The Vanishing: Why Theme Matters

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

A horror novel does not hang entirely upon the explanation of the horror, perhaps, but a good amount of readers’ satisfaction (or lack thereof) does hinge upon a satisfactory account of the horrific incidents or events that transpire during the course of the story. By satisfactory, I mean satisfying, and, by satisfying, I mean that the explanation is both feasible and integral to the action for which it is the account. It is not simply tacked on, as if it were an afterthought, to bring the narrative to a convenient conclusion. It is not a deus ex machina.

As both critics and readers have pointed out, Bentley Little’s novels too often end in such a manner, without rhyme or reason. This has happened, followed by that, for two or three hundred pages, for little enough (if any) reason, and that is, too often, enough for Little. The story is the important thing, and he has entertained his readers; a theme is of no real importance. Such seems to be the point of view of writers such as Little and, indeed, his unofficial mentor, Stephen King (who labels Little “the poet laureate of horror”).

Theme, however, does matter to most readers, writers, and critics. (One suspects that it matters to King, too, if not to his unofficial protégé, because King’s novels and short stories typically do suggest relatively important lessons.) Perhaps themes matter less to Little because fiction that doesn’t challenge or enlarge one’s understanding or tolerance or perspective or sympathy is much easier to write than fiction that does do so.

Unfortunately, although Little’s fiction frequently entertains, it seldom edifies. He often raises some important issues and, more importantly, perhaps, questions, but, because he is seldom, if ever, concerned with such matters as unity and cohesion and the logic of his plot is rarely rigorous, these issues and questions go largely unaddressed. The Vanishing is no exception.

After tantalizing readers with his insightful suggestion that perverse sexuality implies the decadence of human nature out of which such distorted impulses arise, while implying, at the same time, that religious faith (perhaps because it is mired in the same perverted nature), fails to remedy such impulses or to redeem the souls from which they arise, Little ignores these lines of development. Although horror stories frequently depend upon misdirection, which is generally effected through situational irony, such bait-and-switch tactics are usually narrative, seldom thematic, having to do with action rather than the meaning of the story as a whole. Instead of following his own suggested train of thought--that the perverted nature of human beings cannot be rectified through religious redemption or salvation (because, it may be, their very faith is also tainted by their sinful nature), Little turns his could-have been, should-have-been theological story into an ecological one, with the monstrous, Yeti-like creatures who menace the humans (with whom they also fornicate to preserve their corrupt stock), seeking, native American-like, to defend their territory, from encroaching civilization and its pollution of the environment:

“. . . Something Phillip Emmons said last night stuck with me: ‘They slaughtered invaders in order to preserve and defend the vanishing wilderness in which they lived. It was a protective measure.’ When I was doing my research at the library this morning, I looked at everything through that lens, and I have to admit, it made a kind of weird sense. What if whoever--or whatever--is left of this dying breed is trying to fight back, retake the land that was stolen from them, come out from whatever small corner of the wilderness they’ve been pushed into and strike against the now dominant species that stole their spot on the food chain: us?”

He looked at her skeptically. “So we’re involved in some kind of ecological horror story?’

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the forest grew back the day--the day--after the last stand of old growth trees was cut down.”

“Not only that,” she added. “Besides their money, what do Lew and Stephen Stewart and all those other men have in common? Oil, gas, construction, development, real estate. They all make money off the land, through its exploitation or the theft of its natural resources. Sure some of them give back and do good and try top help others, but that’s only because deep inside they feel guilty and know they’ve done wrong.”

“So what are you saying? That they’re killing their own families and committing suicide in order to stop themselves from drilling for oil or building more homes? That’s pretty ridiculous.”

[Readers will doubtlessly agree with this sentiment, at least.]

“. . . When cities expand and encroach on wilderness areas, the animals that live there are either removed or exterminated, forced to coexist or, as is usually the case, pushed even farther out into whatever open country remains. Why should this be any different? Besides, the defense and pursuit of land has caused even more wars than religion.”

“So we’re at war?”

“Aren’t we?” (337-338)

The reference to religion at the end of the novel is entirely too late and too weak to ennoble Little’s ecological theme, however widespread and wholesale his characters may consider the rape of the land and the consequent suffering of its furry denizens. In writing The Vanishing, Little could have given his readers a novel worth reading, akin to King’s Desperation. Instead, “the poet laureate of horror” delivers a mangled tale worthier of M. Night Shyamalan than Little’s own unofficial mentor.

It’s a shame to see talent as great as Little’s go to waste.

Bentley Little: Aberrant Sex as Symbolic of the Nature of Sin

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Dean Koontz, Past and Present

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Before he wrote horror and cross-genre fiction, Dean Koontz wrote science fiction. Arguably, his earlier stuff is better than his current material. In “Undercity,” which appears in the anthology Future City, edited by Roger Elwood (Trident Press, NY, 1973, pp. 81-95), Koontz extrapolates from contemporary cities, such as Las Vegas, Nevada, using its gambling enterprise and its reputation, as “Sin City,” for vice as the basis for his own criminal world of nefarious Mafia-like criminal characters, the narrator, who goes by the alias Lincoln Pliney, included.

The title of his story is not all that original, but, in the 1970s, many were just as mundane, and what counted was the twist to which an author could put to a then-contemporary situation or state of affairs. Koontz’s story successfully establishes and maintains the allegory of a futuristic “undercity” representing the underbelly of the modern criminal world in which members of rime form an “underworld.” In case one of his more obtuse readers misses the extended comparison, Koontz is careful to have his narrator inform the reader that the undercity replaced what had once been the underworld, a loose confederation of criminals in which characters like Pliney were “feared” and “envied.”

Huge subterranean megalopolises of towering structures, undercities are hives of gambling, prostitution, legalized prostitution, dueling, and other vices. Perhaps in an attempt to thwart crime, the government has legalized most such activities. Adultery is no longer stigmatized, and hired killers need no longer apply, for dueling provides a legal means of settling one’s scores. In fact, if one is challenged to a duel, he or she must accept the challenge, unless he or she has a pass.

Pliney is telling a younger person, referred to throughout the story simply as “kid,” about his day, to show how hard it is to make a living as a criminal in an environment in which most activities that were once outlawed are now legal. To m make a living, he says, an individual must constantly “hustle.” To illustrate his contention, he describes his activities, which, he implies, are typical of any day’s dealings in the undercity.

He started his day with an accomplice, sabotaging Gia Cybernetic Repairs, a robot fix-it plant. Then, he delivered a map of part of the undercity’s sewer system to Gene and Miriam Potemkin, a couple who want to escape from the undercity, despite the rumors that, beyond its protective dome, the atmosphere is contaminated by poisons and is inhospitable to life. They are willing to risk death, they say, to avoid the constricting limits of their environment.

Pliney next visit’s the megalopolis’ garbage dump, where he works with K. O. Wilson, who manages the operation’s first shift, and Marty Linnert, who manages the operation’s second shift, allowing Pliney to skim off valuables from the undercity’s refuse before it is “catalogued and sent up to the city’s lost-and-found bureau.” During this visit, Pliney is able to scavenge rings, watches. Coins, and a “diamond tiara.”

Following his visit to the garbage site, Pliney learns that the sabotaged robot-repair plant has been repaired--by men on his payroll, who have charged an exorbitant fee. He then arranges an illegal marriage between Arthur Coleman, a dominant, sexist man, and his submissive girlfriend Eileen, in defiance of the undercity’s Equal Rights Act, which forbids male chauvinism.

Revisiting the garbage dump, Pliney scavenges “silver dinnerware an antique oil lantern, and a somewhat soiled set of twentieth-century pornographic photographs” worth big money as “comic nostalgia.” Then, he illegally sells an oversize apartment--that is, one that is larger than the law allows a single man--to a customer with a yen for more spacious accommodations than he now enjoys.

The Potemkins are caught by a maintenance crew as they seek to escape through the sewer tunnel on Pliney’s map, and afraid that, during their interrogation by the police, the couple will implicate him in their escape plan, he burns down the office--a front doing business (or not) as Cargill Marriage Counseling--in which he keeps additional escape maps. (During his recounting of this adventure, he tells his listener that he must be careful to avoid arrest, even to the point of wearing “transparent plastic fingertip shields to keep from leaving prints.” It‘s obvious that, as he recites his day‘s activities, Pliney takes every opportunity to lecture the “kid” concerning the tricks of the criminal trade. He is not merely a raconteur; he is a mentor.)

Coleman advises Pliney that he and his girlfriend want to marry this evening, instead of waiting the customary six months to do so, and if Pliney refuses to arrange the ceremony, he will take his business elsewhere. Afraid that Coleman will hire “some incompetent criminal hack who’ll botch the falsification of Eileen’s death certificate,” which is needed before a new identity can be fabricated for her, making her a person without a past that the police can check, and that Coleman and Eileen will be arrested, informing the police about him, Pliney agrees to meet with the couple to “finalize things” that night, although, to do so, he must postpone an appointment with a man who wants to buy a “Neutral Status Pass” that will exempt him from accepting duel challenges.

His meeting with Coleman and his bride to “:finalize things” is the reason, he tells his listener, that he is late getting home. The next day, he says, the “kid” can tag along as he goes about his business, so that he can provide tips as he teaches her “the business.” He adds that he has no doubt but that her late mother would be proud of their daughter, who has all the qualities of a successful career criminal.

Koontz’s tongue-in-cheek story suggests that human beings are innately wired, as it were, to sin. Even if vices were legalized, others would flourish, because it is the nature of men and women to seek that which is forbidden and to indulge themselves in the pursuit of the banned and the prohibited. It is this impulse, he suggests, which explains the existence of both Las Vegas and organized crime, just as it explains the fact that, despite the existence of a “Sin City” and the mob, ordinary men and women, like the everymen and women who populate his undercity, vice, sin, corruption, and crime will continue to thrive everywhere. No city limits can contain the transgressions of the human heart. The undercity is every city. Moreover, Koontz suggests, even if humanity were to legalize activities which are currently illegal, forbidden desires would manifest themselves in the pursuit of objects and activities that would fall outside the laws of even the most permissive societies. The problem is not in the doing, he implies, but in the doer--or the wrongdoer.

That’s quite an impressive theme--original sin--for such a slight story. In this early piece of fiction, Koontz is as deft as ever in sketching characters (he has never been adept at true characterization, such as novels demand), at delivering the surprise ending (the criminal narrator’s protégé is his own daughter), at describing the setting, and at extrapolating from the actual and the familiar to the imaginary and bizarre, abilities which served him well as a science fiction writer, which served him well as an author of horror fiction, and which serve him moderately well as a writer of cross-genre fiction.
\
He hasn’t lost his touch, even today, but his fiction has lost some of its heart and soul, as any body of work must do when it is stamped out by the cookie cutter of formula with interchangeable characters, settings, plots, and themes--the same story, time and again, wherein only the names change. In his heyday, which, alas, was yesterday, Koontz could write more engaging fiction than the pap he produces today. “Undercity” is worth many of his current works, although it is but a short story and his current stuff takes the form of the novel.

There’s another plus about “Undercity” that a reader doesn’t get in any of Koontz’s more contemporary works. There’s no dog in the cast.

Horror Subsets

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In Terror Television: American Series, 1970-1999's "Commentary" on The X-Files, John Kenneth Muir offers a helpful classification of the show’s “subsections of horror,” breaking the types of antagonists that the FBI’s Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully face each week into ten groups:

1. “Trust No One,” which involves “secret experiments” that “the U. S. government. . . is conducting on its own people”
2. “Freaks of Nature,” which presents “mutants and monsters,” some of which are “just beasts,” others of which are “evolutionary nightmares,” and still others of which are “genetic mutants”
3. “Foreign Fears,” comprised of “ancient ethnic legends” which happen “to have a basis in fact”
4. “From the Dawn of Time,” featuring prehistoric “creatures” which “reassert themselves in present time”
5. “Aliens!,” or “extraterrestrial creatures”
6. “God’s Masterplan,” which is replete with “elements of Christian religion/mythology” which are “explored as ‘real’ concepts”
7. “The Serial Killer”
8. “Psychic Phenomena,” such as “astral projection. . . clairvoyance. . . soul transmission,
   and. . . the effect of heavenly bodies on human bodies”
9. “The Mytharc”/”Conspiracy,” comprised of “the history of the government’s association with aliens”
10. Tried-and-trued “Standards” of the horror genre, which is populated by “the vampire. . . the werewolf. . . ghosts. . . crazy computers. . . matters of time. . . succubi. . . cannibalism. . . tattoos. . . Evil dolls. . . and the like” (353).

“In addition to these ten plots,” Muir observes, “The X-Files has also showed a commendable dedication to asking the great questions of our time, and telling stories about the most puzzling mysteries humankind has yet faced,” so that an eleventh “subsection of horror” discernable in the series is the episodes that center upon “The Mysteries” (354).

Muir’s categorization of the types of threats that the series’ protagonists face is interesting in itself, but it is also interesting because it represents an approach that writers of horror may adopt for themselves in the writing and development of their own oeuvres. A writer who writes a series, whether of television episodes, novels, or even short stories that are unified by a theme, as those, for example of Ray Bradbury and H. P. Lovecraft sometimes are, can take a leaf from Muir’s classification of the “subsections” common to The X-Files’ exploration of the horror genre.

Just as a literary genre tends to develop stock characters and characteristic settings, it also tends to evolve typical themes and situations. These situations, in fact, can, and should, support the themes, as those of The X-Files do. For example, Muir assigns the following X-Files episodes to the “Trust No One” category: “Eve,” “Ghost in the Machine,” “Blood,” “Sleepless,” “Red Museum,” “F. Emasculata,” “Soft Light,” “Wetwired,” “Zero Sum,” “The Pine Bluff Variant,” “Drive,” and “Dreamland (I & II)” (353). Taken together, he says, these episodes express “paranoia” which results from the government’s violations of “its sacred trust to represent the people,” as its agents seem “capable of any atrocity, including murder and cover-ups” (353). Eugenics experiments, bioengineered disease, experiments with dark matter, mind control, bee-delivered plague, and the like are enough to make paranoia a rational, rather than an irrational, response to the an unscrupulous government that is clearly out of control.

Muir points out eleven sources for horror; others might be space, crackpot theories or visions, the biochemical foundations of animal and human existence, arcane and mystical traditions and lore, religious cults, alternate histories and universes, conspiracies and cover-ups, dangerous self-fulfilling prophecies, solipsism, actual unsolved mysteries of crime or history (what really became of the Lost Colony of Roanoke?) and, always, of course, the seven deadly sins.

How to Haunt a House: Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Even Victorians can intimidate.

In the previous post, we considered two rules concerning how to haunt a house:

1. Make it spacious--the bigger, the better.
2. Fill it with rooms.

In this post, we’re going to look at the ways in which haunted houses often symbolize characters and their states of mind or serve as a gateway to a darker realm. As is often the case with regard to fiction, fact gives us a direction. In particular, we’re thinking of Ed Gein, the schizophrenic murderer upon whom such characters as Psycho’s Norman Bates, Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface, and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill are based.

If ever a home was a reflection of its resident, Gein’s house certainly indicated his mental state. The house was a veritable garbage dump. The floors were littered and strewn with old magazines and newspapers, and boxes stood in precarious stacks along the walls and among piles of assorted materials that should have been discarded but weren’t. Among the rubbish were the trophies, consisting of human body parts, that Gein collected from the female corpses he robbed from the cemetery in his hometown, Plainfield, Wisconsin, and from Spirit Land, a graveyard located a few miles to the north. One box contained a bag, inside which, police found, was a mask that had once been the face of Mary Hogan, the owner and operator of a tavern that Gein had once frequented. The walls of some rooms were decorated with other such masks, and Gein ate soup from bowls he’d fashioned from the upper halves of human skulls. He also kept a torso, or mammary, vest; a collection of women’s noses; female genitals; and a belt made of women’s nipples.

After his mother died, Gein, who was a momma’s boy, missed her so much that the psychiatrist who examined the killer after his arrest concluded that Gein collected cadavers and female body parts in an attempt to fill the loss of female companionship that ensued his mother’s death and burial. In some ways, he was thought to be trying to bring home a bride (or parts thereof) or, perhaps, his dearly departed mother. Gein also kept part of the farmhouse he inherited upon his mother’s demise sealed off from the rest of the residence as a sort of shrine to his mother’s memory.

From Gein’s example, we see that haunted houses may be cluttered, and that the clutter may include some grisly, ghastly artifacts--perhaps human body parts--and that the resident of such a house might keep a door locked or even part of the house sealed off, either as a shrine or for some other purpose (hiding a body, an insane relative, or a secret of some sort, perhaps). In A Winter’s Haunting (2002), Dan Simmons’ sequel to Summer of Night (1991), the protagonist, Dale Stewart, keeps the upper floors of the house he rents--it belonged to a childhood friend who was murdered, years ago--sealed off from the lower floor, where he resides. Likewise, there’s a locked attic in The Skeleton Key (2005). After hearing voices from inside the locked room, the movie’s protagonist, Caroline Ellis, becomes curious. When she finally manages a look inside, she finds evidence that maybe demons do cause illness, and, in fact, maybe the invalid she’s been hired to care for may be a victim of dark magic. We all know what’s said about curiosity and the cats it lures. Other horror stories, both in print and on film, make use of the locked room motif as well.

Other novels suggest other approaches.

Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, suggests that it may be the individual within a house, rather than the house itself, who is haunted or (depending upon one’s reading of her story) that a haunted house may, in turn, haunt its residents. This novel, like Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and many lesser narratives, drives home the relationship--indeed, the interrelationship--between resident and residence. A home is a reflection of its owners or occupants. The disorderly state of Gein’s house reflected the disordered (confused) state of his mind, because normal people not only do not live among filth and clutter, but they also do not reside among human body parts and eat out of human skulls. Often, ghost stories are symbolic of past sins, of guilt, and of remorse or of past trauma and its continuing, present-day effects.

Therefore, many ghost stories connect with past events, and the incidents that occur within haunted houses represent such sins, such guilt, and such trauma. In The Others, the mother keeps her house dark because her children suffer from photophobia, a fear of light. Her concern with keeping them in the dark represents her love for them, but the darkness of the house also represents her ignorance of--and her refusal to see--the truth about her past. She has killed her children, and they, like her, are the ghosts who actually haunt the house in which they reside, not the residents of the house whom she imagines are its ghosts.

In an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, college students transform a fraternity house into a haunted house as a setting for a Halloween party. The partygoers become more than amorous, all but having sex in front of one another. Buffy stays in bed with her boyfriend, Riley Finn, from the time they arrive until their friends rescue them. When the partygoers touch a wall, they experience an orgasm, and playing a game of spin-the-bottle becomes the occasion for more than a friendly kiss between players. Buffy’s mentor and friends discover that the house is haunted by the souls of adolescents who’d lived in the house under the stern and disapproving tyranny of a foster mother who feared and hated sex and severely punished her charges when, at the onset of puberty, they began to experiment with sex, murdering at least one boy by drowning him in her bathtub. The dead child--or, perhaps, children--having been abused, now, as ghosts, become the abusers.

The Winchester mansion is allegedly haunted.

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.

When a locked room or a shut-off part of the house is part of a haunted house, the secret it contains will probably be the heart of the narrative’s mystery and, most likely, it will represent a great truth about the haunted character’s nature, behavior, goal, past, or present. Unlocked, the door may admit the resident to madness--or to revelation. The secret within the locked or sealed-off room or suite may deliver or destroy.

H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear” and “The Rats in the Walls” show that basements can be portals, as it were, to other, darker places, such as subterranean cities or dwellings in which cannibalistic mutants reside. His example reminds us that haunted houses often contain secret passageways, hidden rooms, and trapdoors to subterranean chambers or tunnels that allow villains to come and go in secret or to conduct clandestine operations. Sometimes, dungeons are accessed through trapdoors, wherein sadists torture, dismember, and kill victims. Such portals may even be gateways to another dimension or to hell itself, as in William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderlands and Bentley Little’s The House.

From this consideration of how to haunt a house, we may deduce three additional rules:

1. A haunted house often symbolizes its resident’s state of mind.
2. A haunted house is often associated with the resident’s past.
3. A haunted house may be the portal to another dimension or to hell itself.

In our next post, we’ll take a look at what might be called the special effects that are typical of haunted houses.

Buber, Bosch, Giger, et. al.: The Face in the Mirror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

H. R. Giger created the artwork upon which Alien’s xenomorphs are based. He also created the bizarre furniture--his chairs, for example, resemble the skeletal abdomens of things that might have been human beings, in their better days--which was featured in nightclubs, mostly in Europe, known as “Giger bars.”

He also created a large body of art--some sculpture, but mostly paintings--using , among other instruments, airbrushes. His work is of the type known as “biomechanical,” fusing the human and the mechanical into something that is both and neither. In most cases, the fusions involve females engaged in bizarre sexual behavior with machines or, less often, machine-men.

He’s mostly a sci fi artist, but his art also contains many horrific elements. To view it is to be disturbed, because his art is, well, disturbing. However, it has value beyond the merely entertaining and (in its own way) aesthetic. His paintings, in particular, can be interpreted as cautionary tales, told in imagery, rather than in words.

The Jewish theologian Martin Buber, in I and Thou, describes two ways by which a person may orient him- or herself to others. One may see the other as a fellow subjectivity, a “thou,” or one may regard all others as being inanimate objects, mere things, or “its.” The former way of relating to others allows love and the many emotions, good and bad, that flow from interpersonal relationships, whereas the latter way permits only a controlling situation in which others are simply means to an end, to be used and discarded at will by the only “thou” there is--oneself. Giger’s art shows the ultimate result of the “I-it” relationship, which reduces people to objects while dehumanizing the “I” who regards everyone else as merely an “it.”

Many of Giger’s painting involve sex of some sort of another, albeit seldom of a reproductive nature. However, there is never any intimacy or love in any of these acts. His cyborgs, mechanical and perfunctory, engage in sex simply for sex’s sake. Mostly, they are emotionless, although they occasionally express lust and rage. Often, the sex seems to involve rape--but, horribly enough, one cannot always be quite certain. The woman-as-machine appears to be being assaulted, suggesting that, despite her “biomechanical” character, she is not quite yet purely an object. Her partial humanity makes her situation even more horrible. Were she not still partially human, the paintings would still be weird, even, somehow, blasphemous, but it would be difficult to say that they are “horrible,” for there would be no violation of the human in them anymore if the woman and the machine were completely and truly fused. There is, still, despite the Industrial Revolution and the abuses of the military-industrial complex, a ghost in the machine, and it is this dualism of the spiritual and the material that makes Giger’s art horrific. In a completely materialistic universe, horror would not be possible, as Giger’s art suggests. In a way--in fact, precisely in this way--Giger’s art is like that of Hieronymus Bosch.

Indeed, some of Bosch’s paintings even depict the merger of man and machine, or the human and the mechanical. However, more of the demons that appear in Bosch’s work are strange hybrids of a human-animal mixture. Bosch lived before the Industrial Revolution provided a more or less systematic and elaborate framework for the framing of human-machine metaphors, so, in his day, people--particularly, sinners--were regarded more as bestial than as mechanical. In Giger’s time--which is to say, our time--the demonic is often seen as being more mechanical than bestial. The same impulse is at work in both metaphors, however. Man becomes demonic by becoming both other than and less than human. An animal-man is no longer a man, just as a machine-man (or, in Giger’s work, a machine-woman) is no longer a man.

C. S. Lewis cautions us that, every day, the choices we make and the actions we take make us a bit more like an angel or a little more like a devil, as the case may be, and that, in this manner, slowly and surely, we are creating the self that we shall be for eternity. Giger’s work, like Bosch’s before his, suggests something of the same thing, except that Giger’s art uses the machine in place of the animal or the demon to warn us of yet another lower form that we may take in denying the spiritual aspects both of ourselves, the “I,” and of the other, the “thou.”

Science fiction and horror writers have, in cruder fashion, perhaps, often told the same sort of cautionary tale. Whereas, in Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary conceives, bears, and finally delivers Satan’s child, in Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed, the protagonist is impregnated by a supercomputer that attains artificial intelligence. In The Terminator, militant machines have taken over, and only a time-traveling cyborg (a half-man, half-machine) can save humans from the world to come. In these cautionary tales (and many others), there’s a common threat, and this threat is the horror against which we are warned. As God created man in his image, so, too, does man create things in his own likeness.

The mechanical humans of Giger’s art are no less human than is Frankenstein’s monster, and the infant born of the Demon Seed’s protagonist is as much the child of humanity as Rosemary’s baby. We are in all things, because we project ourselves into all things, and we have created much of the world in which we live, including, to some degree, ourselves. Whenever, in doing so, we are content to be not only other but also less than we are, we are the monster in the looking-glass. That’s the theme of Buber, of Bosch, of Giger, and of the science fiction and horror fiction in which human beings are only too happy (and miserable) to accept a lesser status in creation than that with which they were created.

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.