Synopsis
Edgar Allan Poe High School, Home of the Ravens, was a normal academic institution, populated by normal teenagers--or was it? Once the new principal took over, things quickly went from normal to bizarre, and Crystal Fall’s and her friends’ lives were in danger. But the teens had a secret ally: God was on their side! For readers who've graduated from R. L. Stine but aren't quite ready for Stephen King, this novel and its sequel, Mystic Mansion, are perfect reads!
For more, visit Saturday's Child
Sample
PrologueAmy Black nodded. Her head dropped, and she woke with a start. Mr. O’Brien was droning on, something about a bare body or a bear named Bodkin or some other such Shakespearean nonsense. Why couldn’t Shakespeare have written his plays in English? she thought drowsily.
She closed her eyes.
Her head fell forward again, and she saw the gun--
It was there, in her locker, under her gym bag.
She reached in, took the cold hard steel in her hand.
Him! That jerk!
She watched him enter the boys’ rest room. Her legs carried her down the hallway, and she pushed the door open.
He was at one of the sinks, washing his hands. He turned, saw her, his mouth and eyes wide with surprise.
“What are you doing in here?” he demanded.
He was always demanding something.
“Can’t you let me have even a moment’s privacy? Do you have to--”
There was a sound of thunder, a flash of lightning, and the gun kicked hard in her hand.
Somewhere, someone was screaming.
She sat bolt upright in her chair, barely able to distinguish her dream from the commotion around her and the ringing bell.
The other kids were gathering their books. They left their seats and hastened toward the door, toward a few minutes of freedom, toward a five-minute rendezvous with their friends. Mr. O’Brien called after them, reminding them of their homework. Amy grabbed her book, too, stuffed it into her book bag, and strode from the classroom, the deafening sound of the gunshot still in her ears.
In the hallway, outside Mr. O’Brien’s English Lit class, Amy paused to lean against the wall. She was breathing fast. She was shaking, and she felt faint. The dream, the vision, the hallucination, whatever it was--it had been so vivid, so real! And this was the third time in two weeks that she had had the nightmarish vision.
Why did she keep seeing herself shooting Ed Warner?
She may not love him, exactly, not anymore. But she still had some feelings for him. Certainly, she didn’t hate him. And, most definitely, she did not want to hurt him, least of all to see him dead. After all, he was her boyfriend, for the time being, anyway.
Sure, sometimes Ed could be a little too pushy--all right, a lot too pushy, demanding even, but, hey, that wasn’t any reason to have such violent fantasies.
Maybe I need help, Amy thought. Maybe I’m going crazy.
The thought frightened her. What would Ms. Martin, the counselor, do if Amy dared to confide in her about her “dreams”? Call the cops? Have her arrested? Or put her into a mental institution? Amy shuddered, feeling even weaker. She couldn’t bear being torn from her home, from school, from her parents and friends, and she didn’t think that the understanding Ms. Martin would, in fact, be all that understanding. Maybe no one would, not doctors or her mom and dad or even her friends. She didn’t understand it herself. How could anyone else?
No, Amy decided, she couldn’t risk telling anybody about these strange hallucinations. She would just endure them and maybe, eventually, they would no longer plague her.
She bent over the water fountain and drank deeply of the ice-cold water. Her head hurt. There was a dull ache behind her eyes that threatened to explode at any moment.
“Hi, Amy!”
She straightened, forcing a tight smile.
Her friend, Dee Dee Dawkins, looked at her, an expression of concern on her face. “Are you all right?” Dee Dee inquired.
“Not bad for a Monday,” Amy lied. “Just a little headache.”
“Yeah,” Dee Dee replied, with a giggle. “A headache by the name of Ed Warner.”
Amy gasped.
Dee Dee’s eyebrows lifted. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Sure,” Amy said.
She didn’t sound too convincing, Dee Dee thought. Then Dee Dee said, “Duh!” and smacked herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand. “It’s because you’re breaking up with him today, right?”
Amy smiled. This time, the smile looked more genuine. “Well, maybe not today, not with this headache,” she said, “but soon.”
“I’m glad,” Dee Dee said.
Amy arched an eyebrow, looking pointedly at her friend.
“Well, I am,” Dee Dee insisted. “He’s become such a jerk!”
The girls came to a junction in the hallway. “See you at lunch,” Dee Dee said.
“See you at lunch,” Amy repeated mechanically, her thoughts elsewhere.
Dee Dee, looking at her friend as Amy walked slowly down the other hall, shook her head. “Boys!” she said, exasperated.
Amy thought about lunch, about Dee Dee, about the test coming up in Biology, about what a mess her room was and how she’d promised her mom she’d clean it up after school, about the new teen club that she and her friends were considering visiting tonight--about anything and everything she could think about to keep her mind off Ed Warner and the awful visions she had had of the smoking gun in her hand and his lifeless body on the bloody rest room floor.
For more, visit Saturday's Child
Strangely enough, UFO’s and extraterrestrial creatures, often called aliens, have a history. In fiction (mostly science fiction, but some horror fiction as well), aliens have made appearances, usually as the enemy of humanity (but sometimes as its friend and would-be guru) as early as the seventeenth century. The idea that the moon might be inhabited was introduced in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) when an angel implies that the lunar satellite may be inhabited by lunatics similar to Adam and Eve, and Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle made a case for alien civilizations in his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686). Aliens appear in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) as villains who meet their match in their encounter with Earth’s lowly bacteria. The recent discovery of rather large quantities of water on Mars makes the idea of life’s reality or possibility on other planets more feasible to many scientists than it seemed before this discovery.
Like Wells and other nineteenth-century novelists, many contemporary writers have featured aliens as characters in their novels. Stephen King (Dreamcatcher, The Tommyknockers) and Dean Koontz (The Taking) are examples. However, Hollywood loves aliens even more than novelists, and many films, both of the science fiction and the horror variety, have featured extraterrestrials.
This post is concerned not so much with the appearance of extraterrestrials in science fiction and horror stories but with the means by which such creatures seek to accomplish their goals or missions.
Form is limited by what nature exhibits. Therefore, as one might suspect, most aliens are either bipedal or humanoid in form, if not function, because it is difficult to imagine a creature that is otherwise, unless a writer takes (as some have done) one of our four-legged animal friends, one of our six-legged insect friends, or one of our eight-legged arachnid friends as his or her model. A few writers have looked to supernatural entities for their inspiration. Star Trek: The Next Generation’s allasomorph, in its true form, for instance, resembles nothing so much as it does a ghost. Although no such inspiration has been confirmed, it seems that George Lucas’ muse for his many extraterrestrial creatures could have been the demons with which Hieronymus Bosch populated the canvases of his Garden of Earthly Delights triptych.
One of the more interesting aliens is The Blob, a gelatinous mass similar to an ameba that has been magnified several millions of times. Although a giant jelly-like mass may seem silly, it seems less so if one imagines what it would be like to be engulfed by such a blob. One would no doubt twist and thrash about, kicking (if not screaming), panicked and terrified, as he or she began to suffocate within the gelatinous mass. If mere suffocation is not enough to frighten and annoy the victim, one is not to worry: the creature also digests its prey, dissolving him or her into a nutritious protein stew. Meanwhile, the terrified face of the struggling victim is visible through the blob’s membranous, gelatinous form.
King’s Dreamcatcher aliens resemble legless red weasels. Spawned by the ingestion of an infectious mold called a byrus, the aliens, known as byrum, incubate within their hosts’ abdomens and exit through their rectums. The byrum is linked telepathically with the byrus, with which the alien creatures maintain a symbiotic relationship that is hazardous to human health. King said that his aliens symbolize cancer, which is the title that he’d originally given his work in progress before deciding upon Dreamcatchers instead.
The aliens of King’s Tommyknockers are more human in their appearance, although with a bit of crab and dog thrown in, for good measure. Unusually tall, they have claws instead of feet and canine countenances. Gray of skin, they are milky-eyed and have apparently foregone sex and gender in favor of sexless androgyny. They have also given up spoken and written language, it seems, preferring to communicate telepathically. (In King’s novels, the ability to use telepathy is one of the necessary attributes, it seems, for aliens.) In other ways, however, the aliens are severely limited, if not actually mentally handicapped. Unable to reproduce sexually, the aliens resort to transforming humans into semblances of themselves in an apparent attempt (King is never too clear on this point) at colonizing the Earth. Many critics see these aliens as representing the effects of substance abuse, from which King was allegedly suffering at the time that he wrote this novel.
Koontz’s aliens are so much like spaceships that the human characters mistake the extraterrestrials for such. (In fact, though, the creatures aren’t aliens at all, as it turns out; they’re fallen angels, led by Satan). When they pass overhead, one feels as if he or she is mentally radiated, as it were, and known, completely and instantly. To facilitate their conquest of the Earth, an advance team of the extraterrestrials is undertaking a reverse-terraforming of the planet to create an atmosphere that is hazardous to humans but agreeable to the extraterrestrials. It is only toward the end of the novel that the protagonist learns that the aliens are actually an army of demons who have come to destroy the planet. In this novel, Koontz inverts the old idea that the demons of myth and legend were inspired by aliens who visited the Earth in days long past, making the belief in aliens a consequence of the actual existence of demons. This plot ploy allows Koontz’s novel an unusual theological significance that King matches in his own demon-haunted novel Desperation.
Form is one of the limits that nature imposes upon writers who want to write about alien creatures, for people, writers included, are limited by nature as to what they can know and, consequently, about what they can write. Nature, although varied, is finite, and, sooner or later, minerals, plants, insects, and animals are going to run out of characteristics and abilities that can be imposed, in more or less disguised fashion, upon supposedly extraterrestrial creatures. This is a given.
Therefore, writers are well advised, if they want their monster to be an alien, to take a leaf from King and Koontz and give them a non-human (and possibly an inhuman) means of carrying out their (more or less human) motives for visiting Earth to begin with and for whatever mission or endeavor they undertake after they get here. Despite some problems with his plots, King’s Dreamcatcher and Tommyknockers do impart more-or-less alien means of accomplishing his extraterrestrials’ more-or-less human purposes, although he uses a biological concept (symbiosis), a paranormal cliché (telepathy), and a centuries-old political purpose (colonization) to do so: his aliens are here to invade the Earth (Dreamcatcher) and to colonize our planet (The Tommyknockers); the way they go about doing so--spreading a disease in which they are symbiots and transforming humans into themselves with a gas--are more-or- less alien methods. Koontz’s motive for his aliens’ presence is even more intriguing: they are merely wearing disguises; the aliens are actually demons who wear their extraterrestrial appearances as fleshly costumes. Affecting a disguise isn’t all that unusual, especially for humans, but the means by which the demons in his novel accomplish their purpose--taking upon themselves an extraterrestrial likeness--is beyond the scope of anything that human beings can accomplish--at least this side of hell.
If a writer can’t get past the restrictions of form in creating aliens, he or she should at least try to imagine a way to bypass function, giving his or her aliens a non-human method by which to accomplish their purposes. As in so many other matters relating to horror fiction, King and Koontz have shown the way by which writers can do so.
Genre fiction is formulaic fiction.
It must be.
There’s an unwritten law somewhere that requires it to be. (Or maybe it’s a written law.)
Formulaic fiction fails to entertain after a while, because most people get tired of reading yet another variation on the same tired and tattered narrative formula, especially when the formula is fairly straightforward and simple.
Formulaic fiction fails because it is predicable.
A reader pretty much knows what to expect from the beginning and pretty much every time before something happens. Formulaic fiction is unimaginative, unoriginal, predictable, and boring. It’s a cliché. Actually, it’s a series of clichés strung together like so many faux pearls. There are no surprises, shocks, chills, or thrills because everything that happens is seen coming way before it actually arrives. Familiarity breeds contempt, and formulaic fiction, whether it’s adventure, detective, horror, fantasy, romance, science fiction, Western, or otherwise, is all too familiar to its readers.
In a word, formulaic fiction is frustrating, but there are ways to frustrate formulaic fiction. In this post, we will consider a few techniques for doing so. Mostly, though, these methods boil down to this: become a Boy Scout. In other words, as a writer, expect the unexpected--from yourself and your characters.
Formulaic fiction is formulaic largely because it is routine and repetitive rather than exploratory. It follows the same path over the same ground, leading around and around in the same concentric circles. To frustrate formulaic fiction, a writer must become a stranger in a strange land. He or she must choose the little-worn over the well-worn path. Better yet, he or she should choose from one of several other possible paths.
Just as some moviemakers now make movies with one official ending, as it were, and several “alternative endings,” a writer should have several pathways (and possibly a few byways) from any major (or even minor) incident of the plot. Stories are, by and large, linear, but the any point from “B” to “Z” can end up as point “B.” Only after it is chosen, does it become the chosen one. Until then, several other incidents should compete for the honor and distinction of being this second incident. The same is true of incidents “C,” “D,” and so on, all the way to “Z” (or however many incidents make up the chain of actions, events, and situations that form the story’s plot).
Let’s try an example.
A man finds a love letter, in his wife’s hand, addressed to another man.
Oops! What might he do?
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