based, even if some of the filmmakers themselves were unaware of the Darwinian basis of their films. By definition, a film concerns itself with only one type of antagonist and with one dominant setting; these elements often determine the type of threat to which the hero or heroine is exposed, the type of threat that tests the survivability of his or her traits.)

Survivors survive against a specific type of threat—in horror fiction, usually this threat takes the form (or formlessness, as the case may be) of a monster. This threat tests the survivor's fitness; if the hero or heroine is fit enough, he or she survives; if not,

well . . . .

Laurie Strode,  Halloween's final girl

In many horror movies, though, survivors don't have any ready-to-hand weapons except those which nature or nature's God (depending upon one's point of view) equipped him or her or traits and skills he or she acquired along the way: brains, brawn, courage, decency, loyalty, and so forth. In such cases, fitness, Darwin's sole prerequisite for survival, is a matter of physical, intellectual, and emotional suitability. One character, in particular, has what it takes to survive against monsters and pretty much all other odds, even without ready-to-hand weapons or survival kits: the final girl.

The good girl (and other horror movie survivors) makes it possible to analyze and evaluate horror movies from a Darwinian point of view. These movies' settings and the monsters who originate or dwell therein represent the environments that test the hero's or heroine's traits, determining whether the traits are such as would survive in such an environment.

Note: just because a survivor is shown to possess the traits that enable him or her to survive against the threats of one environment does not necessarily mean that he or she would survive in another horror movie's environment. Take Buffy, for instance. She does well in Sunnydale, against the minions of the Hellmouth, but how would she make out against Pennywise, the dreaded Dormammu, Namor the Sub-Mariner, Anti-Monitor, Doomsday, or Mister Mxyzptlk?)

With mixed results, scientists can use computer models to test hypotheses when it's impractical or impossible to test them through actual experiments. It's too bad that human experience is too complex to be tested in the same way. The best we can do, perhaps, at present, is to envision situations, characters, and settings which, at least in theory, allow us to see which traits might sustain us in struggles to survive against specific, albeit fictional, threats in a variety of particular environments. One of the problems with such an approach was pointed out by Edgar Allan Poe, in a different context, well over a century ago: by definition, fiction's plots are inescapably tautological, their beginnings predetermined by their ends, which, we might add, is not at all how evolution works. Do we see because we have eyes, or do we have eyes because we see? Which is cause, and which is effect?

This article lists some of horror movie characters who have survived against all odds; each is a version of the final girl.

Just as the Navy SEALs' and the nineteenth-century vampire hunters' kits (and Buffy's wooden stakes) give their owners tools and abilities they don't have naturally, so does human culture, with its emphases on such traits as brains, brawn, courage, decency, loyalty, and so forth. By nurturing these traits, by emphasizing them with role models (may of whom are fictitious), and awarding their expression, we, as a society, seek to ensure their survival, because they have helped to ensure our own. With human beings, humanity itself has become a factor in evolution, human and otherwise, because we have learned that our actions influence our fate. If we are not yet fully masters of our own destiny, we are members of a crew sailing upon the cosmic sea in which our survival as a species is determined not only by the blind forces of evolution but by the contributions we make to the direction these forces may take. Nature or nature's God has given us a part to play in the cosmic play unfolding before us each moment, every day.

Title and Caption: The Horror of the Evocative

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Often, the titles and captions of horror movie posters are suggestive. They're enticing. They invite their viewers' minds to wander, to speculate, to imagine—and, of course, we imagine much worse things, much worse monsters, than those even the most talented special effects wizards and screenwriters are apt to show us. There's no substitute, when it comes to fear, for the human imagination itself, as H. G. Wells implies in his masterful short story “The Red Room.”

But this post isn't about short stories or novels or horror movies. It's about the suggestiveness of words combined with images, which together explain nothing, state little, and evoke much.

The poster for Dark Was the Night evokes terror, the fear of the unknown, both with its title (notice the use of the past tense), which refers to “dark” and “night,” which can be understood both literally and figuratively, suggesting both nocturnal hours and evil, and the poster's caption, “Evil's Roots Run Deep. . . .”

The text is accompanied by an image of a man wearing a uniform, probably that of a local police department, alone in a forest. Alone, he holds a flashlight in one hand, a rifle in the other, the tool parallel to the weapon. Technology and nature are thus symbolically juxtaposed.

But there is another juxtaposition, too: that of man and beast. Despite his flashlight and his rifle—despite his technological advantages—the hunter has become the hunted, his prey, a gigantic creature that looks simultaneously both fleshly and earthborn, has become the hunter. The creature, which may or may not have a head (if it does, it is low, below chest level, as if the creature crouches, although its body appears to be erect), is behind the human. In the wilderness, technology has its limits; in the forest primeval, engineering and its effects count but little, if at all.

The poster suggests that, in hunting the creature of the woods, the human may, in fact, be hunting himself, or the beast within himself, for its placement suggests that it could be rising from the man, a shadowy figure as much flesh and blood as leaf and dirt. It is the beast within, his on bestial nature, perhaps, that the man hunts, and it is this bestial element of himself which hunts him.

The poster recalls Friedrich Nietzsche's warning, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” This idea of the beast within is reinforced by the letter “i” in “Night,” which is an image of a stunted tree, its branches superimposed upon the limbs of the forest's trees, its roots forming a clawed hand reaching down, into the portrait of man and beast.

By explaining nothing, but evoking much, the poster invites viewers to form their own explanations, to make the text and image mean whatever they think or want them to mean. In this sense, movie posters become Rorschach inkblots or a sort, by which, in projecting one's own thoughts and feelings upon the poster, viewers identify the monster in themselves (just as I myself have done, no doubt, in explaining such posters as Rorschach tests).

A review of the movie shows a few of my interpretations of the poster's significance are false in terms of what actually happens in the film. However, there is a lawman—two in fact: Deputy Donny Saunders and Sheriff Paul Shields, and technology is represented by the tools the victims, a group of loggers, use, who do encounter a monster. The movie makes plain some of the monster's characteristics and behaviors: it snatches the local townspeople's cattle, so, presumably, it's a carnivore, and it “leaves hoof prints in the dirt” and “scratch marks on metals,” suggesting it has powerful, sharp claws.

What about my supposition that the monster arises from the lawman (or from human beings in general)? A couple of the characters suffer from chronic guilt concerning a child for whose lose they blame themselves, but the film doesn't play on their guilt as a symbolic “root” of the monster and the evil it does; instead, New York Times critic Andy Webster points out, it's a sort of “ecologically minded demon that’s some kind of godless instrument of the Devil,” as is suggested by the “tree dweller['s] . . . fighting encroaching overdevelopment on its habitat (attacking those who don’t 'respect the land,' says a part-Shawnee bartender)” and its subsequent attack upon “huddled citizens seeking refuge in a church, as if to assault their faith.”

For Webster, this implicit explanation of the creature's motives, if not its nature, doesn't work well: Even in a horror movie, that’s hard to believe. ” My own idea, that the lawman's own character is the source in which the monster is rooted, seems a better explanation. It worked well for Robert Louis Stevenson, after all.

The creature seems to remain mysterious, although some suggest it might be the devil or a demon, and one reviewer sees it as a contemporary version of Spring-heeled Jack, “as similar creature” that terrorized the population of Devon, England, in the mid 1800s. This same creature, “or something similar,” apparently “made its way to America,” where it became “known as the Jersey Devil.”

Both creatures have interesting (and varied) histories, but neither seems to have arisen, Mr. Hyde fashion, out of their human, Dr. Jekyll, counterparts, so, here, my imagination doesn't dovetail with the movie's plot, but, then, the imagination often doesn't, which is one reason, perhaps, that we often say the imagination provides images not only different from, but superior to, many a movie and, for that matter, many a monster.

Monsters in Our Midst

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In horror fiction, monsters originate from only a handful of sources:

• Natural
  • Physiological (e. g., mutation or birth defect)
  • Natural catastrophe
  • Human
    • Psychological
    • Social
    • Scientific/Technological
• Supernatural
  • Angelic/Demonic
  • Divine

Within this framework, the specific contents of these categories change, sometimes vanishing (at least for a time) or being replaced by newer understandings of the concept of the monstrous.

For example, among the ancients, hermaphrodites were considered omens from God. Signs of his displeasure, humans with both male and female sex organs were viewed as warnings form God. Their existence bespoke His wrath and the punishment that He would soon visit upon his sinful people.

Today, hermaphrodism is understood as an effect of male hormones, an adrenal glans disorder, or aromatase deficiency. In other words, the condition results from natural, not supernatural, causes. In male-to-female or female-to-male transgender transgender cases, the cause of gender dysphoria is corrected through hormone therapy, gender-confirmation surgery, and other surgical or medical procedures. Its cause is psychological; its remedy is medical and surgical.

With the change in the understanding of the causes of hermaphroditism and transgender conditions, intersex individuals are seldom cast as “monsters” in contemporary horror fiction, and, when they are cast as such, as in Sleepaway Camp (1983), critics, like much of the general public, movie-going and otherwise, are offended by such representations.

Likewise, zombies, as they are depicted today, more often result from radiation, mental disorders, pathogens, or accidents during scientific experiments than from voodoo or magic. These fundamental changes, both in the way we view the world and the basis of epistemology, have led to changes in the nature and origin of the zombie.

In short, the category of horror “monster,” which once included hermaphrodites as omens of God's displeasure and imminent wrath, are now more frequently seen as having experienced a hormonal or glandular problem or as having experienced gender dysphoria. Their conditions are caused by physiological or psychological, not supernatural or divine, agencies. Zombies, likewise, have been given a natural, rather than a supernatural, origin.

Frequently, horror movie monsters are seen as representing metaphors for political, social, or cultural events typical of particular time periods:

Godzilla (1954) has been seen as representing the nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

Them! (1954) ends with a caution about the dangers of “the Atomic Age,” as myrmecologist Dr. Harold Medford warns, “When Man entered the Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict.”

The 1966 science fiction-horror movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which people were replaced with alien look-alikes, has been regarded as an allegory for both McCarthyism and communism.

Some critics regard The Fly (1986) as a metaphor for AIDS, although director David Cronenberg said he intended the horror movie to be a metaphor for “aging and death.”

Although no horror movie seems to sum up more recent decades, a film in which political figures instigate armies of ordinary citizens to go to war against one another might be just the type of film to symbolize the current state of affairs in the United States, wherein Antifa and Democratic protesters, encouraged and emboldened by otherworldly or demonic, hypnotic versions of Senator Maxine Waters, who exalts the public confrontation of individuals who disagree with her party, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who claims civility is impossible between Democrats and those who oppose them, attack their opponents in the street, confront political appointees during meals in public restaurants, disrupt Senate hearings, and attack the Supreme Court Building, eventually precipitating a war that endangers the entire country. Such an allegorical film, called, perhaps, Demonic Uprising would certainly capture the spirit of our age.

Nature and Nurture: Character and Setting as Destiny

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

Why did you throw the jack of hearts away?
It was the only card in the deck I had left to play. -- The Doors

During the O. J. Simpson trial, observers claimed that, on his defendant’s behalf, attorney Johnny Cochran played the “race card.” Dancing with the Stars critics said that, in an effort to endear herself to the show’s audience and judges, contestant Marie Osmond played the “sympathy card.” Historians claim that the cards that Wild Bill Hickock was playing, which contained aces and eights, comprise the “dead man’s hand,” because he was shot to death while gambling with them.

These allusions are based upon the old analogy that compares one’s personal attributes and assets to the hand that one is dealt at birth. Life, according to this view, is not just any game; it's a card game. It’s a gamble. The stakes may vary, but the goal is always the same: to play the cards one has been dealt to one’s best advantage in the hope of winning the pot.

Even before poker, the life = game equation was popular. The Tarot deck is based upon this notion, and, as a result, its devotees claim, the Tarot hand that one is dealt can foretell his or her future, or fortune.

Beowulf, a poem that is interesting for many reasons, shows us the same thing that a study of Greek mythology discloses: humans, like the gods themselves, were subject to the whims of fate. To paraphrase Alexander Pope, Zeus (or Beowulf) might propose, but it was the Fates (or fate) who disposed of the issues, or determined the outcome of the events, of the day. In the days of ancient Greece, the Fates, envisioned as three sisters, were the ones who decided how events would play out. In Beowulf, the Fates have become fate, an impersonal force, much as the Norse goddess Hel became the impersonal place, hell, in Christian belief. Nevertheless, in both the worlds of the ancient Greeks and of the medieval Norsemen, Geats included, it was not the gods or humans who had the final say as to how incidents or actions, including their own, would turn out. There was a power higher than theirs, to which their own wills were subject.

Beowulf was told and retold for centuries before it was finally committed to paper. The person who wrote it down for posterity was a Christian, and, upon the pagan folkways and beliefs evident in the poem, the scribe overlaid references to Christian faith and doctrine. As a result, there is an uneasy alliance between the pagan and the Christian world views that is incompatible and conflicting. Some may suppose that this duality of vision weakens the poem, but it may be argued that the juxtaposition of these two Weltanschauung, in fact, enriches the narrative. The poem shows what the Norse philosophy of life and social values were before their Christian conversion and what they were becoming during, and would be after, this conversion. For example, before, Beowulf attributed his victories over his foes to fate; afterward, he credits them to God’s will. This twofold attribution of success indicates that, gradually, the idea that it is an impersonal fate that determines the affairs of humans was being replaced by the belief that God’s will is the determinant of such outcomes. In other words, fate becomes God's will. The doctrine of predestination develops this idea with rigorous logic, making humans little more than automatons whose behavior consists of little more than actions that are programmed from the beginning--that is, from eternity--by the will of God.

In the pagan world, the cards one is dealt would have been said to have been dealt by the Fates or by fate. In the Christian world, it is God who deals the cards.

A person might be dealt any of the 22 Major Arcana cards or the 14 Minor Arcana cards of the Tarot deck. All of these cards signified and brought about particular things. Today, people don’t usually think of a person as having any particular set of cards of such a predetermined nature in the hands that fate or God deals to him or her. Instead, whatever personal attributes and assets a person has or accumulates are usually considered the cards that he or she has been dealt. Over time, the cards in a person’s hand may change as one is lost or another is acquired. Were we to apply this concept to Beowulf, we might say that his cards included courage, unusually great strength and stamina, martial prowess, longevity, wisdom, loyalty, compassion, great wealth, popularity, and kingship. When circumstances warranted his doing so, he might play one or more of these cards. In his fights with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon, he played his courage, strength and stamina, and martial prowess cards; as king, he played his loyalty, compassion, and wisdom cards.

Human destiny is complex and impossible to know in advance. Life seems to be a gamble. We also sometimes do not know the full extent of our personal attributes and assets until we are, as it were, called upon by circumstances to use them. We are not always privy to every card in our hands; sometimes, some must be played from a face-down position. Luck (in pagan terms) or divine will (in Christian terms) has a role to play as well. By using such metaphors and analogies as life = gamble, life = game, and one’s personal attributes and assets = a hand of cards, we reduce these complex sets of incidents, circumstances, and actions to simpler, more understandable ideas. Whether any of these ideas is objectively true is perhaps unknowable, but they are, at least, true to one’s sense of how things are and of how things work. They seem to explain. They make sense to us emotionally, if not rationally.

What does all this have to do with character and setting? Writers play God (or fate) when they write stories. The writer is the one who deals the cards that the characters must play, giving or withholding this personal attribute or that individual asset. It was the writer--and the group of storytellers before him--who gave Beowulf his courage, unusually great strength and stamina, martial prowess, longevity, wisdom, loyalty, compassion, great wealth, popularity, and kingship, just as it was Charles Dickens, for example, who gave Ebenezer Scrooge his greed and stinginess, his callous disregard for others, and his capacities--at first unrealized--for compassion, sympathy, and love.

The cards that writers deal to their characters represent the genetic inheritance of these imaginary persons. But genetics is only one influence, as scientists remind us, that affects--and determines--behavior. We’re products of our environments as much as we are the products of our genes. Both nature and nurture make us who and what we are and who and what we become.

If the personal attributes and assets of the individual character represent his or her genetic inheritance, as it were, what represents the character’s environment? In fiction, the setting is the time, the place, and the cultural milieu into which the character is born. The setting may be past, present, or future. It may involve a tyranny, a theocracy, a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a democracy. It may be secular or religious. It may be amoral, moral, or immoral. It may be a universe or the microcosm of a total institution, such as a boarding school or a prison. It may be a metropolis or an island. It may be urban, suburban, or rural. It may be a rain forest or a desert, a castle or a shanty, this world or another planet in a galaxy far, far away; it may even be heaven or hell. Obviously, if a character were born into or lives in any one of these settings, his or her development would differ--in many cases, radically--from his or her development in another setting. Beowulf, both because of the cards he’s dealt and the time and place in which he lives, is a very different character than Ebenezer Scrooge!

By giving characters specific attributes and assets and by setting their lives in particular times, places, and cultural milieus, writers mimic the genetic and environmental aspects of human existence, providing their imaginary people with the gifts of nature and nurture that actual humans receive from evolution, geography, and culture. Whereas, for people, these gifts are likely to be seen as the effects of accident, luck, or grace, there’s no doubt as to who provides them to fictional characters, and they are given deliberately so that each character can fulfill his or her role in the drama the author has determined to create. The writer, depending upon one’s perspective, is, for his or her characters, fate or god.

Fever Dream’s Opening Paragraphs (Chapters 14 through 16)

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

The fourteenth chapter of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Fever Dream is the shortest so far. Its purpose is purely utilitarian: to involve someone (protagonist Pendergast, as it turns out) in conversation. The chapter’s tagline informs the reader that the scene is “Penumbra Plantation,” which is Pendergast’s home:

“Would you care for another cup of tea, sir?” (74)

Although the speaker is as-yet unidentified, the one line of dialogue, a question, posed in media res, one might suspect that he is Pendergast’s factotum, Maurice, as, indeed, it proves to be.

The opening paragraph for Chapter 15 is longer. Preceded by a tagline that identifies the setting as “Rockland, Maine,” we are in a tavern with D’Agosta, a place that appears to be much like the lieutenant himself, in three particulars, at least. There is no reason to assume that the detective is “cheap,” but, otherwise, he is much like the tavern: “honest, unassuming, working class.” However, his state of mind prevents him from identifying much with the place, and he is in no mood to share a few rounds with the tavern’s local patrons:

Under ordinary circumstances, The Salty Dog Tavern would have been just the kind of bar Vincent D’Agosta liked: honest, unassuming, working class, and cheap. But these were not ordinary conditions. He had flown or driven among four cities in as many days; he missed Laura Hayward; and he was tired, bone-tired. Maine in February was not exactly charming. The last thing he felt like doing at the moment was hoisting beers with a bunch of fishermen (77).

Of course, if “the last thing he felt like doing at the moment was hoisting beers with a bunch of fishermen ,” why, the reader must wonder, is the detective in a tavern with such patrons? This simple, seemingly throw-away comment on the omniscient narrator’s part whets the reader’s curiosity. To find the answer to this implied question, the reader will have to continue to read. Preston and Child have, once more, demonstrated their skill in manipulating the reader so well and smoothly that the reader is not likely to realize that he or she has been manipulated into continuing to read the novel.

We all enjoy time to ourselves, especially after a busy day at work, so we can easily sympathize (in “New Orleans,” as the chapter’s tagline indicates) with Desmond Tipton’s desire to enjoy his own solitude after “the visitors [have] gone and he is alone, once more, in the museum in which he works:

Desmond Tipton liked this time of day more than any other, when the doors were shut and barred, the visitors gone, and every little thing in its place. It was the quiet period, from five to eight, before the drink [sic] tourists descended on the French Quarter like the Mongolian hordes of Genghis Khan, infesting the bars and jazz joints, swilling Sazeracs to oblivion. He could hear them outside every night, their boozy voices, and infantile caterwauling only partly muffled by the ancient walls of the Audubon Cottage (84).

Again, the authors’ description of a place also serves to typify a character. Tipton, a museum worker (possibly the curator) is more at home among things than he is among people; in the Audubon Cottage, things are safe (“the doors are shut and barred”), “quiet,” and orderly (“every little thing [is] in its place”). The Cottage is charming, because of its serenity and peace, but it is also charming because of its art, its culture, and even its age. At home in the museum, the metaphors upon which Tipton’s thoughts are constructed tend toward the ancient, the artistic, and the cultural. He sees the revelers of the French Quarter as invading barbarians, as “the Mongolian hordes of Genghis Khan.” Tipton is obviously an educated and cultured man and a man who, as such, fears the “hordes” of drunken “tourists” who disturb his own peace as they swarm “the bars and jazz joints,” drinking cocktails “to oblivion,” but not before disturbing the general peace with their “boozy voices, whoops, and infantile caterwauling,” which not even the wonders of Audubon’s Cottage can keep at bay for long; the din is “only partly muffled by the ancient walls of Audubon Cottage” (84). It will be interesting to see with whom Tipton interacts--the drunken “tourists” who behave “like the Mongolian hordes of Genghis Khan,” a low-life who lives in the vicinity, or someone of a more sophisticated and cultured air, such as Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast.

Fever Dream’s Opening Paragraphs (Chapters 11 through 13)

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

The eleventh chapter of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Fever Dream\ introduces the reader to the “Wisley ‘farmstead,’” somewhere in remotest Zambia. The protagonist, the FBI’s Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast, and his investigative partner, homicide lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta, are traveling, via ramshackle Land Rover, to their destination, somewhere “northwest of Victoria Falls”:

Everyone, it seemed, knew where the Wisley “farmstead” was. It lay at the end of a well-maintained dirt track on a gently sloping hill in the forests northwest of Victoria Falls. In fact--as Pendergast paused the decrepit vehicle just before the final bend in the road--D’Agosta thought he could hear the falls: a low, distant roar that was more sensation than sound (53).

The fact that the “dirt track,” despite its location, “in the forests northwest of Victoria Falls,” in deepest Zambia, is “well-maintained” suggests that the “farmstead” that it serves belongs to a man of means, for it would be difficult, indeed, to maintain even a simple “dirt track” far in the interior of the African continent, among forests as thick as those which surround Victoria Falls. Such a “dirt track,” obviously connects the “farmstead” to such greater civilization as Zambia is able to offer, suggesting that its owner has been or expects to be in residence on his “farmstead” for some time. One wonders, of course, what Wisley might be doing in such a place. The paragraph concludes with a phrase that will communicate well to anyone who has ever been in the vicinity of a powerful waterfall, which, indeed, seems, as Preston and Child observe, to be “more sensation than sound” and helps to create a sense of immediacy for the reader, placing him or her on the scene, as it were, able both to see, to hear, and to feel the environment that the authors’ omniscient narrator describes.

The opening paragraph of Chapter 12 places us back in the United States, in “Savannah, Georgia,” as the chapter’s tagline indicates. The civilized charm of the deep South contrasts sharply with the wild beauty of the African forests, a connection with which the narrator establishes with the paragraph’s last sentence:

Whitfield Square dozed placidly in the failing light of a Monday evening. Streetlights came up, throwing the palmettos and the Spanish moss hanging from gnarled oak limbs into gauzy relief. After the cauldron-like heat of Central Africa, D’Agosta found the humid Georgia air almost a relief (62).

It’s unclear as to why D’Agosta finds the cooler air “almost a relief” rather than an actual relief, but the setting’s serene, seemingly indolent tone contrasts with the “forests” and the “falls” of “Central Africa” as clearly as Georgia’s “humid” air contrasts with Zambia’s “cauldron-like heat.” Of course, the “palmettos and the Spanish moss hanging from gnarled oak limbs” also contrasts starkly with “the forests northwest of Victoria Falls” and the “distant roar” of the falls “that was more sensation than sound.” The contrast between the wilderness of Africa, in which Pendergast’s wife, Helen, was killed in a lion’s attack, and the urban environment of the postbellum South in which her murder is under investigation is as stark as villainy and goodness. This paragraph, masterfully written, contrasts not only two continents and two ways of life, but also two extremes of the moral continuum.

Chapter 13’s opening paragraph is more utilitarian, changing the scene from Savannah, Georgia to “New Orleans” as Pendergast drives into a Louisiana parking lot:

Pendergast turned the Rolls-Royce into the private parking lot on Dauphine Street, harshly lit with sodium lamps. The attendant, a man with thick ears and heavy pouches below his eyes, lowered the gate behind them and handed Prendergast a ticket, which the agent tucked in the visor (69).

The authors’ description of the parking lot attendant keeps the paragraph interesting, individualizing a character that could easily have been bypassed or written off, so to speak, as merely “the attendant.” The references to his “thick ears” and to the “heavy pouches below his eyes” humanizes him. Such tags may also characterize Pendergast as someone who is trained to make note of the distinguishing features of not only criminal suspects but of everyone. As a well-trained and experienced FBI agent, little that goes on around him is lost to Pendergast; his mind seems to have assumed the efficiency of a surveillance camera in recording the details associated with any and all particular persons, places, and things, including even a parking lot attendant whom Pendergast is unlikely to see again for a long time to come, if ever.

The opening paragraphs to chapters 11 through 13, like those which have come before, show how adroitly and purposefully accomplished writers of the likes of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child make use of descriptive, introductory text. These authors’ style and technique are certainly worthy of study by anyone who writes or wishes to write thrillers, horror stories, or fiction of any other genre.

Fever Dream’s Opening Paragraphs (Chapters 7 through 10)

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

The seventh chapter of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Fever Dream places the reader (alongside D’Agosta and Pendergast) in New York City, as the FBI agent’s “Rolls-Royce” tears “up Park Avenue.” The homicide detective and the FBI agent are seated in the back of the vehicle, with D’Agosta “feeling awkward” because of Pendergast’s uncharacteristically emotional openness:

The Rolls-Royce tore up Park Avenue. Late-cruising cabs flashing by in blurs of yellow. D’Agosta sat in the back with Pendergast, feeling awkward, trying no to turn a curious eye toward the FBI agent. This Pendergast was impatient, unkempt, and--most remarkable--openly emotional (37).

Like most of the other of the novel’s opening paragraphs, this one sets the scene, accomplishing its purpose with economy. At the same time, the paragraph characterizes both the scene and the main character. As if employing deft strokes of an artist’s brush, the authors use phrases to paint the picture: “Rolls-Royce” and “Park Avenue” suggest wealth and luxury; “cabs flashing by in blurs of yellow” provides an image that the reader can not only visualize in his or her mind but also nearly hear; and the adjectives that appear at the end of the paragraph characterize the protagonist with the same decisive economy: “impatient, unkempt, and. . . emotional.”

Chapter 8 introduces another of the series’ recurring characters (or, for first-time readers, debuts her): Captain Laura Hayward, although she is not seen or even heard; she is introduced merely by the omniscient narrator’s mention of her: “D’Agosta stood, a little uncertainly, in the hallway of the tidy, two-bedroom he shared with Laura Hayward.” The reader learns that the couple has only just become a couple again, after an apparent earlier breakup, and that D’Agosta fears that his partnering with Pendergast may cost him his newly repaired relationship with the police captain:

D’Agosta stood, a little uncertainly, in the hallway of the tidy, two-bedroom he shared with Laura Hayward. It was technically her apartment, but recently he’d finally begun splitting the rent with her. Just getting her to concede to that had taken months. Now he fervently hoped this sudden turn of events wouldn’t undo all the hard work he’d put into repairing their relationship (42).

There is conflict here--or potential conflict: Hayward may break up with D’Agosta again. There is also the implication that Hayward was hard to win over; it was difficult for D’Agosta to gain her trust and her heart, for it “had taken months” for him to get her to “concede” to his offer to split the apartment’s rent with her--in other words, to accept him as a roommate and not just a visitor. Moreover, there is the suggestion that D’Agosta finds Hayward worth the effort that it has taken for him to win her over again: he has put a lot of “hard work into repairing their relationship.” Finally, there is also an allusion to a past event or series of events that had somehow fractured their relationship; otherwise, no “repairing” would be necessary. Once again, the authors set the scene with their chapter’s opening paragraph, and, once again, at the same time, they accomplish more--in this case, creating suspense (for new readers, at least) concerning what has happened to damage the relationship between D’Agosta and Hayward in the past and (for readers old and new) the question as to whether D’Agosta’s partnering with Pendergast will have a disastrous effect upon their present relationship, undoing “all the hard work” that D’Agosta has “put into repairing their relationship.”

Again, using carefully worded phrases to paint a picture of the New York Harbor, as Pendergast and D’Agosta, driven by the FBI agent’s chauffeur, Proctor, the authors set the scene, suggest the narrative’s progress, and introduce a “detour”:

The Rolls, Proctor again at the wheel, hummed along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway south of the Brooklyn Bridge. D’Agosta watched a pair of tugboats pushing a giant barge heaped with cubed cars up the East River, leaving a frothy wake behind. It had all happened so fast, he still wasn’t quite able to wrap his head around it--they would have to make a brief, but necessary, detour (44).

Where will the detour take the characters, the reader wonders, and why? We, along for the ride, are apt to be as curious as D’Agosta, eager to learn of our destination and its purpose. With economy, Preston and Child, as usual, suggest action (we are riding along with D’Agosta and Pendergast, “along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway south of the Brooklyn Bridge,” tugboats on view outside the window of the Rolls-Royce), and create suspense (concerning the nature and the reason for the “detour”) that D’Agosta and Pendergast must take--quite a feat for a paragraph of only sixty-six words!

The opening paragraph of the next chapter returns the reader to Africa, or, more specifically, as the chapter’s tagline makes clear, “Zambia.” D’Agosta (with Pendergast at the wheel, the reader learns, in the next paragraph), travels inside a rickety and ramshackle vehicle along a rutted road. We are not sure what we are doing in Zambia, when, last we knew, D’Agosta and Pendergast were in New York, about to catch the airplane that, presumably, has brought them here, to Africa, but, it seems clear, we will soon find out. Once again, the authors maintain the reader’s interest by shifting scenes:

Zambia

The smiling, gap-toothed man at the dirt airstrip had called the vehicle a Land Rover. That description, D’Agosta thought as he hung on for dear life, was more than charitable. Whatever it might have been, now it barely deserved to be called an automobile. It had no windows, no roof, no radio, and no seat belts. The hood was fixed to the grille by a tangle of baling wire. He could see the dirt road through giant rust holes in the chassis (48).

Fever Dream’s Opening Paragraphs (Chapters 4 through 6)

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

The fourth chapter of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Fever Dream does not begin with a tagline that identifies the action’s location, for the action continues in the setting that was identified in the previous chapter’s tagline, that of “The Fever Trees.” The chapter’s opening paragraph opens in media res, or in the middle of things, with the protagonist’s regaining consciousness:

The world came back into focus. Pendergast was in one of the rondevaals. The distant throb of a chopper sounded through the thatch roof, rapidly increasing in volume (22).

The authors again prove their adroitness at marrying action to emotion and, indeed, action to a specific character’s own current dilemma or perceptions. The helicopter’s “throb” mirrors the throbbing that, readers might suspect, Pendergast himself feels after having just been mauled by a huge and vicious lion. In addition, the fact that the sound of the aircraft’s engine “rapidly” increases “in volume” suggests that it is arriving, not departing, and again makes readers share the protagonist’s perspective: Pendergast hears the approaching “chopper,” as do the novel’s readers. It is as if the aircraft is coming for them as much as for him.

The scene shifts in Chapter 5, as its tagline informs readers, from Africa to “St. Charles Parish, Louisiana.” The paragraph’s allusion to luxury automobiles, to a palatial “plantation house,” and to the estate’s being listed “on the National Register of Historic Places” indicates that whoever is traveling in such an automobile to such a destination probably him- or herself (himself, as it turns out, for the next paragraph makes the character’s identity--protagonist “A. X. L. Pendergast”--clear)a man or woman of means and status:

The Rolls-Royce Grey Ghost crept around the circular drive, the crisp crunch of gravel under the tires muffled in places by patches of crabgrass. The motorcar was followed by a late-model Mercedes, in silver. Both vehicles came to a stop before a Greek revival plantation house, framed by ancient black oaks draped in fingers of Spanish moss. A small bronze plaque screwed into the façade announced that the mansion was known as Penumbra; that it had been built in 1821 by the Pendergast family; and that it was on the National Register of Historic Places (24).

Chapter 6 transports the reader, its tagline declares, to “New York City,” introducing a recurring character, Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta, who is busy investigating a murder scene. For readers for whom Fever Dream is the first of the Pendergast series of novels, D’Agosta will appear to be a new character; those who have read other novels in the series will recognize him as a friend and sometimes-ally of Pendergast. The paragraph is matter-of-fact in style, depicting the crime scene with the dispassionate and objective manner of a motion picture camera. Employing, as the rest of the novel does, an omniscient narrator, the paragraph’s impartial reporting of the scene indicates D’Agosta’s own professionally detached observation of the scene. Here, readers will think, is a man who is used to investigating murders.

Four AM, Saturday, Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta pushed through the crowd, ducked under a crime-scene tape, and walked over to where the body lay sprawled across the sidewalk outside one of the countless identical Indian restaurants on East 6th Street. A large pool of blood had collected beneath it, reflecting the red and purple neon light in the restaurant’s grimy window with surreal splendor (32).

(Readers may--or may not--learn more about this seemingly casually referenced death; the authors sometimes include a future incident that bears upon or is in some way related to such a seemingly random event as this murder of an as-yet anonymous individual; other times, such an incident as the one described in this opening paragraph is a stand-alone occurrence, unrelated to future narrative events. By sometimes connecting such an incident to another, future event and sometimes not making such an association, Preston and Child keep their readers guessing.) In either case, the investigation of a murder scene is an interesting way to introduce a character and a good way to suggest his expertise as an investigator.

Once again, the authors show their substantial talent for making a single paragraph perform several functions--in the cases of the three cited in this post, identifying readers’ perspective with that of the novel’s protagonist and characterizing characters by associating them each with a particular type of setting.