Perennial Favorites

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The ingredients of the horror plot are relatively few and relatively simple:

• A series of bizarre incidents or situations (or both).
• An explanation for the bizarre incidents or situations (or both).
• A battle with the monster in which the monster is defeated (using the knowledge gained by the explanation of the bizarre incidents or situations [or both]).

Usually, such a simple formula results in boredom pretty quickly. Even great literature, such as Voltaire’s Candide and Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote, built, as they are, on repetitions of the same plot device (the discovery of evil and suffering in various situations and the misunderstandings of incidents and situations because of a special species of madness, respectively) soon become rather tiresome. Why doesn’t horror fiction?

The answer, of course, is that quite a bit, even of the best of it, does become tiresome, sooner or later. Some stories don’t seem to wear out their welcome as quickly as other stories do or, another way of putting the same thing, some writers don’t seem to wear out their welcome as soon as others do. A few--Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Shirley Jackson, Dean Koontz, Stephen King--are perennial favorites, some even long after their demise. (Those who regard Wells as strictly a science fiction writer haven’t read such novels as The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Food of the Gods or such short stories as “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” and “The Red Room”.)

So what makes a horror story (or its author) a perennial favorite? There are lots of ingredients, but these are some of the more noticeable and longstanding

Mystery, especially when it is coupled with menace, is one of the secret ingredients of the perennial favorite. A sense of foreboding, communicated by the story’s tone and mood--its atmosphere--gets under the skin and stays under the skin sooner and longer than most of the story’s other elements, including, when there is an overt one present, the monster. The vehicle for the creation of such atmosphere is description. The writer who can write powerful descriptions is likely to write powerful fiction, and, when the fiction that he or she writes is horror, it will be horrific. The description of Poe’s House of Usher alerts the reader that the decaying mansion is likely, in some sense, to be haunted, even, perhaps, conscious and aware of itself and others, intentionally evil. Stoker’s description of the countryside through which Dracula’s guest wanders on Walpurgis Night suggests that a tremendously powerful force is operating behind the scenes of natural incidents. H. P. Lovecraft’s varied descriptions of the type of monster that menaces the protagonist and the villagers of the small town in his story, “The Lurking Fear,” takes place keeps the reader on the edge of his or her seat and the protagonist’s teeth on edge. The treatment of a horrendous game of chance as commonplace makes Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” a haunting tale. H. G. Wells’ descriptions of the mysterious incidents upon the remote jungle island upon which Dr. Moreau performs experiments as immoral as they are cruel and vicious keeps readers turning the pages, especially when the protagonist, Edward Prendick, believes he may be the doctor’s next victim. Mary Shelley’s description of the pitiful, but also terrifying and repulsive, creation of Victor von Frankenstein hooks her readers and keeps them hooked.

The knowledge that the hyper-masculine monster is much stronger, faster, and inhuman than the human characters adds to the suspense. How can a band of men and women survive against madmen, monsters, and supernatural threats that, too often, are motivated by impulses foreign to the vast majority of people and are not only dangerous but also frequently lethal? “It is a terrible thing,” Jonathan Edwards warned his congregation, “for a sinner to fall into the hands of the living God.” It is also a “terrible thing,” it seems, for a horror story protagonist to “fall into the hands of a living” madman, monster, or supernatural force or entity. How can a mere man or woman be expected to fight that which is far stronger and faster, but much less human, than they are? A boy told a news anchor what it was like to be picked up and flung by a tornado. It was terrifying, he said, because it made him feel helpless. The wind simply lifted and threw him as if he were nothing more than a rag doll. The same sense of terror and vulnerability would apply were a monster to attack, whether its victim was female or male.

The betrayal by a familiar and trusted family member, friend, or neighbor, or even a dog or everyday object, such as a toy, makes a story or an author popular and memorable, as Stephen King proves with such novels as Cujo, Christine, From a Buick 8, ‘Salem’s Lot, Desperation, The Regulators, and others, and as William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, Dean Koontz’s The Good Guy and The Taking, and Dan Simmon’s Season of Night, to name but a few, indicate.

Mystery, menace, atmosphere, a powerful monster, and betrayal by one who is familiar and trusted are all ingredients of those horror stories, whether short stories or novels, that become perennial favorites, but one that stands out even more, perhaps, is these narratives’ worlds. The best of these writers have the gift of creating not only intriguing and eerie incidents and situations, sympathetic characters, and zigzagging plots, but each also creates a specific, self-contained world unto itself, full of memorable persons, places, and things. Whether this world is Elm Haven, Castle Rock, Derry, Desperation, Wentworth, a university campus (as in Bentley Little’s University), Dunwich, Arkham, Innsmouth, Kingsport, Moonlight Bay, or some other God-forsaken place, the perennial favorites among horror fiction and authors create their own worlds, replete with all the accoutrements of town, suburbs, or city, even, at times, maps of the streets, complete with the designations of the place’s residents’ houses. These writers make their readers part of a bigger community, giving them a home, no matter how humble and (eventually) dangerous, and the reader, becoming, as it were, him- or herself a fellow resident, at the very least, and possibly a friend, as it were, to one or more of the inhabitants of the story’s town, have themselves a stake in the incidents that occur there and in the outcome of these incidents and situations. It is unfortunate that another person’s house or town or state or country is attacked; it is catastrophic when one's own house, town, state, or country is the one that's attacked--and by a monster, at that! Therefore, to mystery, atmosphere, a powerful monster, and betrayal by one who is familiar, we must add the worst of all possible threats--the one to hearth and home, to family and friend. Look for this sense of community in the stories and novels of horror that have most struck your own fancy and which continue to enthrall and entertain you. It’s one of the horror writer’s most dependable and effective narrative techniques. Hillary Clinton was right about something, after all (sort of); it takes a village to raise the hackles.

Finally, horror fiction offers what no other type of genre can: a unique perspective. The world of horror is not safe (it’s full of monsters and menace, after all), but it’s unsafe in a way unlike the worlds of any other genre. Horror fiction’s ultimate theme is that, in the great roulette wheel in the sky upon which our lives are played out, there is the red (blood) and the black (death), and any spin of the wheel will land us on one or the other. Life, in short, is brutal, full of suffering, and ends, sooner or later (usually sooner, in horror fiction) in death, which may or may not be the end of it. (There could be, as Hamlet supposes, a worse place than the grave.) Life is painful. Life is harsh. Life is grievous. And then we die. However, life has its moments, mostly while the ball is still in motion and hasn’t lit, yet, on the red or the black, and, while the ball is hurtling round and round, we survive; perhaps, we even thrive. We go places, we see things, we might, on occasion, between the halt of the wheel and the jolting hops and skips that end on blood or death, even enjoy ourselves. In addition, since the game of chance that is our lives is viewed, in fiction, from the outside, vicariously through our identification with the little silver ball called the protagonist, we ourselves (although the same may not be said, always, for the protagonist) survive the trauma and the destruction of the red and the black, learning that we can endure despite pain and suffering and death. Meanwhile, the wheel spins, and the silver ball goes round and round, and where she will stop, no one knows (except that it will be on either the red or the black).

Scientists: Ghosts and Vampires Need Not Apply

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Physicists have lowered the boom on ghosts and, while they were at it, vampires.

According to Professor Costas Efthimiou of the University of Central Florida, a theoretical physicist, ghosts can’t both walk and pass through solid objects, such as walls, any more than, presumably, they can talk and chew gum at the same time. To walk requires the exertion of force to propel oneself forward, because a stationary object will remain stationary unless an exterior force is exerted upon it.

When we (and, presumably, ghosts) walk, we exert force on the floor or ground, and this downward-directed force (an action) causes an opposite and equal reaction, the lifting of our foot, which propels us forward.

The exertion of such a force requires a material body (here, represented by the foot, which is attached to the ankle bone, which is attached to the shin bone, and so forth), and material bodies, alas, cannot pass through solid objects. However, if ghosts are spirits and, as such, have no material form, they cannot exert the force necessary to walk.

Dr. Richard Lord, a British acoustic scientist has also come up with a way to explain (or explain away) haunted houses. Low-frequency sound, which is usually inaudible to humans, can cause people to experience anxiety, grief, chills, and other bizarre sensations. He theorizes that such sound may be associated with allegedly haunted sites.

Mathematics proves vampires are impossible, because, if they were real, and they went around biting people to turn their victims into fellow vamps, even at the rate of one victim per month, in two and a half years, their whole supply of victims (the human race) would have been converted into pantry (or maybe freezer) items.

Fortunately, horror writers, fans, and critics have a powerful counter to these eggheads: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous law of counterphysics: the willing suspension of disbelief, so there!

Horror is (Undesirable) Otherness

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror is . . . .

What? Disfigurement. Dismemberment. Death.

Loss of innocence.

A journey truncated, or even bisected, by violence or madness (or both).

A girl (or boy) interrupted.

Blood. Guts. Gore.

Monsters.

The needle’s drip.

The headless doll.

All of this, and much more.



As Stephen King implies in It (and the ancient Greeks, long before), horror--or the monster, at any rate--is one’s worst fear, one’s most terrible nightmare, come true, come to life. . . as the bogeyman, who’s after you!

Horror’s many monsters, as we have observed, are metaphorical. This (evil thing) = that (existential threat). Like all fiction, in this sense, the horror genre is formulaic (for equations are formulaic). As Emily taught us, “The differences are where the meanings are.”

Life is what we make it, what we want it to be, more or less, whether we consciously and deliberately intend it to be or just follow the paths of least resistance. (We are what we do, and we do what we are.) It is a journey, life, the middle way between extremes. Conflict is mediation: in the collision of opposites, the bearing away of (and the baring away by) the violent, we are taken by force. The Tao of horror is the middle way between the extremes of being and nothingness and of everydayness and the divine (or, more often, since it’s horror we’re talking about, the demonic). We create ourselves by reconciling (or avoiding the reconciliation of) the polar opposites of our being or of our becoming.

We are surrounded by foils (and by fools, but that’s a different story). If we don’t want to become the monster, we must become its slayer; if we don’t want to turn into a demon, we must turn into an angel--or, more often, something between these two extremes. Of course, the other may be anyone or anything we are not, any opposite to ourselves or to the directions we are taking in our journeys through life. Sometimes, the other is anima or animus; sometimes, shadow; sometimes, wise old man; sometimes something new and unnamed, a monster born of our own individual (rather than a communal) existential and personal crisis. This is a rarity, indeed, however: most of our monsters are readymade, waiting for the scripts we are writing by virtue of our living out our lives to call for some off-the-rack monster from central casting that will fill the bill. In horror fiction, the fashionable monster is the rare exception to the rule.

In short, horror is undesirable otherness. It is that which we are not (at least, not yet) but are in danger of becoming.

Horror is envy. It is greed. It is gluttony. It is lust. It is pride. It is sloth. It is wrath.

Horror is ignorance. It is moral weakness, or timidity. It is indifference. It is threat to the local community. It is loss of life, of limb, of mind. It is despair. It is fear of the dark.

We would envy; we would be greedy; we would be gluttonous. We would be proud. We would be full of wrath. We would be ignorant. We would be timid. We would be indifferent. We would threaten family or town or nation or world. We would lose ourselves, part by part, or a mind at a time. We would despair. We would fear the dark.

Therefore, these are “others,” sirens calling to us from the deeps, bidding us to come to them.

Horror stories are cautionary tales.

In lucid dreams, believers in dream analysis and dream therapy believe, a dreamer can confront the stalking monster and demand to know its name. Names are powers. They can be used against the one who is known by them. Identified, a monster loses its mystique and becomes knowable, if not known; it has stepped out of the darkness, into the light. Who are you? we may ask our dreaming selves’ monsters (for all monsters are aspects of ourselves or our species), and the monster must reply.

In the truest nightmare, the monster’s name is Legion, for he or she is many.

The worst nightmare of humanity is humanity, and humanity is protean. We undergo metamorphoses, becoming, always becoming, that which we are not (or avoiding such becoming at all costs when the change isn‘t desirable).



Prophase
Metaphase
Anaphase
Telophase

In which phase are you?

Explanations for Evil, Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In the previous post, we saw how the explanation for the evil that is at the root of the bizarre incidents of the typical horror plot is an essential part of such a story line. However, although there are a variety of possible and potential sources of evil from which to choose (ignorance, indifference, inhumanity, sin, madness, and others), these sources are not inexhaustible, and, eventually, vary them as he or she may, the horror writer is going to run out of new (that is, not used previously by him or her in his or her fiction) types fairly soon. Therefore, the horror writer needs a few more tricks up his or her sleeve to assist in the maintenance of suspense and reader interest. Since, by nature, the explanation depends upon knowledge, the writer will not only provide information in dibs and dabs, piecemeal, as it were, on an as-needed basis, but he or she will also enhance the delivery of these bits and pieces of exposition by adopting one or more techniques, some of which we have compiled here:

Introduce a red herring. In other words, suggest a cause for the events that is, although plausible and potentially explanatory, turns out to be false or erroneous. Dean Koontz is a master of this approach. For example, in Phantoms, he suggests (through the thoughts and declarations of one of his characters) that the cause of the disappearances, deaths, and dismemberments of a small town's residents are the effects (perhaps) of a secret biological or chemical warfare agent. In fact, the cause turns out to be an ancient, egocentric creature who periodically feeds upon humans and whose physical structure is based upon petrolatum, enabling the survivors of his attacks to destroy him with oil-eating bacteria (no, we're not making this up). There really are such bacteria, of course. Some were used to clean up oil spills. However, the likelihood of a petrolatum-based organism seems spurious to say the least. Nevertheless, if the story is horrific and suspenseful enough, the readers will overlook the ultimate explanation as long as there is one and it could, however unlikely, be a dim possibility (even if the alternate, red herring theory makes more sense from a scientific point of view). What appears to be a guardian angel in Lightning turns out to be a time traveler from Nazi Germany. Are the bizarre incidents in Midnight the work of aliens? No, politicians and scientists have cooperated in creating a computer system to "convert" citizens to their way of thinking. What appears to be the results of fugue states and amnesia in The Bad Place are actually the effects of genetic mutations that resulted from hermaphroditic self-fertilization. Incest can have negative effects, apparently, even when its practice is limited strictly to oneself. Likewise, murderous fugue states are not responsible for the mayhem in Mr. Murder, as it turns out; the death and d estruction is the result of the actions of a genetically engineered clone. the supposed SWAT team in Dark Rivers of the Heart turns out to be a clandestine paramilitary group. The use of the red herring explanation suggests that nothing is as it appears to be--or shouldn't be, at le

Complicate the search for answers. As the characters seek to make sense of their experiences--that is, of the odd incidents happening to and around them--they happen upon a situation even more bizarre, complicated, and seemingly impossible.

Make the answer man part of the problem. The character from whom the others learn the explanation (herein after called "the answer man," even if he's a she rather than a he) may be part of the problem or, worse yet, he may be the problem.

Use the jigsaw approach. The explanation may depend upon each member of a group of characters contributing some knowledge of the total answer. This jigsaw puzzle approach allows further complications of the plot's conflict. First, somehow, the individual members of the group must rendezvous (and there may be some or many who want to prevent one or more--or all--of them from doing so); one or more may actually be eliminated before he or she or they can add his or her or their missing piece or pieces of the puzzle to complete the big picture (that is, the explanation as to the cause of the strange incidents or bizarre situations); or one or more of the answer men may decide to provide false information or may report erroneous information without any conscious intent to deceive.

Give the answer man an alternative motive. The answer man may have an ulterior motive--a reason not to explain the cause or to explain it falsely (that is, explain it away).

Use the missing-in-action (MIA) appraoch. Someone may know the secret--may even have known it from the get-go--but the answer man may be missing and have to be tracked down or incarcerated and have to be sprung. Alternatively, he might have passed the answer on to someone else, before being killed, so, now, this surrogate answer man must be found.

Let repentance be the key. An answer man, possibly working for the enemy, may refuse to divulge the answer until, repenting (for some believable reason), he repents, confessing everything.

Use the repressed memories approach. The answer man may have repressed his memories of the cause of the extraordinary incidents or astonishing situations and, although the information returns, in bits and pieces, it may nort always be reliable and accurate; he may have a few false memories (red herrings) among the "facts" he recalls, whether on his own or as a result of hypnosis.