A Certain Slant of Light

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Audiences who watched An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, or even earlier werewolf movies were treated (if such a word may be rightly used in such a context) to the sights (and sounds) of men and women being transformed into wolves--or, rather, bipedal werewolves. The shapes of their skulls changed radically, noses elongating into snouts; mouths enlarging into gaping maws full of sharp, jagged teeth; and ears popping up from their heads. The pupils in their eyes became vertical slits inside yellow irises. Their bodies bulked up like those of athletes on steroids, hands and feet stretching into long paws, tails sprouting from their backs, and fur covering every square inch of their bodies. It wasn’t a pretty sight. In fact, it was pretty appalling.

Other, equally horrific transformations have also been captured on celluloid. In The Fly, a scientist inventing a teleportation device that disassembles one’s molecules at Point A to reassemble them, at light speed, at Point B, is transformed into a fly when one of these insects’ DNA is accidentally mixed with the scientist’s own genetic material, just as the teleportation process gets underway. In The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, alien pods replicate people, producing doppelgangers left and right, which is bad enough in itself--who needs two Paris Hiltons or Lindsay Lohans?--but it’s even worse when a man and his dog are merged during one such transformation, resulting in a truly bizarre creature consisting of a dog’s body with his master’s head--and face.

Even before horror (and science fiction), there were such transformations, of course. Quite a few of them took place in ancient myths. Ovid wrote of many in his poem, Metamorphoses, in which a statue becomes a woman, girls pursued by would-be rapists are turned into trees, and people are changed into such animals as magpies, deer, a bear, a wolf, and spiders. Even in the Bible, a few such metamorphoses occur, as when God turns Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt or Moses (and pharaoh’s magicians) transform sticks into serpents.

In reality, metamorphoses also occur. Women, becoming pregnant, for example, change shape rather drastically over a relatively short period of time. Living bodies become corpses. Men sometimes develop womanly breasts (a condition known as gynecomastia) and may even lactate, whereas a few women grow mustaches, beards, and thicker-than-usual body hair. Before science could explain such apparently miraculous occurrences, myth-makers made up myths to account for such extraordinary, unusual, or extreme transformations. Today, writers in such genres as fantasy, horror, and science fiction continue to do so, creating monstrosities that, one may suppose, would warm the hearts of editors and publishers at DC and Marvel Comics.

Before science, the world was full of divinities and demons, and, often, it was the activity of such spirits that caused the wonders of the world, including the metamorphoses through which rocks, plants, animals, and people sometimes went. In “The Growth of Explanatory Transformation Myth,” Professor Andrew Dickson White lists several of the many ways in which myth was used to explain--or to explain away--the oddities and seeming wonders of the world, such as “mountains, rocks, and boulders seemingly misplaced.” Many of these were the missiles, he says, of warring gods. In the Middle East, Christian or Muslim religion explains the odd appearance or unlikely locations of these natural objects, just as, in Asia, Buddhism accounts for the strange rock formations and “in Teutonic lands, as a rule, wherever a strange rock or stone is found, there will be found a myth or a legend, heathen or Christian, to account for it.”

Of course, more than just the appearance and location of rocks and mountains--or of even the lay of the land in general--is explained by etiological (explanatory) myths, and the explanations deal with the “why” as well as the “how” of things, answering such fundamental questions as why people die, why people have skins of various colors, why animals have certain features, why this ruler rules, or why this rite is practiced.

The College of Siskiyous (yes, it does exist; it’s a community college in Weed, California (yes, it does sound like a joke), near Mt. Shasta) offers a (a rather oddly written) summary of the role of the etiological myth, differentiating it, at the same time, from science’s similar role in explaining the whys and wherefores of the world:

While science might [?] say the sky is blue due to excited nitrogen and refractive dust particles, myth is more likely to explain [that] the blue is due to a giant bird’s blue feathers or the cold breath of an ancient god.

The same site challenges visitors to create their own etiological myth, offering several examples and these useful guidelines:

Your etiological narrative can be either a myth or a folktale. It can recount the creation of a well-known geographical feature (Mt Shasta, Lake Tahoe), specific animal traits (why dogs bark, why ants work together), taboos (why incest is wrong), customs (why people are buried underground). Please be descriptive. You may use dialogue, figurative language, or any other rhetorical device you wish. Try to imagine you are a member of an ancient culture, a pre-scientific culture, and myth is your vehicle of explanation. Indicate in the title whether your narrative is an etiological myth or an etiological folktale.

Writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror may want to employ a similar strategy in creating fantasy worlds, scientific marvels, or monsters. Forget the scientific explanation as to how and why something is what it is or does what it does. Instead, recapture the spirit, so to speak, of our ancient ancestors, looking at the world anew, or see it as young children see it, fresh and vivid. Ask yourself, How? Ask yourself, Why? (a child’s favorite question, as every parent knows). Be creative. As a result, you’re apt to infuse your fiction with excitement, glamour, chills, and thrills.

At Chillers and Thrillers, we don’t denigrate science. In fact, we appreciate and admire it. Besides, since many horror stories involve mad scientists and their attempts to transform, if not dominate, the world, we find the principles and theories of the sciences to be very useful. Nevertheless, from a mystical point of view, such as was common among pre-scientific societies, science seems to have demystified the world, depleting it of its deities and its demons, as Edgar Allan Poe observes in his “Sonnet--To Science” (written when he was but a lad of twenty years):

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

In “Intimations of Immortality,” William Wordsworth laments a similar loss of the magic and mystery of nature, as it appears through the eyes of a child, capturing, at the same time, a sense of the very “glory” the passing of which he mourns:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth. . . .

As long as we persist in seeing a snake only as science defines it--as “a legless reptile of the sub-order Serpentes with a long, thin body and a fork-shaped tongue,” (Allwords.com)--rather than as Emily Dickinson’s “narrow fellow in the grass” or D. H. Lawrence’s “king,” it shall never appear to us with the vividness--or the sheer presence--as Dickinson’s serpent:

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,--did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,--
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

Nor shall we see this “legless reptile” as Lawrence saw it:

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

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.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

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 voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
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.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

All good fiction, whatever its genre, immerses its readers in the world, in sensory perceptions, in experience, bringing to life again that which was dead, and presenting to the attention that which is taken for granted, forgotten, or ignored. Intensity of presence, like the quality of mystery, is a hallmark of superior writing, especially in regard to imaginative prose or poetry.

However, as we have said before, horror is horror, not romance (or, for that matter, fantasy or science fiction or any other genre, although horror fiction may contain elements of any of these, and other, types of literature). Horror fiction has its own bent, its own interest, its own passionate concern. For horror, this focus is the dreadful, the horrific, the appalling. Horror fiction is, first and foremost, after all, the fiction of fear. It is fear that is the “certain slant of light” with which horror fiction is concerned, to borrow a phrase from another of Dickinson’s poems, one that has a peculiar suitability to chillers and thrillers:

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the meanings are--

None may teach it--Any--
'Tis the Seal Despair--
An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air--
When it comes, the Landscape listens--
Shadows--hold their breath--
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death--

We discuss this “Heavenly Hurt” to which Dickinson alludes in a more detailed, if less poetic, fashion in “Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear,” our blog’s inaugural post:

Horror fiction provides us with a way of exercising and of exorcising our inner demons, but it also reminds us that life is short, and it suggests to us that we should be grateful to be alive, that we should appreciate what we have, and that we should take nothing for granted--not life, limb, mind, health, loved ones, or anything else. Horror fiction is a literary memento mori, or reminder of death.

In the shadow of death, we appreciate and enjoy the fullness of life.No one ever wrote a horror story about a man who stubbed his toe or a woman who broke a nail. Horror fiction's themes are bigger; they're more important. They're as vast and profound as the most critically important and most highly valued of all things. Horror fiction, by threatening us with the loss of that which is really important, shows us what truly matters. As such, it's a guide, implicitly, to the good life.Horror fiction also shows us, sometimes, at least, that no matter how bad things are, we can survive our losses. We can regroup, individually or collectively, subjectively or objectively, and we can continue to fight the good fight.

It is this “slant of light” of which Dickinson writes, or something very much like it, to which H. P. Lovecraft refers in “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”:

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird tories because they suit my inclination best--one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or "outsideness" without laying stress on the emotion of fear. The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.

In setting aside the explanations of science and delving, once more, into that deep reservoir of what science might characterize as superstition, but what others might call faith, and seeing the world anew, as our ancient ancestors did or as young children still do, we reconnect with the mystery (and the dread, or awe) of life, immersing ourselves in the experience of Rudolph Otto’s numinous, the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans” that inspires faith in powers “wholly other” than, and greater than, our own, some of which may be friendly and helpful and some of which may be fiends and monsters. The numinous is neither exclusively divine nor exclusively demonic; rather, it is a quality of the mind or of an experience, which, in the Bible (and in the work of Soren Kierkegaard), is sometimes described as one of “fear and trembling.” In The Idea of the Holy, Otto describes the numinous, in part, as:

The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its "profane," non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strongest excitments, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering (12-13).

As Otto defines the term, the numinous is awful (that is, it fills one with awe), overpowering, urgent, fascinating, and completely alien to human experience.

In our “Why Monsters? Why Metaphors?” post, we identified the use of the monstrous, or grotesque, as having a purpose similar to that which Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, each in his or her own way, seeks to accomplish in his or her respective fiction; it seeks to grasp, to seize, and to awaken one to the presence of the depth and mystery of existence. We might also characterize this purpose as being to recover a perception of the holy, or the numinous. We said that monsters are often used as metaphors in horror fiction because monsters “they have presence”:

What do I mean by “presence”? Walker Percy illustrates the idea well in his novel The Moviegoer. His protagonist, Binx Bolling, a soldier at this time in the story, has been injured in a battle. As he lies upon the battlefield, he catches sight of a dung beetle. Normally, he probably wouldn’t have seen the insect and, if he had, he wouldn’t have been likely to devote careful study to it. However, he is not operating under normal circumstances, and he is astonished to see the beetle, in all its glorious detail. It has presence for him; it has become visible. In doing so, it has shed the malaise of everydayness and become real. Here’s the way that Percy describes the scene:

. . . I remembered the first time the search occurred to me. I came to myself under a chindolea bush. . . . Six inches from my nose a dung beetle was scratching around under the leaves. As I watched there awoke within me an immense curiosity. I was onto something.

Later, a similar experience happens to Binx:

. . . This morning, as I got up, I dressed as usual and began as usual to put my belongings into my pockets: wallet, notebook. . . pencil, keys, handkerchief, slide rule. . . . They looked both unfamiliar and at the same time full of clues. . . . What was unfamiliar about them was that I could see them. They might have belonged to someone else. A man can look at this little pile on his bureau for thirty years and never once see it. It is as invisible as his own hand. Once I saw it, however, the search became possible. . . .

We can all remember the times, usually as a child, during which we could lose ourselves in the contemplation of everyday objects such as a daisy or a drop of dew. We could see each grain of pollen, every glistening color of the rainbow that seemed to emanate from within the clear drop of early morning dew as it shimmered upon a green leaf. All the world was present in a grain of sand.Then, as we grew older, things changed--or we changed. Saddled with responsibilities and governed by social expectations and conventions, our priorities changed. Eventually, we changed. We no longer had time to appreciate, admire, and embrace the world around us. We became alienated from our environment and estranged from or surroundings. We took for granted the wonders and enchantments of nature. More and more, the world began to disappear as we took birds and brooks, sun and moon, mountains and beaches, and pine trees and breezes for granted. The malaise of everydayness spread until we were nearly blind and deaf to the world around us. Things and people alike began to lack presence. Occasionally, something happens, and we see again. We hear again. The world becomes present to us again, as the dung beetle became present for Binx. We recover the world or, perhaps, only a tiny portion of the world--maybe nothing more than a dung beetle. But it’s a start. If we can see an insect today, maybe someday we can see a forest or, looking into a looking-glass, even ourselves. Monsters make us sit up and take notice. They grab our attention. They have immediate and intense presence, even in a world devoid of detail and force. Like a snake, a monster’s hard to miss. Emily Dickinson suggests this quality when she describes a hiker crossing a serpent’s path. . . . The monster, likewise, is noticeable, immediately. That’s one reason that horror writers employ the monstrous. Monsters have presence. They’re bold font, italics, exclamation points, underlining.

Flannery O’Connor, asked why her fiction contains so many grotesque characters--physically, emotionally, or spiritually deformed characters (monsters, of a sort, really)--implied that she wrote for a “hostile audience“ and explained that, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large, startling figures.”

In “Creating Mood in Horror Fiction,”our review of Bram Stoker’s short story, “Dracula’s Guest,” we showed how a great writer in the horror genre creates a sense of the numinous by the way that he describes the various incidents which occur in the narrative and his protagonist’s experiences and perceptions. The techniques that Stoker uses to accomplish this feat are many and varied, as we point out in our review, but we want to recall a couple that seem especially relevant to our present discussion:

. . . The coachman’s account of the abandoned village gives the Englishman a definite destination, and he undertakes a hike into the valley, in search of the site of the deserted town. From a distance, the valley seemed enchanting, pleasant, and inviting, but, as he enters the basin, its appearance changes--or seems to change--becoming “desolation itself.” He pauses to rest, and the cold winter’s night and the gathering of high storm clouds cause him to realize that a blizzard is approaching. As he resumes his trek, the countryside appears “more picturesque,” and he becomes lost to time as he enjoys the “charm of [its] beauty” until, at length, “deepening twilight” turns his thoughts to finding his way back “home.” Stoker adds a discordant note to the “picaresque” scene, as, again, the Englishman hears the sound of a wolf. In this description of the woods, as in others to come, Stoker masterfully suggests that there may be some unseen power, acting behind the scenes, to manipulate and control the protagonist’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. Readers are apt to get a strong impression that the valley, including its woods, is truly enchanted--that is, magical--and that the environment has cast a spell upon the traveler, seeming now desolate, now charming, and making him forget both himself and the time of day as he hikes farther and farther on his way to his “unholy” destination, Walpurgis Night fast approaching.

Earlier in the story, the coachman predicted the advent of a snowstorm, and the gathering clouds support Johann’s forecast. Now, when a blizzard begins, the storm seems natural enough. Indeed, it is expected. At the same time, however, because of the way that Stoker has described the woodland valley, readers are apt to wonder whether the occult power that seems to control the landscape may also be controlling the weather, for the blizzard begins at a most convenient moment, just as the traveler glimpses, through the trees, what appears to be a building and thinks that he has likely discovered the long-abandoned village that has become the object of his quest. This possibility is strengthened by the chorus of wolves’ howls he hears at this same moment and by the way in which the cypress trees form an “alley” that leads to the site. The storm, the wolves, and the “alley” of cypresses all seem to conspire, as it were, to guide and direct the Englishman to the same location. The sense that nature itself is being manipulated and controlled by an unseen power is strong, as is the sense that this same power (or another) is secretly observing the Englishman. These techniques increase the story’s suspense by multiplying the power of the narrative’s unseen protagonist, for whoever or whatever can control nature must be not only supernatural but also extremely powerful. The fact that the adversary is unseen is unnerving as well, because, obviously, one cannot defend oneself against an enemy that he or she cannot see. The invisibility of the adversary also lends it a certain majesty, suggesting, again, that it is beyond human ken. However, Stoker also leaves open the narrow possibility--and the possibility seems to become narrower all the time--that perhaps all is normal, except for the Englishman himself. Perhaps the protagonist merely believes that these incidents have a greater significance than they actually have. So far, there has been no definitive reason to suspect that the apparently supernatural force operating behind the scenes is supernatural or, in fact, that it exists at all. . . .

By using similar techniques, we argued, in “Horror By the Slice,” our review of “The Lurking Fear,” Lovecraft also succeeds in creating the impression of a mysterious, unseen power operating, as it were, behind the scenes, or, in other words, he likewise captures a sense of the numinous:

In the first part of the story, Lovecraft hints at several possible identities for his story’s antagonist or--he is not clear even as to their number--antagonists. The villain could be a ghost, a demon, or some sort of monster with fangs and claws. He is ambiguous as to the creature’s origin as well. Local residents believe that it is associated with the Martense mansion atop Tempest Mountain. However, the narrator of the story, who is also the narrative’s protagonist, suggests that it may be linked to the weather--particularly, to the thunder. (The mansion and the weather, in fact, may themselves be connected in some way, as the house’s location, atop a mountain that takes its very name from a storm, or “tempest,” suggests.) Lovecraft’s multiplication of these possibilities is only one instance of such multiplications to be found in “The Lurking Fear.” On one occasion, the protagonist is certain that the creature is “organic,” or corporeal, but, later, he is just as sure that it is incorporeal. Obviously, it cannot be both, so which is it, tangible or intangible?

Another way by which Lovecraft multiplies possibilities (and therefore promotes ambiguity) in his tale is by suggesting several possibilities as to the creature’s point of origin. It is said to dwell in “some secret place.” Is it located in the house, in Jan Martense’s grave, in an underground tunnel, in the “odd mounds and hummocks of the region,” or elsewhere? Indeed, at times, it seems to drop out of the sky. Is it of an aerial nature? Neither the protagonist nor his companions, George Bennett and William Tobey, staying overnight in the mansion, know whether to expect the ghost, the demon, or the clawed monster to attack them from within or from without the house, so they are careful to suspend three rope-ladders from the ledge on the wall outside the room, one for each of them, in the event that the monster’s assault is from outside rather from inside the house. When the creature abducts Bennett and Tobey, it’s as if the men simply ceased to exist: they are simply gone, leaving “no trace, not even of a struggle,” and are “never heard of again.” Repeatedly, the reader wonders just what sort of threat it is that the protagonist faces. There are clues aplenty as to its possible identity, but none of them add up. All is confused and ambiguous. Therefore, and thereby, the story’s horror is increased, and its terror mounts.

As do Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Dan Simmons, Robert McCammon, James Rollins, and other masters of the horror genre, past and present, Lovecraft both captures the sense of the numinous described by Otto and suggests the “Heavenly Hurt” spoken of by Dickinson--two characteristics that are, as much as the madness, monsters, mayhem, and terror, the hallmarks of horror fiction, representing “the certain slant of light” that illuminates the interests of its writers, readers, critics, and aficionados. In the pages (or upon the screen) of horror fiction, we are in the presence, often, of a “wholly other” force that is overpowering, urgent, and fascinating. Of course, it also happens, more often than not, to be destructive and deadly. It may be a horrible fate to encounter a demon after all, and, as Jonathan Edwards (and, less directly, Stephen King), warns us, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God," to be sure.

Threat Recognition: Keeping It Real

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Most of us, if we survive our childhoods--no easy task, often--develop the ability to distinguish threatening situations, plants, animals, and other people from their non-threatening counterparts. How do we manage to do such a feat, within seconds or less, as often as necessary (except during naps)? Most people would probably attribute this ability to “instinct,” and, certainly, instinct (whatever is meant by this word) could have be one way--maybe the only way--by which this feat is accomplished. However, it seems reasonable that there may be something more to it than just the action of a genetic automatic target-recognition sixth sense or gut feeling. In this post, we offer a few additional possibilities, leaving it to the psychologists to determine whether any of these ideas seem worth the time and trouble of writing a multi-million-dollar grant proposal. (If it is, and the proposal is successful, remember who made the whole thing possible!)

Predators, scientists tell us, whether they (the predators, not the scientists) are lions, tigers, bears, or your Aunt Matilda, have binocular vision, with their eyes facing forward to look straight ahead, rather than having sideways-oriented oracular organs as do, for example, wildebeests, impalas, deer, and Uncle Henry. Doesn’t it seem possible--or even probable--that, over the centuries prey might come to understand that if the eyes face forward, danger threatens?

Likewise, anything that’s bigger than oneself, whether oneself is a shrimp, a slug, a sparrow, a bunny rabbit, or Cousin Bertha, is likely to be able to kill one and should be, at least until proper introductions are made and a chaperone armed with a 12-gauge shotgun is present, avoided.

Speed, too, may be a red flag, even though many prey animals are fairly fleet-footed themselves. There’s probably a reason that snakes are lightning quick and cheetahs run as fast as a lot of Mustangs--over a short distance, anyway. A fast animal, especially if it’s also relatively large, like a lion or a bear or a shark, ought to be avoided. Likewise, anything that just looks weird or scary, such as a snake or a puffer fish, should generally be kept at bay.

Most plants look harmless (although the Venus flytrap’s pretty scary looking, with all those thorny--or toothy--things along the edges of their leaves). Prey animals can learn something from them and their bright-colored animal friends (or foes), too, though. Some plants, like some animals, mimic dangerous cousins (and, sometimes, grandparents). Bright colors, scientists tell us (possibly as a result of a little too much experimentation) often indicate poison, in both plants and animals, and some harmless ones imitate the dangerous ones by assuming the deadly varieties’ coloration. Anything that’s imitated--female impersonators, for instance--are best avoided.

Persons, places, or things that move--things that move?--Sure, we’re talking horror, right?--in numbers (killer bees, a school of piranhas, a pack or wolves or hyenas, a graveyard full of zombies--should, it goes without saying, be avoided, evaded, and otherwise eluded. (Remember The Birds?)

Sen. John McCain, a Republican in name only (RINO)

Anything that has something you don’t have--armor-quality skin, fangs, claws, spines, quills, thorns, rabies, or whatever--is also a no-no when it comes to even casual dating. Avoid these creatures; they are armed and dangerous.

By knowing what constitutes a potential threat, horror writers can lend verisimilitude to their stories by describing threats in reference to the features that may, to the plants and animals that have learned, as the victims of such bullies, what clues to look for, which, again, includes straight-ahead binocular vision, large size, fast speed, Technicolor apparel, a pack mentality, or some sort of organic weapon.

If the threat’s not human or animal or vegetable--if it’s some kind of machine, for example--a website such as that of Federation of American Scientists (listed among our “Recommended Sites” at the bottom of this column) can shed more light than heat, we hope, upon threat-recognition as it applies to enemy aircraft, artillery, poisons, and other weapons systems, at least.

In other words, you’re pretty safe with roses and daises--unless you’re allergic to pollen or there are killer bees about.

Remember, knowing what constitutes a threat--or the appearance of one--helps you to keep it real as a writer. Who knows? It may even save a life.

Note: The photographs that appear in this post are from the U.S. Government Photos and Graphics website. (In other words, you paid for them.)

Tag! You’re It!

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Occupy the seats. These three words summarize the box office imperative of movie theaters across the country. Since motion picture studios are in business to make money and, in their industry, making money is based upon selling tickets, movies, to be, must be perceived. To entice potential audience members, trailers or previews of movies are shown. Another tactic, besides advertising in general and the movie poster in particular, is the use of the movie tagline. A tagline is a short, sometimes witty, slogan that focuses readers’ attention upon specific features of the film--often its storyline. As we will see, though, a well-written tagline can intimate much more than simply the basic plot of its film. Since Chillers and Thrillers is concerned with the theory and practice of writing horror fiction, we’ll consider the taglines for movies in this genre. Makes sense, right? Some taglines suggest the identities of the protagonist and the antagonist and intimate the nature of the basic conflict between them. Of course, the antagonist is going to be in some way horrific, as is the struggle that takes place between the two main characters--we’re talking horror, after all, not romance--and, no, they’re not the same thing (not always, or necessarily, at any rate). Here’s an example:

His mind is her prison (The Cell).

This tagline suggests that the antagonist is likely to be a stalker. The tagline tells us that he is a male, and his prisoner is a female. His thoughts about the protagonist somehow imprison her. Apparently, he is obsessed with her. He is likely to have stalked her. Whether he has, in fact, kidnapped her is unspecified, but possible--even likely. This tagline is effective. In only five words, it identifies the type of protagonist (a victim) and antagonist (a stalker or a kidnapper) and the nature of the struggle between them. It also raises a few tantalizing questions. If she has been adducted, where is she being held captive (other than in his mind)? If “his mind is her prison,” is he a control freak and, perhaps, a sadist? If she is literally a captive, will she escape? If so, how? If not, why not? Does her captor kill her? In what manner, and why? Is torture involved? 

The title of the movie, The Cell, constitutes an effective play on words, for a cell can be a compartment in a jail or prison, but it is also the tiny, constituent structure of body organs, including the brain. “Mind” and “brain,” while not necessarily synonymous (depending upon one’s worldview), are often used more or less interchangeably. Therefore, the play on words links the mental state of the antagonist and the physical prison in which the antagonist is likely to be incarcerated, reinforcing the tagline’s message, “His mind is her prison.” 

The next tagline lacks a context (until one reads the title of the movie to which the tagline refers):

Bigger. Smarter. Faster. Meaner. (Deep Blue Sea)

What’s “bigger, smarter, faster, and meaner”? We aren’t told. Therefore, we’re free to imagine what these adjectives refer to. They could refer to a machine, to a new species resulting from bioengineering or eugenics, or to a robot or cyborg assassin. In fact, it’s a maritime threat, and the comparative forms of the adjectives in the tagline compare it, favorably, against the great white shark that appeared as the monster in Jaws. This tagline, in alluding to a previous movie, appeals to the fans of the Steven Spielberg film, but suggests that the movie to which it refers, Deep Blue Sea, will be even more chilling and thrilling than Jaws was. “If you liked Jaws,” it suggests, “you’ll love Deep Blue Sea.” After all, this movie, like its monster, will be “bigger, smarter, faster, and meaner” than Jaws. 

We can get out of most difficulties by using a variety of Freudian defense mechanisms or even simpler techniques such as lying, rationalizing, excusing, and blaming others (not that any of these tactics is justifiable or recommended). In fact, an aphorism suggests that there are but two things that one cannot avoid: death and taxes. This tagline offers a similar observation:

Death doesn’t take “no” for an answer (Final Destination).

Death is unavoidable; it “doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” Therefore, the grave is our “final destination,” as the title of the movie, in the context supplied to it by its tagline, suggests. Of course, the tagline also suggests that we’re in imminent danger: death has asked us to join him (or it), and he (or it) is awaiting our answer--which had better be “yes,” since “Death doesn’t take no for an answer.” Is there a fate worse than death? Hamlet thought so:

To be, or not to be--that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep-- No more--and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep-- To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There's the respect That makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th' unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprise of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. . . .

Many others, both fictional and living, believe the same thing, more or less, and are afraid that there may very well be “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in. . . [their] philosophy,” including, perhaps, hell. The fear of damnation, which still beats within the breasts of many, is the wellspring of terror upon which the following tagline depends for its gush of dread, implying that, as great as it may be to lose one’s life, the loss of one’s eternal soul is unimaginably worse:

You have nothing to lose but your soul (Lost Souls)

The next tagline refers to a game, and a common metaphor compares life to a game:

The game is far from over (Along Came a Spider)

Other types of games may spring to mind, too, such as the rather sadistic “game of cat and mouse,” wherein a predator amuses itself by tormenting its prey. If the game in question is life--and life, perhaps, spent in misery, as the victim of a sadist who amuses himself by tormenting his victim--and “the game is far from over,” a sense of horror asserts itself readily enough. (We were much more frightened when we thought that the tagline might refer to Hillary Clinton’s winning the White House! After all, she’s always assuring us--or herself, perhaps--that the Democratic primary, a game if ever there was one, “is far from over.”) Like most taglines, this one lacks a context--until the title of the movie with which it is associated is read. Along Came a Spider is taken from the “Little Miss Muffet” nursery rhyme:

Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet, Eating her curds and whey; Along came a spider, who sat down beside her And frightened Miss Muffet away.

Therefore, this tagline comprises a literary allusion. After describing a picture of innocence and everyday comfort (a little girl, dining), the tagline introduces a threat--the spider, an unwelcome intruder, which violates the heroine’s personal space, sitting “down beside her,” and frightens her. The tagline also suggests that the nursery rhyme has some bearing upon the movie’s plot, theme or, perhaps, its protagonist or antagonist (or both). If we haven’t yet seen the film, we may not be sure of the exact nature of the significance the nursery rhyme has in regard to the film, but we can be pretty certain that, whatever it is, it will be horrendous, and that it will involve the frightening intrusion of a threat upon an innocent. (In fact, the allusion is a bit more tenuous than we might anticipate; the movie turns out to be more of a thriller than a chiller, the Little Miss Muffet of which is a congressman’s daughter who is abducted from a private school by the kidnapper, or “spider.”) 

It seems that, everyday, we seek to impose our wills upon others or others attempt to impose their wills upon us. We seek constantly to make others do our bidding or to take upon themselves our likeness, just as others seek to do the same with regard to us. Sometimes, we acquiesce willingly. Other times, we allow ourselves to be used or changed or manipulated or controlled only under protest and duress. The next tagline suggests that the latter is likely to be the case in regard to those who may now be less than perfect (according to someone else’s standards) but need not worry, for, after all, they are about to undergo a metamorphosis, most likely against their will:

It doesn’t matter if you’re perfect. You will be (Disturbing Behavior).

Sure enough, the movie involves a plot by townspeople to transform their rebellious teens into perfect citizens. (Ironically, what’s “disturbing” about the teens’ behavior is that it’s literally too good to be true.)

Personification (the attribution of human characteristics or behaviors to animals or inanimate objects) is not uncommon in taglines, and this one makes use of this literary device, assigning “appetite” to the “night,” and transforming the darkness at day’s end, therefore, into something that is like to be beastly or monstrous (for, again, we’re talking horror movies here, not romances):

The night has an appetite (The Forsaken).

Most likely, the veterans of horror movie madness will think, this movie, The Forsaken (short, perhaps for The Godforsaken), deals with something on the order of vampires or werewolves. (In fact, the film’s antagonists are the undead.)

 

Mothers, God bless them, are more full of cautionary tales and aphorisms than the Bible. With their children’s best interests and welfare always at heart, they have a wise word for every occasion. They also have some verbal pearls to cast even when there is nothing particular about an upcoming event. These all-purpose pearls, of course, tend to be more general in scope than the occasion-specific gems. Here’s one of the more inclusive Mom Maxims:

Be careful who you trust (The Glass House).

Pretty sound advice, even if it’s a tad general--especially in a horror movie. Some people, we learn, are not worthy of our trust. The movie’s title calls to mind another aphorism: “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” meaning that the pot is ill-advised to call the kettle black, since it takes one to know one or something like that. In this movie, the glass house, however, turns out to be the home of the Glasses, Terrence and Erin, who are the former Malibu neighbors of two siblings whose parents are killed in a car crash. After their parents’ deaths, the children, Ruby and Rhett Baker, are taken in by the Glasses, who treat them well--at first. Ruby then finds some evidence that suggests that the Glasses, motivated by the chance to get their greedy hands on their new wards’ four-million-dollar trust fund, may have been responsible for her parents’ deaths. The Glasses are not as transparent as they seem; they have some dark secrets. Once again, Mom’s Maxims prove to be right on the money. (An alternate tagline for this movie is “It’s time to kick some Glass.”)

The next tagline speaks for itself:

What’s eating you? (Jeepers Creepers)

It doesn’t, really, of course. It’s only a rhetorical question, after all. Isn’t it? As it turns out, it can be taken literally: in the film, a pair of siblings, Darry and Patricia Jenner, on their way home through an isolated stretch of countryside during spring break, encounter a cannibalistic creature known as The Creeper. (The “What’s” part of the question suggests, on a figurative level, that there’s something the matter, emotionally, perhaps, with the person being eaten, as it were. On the literal level, the same part of the question implies that the identity of the devourer is unknown, perhaps mysterious or even monstrous, as though one were really asking “What in hell is eating you?”)

 

The movie’s title derives from part of a 1938 jazz song:

Jeepers Creepers, where’d you get those peepers? Jeepers Creepers, where’d you get those eyes? Gosh, all get up! How’d they get so lit up? Gosh, all get up! How’d they get that size? Golly gee! When you turn those heaters on, woe is me! Got to get my cheaters on. Jeepers Creepers, Where’d you get those peepers? Oh, those weepers! How they hypnotize! Where’d you get those eyes? Where’d you get those eyes? Where’d you get those eyes?

The tagline for Jeepers Creepers II maintains the allusion to eating, but defines the moviegoer as the monster’s food: “He can taste your fear.”

 

Shamelessly, the tagline for The Fly--in which fly DNA gets scrambled with the human DNA of a mad scientist who, having too much time on his hands, is working out the kinks of a teleportation device that disassembles matter and reassembles it elsewhere--tells the potential audience just how they should feel while whiling away the hours in front of the screen showing this movie:

Be afraid. Be very afraid (The Fly).

The next tagline identifies the setting--a place far more remote than the locales in which the action of most horror movies takes place--and suggests that something dreadful is going to take place therein, something that would make its victims scream:

In space, no one can hear you scream (Alien).

Why do people scream when they’re afraid? “Duh! Because they’re afraid!” is the obvious answer, but, according to evolutionary biologists there’s another, somewhat more profound reason for this unseemly behavior. Screaming is the human equivalent of an air-raid siren, a car alarm, or an emergency vehicle siren: to annoy the hell out of everyone who hears it’s incessant, screeching wail. No, really, the purpose is to alert, to alarm, to warn, to get others’ attention. It’s a cry for help. The fact that “in space, no one can hear you scream” adds another layer to the distress of the victim, heightening the horror of the injured party’s fate, because screaming, as an attention-getter, is of no avail: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

 

There are many, many other taglines, and we may analyze a few more in other posts, but, for now, let’s consider what these slogan-like ad pitches teach us about writing horror:

• They describe a basic situation that lacks a context, the context being provided by the title of the film for which the tagline is a pitch, making a sort of game out of the two elements (title and tagline).
• They pique our interest by identifying the main characters (protagonist and antagonist) and suggesting the nature of the conflict between them.
• They include plays on words that associate literal with figurative meanings, relating physical actions to emotional states.
• They allude to similar films, suggesting that they are better (read scarier) than their competitors.
• They confront their audience with a powerful, apparently unstoppable foe.
• They personify non-human threats.
• They place characters in nearly impossible situations that are likely to get them dismembered or killed (or both).

An opening paragraph in a short story, the first chapter of a novel, or the first fifteen minutes or so of a movie that accomplishes one of these feats is likely to hook its reader or viewer, too.

The aspiring writer isn’t--or shouldn’t be--too proud to beg, borrow, or steal--well, not steal, maybe--effective techniques wherever he or she may find them, including the lowly motion picture tagline. Nothing succeeds like success, after all, and, yes, sometimes “brevity” certainly is “the soul of wit,” as Shakespeare’s Polonius advised.

Fictional Stories as Thought Experiments

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

According to James Robert Brown’s article in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, thought experiments are “devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things.” (This definition makes fiction itself a grand and complex thought experiment, we may argue.) Among the more famous of such experiments are “Newton’s bucket, Maxwell’s demon, Einstein’s elevator, Heisenberg’s gamma-ray microscope, and Shrodinger’s cat”:

Schrödinger's cat. . . does not show that quantum theory (as interpreted by Bohr) is internally inconsistent. Rather it shows that it is conflict with some very powerful common sense beliefs we have about macro-sized objects such as cats. The bizarreness of superpositions in the atomic world is worrisome enough, says Schrödinger, but when it implies that same bizarreness at an everyday level, it is intolerable. . . . Einstein's elevator showed that light will bend in a gravitational field; Maxwell's demon showed that entropy could be decreased. . . . Newton's bucket showed that space is a thing in its own right; Parfit's splitting persons showed that survival is a more important notion than identity when considering personhood (“Thought Experiments”).

Thought experiments are just as important to philosophy, Brown observes, as they have proven to be to science: “Much of ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind is based firmly on the results of thought experiments,” and, to illustrate his observation, he identifies several of the more important philosophical thought experiments: “Thompson's violinist, Searle's Chinese room, Putnam's twin earth, Parfit's people who split like an amoeba.” (We might add the example of the philosophical zombie, discussed in a previous post, as well.)

Describing an early thought experiment, which appears in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Brown identifies three “common features of thought experiments”: “We visualize some situation; we carry out an operation; we see what happens.”

Like special effects, thought experiments can be conducted even when actual conditions or moral considerations make an actual experiment impossible or objectionable.

Occasionally, thought experiments might help to revolutionize scientific theory as well, according to Thomas Kuhn: “a well-conceived thought experiment can bring on a crisis or at least create an anomaly in the reigning theory and so contribute to paradigm change” (Brown). For additional benefits from, and some objections that scientists and philosophers have advanced concerning the use of thought experiments, those which were conducted by the likes of Newton and Einstein notwithstanding, check out Brown’s article (liked above).

We suggest that, before science, there were also thought experiments, called fiction (or, before fiction was recognized as invented rather than of an inspired or an empirical origin), as myths, folktales, and legends. Ancient Greek (and Egyptian and Norse) myths were of special significance in establishing the ways by which storytellers and their audiences (pretty much all of any society of the time) understood, thought about, and interpreted themselves and the world around them. Such stories, from time to time, also sought to investigate the possibilities of human existence and of nature. At such times as these, the myths became what we could call narrative or dramatic thought experiments. Even today, stories, especially in the fantasy and science fiction genres, continue to pose and conduct thought experiments about all aspects of human existence and nature itself. Horror fiction also conducts such experiments on occasion (as the popularity of the mad scientist, for example, suggests).

Brown’s analysis of Lucretius’ thought experiment led him to posit three features characteristic of all thought experiments: “We visualize some situation; we carry out an operation; we see what happens.” The what-if mode of envisioning stories (an abbreviated way of saying “What might happen if”), common, once again, to fantasy and science fiction (and to alternate history stories) virtually demands such an approach, at least at times, but horror fiction and literature in other genres can do so, too. In horror fiction, we might ask, “What if a chemical compound could, when ingested, cause abnormally large growth in the animals that had consumed it?” The result of this visualization of a specific situation, carried out by the telling of the tale, might be H. G. Wells’ The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, in which the result is shown to be an imminent war between the haves (the “Children of the Food” and the have-nots (the “Pygmies”) to determine whether growth shall win out over the non-growth of the status quo.

Unhampered by modern science’s knowledge of natural laws, Greek myths (as well as those of other ancient nations) asked what-if questions with the abandonment that can result only from the naiveté of the abysmally ignorant:

• What if a person (or maybe a demon) could assume whatever shape it chose, for as long as it chose to do so?
• What if a person were of gigantic size and had a single eye in the middle of his forehead?
• What if a creature were half-man and half-horse?What if a creature were half-woman and half-fish?
• What if a horse, having wings, could fly?
• What if men and women lived forever and could rule over various aspects of nature?
• What if one man had the strength of twenty men?
• What if women could fight as good as--no, better than--men?
• What if a woman had a baby after being raped by the devil?
• What if God mated with a mortal woman?
• What if a house were haunted by a vengeful ghost?

Horror fiction asks similar (or, indeed, on occasion, identical) questions, but with an emphasis on the horrific:

• What if a person (or maybe a demon) could assume whatever shape it chose, for as long as it chose to do so? (It)
• What if a demon could animate a corpse? (Dracula)
• What if the spirits of the dead exist in some shadowy manner and can interact with humans? (The Turn of the Screw)
• What if a scientist could cause a body constructed of parts from corpses to live again? (Frankenstein)
• What if a man could change into a wolf and back again into a man? (The Howling)
• What if a woman, raped by the devil, gave birth to a son? (Rosemary’s Baby)
• What if a child abuser, torched by his victims’ parents, returned as a vengeful bogeyman? (Nightmare on Elm Street) \
• What if an extraterrestrial female came to earth, seeking a mate? (Species)
• What if vampires came to a small town in modern America? (‘Salem’s Lot)
• What if a modern-day Cinderella with telekinetic powers had a terrible time at the ball? (Carrie)
• What if myths were based upon true incidents or creatures? (Dominion)
• What if the earth were invaded by a Martian military force (The War of the Worlds)
• What if a scientist tried to create an intelligent, hybrid human-animal species? (The Island of Dr. Moreau)
• What if a brain could survive inside a decapitated head on life-support? (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die)
• What if an extraterrestrial creature, trapped in a block of ice, were thawed out by a group of scientists operating an arctic research laboratory? (The Thing)

These and countless other what-if questions allow writers to envision a situation that is improbable or impossible in nature or because of moral concerns, carry out a thought experiment (writing or reading the resulting story), and see what happens. Different genres appeal to different concerns and respond to different issues:

• Adventure appeals to the desire to escape and to explore new worlds.
• Detective and mystery stories appeal to the desire to solve a puzzle and to see that justice is served.
• Fantasy appeals to the desire for experience wonder and awe.
• Horror appeals to the desire to survive against seemingly impossible odds and to endure great losses and suffering.
• Science fiction appeals to one’s innate curiosity about the world and the desire to discern the realities behind appearances.
• Romance appeals to the desire to meet and marry Mr. Right.
• Westerns appeal to the desire for law, order, and justice, especially for the underdog.

Each genre of fiction is apt to pose imaginary (and imaginative) situations that, peculiarly appropriate to their own purposes, allow writers and readers to “carry out an operation” and “see what happens” with regard to the genres’ own special interests and concerns. As much as the myths, legends, and folktales of yesteryear, contemporary fiction, including horror stories, remains a vast and complex series of never-ending thought experiments that can draw upon not only science and philosophy but also theology, art, and all other cultural realms and practical aspects of human existence.

Source cited

Brown, James Robert. "Thought Experiments.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2007.

Going Through the Motions, or The Physics of Fiction

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Viewing a subject from an unfamiliar or little-used perspective renews one’s own appreciation and understanding of the matter, making the familiar appear strange and new again. In The Physics of Superheroes, Professor James Kakalios, himself a physicist, provides such a vantage point as he applies the principles of physics to the powers of costumed crime fighters with superhuman abilities in order to explain why they could perform the feats they routinely perform (or, in some cases, why they could not perform such deeds), given the willing suspension of disbelief that is required to accept the premise that these characters can perform such exploits to begin with, the “miracle exception” that represents “the one thing you have to buy into to make the superhero plausible” and that allows “the rest that follows” to “be consistent with science” (15). The various superheroes whose mighty deeds Kakalios considers comprise a true who’s who list of caped crusaders (and a few super villains), including Superman, Spider-man, Flash, and Ant-man (in “Section 1” of his book, concerning “Mechanics”) and Flash, The Atom, the X-Men, Superman, Electro, Superboy, Magneto, Iron Man, and others (in "Section 2" of his book, concerning "Energy--Heat and Light.") It’s an interesting book for bookworms like Peter Parker and geeks of all ages.

We’re interested in the book for reasons of our own, though, which pertain to the theory and practice of writing horror fiction. The principles that Kakalios uses to explain the actions of the superheroes and villains in DC and Marvel Comics also explain how, if not always exactly why, horror fiction chills and thrills its readers, offering a fresh way of seeing the effects of dramatic structure and plotting.

In the first section of The Physics of Superheroes, Kakalios reminds his readers of the “three laws of motion” laid down by Sir Isaac Newton:

1. An object at rest remains at rest, or if moving remains moving in a straight line if no external forces act upon it.
2. If an external force is applied, the object’s motion will change in either magnitude or direction, and the rate of change of the motion (its acceleration) when multiplied by the object’s mass is equal to the applied force.
3. For every force applied to an object there is an equal and opposite force exerted back by the object (24-25).

Let’s apply these laws of motion to the horror story plot (or, for that matter, any other type of plot).

According to Gustav Freytag, an incident in the story’s plot sets everything that follows it into motion. This incident, called the inciting moment, is like a spark that starts a fire or, in terms of Newton’s laws of motion, it is the external force that changes the plot-as-object’s motion, causing it to take a new direction. Were it not for the inciting moment, the plot would continue forward, in a straight line, so to speak, rather than changing direction as it begins its upward climb which commences what Freytag calls the plot’s rising action.

The third law of motion is also useful as a means of envisioning what writers, literary critics, and readers call conflict, for it is the “force applied” by the protagonist to the antagonist, or “object,” countered by the “equal and opposite force exerted back” by the antagonist that balances the story’s action (at least until the turning point, a second inciting moment of sorts, which intervenes to set the plot off in a new, downward direction, as it were, Freytag’s falling action.

As Kakalios points out, the second law of motion (“If an external force is applied, the object’s motion will change in either magnitude or direction, and the rate of change of the motion (its acceleration) when multiplied by the object’s mass is equal to the applied force”) can be represented by the mathematical formula F = ma, wherein F = force, m = mass, and a = acceleration (25). (Acceleration differs from velocity, Kakalios reminds his readers. The former refers to the change in speed over time, whereas the latter refers to the change in speed over distance [30].) Mass is simply a measure of how many atoms make up an object. A piece of plastic is made up of relatively few atoms, whereas lead is comprised of many more atoms, packed, as it were, in an equal amount of space. The more atoms-per-space (mass) and the greater the rate of acceleration, the more force results. In terms of story plotting, we mentally replace atoms with narrative incidents (or, in description, perhaps with action verbs and shorter sentences). The more incidents, action verbs, and sentences we “pack” into a passage, the greater its force, or narrative effect, upon the reader. It seems that Edgar Allan Poe has something similar to this concept, minus the physical laws of motion, in mind, when he argues, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” that a shorter story, especially one that can be read in “a single sitting,” without interruption, has a greater effect upon its readers than a longer story which is, in effect, simply a series of shorter stories told successively and related to one another through cause and effect. To make a story more horrifying, speed up the action (writing action verb-packed short sentences in a rapid-fire series of narrative incidents); to slow the pace and the story’s effect (horror), slow down the same process.

It seems that, understood figuratively, Newton’s laws of motion apply to plotting horror fiction (and other literary genres) as much as they do to physical and mechanical motion.

Source cited

Kakalios, James. The Physics of Superheroes. New York: Gotham Books, 2005.

Contemporary Horror Fiction Bookshelf

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In other posts, we have dropped the names of several of the horror genre’s greatest authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and H. P. Lovecraft. In addition, in his 10-part series concerning “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft himself lists many additional big names among the masters of the genre. What’s missing is a roster of the names of horror fiction’s contemporary masters. This post fills this gap on the horror fiction bookshelf by naming the names of many of those who are missing in action, so to speak.

A word or two of explanation is in order, though, for those who are new to this type of reading. First, contemporary horror fiction tends, more so, in many cases, than its predecessors, to mix various other genres with its own, so that science fiction, fantasy, detective, adventure, folklore, myth, legend, and even romance and Western elements become part and parcel of the bogeyman stories. That’s quite a literary stew, but anyone who follows any literary genre long enough will find that, along the way, whatever path it takes, it will include, from time to time, not only elements from other types of fiction, but also a good many themes and topics from such academic disciplines as theology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, geography, geology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, botany, zoology, astronomy, history, art, and a host of others. Fiction’s value lies, largely, in fact, in its capacity to impinge upon all these territories, bringing together in dramatic or narrative form, the whole experience of humanity. Horror fiction is no exception. For this reason, expect to find, in the works of the authors whose works belong to the contemporary horror fiction bookshelf many of these other literary genres and academic disciplines. Second, even a list of contemporary horror fiction won’t likely to be exhaustive. This one certainly won’t be. Rather, it offers a roster of many of the names of writers who are writing today whose names would show up on almost anyone’s list of such authors. Once one becomes a fan of horror fiction, he or she will no doubt find additional writers to add to his or her own contemporary horror fiction bookshelf. The names in this post are a start, and a good and reliable one at that. (The works listed are novels; short stories, although, in some cases, they are numerous, are not included in the list.) As with all writers, some of their works are better than others; I have indicated the ones I found to be superior in red font.

Stephen King: Bag of Bones, Black House, Blaze (written as Richard Bachman), Carrie, Cell, Christine, The Colorado Kid (detective, rather than horror), Cujo, Cycle of the Werewolf (illustrated), The Dark Half, The Dark Tower series (seven novels), The Dead Zone, Desperation (companion novel to The Regulators), Dolores Claiborne, Dreamcatcher, Duma Key, The Eyes of the Dragon, Firestarter, From a Buick 8, Gerald’s Game, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Green Mile, Insomnia, It, Lisey’s Story, The Long Walk, Misery, Needful Things, Pet Semetary, The Plant, Rage, The Regulators (companion novel to Desperation), Roadwork (written as Richard Bachman), Rose Madder, The Running Man (written as Richard Bachman), ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Talisman (written with Peter Straub), Thinner (written as Richard Bachman), Tommyknockers. (King’s official website).

Dean Koontz: Odd Hours, The Good Guy, Brother Odd, The Husband, Forever Odd, Frankenstein (three-book series; two have been written to date), Velocity, Life Expectancy, The Taking, Odd Thomas, The Face, By the Light of the Moon, One Door Away from Heaven, From the Corner of His Eye, False Memory, Seize the Night, Fear Nothing, Sole Survivor, Tick Tock, Intensity, Icebound, Strange Highways, Dark Rivers of the Heart, Winter Moon, Mr. Murder, Hideaway, Cold Fire, The Servants of Twilight, Shadowfires, The Bad Place, Midnight, Lightning, Watchers, Twilight Eyes, The Mask, Whispers, The Funhouse, The Voice of Night, The Key to Midnight, The Vision, Face of Fear, Night Chills, Invasion, Dragonfly. (Koontz has also written a number of science fiction novels, the genre with which he started his career. He wrote some of these novels and others under various pen names: David Axton, Brian Coffey, Deanna Dwyer, K. R. Dwyer, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Anthony North, Richard Paige, Owen West, Aaron Wolfe, and Leonard Chris. Although Koontz denies it, some researchers contend that, much to his current regret and dismay, under the Leonard Chris pen name, Koontz wrote a 1970 erotic potboiler, Hung, and, according to Stu Weaver, Koontz may also have written “13 other erotica titles under as many as 5 other pseudonyms.”). Koontz and his dog Trixie maintain a website.

Bentley Little: The Academy, The Vanishing, The Burning, Dispatch, The Resort, The Policy, The Return, The Association, The Walking, The Town, The Ignored, The House, The Store, Dominion, University, The Summoning, Death Instinct (written as Phillip Emmons), The Mailman, The Revelation. Little does not maintain a website.

Robert McCammon: The Queen of Bedlam, Speaks the Nightbird, Gone South, Boy’s Life, Blue World, MINE, The Wolf’s Hour, Stinger, Swan Song, Usher’s Passing, Mystery Walk, They Thirst, The Night Boat, Bethany’s Sin, Baal. (McCammon’s official website is robertmccammon.com).

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child: Relic, Reliquary, Cabinet of Curiosities, Still Life with Crows, Brimstone, Dance of Death, Book of the Dead, Wheel of Darkness, Mount Dragon, Riptide, Thunderhead, The Ice Limit. (Both Preston and Child have also written both novels and non-fiction separately, under their own individual bylines--Child has written Death Match and Deep Storm; Preston has written Monster of Florence, Blasphemy, Tyrannosaur Canyon, The Codex, Cities of Gold, Ribbons of Time, The Royal Road, Jennie, and Dinosaurs in the Attic). The authors maintain a joint website, located at Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child).

James Rollins: Amazonia, Deep Fathom, Excavation, Subterranean, Ice Hunt, Sandstorm, Map of Bones, Black Order, The Last Oracle. (Rollins maintains a website at jamesrollins.com).

Dan Simmons: Carrion Comfort, Song of Kali, Summer of Night, Children of the Night, Fires of Eden, A Winter’s Haunting. (Simmons, who also writes science fiction, thrillers, and mainstream novels, maintains an official website at dansimmons.com).

Guest Speaker: H. P. Lovecraft: Supernatural Horror In Literature, Part X

X. The Modern Masters

The best horror-tales of today, profiting by the long evolution of the type, possess a naturalness, convincingness, artistic smoothness, and skilful intensity of appeal quite beyond comparison with anything in the Gothic work of a century or more ago. Technique, craftsmanship, experience, and psychological knowledge have advanced tremendously with the passing years, so that much of the older work seems naive and artificial; redeemed, when redeemed at all, only by a genius which conquers heavy limitations. The tone of jaunty and inflated romance, full of false motivation and investing every conceivable event with a counterfeit significance and carelessly inclusive glamour, is now confined to lighter and more whimiscal phases of supernatural writing. Serious weird stories are either made realistically intense by close consistency and perfect fidelity to Nature except in the one supernatural direction which the author allows himself, or else cast altogether in the realm of phantasy, with atmosphere cunningly adapted to the visualisation of a delicately exotic world of unreality beyond space and time, in which almost anything may happen if it but happen in true accord with certain types of imagination and illusion normal to the sensitive human brain. This, at least, is the dominant tendency; though of course many great contemporary writers slip occasionally into some of the flashy postures of immature romanticism or into bits of the equally empty and absurd jargon of pseudo-scientific "occultism," now at one of its periodic high tides.

Arthur Machen

Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen, author of some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness. Mr. Machen, a general man of letters and master of an exquisitely lyrical and expressive prose style, has perhaps put more conscious effort into his picaresque Chronicles of Clemendy, his refreshing essays, his vivid autobiographical volumes, his fresh and spirited translations, and above all his memorable epic of the sensitive æsthetic mind, The Hill of Dreams, in which the youthful hero responds to the magic of that ancient Welsh environment which is the author's own, and lives a dream-life in the Roman city of Isca Silurum, now shrunk to the relic-strown village of Caerleon-on-Usk. But the fact remains that his powerful horror-material of the nineties and earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in its class, and marks a distinct epoch in the history of this literary form.

Mr. Machen, with an impressionable Celtic heritage linked to keen youthful memories of the wild domed hills, archaic forests, and cryptical Roman ruins of the Gwent countryside, has developed an imaginative life of rare beauty, intensity, and historic background. He has absorbed the mediaeval mystery of dark woods and ancient customs, and is a champion of the Middle Ages in all things--including the Catholic faith. He has yielded, likewise, to the spell of the Britanno-Roman life which once surged over his native region; and finds strange magic in the fortified camps, tessellated pavements, fragments of statues, and kindred things which tell of the day when classicism reigned and Latin was the language of the country. A young American poet, Frank Belknap Long, has well summarised this dreamer's rich endowments and wizardry of expression in the sonnet "On Reading Arthur Machen":

There is a glory in the autumn wood,
The ancient lanes of England wind and climb
Past wizard oaks and gorse and tangled thyme
To where a fort of mighty empire stood:
There is a glamour in the autumn sky;
The reddened clouds are writhing in the glow
Of some great fire, and there are glints below
Of tawny yellow where the embers die.
I wait, for he will show me, clear and cold,
High-rais'd in splendour, sharp against the North,
The Roman eagles, and through mists of gold
The marching legions as they issue forth:
I wait, for I would share with him again
The ancient wisdom, and the ancient pain.

Of Mr. Machen's horror-tales the most famous is perhaps The Great God Pan (1894) which tells of a singular and terrible experiment and its consequences. A young woman, through surgery of the brain-cells, is made to see the vast and monstrous deity of Nature, and becomes an idiot in consequence, dying less than a year later. Years afterward a strange, ominous, and foreign-looking child named Helen Vaughan is placed to board with a family in rural Wales, and haunts the woods in unaccountable fashion. A little boy is thrown out of his mind at sight of someone or something he spies with her, and a young girl comes to a terrible end in similar fashion. All this mystery is strangely interwoven with the Roman rural deities of the place, as sculptured in antique fragments. After another lapse of years, a woman of strangely exotic beauty appears in society, drives her husband to horror and death, causes an artist to paint unthinkable paintings of Witches' Sabbaths, creates an epidemic of suicide among the men of her acquaintance, and is finally discovered to be a frequenter of the lowest dens of vice in London, where even the most callous degenerates are shocked at her enormities. Through the clever comparing of notes on the part of those who have had word of her at various stages of her career, this woman is discovered to be the girl Helen Vaughan, who is the child--by no mortal father--of the young woman on whom the brain experiment was made. She is a daughter of hideous Pan himself, and at the last is put to death amidst horrible transmutations of form involving changes of sex and a descent to the most primal manifestations of the life-principle.

But the charm of the tale is in the telling. No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds without following fully the precise order in which Mr. Machen unfolds his gradual hints and revelations. Melodrama is undeniably present, and coincidence is stretched to a length which appears absurd upon analysis; but in the malign witchery of the tale as a whole these trifles are forgotten, and the sensitive reader reaches the end with only an appreciative shudder and a tendency to repeat the words of one of the characters: "It is too incredible, too monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world....Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare."

Less famous and less complex in plot than The Great God Pan, but definitely finer in atmosphere and general artistic value, is the curious and dimly disquieting chronicle called The White People, whose central portion purports to be the diary or notes of a little girl whose nurse has introduced her to some of the forbidden magic and soul-blasting traditions of the noxious witch-cult--the cult whose whispered lore was handed down long lines of peasantry throughout Western Europe, and whose members sometimes stole forth at night, one by one, to meet in black woods and lonely places for the revolting orgies of the Witches' Sabbath. Mr. Machen's narrative, a triumph of skilful selectiveness and restraint, accumulates enormous power as it flows on in a stream of innocent childish prattle, introducing allusions to strange "nymphs," "Dols," "voolas," "white, green, and scarlet ceremonies," "Aklo letters," "Chian language," "Mao games," and the like. The rites learned by the nurse from her witch grandmother are taught to the child by the time she is three years old, and her artless accounts of the dangerous secret revelations possess a lurking terror generously mixed with pathos. Evil charms well known to anthropologists are described with juvenile naiveté, and finally there comes a winter afternoon journey into the old Welsh hills, performed under an imaginative spell which lends to the wild scenery an added weirdness, strangeness, and suggestion of grotesque sentience. The details of this journey are given with marvellous vividness, and form to the keen critic a masterpiece of fantastic writing, with almost unlimited power in the intimation of potent hideousness and cosmic aberration. At length the child--whose age is then thirteen--comes upon a cryptic and banefully beautiful thing in the midst of a dark and inaccessible wood. In the end horror overtakes her in a manner deftly prefigured by an anecdote in the prologue, but she poisons herself in time. Like the mother of Helen Vaughan in The Great God Pan, she has seen that frightful deity. She is discovered dead in the dark wood beside the cryptic thing she found; and that thing--a whitely luminous statue of Roman workmanship about which dire mediæval rumours had clustered--is affrightedly hammered into dust by the searchers.

In the episodic novel of The Three Impostors, a work whose merit as a whole is somewhat marred by an imitation of the jaunty Stevenson manner, occur certain tales which perhaps represent the highwater mark of Machen's skill as a terror-weaver. Here we find in its most artistic form a favourite weird conception of the author's; the notion that beneath the mounds and rocks of the wild Welsh hills dwell subterraneously that squat primitive race whose vestiges gave rise to our common folk legends of fairies, elves, and the "little people," and whose acts are even now responsible for certain unexplained disappearances, and occasional substitutions of strange dark "changelings" for normal infants. This theme receives its finest treatment in the episode entitled "The Novel Of The Black Seal"; where a professor, having discovered a singular identity between certain characters scrawled on Welsh limestone rocks and those existing in a prehistoric black seal from Babylon, sets out on a course of discovery which leads him to unknown and terrible things. A queer passage in the ancient geographer Solinus, a series of mysterious disappearances in the lonely reaches of Wales, a strange idiot son born to a rural mother after a fright in which her inmost faculties were shaken; all these things suggest to the professor a hideous connection and a condition revolting to any friend and respecter of the human race. He hires the idiot boy, who jabbers strangely at times in a repulsive hissing voice, and is subject to odd epileptic seizures. Once, after such a seizure in the professor's study by night, disquieting odours and evidences of unnatural presences are found; and soon after that the professor leaves a bulky document and goes into the weird hills with feverish expectancy and strange terror in his heart. He never returns, but beside a fantastic stone in the wild country are found his watch, money, and ring, done up with catgut in a parchment bearing the same terrible characters as those on the black Babylonish seal and the rock in the Welsh mountains.

The bulky document explains enough to bring up the most hideous vistas. Professor Gregg, from the massed evidence presented by the Welsh disappearances, the rock inscription, the accounts of ancient geographers, and the black seal, has decided that a frightful race of dark primal beings of immemorial antiquity and wide former diffusion still dwell beneath the hills of unfrequented Wales. Further research has unriddled the message of the black seal, and proved that the idiot boy, a son of some father more terrible than mankind, is the heir of monstrous memories and possibilities. That strange night in the study the professor invoked "the awful transmutation of the hills" by the aid of the black seal, and aroused in the hybrid idiot the horrors of his shocking paternity. He "saw his body swell and become distended as a bladder, while the face blackened....." And then the supreme effects of the invocation appeared, and Professor Gregg knew the stark frenzy of cosmic panic in its darkest form. He knew the abysmal gulfs of abnormality that he had opened, and went forth into the wild hills prepared and resigned. He would meet the unthinkable "Little People"--and his document ends with a rational observation: "If unhappily I do not return from my journey, there is no need to conjure up here a picture of the awfulness of my fate."

Also in The Three Imposters is the "Novel of the White Powder," which approaches the absolute culmination of loathsome fright. Francis Leicester, a young law student nervously worn out by seclusion and overwork, has a prescription filled by an old apothecary none too careful about the state of his drugs. The substance, it later turns out, is an unusual salt which time and varying temperature have accidentally changed to something very strange and terrible; nothing less, in short, than the mediæval vinum sabbati, whose consumption at the horrible orgies of the Witches' Sabbath gave rise to shocking transformations and--if injudiciously used--to unutterable consequences. Innocently enough, the youth regularly imbibes the powder in a glass of water after meals; and at first seems substantially benefited. Gradually, however, his improved spirits take the form of dissipation; he is absent from home a great deal, and appears to have undergone a repellent psychological change. One day an odd livid spot appears on his right hand, and he afterward returns to his seclusion; finally keeping himself shut within his room and admitting none of the household. The doctor calls for an interview, and departs in a palsy of horror, saying that he can do no more in that house. Two weeks later the patient's sister, walking outside, sees a monstrous thing at the sickroom window; and servants report that food left at the locked door is no longer touched. Summons at the door bring only a sound of shuffling and a demand in a thick gurgling voice to be let alone. At last an awful happening is reported by a shuddering housemaid. The ceiling of the room below Leicester's is stained with a hideous black fluid, and a pool of viscid abomination has dripped to the bed beneath. Dr. Haberden, now persuaded to return to the house, breaks down the young man's door and strikes again and again with an iron bar at the blasphemous semiliving thing he finds there. It is "a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing." Burning points like eyes shine out of its midst, and before it is dispatched it tries to lift what might have been an arm. Soon afterward the physician, unable to endure the memory of what he has beheld, dies at sea while bound for a new life in America. Mr. Machen returns to the dæmoniac "Little People" in "The Red Hand" and "The Shining Pyramid"; and in "The Terror," a wartime story, he treats with very potent mystery the effect of man's modern repudiation of spirituality on the beasts of the world, which are thus led to question his supremacy and to unite for his extermination. Of utmost delicacy, and passing from mere horror into true mysticism, is "The Great Return," a story of the Graal, also a product of the war period. Too well known to need description here is the tale of The Bowmen; which, taken for authentic narration, gave rise to the widespread legend of the "Angels of Mons"--ghosts of the old English archers of Crecy and Agincourt who fought in 1914 beside the hard-pressed ranks of England's glorious "Old Contemptibles."

Algernon Blackwood

Less intense than Mr. Machen in delineating the extremes of stark fear, yet infinitely more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours is the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose voluminous and uneven work may be found some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination.

Mr. Blackwood's lesser work is marred by several defects such as ethical didacticism, occasional insipid whimsicality, the flatness of benignant supernaturalism, and a too free use of the trade jargon of moder "occultism." A fault of his more serious efforts is that diffuseness and long-windedness which results from an excessively elaborate attempt, under the handicap of a somewhat bald and journalistic style devoid of intrinsic magic, colour, and vitality, to visualise precise sensations and nuances of uncanny suggestion. But in spite of all this, the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, and evoke as does nothing else in literature an awed convinced sense of the imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities.

The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood's fiction includes both novels and shorter tales, the latter sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series. Foremost of all must be reckoned The Willows, in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note. Another amazingly potent though less artistically finished tale is "The Wendigo," where we are confronted by horrible evidences of a vast forest dæmon about which North Woods lumbermen whisper at evening. The manner in which certain footprints tell certain unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship. In "An Episode in a Lodging House" we behold frightful presences summoned out of black space by a sorcerer, and "The Listener" tells of the awful psychic residuum creeping about an old house where a leper died. In the volume titled Incredible Adventures occur some of the finest tales which the author has yet produced, leading the fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to secret and terrible aspects lurking behind stolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and pyramids of Egypt; all with a serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a cruder or lighter treatment would merely amuse. Some of these accounts are hardly stories at all, but rather studies in elusive impressions and half-remembered snatches of dream. Plot is everywhere negligible, and atmosphere reigns untrammelled.

John Silence--Physician Extraordinary is a book of five related tales, through which a single character runs his triumphant course. Marred only by traces of the popular and conventional detective-story atmosphere--for Dr. Silence is one of those benevolent geniuses who employ their remarkable powers to aid worthy fellow-men in difficulty--these narratives contain some of the author's best work, and produce an illusion at once emphatic and lasting. The opening tale, “A Psychical Invasion,” relates what befell a sensitive author in a house once the scene of dark deeds, and how a legion of fiends was exorcised. “Ancient Sorceries,” perhaps the finest tale in the book, gives an almost hypnotically vivid account of an old French town where once the unholy Sabbath was kept by all the people in the form of cats. In “The Nemesis of Fire” a hideous elemental is evoked by new-spilt blood, whilst “Secret Worship” tells of a German school where Satanism held sway, and where long afterward an evil aura remained. “The Camp of the Dog” is a werewolf tale, but is weakened by moralisation and professional "occultism."

Too subtle, perhaps, for definite classification as horror-tales, yet possibly more truly artistic in an absolute sense, are such delicate phantasies as "Jimbo" or "The Centaur." Mr. Blackwood achieves in these novels a close and palpitant approach to the inmost substance of dream, and works enormous havoc with the conventional barriers between reality and imagination.

Unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of iridescently exotic vision, is Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany, whose tales and short plays form an almost unique element in our literature. Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of surprising folklore, Lord Dunsany stands dedicated to a strange world of fantastic beauty, and pledged to eternal warfare against the coarseness and ugliness of diurnal reality. His point of view is the most truly cosmic of any held in the literature of any period. As sensitive as Poe to dramatic values and the significance of isolated words and details, and far better equipped rhetorically through a simple lyric style based on the prose of the King James Bible, this author draws with tremendous effectiveness on nearly every body of myth and legend within the circle of European culture; producing a composite or eclectic cycle of phantasy in which Eastern colour, Hellenic form, Teutonic sombreness and Celtic wistfulness are so superbly blended that each sustains and supplements the rest without sacrifice or perfect congruity and homogeneity. In most cases Dunsany's lands are fabulous--"beyond the East," or "at the edge of the world." His system of original personal and place names, with roots drawn from classical, Oriental, and other sources, is a marvel of versatile inventiveness and poetic discrimination; as one may see from such specimens as "Argimenes," "Bethmoora," "Poltarnees," "Camorak," "Iluriel," or "Sardathrion."

Lord Dunsany

Beauty rather than terror is the keynote of Dunsany's work. He loves the vivid green of jade and of copper domes, and the delicate flush of sunset on the ivory minarets of impossible dream-cities. Humour and irony, too, are often present to impart a gentle cynicism and modify what might otherwise possess a naïve intensity. Nevertheless, as is inevitable in a master of triumphant unreality, there are occasional touches of cosmic fright which come well within the authentic tradition. Dunsany loves to hint slyly and adroitly of monstrous things and incredible dooms, as one hints in a fairy tale. In The Book of Wonder we read of Hlo-Hlo, the gigantic spider-idol which does not always stay at home; of what the Sphinx feared in the forest; of Slith, the thief who jumps over the edge of the world after seeing a certain light lit and knowing who lit it; of the anthropophagous Gibbelins, who inhabit an evil tower and guard a treasure; of the Gnoles, who live in the forest and from whom it is not well to steal; of the City of Never, and the eyes that watch in the Under Pits; and of kindred things of darkness. A Dreamer's Tales tells of the mystery that sent forth all men from Bethmoora in the desert; of the vast gate of Perdondaris, that was carved from a single piece of ivory; and of the voyage of poor old Bill, whose captain cursed the crew and paid calls on nasty-looking isles new-risen from the sea, with low thatched cottages having evil, obscure windows.

Many of Dunsany's short plays are replete with spectral fear. In The Gods of the Mountain seven beggars impersonate the seven green idols on a distant hill, and enjoy ease and honour in a city of worshippers until they hear that the real idols are missing from their wonted seats. A very ungainly sight in the dusk is reported to them--"rock should not walk in the evening"--and at last, as they sit awaiting the arrival of a troop of dancers, they note that the approaching footsteps are heavier than those of good dancers ought to be. Then things ensue, and in the end the presumptuous blasphemers are turned to green jade statues by the very walking statues whose sanctity they outraged. But mere plot is the very least merit of this marvellously effective play. The incidents and developments are those of a supreme master, so that the whole forms one of the most important contributions of the present age not only to drama, but to literature in general. A Night at an Inn tells of four thieves who have stolen the emerald eye of Klesh, a monstrous Hindoo god. They lure to their room and succeed in slaying the three priestly avengers who are on their track, but in the night Mesh comes gropingly for his eye; and having gained it and departed, calls each of the despoilers out into the darkness for an unnamed punishment. In The Laughter of the Gods there is a doomed city at the jungle's edge, and a ghostly lutanist heard only by those about to die (cf. Alice's spectral harpsichord in Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables); whilst The Queen's Enemies retells the anecdote of Herodotus in which a vengeful princess invites her foes to a subterranean banquet and lets in the Nile to drown them. But no amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's pervasive charm. His prismatic cities and unheard of rites are touched with a sureness which only mastery can engender, and we thrill with a sense of actual participation in his secret mysteries. To the truly imaginative he is a talisman and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream and fragmentary memory; so that we may think of him not only as a poet, but as one who makes each reader a poet as well.

M. R. James

At the opposite pole of genius from Lord Dunsany, and gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognized authority on mediæval manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples.

The art of Dr. James is by no means haphazard, and in the preface to one of his collections he has formulated three very sound rules for macabre composition. A ghost story, he believes, should have a familiar setting in the modern period, in order to approach closely the reader's sphere of experience. Its spectral phenomena, moreover, should be malevolent rather than beneficent; since fear is the emotion primarily to be excited. And finally, the technical patois of "occultism" or pseudo-science ought carefully to be avoided; lest the charm of casual verisimilitude be smothered in unconvincing pedantry.

Dr. James, practicing what he preaches, approaches his themes in a light and often conversational way. Creating the illusion of every-day events, he introduces his abnormal phenomena cautiously and gradually; relieved at every turn by touches of homely and prosaic detail, and sometimes spiced with a snatch or two of antiquarian scholarship. Conscious of the close relation between present weirdness and accumulated tradition, he generally provides remote historical antecedents for his incidents; thus being able to utilise very aptly his exhaustive knowledge of the past, and his ready and convincing command of archaic diction and colouring. A favourite scene for a James tale is some centuried cathedral, which the author can describe with all the familiar minuteness of a specialist in that field.

Sly humourous vignettes and bits of lifelike genre portraiture and characterisation are often to be found in Dr. James's narratives, and serve in his skilled hands to augment the general effect rather than to spoil it, as the same qualities would tend to do with a lesser craftsman. In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy--a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man--and usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes the spectre is of still more eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with spidery eyes, or an invisible entity which moulds itself in bedding and shows a face of crumpled linen. Dr. James has, it is clear, an intelligent and scientific knowledge of human nerves and feelings; and knows just how to apportion statement, imagery, and subtle suggestions in order to secure the best results with his readers. He is an artist in incident and arrangement rather than in atmosphere, and reaches the emotions more often through the intellect than directly. This method, of course, with its occasional absences of sharp climax, has its drawbacks as well as its advantages; and many will miss the thorough atmospheric tension which writers like Machen are careful to build up with words and scenes. But only a few of the tales are open to the charge of tameness. Generally the laconic unfolding of abnormal events in adroit order is amply sufficient to produce the desired effect of cumulative horror.

The short stories of Dr. James are contained in four small collections, entitled respectively Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, A Thin Ghost and Others, and A Warning to the Curious. There is also a delightful juvenile phantasy, The Five Jars, which has its spectral adumbrations. Amidst this wealth of material it is hard to select a favourite or especially typical tale, though each reader will no doubt have such preferences as his temperament may determine.

Count Magnus is assuredly one of the best, forming as it does a veritable Golconda of suspense and suggestion. Mr. Wraxall is an English traveller of the middle nineteenth century, sojourning in Sweden to secure material for a book. Becoming interested in the ancient family of De La Gardie, near the village of Raback, he studies its records; and finds particular fascination in the builder of the existing Manor-house, one Count Magnus, of whom strange and terrible things are whispered. The Count, who flourished early in the seventeenth century, was a stern landlord, and famous for his severity toward poachers and delinquent tenants. His cruel punishments were bywords, and there were dark rumours of influences which even survived his interment in the great mausoleum he built near the church--as in the case of the two peasants who hunted on his preserves one night a century after his death. There were hideous screams in the woods, and near the tomb of Count Magnus an unnatural laugh and the clang of a great door. Next morning the priest found the two men; one a maniac, and the other dead, with the flesh of his face sucked from the bones.

Mr. Wraxall hears all these tales, and stumbles on more guarded references to a Black Pilgrimage once taken by the Count, a pilgrimage to Chorazin in Palestine, one of the cities denounced by Our Lord in the Scriptures, and in which old priests say that Antichrist is to be born. No one dares to hint just what that Black Pilgrimage was, or what strange being or thing the Count brought back as a companion. Meanwhile Mr. Wraxall is increasingly anxious to explore the mausoleum of Count Magnus, and finally secures permission to do so, in the company of a deacon. He finds several monuments and three copper sarcophagi, one of which is the Count's. Round the edge of this latter are several bands of engraved scenes, including a singular and hideous delineation of a pursuit--the pursuit of a frantic man through a forest by a squat muffled figure with a devil-fish's tentacle, directed by a tall cloaked man on a neighbouring hillock. The sarcophagus has three massive steel padlocks, one of which is lying open on the floor, reminding the traveller of a metallic clash he heard the day before when passing the mausoleum and wishing idly that he might see Count Magnus.

His fascination augmented, and the key being accessible, Mr. Wraxall pays the mausoleum a second and solitary visit and finds another padlock unfastened. The next day, his last in Raback, he again goes alone to bid the long-dead Count farewell. Once more queerly impelled to utter a whimsical wish for a meeting with the buried nobleman, he now sees to his disquiet that only one of the padlocks remains on the great sarcophagus. Even as he looks, that last lock drops noisily to the floor, and there comes a sound as of creaking hinges. Then the monstrous lid appears very slowly to rise, and Mr. Wraxall flees in panic fear without refastening the door of the mausoleum.

During his return to England the traveller feels a curious uneasiness about his fellow-passengers on the canal-boat which he employs for the earlier stages. Cloaked figures make him nervous, and he has a sense of being watched and followed. Of twenty-eight persons whom he counts, only twenty-six appear at meals; and the missing two are always a tall cloaked man and a shorter muffled figure. Completing his water travel at Harwich, Mr. Wraxall takes frankly to flight in a closed carriage, but sees two cloaked figures at a crossroad. Finally he lodges at a small house in a village and spends the time making frantic notes. On the second morning he is found dead, and during the inquest seven jurors faint at sight of the body. The house where he stayed is never again inhabited, and upon its demolition half a century later his manuscript is discovered in a forgotten cupboard.

In “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” a British antiquary unriddles a cipher on some Renaissance painted windows, and thereby discovers a centuried hoard of gold in a niche halfway down a well in the courtyard of a German abbey. But the crafty depositor had set a guardian over that treasure, and something in the black well twines its arms around the searcher's neck in such a manner that the quest is abandoned, and a clergyman sent for. Each night after that the discoverer feels a stealthy presence and detects a horrible odour of mould outside the door of his hotel room, till finally the clergyman makes a daylight replacement of the stone at the mouth of the treasure-vault in the well--out of which something had come in the dark to avenge the disturbing of old Abbot Thomas's gold. As he completes his work the cleric observes a curious toad-like carving on the ancient well-head, with the Latin motto "Depositum custodi--keep that which is committed to thee."

Other notable James tales are “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral,” in which a grotesque carving comes curiously to life to avenge the secret and subtle murder of an old Dean by his ambitious successor: "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You," which tells of the horror summoned by a strange metal whistle found in a mediævel church ruin; and "An Episode of Cathedral History," where the dismantling of a pulpit uncovers an archaic tomb whose lurking daemon spreads panic and pestilence. Dr. James, for all his light touch, evokes fright and hideousness in their most shocking form, and will certainly stand as one of the few really creative masters in his darksome province.

For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural horror provides an interesting field. Combated by a mounting wave of plodding realism, cynical flippancy, and sophisticated disillusionment, it is yet encouraged by a parallel tide of growing mysticism, as developed both through the fatigued reaction of "occultists" and religious fundamentalists against materialistic discovery and through the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such enlarged vistas and broken barriers as modern science has given us with its intra-atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics, doctrines of relativity, and probings into biology and human thought. At the present moment the favouring forces would appear to have somewhat of an advantage; since there is unquestionably more cordiality shown toward weird writings than when, thirty years ago, the best of Arthur Machen's work fell on the stony ground of the smart and cocksure 'nineties. Ambrose Bierce, almost unknown in his own time, has now reached something like general recognition.

Startling mutations, however, are not to be looked for in either direction. In any case an approximate balance of tendencies will continue to exist; and while we may justly expect a further subtilisation of technique, we have no reason to think that the general position of the spectral in literature will be altered. It is a narrow though essential branch of human expression, and will chiefly appeal as always to a limited audience with keen special sensibilities. Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.