Sudden Death "Under the Dome"

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

The first 57 pages of Stephen King’s latest novel Under the Dome, detail the immediate consequences of the descent of an invisible dome over the small town of Chester’s Mill, Maine, which lies northeast of the infamous Castle Rock. (Pretty much the rest of the novel deals with the extended consequences of this incident.)

The descent of the barrier causes quite a bit of damage. A woodchuck is cut in half. An airplane crashes. Several automobiles smash into its curved surface. Birds break their necks as they fly into the transparent hemisphere. The reader isn’t forewarned of the woodchuck’s fate, but the omniscient narrator does give advance notice concerning the deaths of some of the human characters. Concerning Claudette Sanders and her flight instructor, Chuck Thompson, we are told, “Their lives had another forty seconds to run,” and we learn that “the next time” Brenda sees her husband, police chief Howard (“Duke”) Perkins, “he was dead.”

Nevertheless, death is sudden Under the Dome:

He felt the buzzing she had described, but instead of passing, it deepened to searing pain in the hollow of his left shoulder. He had just enough time to remember the last thing Brenda had said--Take care of your pacemaker--and then it exploded in his chest with enough force to blow open his Wildcats sweatshirt, which he’d donned that morning in honor of this afternoon’s game. Blood, scraps of cotton, and bits of flesh struck the barrier.

The crowed aaahed.

Duke tried to speak his wife’s name and failed, but he saw her face clearly in his mind. She was smiling.

Then, darkness.

Before his unceremonious demise, Howard had served on the Chester’s Mill’s police force for over thirty years; in an instant, he is dead, gone as if he never existed.

And he’s not the only resident of the town so summarily dispatched.

The suddenness and the quickness of the townspeople’s deaths bespeaks the uncertainty and danger of everyday life that we seldom consider, busy as we are living our lives. A world in which a flight instructor and his student or a police chief with more than three decades of service to the community under his belt can be killed with as much abandon as a woodchuck is a dangerous world, indeed; it is also, perhaps, an absurd one, for what meaning or value is possible in a world in which human beings are dispatched with as little rhyme or reason and as much cosmic indifference as a woodchuck is suddenly sliced in half?

The opening pages of Under the Dome suggest such questions.

The rest of the novel, we expect, will offer some answers.

How to Haunt a House, Part VIII

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In previous posts, I have presented ideas concerning how to haunt a house, but I haven’t offered any ideas about residential nooks and crannies--the furniture, utilities, and décor.

Films and novels do include references to and depictions or descriptions of such items among their catalogues of haunted objects. So can you.

For example, in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the stairs down which Nancy Thompson flees from Freddy Krueger turn to goop, retarding the protagonist’s progress, just as might happen during a bad dream.

In The Others, ghost children occupy a bed that the boy, Victor, who lives in the house, claims is his; a piano seems to play of its own accord; and curtains appear to tear themselves from windows throughout the house. (In reality, the apparent ghosts are the house’s flesh-and-blood residents and the apparent flesh-and-blood residents are the actual ghosts, so the ghosts occupy the bed, but the human residents play the piano and remove the curtains.)

An episode of the Angel television series offers an interesting take on the folklore that holds that vampires have no reflection. Cordelia Chase’s knowledge of this “fact” alerts her to the fact that her date is a vampire as she realizes that there are no mirrors in his house. Although vampires aren’t ghosts, this incident does apply a supernatural quality to a commonplace household item.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman manages to write an entire, brilliant horror story concerning yellow wallpaper that may or may not be more than it appears to be. Her protagonist, however, is haunted by her own incipient madness, rather than by a ghost as such.

Stephen King’s novel It includes a boy’s terrifying journey into his house’s basement, to tend to the ravenous furnace that glows as if it were burning with hellfire rather than with coals.

One story--the title of which I have forgotten--shows (or perhaps describes) a portrait in which one of the family members stares in stark terror while everyone else in the photograph looks calm and composed. King’s The Shining features a lobby gallery of ghosts, but this scene doesn’t really count for our purposes, since the story is set in a hotel rather than in a house per se.

A few years ago, a newspaper featured an article concerning a house in Chicago which was allegedly haunted. Fire was said to shoot forth a good three feet from wall sockets. The house succumbed, alas, to a bulldozer when it was later razed.

In my own novel, Mystic Mansion, windowpanes rebound like miniature horizontal trampolines; carpet rears, rolls, and crashes like surf; and books in the library take flight, their covers flapping as if they were wings.

Think of the furniture, utilities, appliances, and décor in the average house and what could go “wrong” with it--not merely in an electrical or a mechanical, but in a paranormal o supernatural, way--and you have the raw material for a haunting or, at least, many possibilities for enhancing and complementing the more fundamental trappings of the haunted house.

Imagine a clock running backward or striking thirteen hours! Or a flight of stairs converting themselves instantly into a steep ramp. Or the hideous gargoyle lamp that a character’s mother-in-law gave a couple for their previous anniversary coming to life to attack the wife who stole a mother’s son from her.

The possibilities are virtually endless, and, best of all, new furnishings, appliances, and décor can be added as needed to freshen the horrific effects throughout the course of the story.

Remember the haunted mask that Joyce Summers hung upon her bedroom wall, the one that summoned demons and zombies. . . .

Note: Mystic Mansion is available at Amazon.com or Lulu.

The Monster as (Straw) Bogeyman

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

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

A cannibal in the physical sense is a person who lives off the flesh of other human beings. A moral [again, Hospers’ emphasis] cannibal is one who believes he has a right to live off the “spirit” of other human beings--who believes that he has a moral claim on the productive capacity, time, and effort expended by others.

There is no free lunch (pathetic pun intended), however, and moral cannibals’ appetites for the results of others’ hard work must be borne, Hospers points out, by those whom these cannibals devour:

It has become fashionable to claim virtually everything that one needs or desires as one’s right. Thus, many people claim that they have a right to a job, the right to free medical care, to free food and clothing, to a decent home, and so on. Now if one asks, apart from any specific context, whether it would be desirable if everyone had these things, one might well say yes. But there is a gimmick attached to each of them: At whose expense? [Italics are Hospers’.]

In a politically correct period, Hospers’ argument might not go down well with some. Indeed, many might find his assertions a bit hard to swallow--which is why, in fiction (and, in this case, since we’re talking cannibals, most likely horror fiction, at that) often uses fantastic creatures as metaphors for more mundane (and possibly more horrible) threats, dangers, risks, and menaces.

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

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

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

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

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

From the very beginning, I saw it as a chance to write about the serious ecological problems that we face in the world today. The fact is we all live under the dome. We have this little blue world that we've all seen from outer space, and it appears like that's about all there is. It's a natural allegorical situation, without whamming the reader over the head with it. I don't like books where everything stands for everything else. It works with Animal Farm: You can be a child and read it as a story about animals, but when you're older, you realize it's about communism, capitalism, fascism. That's the genius of Orwell. But I love the idea about isolating these people, addressing the questions that we face. We're a blue planet in a corner of the galaxy, and for all the satellites and probes and Hubble pictures, we haven't seen evidence of anyone else. There's nothing like ours. We have to conclude we're on our own, and we have to deal with it. We're under the dome. All of us.

There are plenty of bogeymen for both the left and the right ends of the socioeconomic-political continuum, but, in an age of intolerant political correctness, in which freedom of speech (and the freedom of thought which it expresses) is threatened on all sides, in lieu of the medieval fool whose time has come and gone, writers, especially of horror, must disguise the real horrors about which they write by dressing these fiends in the teeth and nails of cannibals or the hidebound fur of ecological cavemen. That way, readers on both ends of the political spectrum can pretend that the movies and novels with which they disagree are really just about fiends who eat the flesh of their own kind (and not men and women possessed of an entitlement mentality) or are about nothing more than subhuman barbarians (and not traitors to the environment).

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

Cemeteries: A Matter of Setting Boundaries

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Earlier today, I was watching a movie on the ScyFy Channel. I didn’t bother to watch more than a few minutes of it, and I didn’t make any attempt to identify its title. What was of interest to me was the setting of the particular scene I’d happened to tune in: a cemetery.

 

Readers and writers of horror fiction have--or should have--an affinity for graveyards. When it comes to these places, the older are the better, because modern cities of the dead look more like parks, complete with flowers, than they do burial places.

 

The cemetery in the ScyFy movie was an old one: the stones were weathered; the names and dates associated with the remains of the interred loved ones (long since forgotten, no doubt, in most cases) were obliterated by wind and rain, by sleet and snow, and by passage of slow time; the grounds were untended, home to ragged clusters of weeds and bordered by brush. Skeletal trees stirred among the dilapidated headstones, casting deep shadows across the rugged terrain. There were no mausoleums or other buildings of any kind.

 

Most disturbing of all, there were neither fences nor walls. The lack of such boundaries is the most disturbing feature of the burial place. The fact that there is no clear-cut perimeter means that there is no unambiguous distinction between the cemetery and the surrounding terrain, no specific division between the quick and the dead, no precise demarcation between the natural world and the supernatural realm.

 

When there are no clear-cut boundaries, borders blur. How far beyond the rough confines of the cemetery do its outer limits truly lie? If the burial ground is haunted, how far does its influence project? How distant can its tendrils of evil reach? How far does its decadence and malevolence go?

 

If we were passersby or we were waiting at a bus stop for a bus to stop or we were passenger and driver in a car that stalled just outside the last line of wind-whittled, rain-ravaged headstones, would we be all right or would we be assaulted by zombies or ghosts or ghouls? Would things, once human, rise from their graves, clotted with gore or putrescent with decay, moldy and withered, to shamble forward, toward us, ravenous with hunger or hell bent upon some nameless and unspeakable mission of their own?

 

Without clear boundaries, there may be no limits at all. Of course, these boundaries need not be of iron or stone. They need not be locked behind fences and walls. There need not be a gate across the entrance to the place wherein the dead play host to worms. In horror fiction, conventions are the sentinels who guard the boundary between this world and the next. If they fall, we are imperiled. And, more and more, conventions do fall.

 

For example, for the longest time, a character who was well known, if not well loved, to readers was protected by such familiarity--which had taken the writer, after all, scores, if not hundreds, of pages to establish. Others might suffer and die--no, others would suffer and die, for the genre is horror, after all--and their deaths might be horrific and terrible, full of pain and torment, but this one or these few, whom we know well, in whom the writer had invested so much time and effort, whom we understand and might even like, respect, or love, are sacrosanct and, against them, not even the malevolence of the monster itself might prevail. 

 

That was the convention, at any rate, before Stephen King overturned it in his fiction, killing off as many likeable and well-liked characters as he liked. The result was to increase readers’ anxiety and the suspense of his own work, for in toppling this convention, King also toppled readers’ certainty and easy confidence, opening new possibilities for fear and trepidation. One could no longer be sure which character would survive and which would die. Therefore, any character could suffer, and any character could die. The boundaries expanded, blurred, bled. . . .