"The Cone": Style, Sentence by Sentence

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As I mentioned in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” Wells is a master of style. He makes every word count toward the creation of the final effect he designs his stories to create. Style, as Jonathan Swift defines it, is “proper words in their proper places.” Mark Twain, like other writers, agrees that “the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” AlfredHitchcock says something similar concerning images, the lexicon of film. It is not any single image that matters, he says, but the way in which they are assembled to evoke thought and feeling. On the importance of style, a science fiction writer, a satirist, a humorist, and a master of suspense agree, as does any serious writer or producer. Style is not a small thing; it is everything, for it shapes and invigorates everything: character, including dialogue, action, plot, setting, theme.

With a single phrase or sentence, Wells often accomplishes several narrative or rhetorical purposes at once in his exemplary short story, “The Cone,” as he does in his other tales. The story is a true tour de force, the literary equivalent of expressionistic and surreal paintings, but, as I discuss this aspect of the story in “H. G. Wells: The Art of 'The Cone,'” there's no need to repeat it here. Instead, I will concentrate on the effects, literary and rhetorical, he achieves by several phrases and sentences in “The Cone.”

At the outset of the story, his omniscient narrator comments, “They [Mrs Horrocks and the artist Raut] sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air was fresher there.” This sentence accomplishes three things:

1. It suggests that the air is not “fresher” near the open window, because it is not “fresh” anywhere.
2. The fact that they are “trying to fancy” fresh air near the window means that they are not succeeding. The open window admits no fresh air; like their attempt to imagine fresher air, the open window is a mere prop and, therefore, a failure.
3. The illicit couple's attempt to “fancy the air was fresher” characterizes them. In the face of a reality they find unpleasant, they imagine their circumstances are different. They seek to impose their own preferences upon the world, adjusting what is to what is suitable to them. In this, the sentence's use of “attempt” suggests, they also fail.

Wells gets much out of other phrases, too. In the story's fifth paragraph, his narrator describes an approaching train: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks—passed” not only shows the passing of the cars, but also makes readers count them as they go past: “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks.” The counting helps to make the paragraph active, but it also reinforces the number of cars in the train. The ironworks, we think, is a busy, productive place. In the same sentence, the narrator adds that the cars “were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat of the tunnel,” causing readers to imagine each car being “extinguished” as it enters the tunnel's “throat.” This description includes one of the many personifications Wells uses to bring his ironworks to life as an active, vengeful, and menacing entity.

For Raut, the ironworks represents “Gehenna,” meaning “a place of burning, torment, or misery,” or, “(in Judaism and the New Testament, Hell).” The ironworks is impertinent, daring to belch “fire and dust into the face of heaven.” Raut's words suggest that the ironworks is an affront to God Himself, an impious, wicked hell the very existence of which is an insult to heaven. “Fire and dust,” the insults, as it were, which the hellish ironworks belch “into the face of heaven,” are later juxtaposed to the Biblical phrase “pillars of cloud” and “pillars of fire” in which God appears to Moses and the Israelites as He guides them across the desert after their escape from pharaoh: “And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.” (Exodus 13:21). The substitution of “fire” for the more eloquent phrase “pillars of fire” and of sullying “dust” for the more elegant expression “a pillar of a cloud” degrades the poetic language of the Bible, substituting crass terminology for its elevated diction. While Raut accuses the ironworks of insulting God, it is he, through his paraphrases of scripture, who actually does so.

In two clever sentences, Wells creates a sort of reverse-personification. His omniscient narrator describes blast furnaces, which stand “heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron,” as if they are hearts full of passion and rage; Horrocks himself, as their manager, is the mind, or soul, that controls these savage breasts. His “seething” passions and the “incessant turmoil of [the] flames” of his rage are the vengeful hearts that will burn Raut alive. 

 

Throughout descriptions of the ironworks, Wells's omniscent narrator uses phrases suggestive of violence, blood, death, and hell to depict the ironworks, the scene of Raut's eventual demise: “ghostly stunted beehive shapes,” “a ringing concussion and a rhythmic series of impacts,” “fitful flames,” “hammer beat heavily,” “palpating red stuff,” “blood-red reflections,” “succession of ghosts,” “blood-red vapour as red and hot as sun,” “white as death,” “fire writhing in the pit,” “sulphurous vapor,” “boil the blood,” and “hot suffocating flame.”

References to Gehenna, “the pit,” “pillars of cloud by day,” “pillars of fire by night,” “sin,” “sulphorous vapor” and “God” give the story a Biblical, if not an expressly Christian, context, as does Horrocks's horror at what he has done when “his sanity returned to him,” following his apparent crime of passion and he observes the effect of his vengeance, the sobbing, “inhuman, monstrous creature” that had been Raut. However, this context is undercut by Raut's reference to Jove and the omniscient narrator's allusion to “half-naked Titans.” Not only does the adulterous behavior of Raut and Mrs. Horrocks and Horrocks's seeking of vengeance against Raut suggest that religion is, for them, merely conventional, rather than sincere and devout, but Raut's use of the expression “by Jove,” like the omniscient narrator's employment of the phrase “half-naked Titans,” also implies that none of the characters is religious. Whether Horrocks' own plea to God at the end of the story is genuine or merely an expression of his horror at the sight of what he has done is open to question.

Through his conscious and deliberate selections of words and constructions of phrases throughout “The Cone,” Wells creates and maintains a style that is not only appropriate to his tale, but one which complements it at every turn, creating ironic contradictions; movement and pace; a religious context; complex characterization through allusions and personification; a sense of violence, blood, death, and hell; doubt concerning the characters' true devotion to the religious faith that is implied by the story's allusions to religious themes and theological concepts; and, overall, the unity of effect that produces a seemingly inevitable resolution of the story's central conflict. Wells' style delivers a great deal, largely thanks to his deliberate use of language—“proper words in their proper places”—a and to his own inimitable artistic genius.

Translating Images into Words

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Alive in Shape andColor: 17 Paintings by Great Artists and the Stories They Inspired, an anthology edited by Lawrence Block, is Block's “encore” to InSunlight and Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of EdwardHopper. This time around, the writers themselves picked the paintings (or, in a couple cases, the statues) upon which they based their contributions. Their choices vary from Norman Rockwell's The Haircut and Art Frahm's Remember All the Safety Rules to Rene Magritte's The Empire of Light and Vincent van Gogh's Cypresses. There are even a couple of nudes, Jean Leon Gerome's La Verite sortant du puits and Lilias Torrance Newton's Nude in the Studio.

Lee Child's “Pierre, Lucien, and Me” is the shortest of the shorts. The eight-page contribution, set in 1919 and based on Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Bouquet of Chrysanthemums, is told by its first-person narrator, the “Me” of the story's title. Having had a heart attack, he learns that a second, fatal one is inevitable within days, weeks, or months. He has no regrets and no need to put things right, except in the case of Porterfield, a wealthy young heir to a steel fortune, whom he'd duped. 

Through his roommate, Angelo, the narrator learns of Porterfield's love for Renoir's work. A waiter, Angelo had overheard Porterfield express to his dinner companions his desire to purchase a Renoir before the price of the famous artist's work rises due to Renoir's recent death, and Angelo had told the heir that the narrator, an art expert who works at the Metropolitan Museum, might locate some of Renoir's paintings for him. In fact, the narrator is an amateur artist who works at the museum “unloading wagons,” but he agrees to become Porterfield's agent.

In Paris, the narrator locates Lucien Mignon, a painter and friend of the late painter. His own unsigned works closely resemble those of Renoir, whose work is also available. One of the famous artist's unfinished canvases bears a separate painting in its corner: a vase of chrysanthemums. The narrator purchases the still life, and Mignon cuts it from the canvas, reluctantly agreeing to forge Renoir's name on it, since Renoir did, in fact, paint the chrysanthemums. The narrator also buys twenty of Mignon's own paintings, later forging Renoir's name on each of them as well, and ships Mignon's paintings to Porterfield, keeping the genuine Renoir for himself.

Now that he is dying, the narrator regrets having cheated the naive, trusting young man. To make things right, he takes the actual Renoir painting down from his wall, wraps it, and takes it to Porterfield's home, leaving it with the heir's “flunky,” telling him that he wants Porterfield to have the painting because Porterfield likes Renoir. Returning home, he sits, “waiting for the second episode,” the heart attack that will kill him. “My wall looks bare,” he observes, “but maybe better for it.”

Although Child's story is not a horror story, it's an entertaining, well-written piece. How might Renoir's painting inspire a horror story? The answer, clearly, is in any number of ways. Here, for example, is one possibility, a good title for which might be “Last Respects”:

After the wake that follows a lavish funeral in which hundreds of people paid their last respects, the decedent's widow, Chloe Sullivan, recalls moments of happiness she shared with her late husband: his proposal, their honeymoon in Naples, the elegant home they bought, the births of her children and how her husband had doted on them, the birthdays and holidays they enjoyed as a family. 

She is interrupted by her maid, Juanita, who asks her what she should do with “all the flowers” in the parlor, where her husband's body is laid out. It's a shame to toss them out, she laments. “They are so beautiful, especially the chrysanthemums the family sent.” Chloe snaps, “I'd throw those things in the garbage this instant if Salvatore's son, Guido, had attended the wake, but, even now, he has to screw things up, missing his damned plane! It wasn't bad enough his father put a hit out on my Brody?” The maid tries to console her employer, but Chloe shoos her away. “As soon as Guido pays his last respects, though, that bouquet of chrysanthemums will be the first to go!” she promises herself, as, alone in the parlor, she gazes on her husband's remains.

Block found that he was at a loss for his intended contribution to the anthology, until a friend emailed him a reminder that “Looking for David,” a story Block had written years ago, about Michelangelo's statute of David, would make a perfect addition to the volume. The painting in which Block had sought inspiration for an original story, Raphael Soyer's The Office Girls, serves as the anthology's frontispiece; at the close of his foreword to Alive in Shape and Color, Block invites readers to “come up with a story of your own” for Soyer's painting. “But don't send it to me,” he adds. “I'm done here.”

Joyce Carol Oates based her contribution, "Le Beaux Jours," on this painting, Les  beaux jour, by Bathus

Thomas Pluck based his story, "Truth Comes Out of the Well to Shame Mankind," on Jean Leon Gerome's La Veritie sortant du puits

Remember All the Safety Rules by Art Frahm inspired Jill D. Brock's "Safety Rules"

The volume contains seventeen muses, and there are, of course, hundreds, even thousands, of others available in museums around the world—and online—all waiting for a writer, of horror or other types of fiction, to tell the stories that they, the paintings, suggest. They await, in other words, the translation of images into words.

Building Fear

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

The architecture common to horror stories, whether novels, short stories, or movies, is conducive to the evocation of fear. Although this statement may seem something of a truism, it may be less obvious that it seems. What, precisely, makes a building evoke fear? By using the Aristotelian approach—that is, by analyzing mages of haunted buildings—we can identify the exact mechanisms of this evocation.

Size matters.

Size matters. Large spaces, especially when they appear labyrinthine, disorient us, confuse us, frustrate us. When we're not sure where we are, we don't know what places—what rooms, for example—are safe or in which direction our escape lies. Therefore, our ability to fight or to take flight is hampered. Spacious buildings of uncertain layout are frightening because, well, they could be the death of us.

Probably the best-known example of “size matters” is Stephen King's Overlook Hotel (The Shining [1977]), the mansion in his Rose Red, or the house in the Spierig Brothers' 2018 movie Winchester. (Full disclosure: the house in Winchester and the house in Craig R. Baxley's 2002 television miniseries Rose Red, written by King, were both inspired by the Winchester Mystery Mansion in San Jose, California.)

Books in print, including The Shining; Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959); and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), an early Gothic novel that, when it comes to haunted houses, was one of the prototypes that started it all, are first-rate examples of the principle that size matters.

Darkness matters.

Darkness matters. When it's dark, we can't see; we are blinded. We rely most heavily on our ability to see. When we cannot see, we are handicapped; our ability to observe, to conduct visual surveillance, to reconnoiter, is impeded. What we can't see could be dangerous, even deadly. We could be attacked. We could run into a wall or fall down stairs. We could lose our way.

Many horror stories are shot mostly in the dark, including Alejandro Amenábar's 2001 film, The Others; Victor Zarcoff's 2016 movie, 13 Cameras; and Wes Craven's 1991 film, The People Under the Stairs, to name but a few.

Stephen King's novel 'Salem's Lot (1975), Dan Simmons's novel Summer of Night (1991), Bram Stoker's short story, “The Judge's House” (1891), H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room” (1896) are excellent examples of printed works that take place largely in the dark.

Isolation matters.

Isolation matters. When alone, we are cut off. There are no emergency medical personnel, no firefighters, no police, no military. We do not have access to stores, utilities, or repairers. Our society is sophisticated and complex. None of us knows enough to be entirely self-sufficient. We rely on experts. We're helpless without them. When no one's home but us (and the monster), we're in a whole world full of hurt. Here, King scores again with The Shining. Other stories in which out-of-the-way buildings evoke fear include The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Psycho (1961), Wrong Turn (2003), and The Cabin in the Woods (2012).

For in-print stories of horror in isolated settings, try Stephen King's novel, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) or his Despeation (1996), James Rollins's novel Subterranean (1999), and Denise Lehane's novel Shutter Island (2003). Sir Winston Churchill's short story “Man Overboard” (1899), H. G. Wells's short story “The Cone” (1895), Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The Masque of the Red Death” (1845), and Charles Dickens's short story “The Signal-man” (1866) are superb examples of the isolated horror story as well.

Neglect matters.

Neglect matters. If someone cannot (or will not) look after his or her own home, he or she probably won't look after us, either, should we need help. Neglectful people are usually careless people. Think about that for a moment: careless people = people who care less; in fact, they may not care at all. People who don't give a damn are not survival assets; quite the contrary, their negligence could get us killed.

Of course, a building, especially a house, in a state of neglect, suggests a negligent resident or owner. Do we really want to trust our lives to such an individual. The answer is simple, and it isn't no; it's hell no! The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” (1997) is an example of what can happen as the result of neglect, as is the movie Hide and Seek (2005).

Neglect also happens in Stephen King's novels Carrie (1974) and in Bentley Little's novel The Ignored (1997).

Disrepair matters.

Disrepair matters. Disrepair may be caused by neglect, but it goes well beyond the effects of inattention and laziness. It suggests unsoundness verging upon collapse. Symbolically, a building in a state of disrepair suggests madness. A house in such a state implies that its resident or owner may also be unsound, verging upon mental collapse. Certainly, that's the case in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and a host of other haunted house horror stories.

Location matters.

Location matters. We've already mentioned how isolation can evoke feelings of helplessness. A house on a hill can dwarf us. Looking up at something implies that we are smaller (and lesser) than it, that we are inferior to it. That's why judges and legislators sit on high, to impress us with their superior status, to help us remember our place, our subordinate positions in society. Elevation confers status and authority, weheras the lower the station, the less importance and standing one has. The house in Psycho (1961) suggests its de facto owner, Norman Bates's “mother,” rules the roost; Norman, her caretaker, works for her, much of the time in the motel on the grounds below.

Personification matters.

Personification matters. Most of the buildings we've considered are frightening, each in its own way. More frightening than most—perhaps all—others, however, is the house with a personality of its own. A house to which human attributes (in the case of horror, horrible ones) have been assigned are more than just creepy; they can think, feel, and, worst of all, accomplish their will through action. They can injure, maim, or commit premeditated murder. The house in The Amityville Horror (2005), we can tell by the “eyelike windows,” to borrow a phrase from Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher,” indicate there's a twisted, maniacal madness to the place. It's a house with a personality. It even has curb appeal. To enter, though, is tantamount to suicide.

As the opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House indicates, her haunted house is also personified:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. 

 

In a later post (maybe the next one), we'll take a look at the interior of buildings built to evoke fear.

D. H. Lawrence's "The Snake": A Template for Chthonian Horror Fiction

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Although it was not D. H. Lawrence's intention to provide such a paradigm in his poem “The Snake,” he offers a template for a type of horror fiction of which we have seen but little in the past few hundred years and see even less today.

The poem recounts the encounter of a man and a snake at a “water trough” at which each has come to drink. Although the “water-trough” may symbolize the source of life, since water often represents life, the speaker of the poem considers the trough to be his: “A snake came to my water-trough” (emphasis added).

Certainly, he or another human being built the trough through which the water runs, but the water itself is provided by nature; the man owns this resource no more than the snake does. Besides, the snake has no concept of personal property; the trough is to it no more than the bed of a creek through which water runs. From an objective, disinterested point of view, the notion of “my water-trough” is absurd. Seen against such a perspective, the speaker's first-person point of view is arbitrary, an attitude he imposes upon nature, rather than an aspect of reality itself.

The snake wears only its own skin, but the speaker of the poem is dressed in his “pajamas,” his clothing, like his notion of personal property (and, indeed, his first-person point of view), further distinguishing him from the snake. He is also removed from the world inhabited by the snake by the “pitcher” he carries, having brought it to transport water from the trough to his house. The snake, incapable of the technology required to fashion a pitcher and unable to plan or prepare for the future, lives in the moment, drinking only when it is thirsty and water is available. The speaker's ability to anticipate and prepare for the satisfaction of future needs shows that, unlike the snake, he is not wholly defined and limited by nature.

The trough is located “in the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree.” The adjectives Lawrence uses, “deep, strange-scented,” “great,” and “dark,” suggest the speaker's sense of separation from the natural world: it is strange and mysterious; it is also “great,” or vast. He is both part of, and transcendent to, the natural world, situated both in and beyond nature. The part of him that is above nature is both awed at, and amazed by, the snake, a creature fully immersed in the natural world.

Both the appearance and the movement of the snake are alien and fascinating to the speaker of the poem:

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, Silently.

Lawrence's description of the snake allows readers both to “see” the snake and to appreciate its otherness. It neither looks nor behaves in any way remotely human; it is altogether a creature different from human beings, strange, mysterious, sinuous, and alarming to behold.

The speaker compares the snake with cattle, but the comparison soon fails, as the snake's behavior and appearance, once again, defies the contents of everyday human experience, as is suggested by the latter half of the stanza in which the untenable comparison is offered:

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The reference to Etna, a volcano that, for the time being, is dormant, but which, as its smoke suggests, could erupt at any moment, suggests that nature is an unpredictable force with which to be reckoned. The snake, which the poem associates with the volcano, is likewise unpredictable and potentially dangerous—all the more so because it is nonhuman.

The speaker, an animal that has attained consciousness and self-awareness, is part of nature, but, at the same time, transcendent to the natural world. “The voice” of his “education,” representing the beliefs and teachings of culture, tells him the snake “must be killed.” However, a change has occurred in the speaker's perception of the snake. It is not merely an animal to him now, but a fellow creature; he refers to the snake not as an “it,” but as “he”: “He must be killed.” This shift in perception shows that the speaker, for the moment, at least, recognizes the snake as an equal: like the snake, the speaker himself is a part of nature.

The line, “For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous” indicates that the speaker is educated; his culture has the knowledge, and has transmitted it to him, by which to distinguish between harmless, nonvenomous and deadly, venomous snakes. This knowledge, as relayed to the speaker by the “voice” of his “education,” sets him apart from, and puts him at odds with, the snake, despite his own inclusion among it and other animals, as a part of the natural world. Again, he is both in and beyond nature. He shares the natural world with the snake, but the snake cannot share with him his consciousness and his “education,” which separate them. This is the speaker's dilemma, and it is the poem's major source of conflict.

As “a man,” his culture states that it is his duty to “take a stick and break him [the snake] now, and finish him off.” The speaker does not deny that he has such a duty, but, at the same time, he admits that he likes the snake, finding the reptile a welcome visitor, or “guest.” The continued personification of the snake shows that the speaker continues to regard it as a fellow being, equal, in the world of nature, at least, to himself. The snake is neither a beast, nor an enemy, but a “guest.” Part of the speaker's appreciation of the snake also seems to come from the creature's “thankless” departure after having slaked its thirst. It has no sense of gratitude; it merely takes what it needs. Gratitude, like the concepts of propriety and personal property, are strictly human notions or, one might say, affectations.

The speaker's refusal to heed the “voice” of his “education” causes him to question his motive in having done so: “Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?/ Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?/ was it humility, to be so honoured” by the snake's visit? Instead of an answer, the questions end in an affirmation: “I felt so honoured.” The “voices” (plural now, for the first time, echoing not merely education, perhaps, but also human society itself) are not silenced by the speaker's admission; they persist, saying, “If you were not afraid, you would kill him!” The charge elicits a confession: “And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid.” His fear, however, is only part of the reason for his defying the demands of culture and its voice. “education,” for he remains “honoured/ That he should seek my hospitality/ from out the dark door of the secret earth.”

In ModernPainters (1843-1860), John Ruskin coins the term “pathetic fallacy,” defining it as the “poetic practice of attributing human emotion or responses to nature, inanimate objects, or animals.” Certainly, Lawrence's speaker commits this fallacy, as he projects his own sentiments onto the snake, personifying it according to how he sees it, so that it embodies and expresses his own feelings and attitudes. Although this practice is as old as poetry itself, Ruskin saw its overuse as “the mark of an inferior poet.” If so, not only Lawrence, but such celebrated poets as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, among others, are “inferior poets.” Another possibility is that such personification may be used for rhetorical purposes, creating an ironic point of view, for example, that contrasts human experience, especially as it is shaped and influenced by education, society, and culture, with the natural human condition exclusive of such influences, which seems to be Lawrence's purpose in using this approach in “The Snake.”

Unconcerned with such matters as those which concern the speaker, the snake, a creature motivated only by stimulus and response, its innate inner drive for equilibrium, and its inborn instinct for survival, takes its leave after slaking its thirst. In departing, the snake appears to the speaker as a “god.” Modern readers wonder, perhaps, in what way a snake could seem a “god” (although people in earlier times knew full well the numinous quality of the serpent). “Now his back was turned,” the speaker finds his courage, as the snake's withdrawal into the “horrid black hole” from whence it had come horrifies him. The snake's origin, like its appearance and movement, appall the man:

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned. 

 

Its return to “the blackness” of the “horrid black hole” repels the speaker, the nature of the serpent's domicile emphasizing the vast difference between the reptile and the man, who exchanges one tool of civilization, his pitcher, for another, a weapon: he throws” a clumsy log . . . at the water-trough.” Its “clatter” startles the snake, hastening its departure, as it convulses “in undignified haste.” Immediately, the speaker feels “petty” for his having committed a “paltry . . . vulgar . . . mean act,” and detests himself and “the voices of [his] accursed human education.”

He thinks of the albatross in Samuel Coleridge's poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The ancient mariner, visited by an albatross during a lull of the ocean wind, shoots the bird, supposing it has portended the cessation of the wind, which leaves his ship stranded at sea. As a result, spirits pursue the ship, driving the vessel off course. The crew hang the dead bird around the ancient mariner's neck to punish him for having killed the bird. It is only when, after his crew dies and he is left alone, to live in a state of death, forced to travel the world and tell his tale, that the ancient mariner is able to pray and blesses the creatures of the deep, whereupon the albatross falls from his neck. The speaker of Lawrence's poem sees, in his own act of hurling the log at the snake, a reflection of the mean act of the ancient mariner, who shot the blameless albatross. The speaker's humanity has prompted him to behave in an inhospitable, inhumane manner. Having “missed [his] chance with one of the lords/ Of life,” he feels he has “something to expiate:/ A pettiness.”

Lawrence's poem provides a template for chthonian horror, a subgenre of which we have seen but little in the past and see even less today. The word “chthonian” refers to the underworld. In early Greek mythology, the gods of the underworld, the chthonian deities, were opposite to, and sometimes opposed, the Olympian divinities. Later, this opposition declined as the personalities of the gods were developed, and they began to exhibit qualities once associated only or primarily with their counterparts. However, the gods of the underworld retained their association with subterranean abodes and with death.

The speaker of “The Snake” refers to the reptile as a “god,” and the poem makes it clear that the snake's habitat is subterranean. In this sense, the serpent is of a chtonian nature. It is “dark” and mysterious, venomous and deadly, and at odds with the transcendent rationality and historical continuity of the speaker as a member of the human species, whose education links him to humanity's past. As such, the snake is typically regarded as a threat that is best eliminated. 

 

Although the term “chthonian” is often linked with H. P. Lovecraft's so-called Cthulhu Mythos, it also refers to the underworld deities of ancient Greek mythology and to the sea monsters of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, among many other earlier works, which shows that Lovecraft's fiction is not the word's only, or even its primary, referent. Likewise, the term's use to refer to the sea serpents in Coleridge's poem and to the serpent in Lawrence's poem indicates that “chthonian” need not allude only to divinities.

In further defining the term, we might suggest that its meaning includes:

• traditional elements of the horror genre
• a reference to a physical underworld (e. g., the Greeks' Hades, the Norse's Hel, Coleridge's ocean depths, Christianity's hell);
• possible symbolic significance (e. g., the Freudian or Jungian unconscious, irrationality, madness, non-being, spiritual death);
• the effects of wanton cruelty, wrongdoing, or sin;
• the so-called fleshly, or natural, aspects of human existence, including animality, as opposed to the transcendent aspects of human existence (e. g., consciousness, intelligence, will, autonomy);
• non-cultural influences upon human beings (e. g., genetics, instincts);
• a potentially threatening quality or attribute; and
• its being as the integral, vital, pervasive, and predominant core of the narrative as a whole.
  
  

By this definition, Neil Marshall's 2005 horror movie The Descent, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's 1997 horror novel Reliquary, and James Rollins's 1999 horror novel Subterranean are relatively recent chthonian works, since they depend upon an underworld setting which influences and determines every aspect and element of their respective stories. By contrast, Mitchell Lichtenstein's horror movie Teeth contains elements of the chthonian (Dawn O'Keefe's visits to the cave), as does the Gordon Douglas's 1954 Them!, a feature film that is about equal parts science fiction picture and monster movie (the concluding scene of which occurs inside a tunnel), but these sequences are only scenes,and, although the scenes may be integral and vital to the stories, they are not the pervasive and predominant cores of the entire narratives. (See my post, “A Descent into the Horros of Extreme Feminism” for an analysis of the Descent as a chthonian film. In addition, my post, “Plotting a Horror Story as a Mystery” discusses the movie Them!)