Showing Off the Neighborhood

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.