Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman
Stephen King is known for
the small-town settings of his horror novels, but other
novelists also find plenty of horror in small-town settings,
including Dan Simmons (Summer of Night),
Robert R. McCammon (Boy's Life),
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Still Life with Crows),
Dean Koontz (Phantoms),
and, of course, Ray
Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes).
It's
not hard to see the appeal of such stories.
Small
towns are, in a way, an extension of home, as the term “hometown”
suggests. In the past, especially, whether realistically or naively,
many families left their doors unlocked at night and allowed their
kids to roam the neighborhood at will, the single caveat “be home
by dark.”
A
community, we like to think, is a safe place, like home. It's a place
full of friends, we like to believe. It's a place where everyone
knows everyone else. There are, in small towns, interrelationships of
many kinds: familial, romantic, friendly, neighborly, commercial.
One
of the challenges that writers face when a small town is the setting
of their novels is familiarizing readers with the community. Lots of
people live in the town, people of various statuses, living on
different streets, and performing different functions. Sometimes,
those we think we know are actually strangers—perhaps dangerous
ones—and those we don't know all that well turn out to be heroes.
In a small town, anything is possible.
But
how to introduce the town and its people, the townspeople? How to
show their relationships to others? How to indicate their own hopes
and dreams, fears and uncertainties?
In
other words, how may readers be shown about town?
Writers
tackle this task in several ways. Here are a few.
Still Life with Crows:
The authors opt for description:
Medicine
Creek, Kansas. Early August. Sunset.
The
great sea of yellow corn stretches from horizon to horizon under an
angry sky . . . .
One
road cuts through the corn from north to south; another from east to
west . . . .
A
giant slaughterhouse stands south of the town, lost in the corn, its
metal sides scoured by years of dust storms . . . .
The
temperature is exactly 100 degrees . . . .
Twilight
is falling over the landscape . . . .
A
black-and-white police cruiser passes along the main street, heading
east into the great nothingness of corn, its headlights stabbing into
the rising darkness . . .
Something Wicked This
Way Comes: The author moves from
character to character:
The
seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm . . . .
There's
nothing n the living world like books on water cures,
deaths-of-a-thousand slices, or pouring white-hot lava off castle
walls on drolls and mountebanks.
So
said Jim Nightshade . . . .
Watching
the boys vanish away, Charles Holloway suppressed a sudden urge to
run with them . . . .
Phantoms:
The author uses an eclectic approach, using description, and skipping
from one character to another, but employing the dramatic, or
“showing,” method rather than the expository (“telling”)
method to bot introduce his town and townspeople and to generate and
maintain suspense:
The
scream was distant and brief, a woman's scream.
Deputy
Paul Henderson looked up from his copy of Time.
. . .
During
the twilight hour of that Sunday in early September, the mountains
were painted in only two colors: green and blue. The trees—pine,
fir, spruce—looked as though they had been fashioned from the same
felt that covered billiard tables. Cool, blue shadows lay everywhere,
growing larger and deeper and darker by the minute.
Jenny
Paige had never seen a corpse like this one.
The
Santinis' stone and redwood house was of more modern design than
Jenny's place, all rounded corners and gentle angles. . . .
Whichever
technique an author uses—and the few above are but a tiny sample—he
or she must make the setting seem “real” (i. .e, believable),
provide a sense of “thereness,” create and sustain suspense,
introduce the characters (townspeople), and, of course, establish a
mystery that's rooted in horror. If, in the process, they can
establish theme or symbolism or tone or point of view bigger than
those of his or her characters' individual perspectives on life,
those are pluses—and big ones.
In
a later post, we'll consider how horror movies that feature
small-town settings show viewers around their
neighborhoods.
