Recommended Reading

Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 

 

Ambrose Bierce: “The Damned Thing,” “A Tough Tussle”

Bierce's ideas are original and intriguing. He also reveals aspects of horror that aren't always apparent in seemingly ordinary, if sometimes also terrible, incidents and situations.

William Peter Blatty: The Exorcist

I read this novel when I was twenty; then, I saw the movie. Both are first-rate excursions into terror. Blatty's literary art is discernible even in his metaphors.

Ray Bradbury: “Heavy-Set,” “The Veldt,” “The Foghorn”

A poetic writer who is especially adept at imagery and symbolism, Bradbury writes tales are sometimes that are much “deeper” than they might sometimes first appear.

Kate Chopin: “The Story of an Hour”

In the hands of a skilled writer, an imagined anecdote can be a powerful transmitter of both feminist angst and horror.

Sir Winston Churchill: “Man Overboard”

Churchill echoes the existential despair of Stephen Crane's “The Open Boat” in this much more economical, if not as layered, tale of the sea.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Kubla Khan”

In teaching a lesson about respecting life, Coleridge also teaches readers about crafting a well-told horrific tale and shows, in the process, his own poetic genius.

Stephen Crane: “The Open Boat”

Crane's story reflects not only the traditional categories of narrative conflict, but also a fourth, “man vs. God,” which is echoed in Sir Winston Churchill's short story “Man Overboard.”

Charles Dickens: “The Signal-Man”

For the background to this horrific short story, see my Listverse “listicle,” “10 Classic Stories Inspired by True Events.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “The Yellow Wallpaper”

For the background to this horrific short story, see my Listverse “listicle,” “10 Classic Stories Inspired by True Events.”

 Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birthmark,” “Rappacinni's Daughter”

For the background to “The Birthmark,” see my Listverse “listicle,” “10 Classic Stories Inspired by True Events.”

 O. Henry: “The Ransom of Red Chief,” “The Gift of the Magi”

Many horror stories end with a twist. Although his tales are not horror stories, O. Henry is a master at creating such ironic endings.

Shirley Jackson: “The Lottery,” “An Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,” “Trial by Combat”

Slice-of-life fiction becomes horrific in
“An Ordinary Day, with Peanuts.”

W. W. Jacobs: “The Monkey's Paw”

A true classic of horror!

Stephen King: 'Salem's Lot, Desperation

As in Frank Peretti's Monster and Dean Koontz's The Taking, God makes a cameo appearance in King's Desperation. (Other Christian authors on this list include Flannery O'Connor and William Peter Blatty.)

Dean Koontz: Phantoms, The Taking

Is the horror of The Taking an account of an alien invasion or something even more sinister?

D. H. Lawrence: “The Snake” and “The Odour of Chrysanthemums”

In “The Snake,” we meet a god of the underworld; in reading “The Odour of Chrysanthemums,” I understood why the scent of roses reminds me of death.

Bentley Little: The Revelation, Dominion

Although,  like Stephen King's later fiction, Little's novels often fall apart at the end, the beginning and the middle are captivating and frequently alternate between frightening and being exceedingly eerie.

H. P. Lovecraft: “The Lurking Fear”

Lovecraft does not disappoint in this story or in most of his other work. He brought a new perspective to horror fiction, which is not an easy accomplishment.

Daphne du Maurier: “The Birds”

Any writer whose story Alfred Hitchcock picked as the basis of one of his movies has to be a master of suspense.

Robert McCammon: Swan Song, Stinger

Although I later lost my taste for McCammon, his early novels are entertaining.

Saki (H. H. Munro): “The Open Window”

Like O. Henry, Saki sure knows how to twist a plot. In the process, he also reveals character concisely and very well.

Joyce Carol Oates: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

Reading this story is a bit like watching a music video featuring a psychopathic musician and his groupie victim.

Flannery O'Connor: “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Although she is not a horror writer per se,  O'Connor, something of a Christian, female Edgar Allan Poe, “shouts” and “draws big pictures” for a reason.

Frank Peretti: Monster

Peretti's skill as a writer shows in many ways, not the least of which, in this novel, is his mapping of the monstrous. 

Edgar Allan Poe: “The Cask of the Amontillado,” “Hop-Frog,” “Berenice,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Premature Burial”

I might have included all  of Poe's works.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child: Relic, Crimson Shore

Relic is nothing less than a terrific, terrifying tour de force. Crimson Shore, intriguing for its setting, characters, and situation, is often more suspenseful than frightening, but it is also a fast read.

William Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, King Lear

Critics are right: Titus Andronicus is certainly Shakespeare's worst play, but, hey, it's still Shakespeare (and it's truly horrific as well). Hamlet is unforgettable, and King Lear is part horrifying, part terrifying, and entirely tragic.

Dan Simmons: Subterranean

This novel is simply harrowing.

Craig Spector and John Skipp: The Light at the End

A Barlow-type creature of the night seems to have somehow slipped his way between the covers of John Godey's (Morton Freedgood's) 1973 thriller The Taking of Pelham 123. It's good fun, amid the splatter of blood and gore.

Bram Stoker: “The Judge's House,” “The Burial of the Rats,” “Dracula's Guest”

All of these short stories show, in miniature, the mastery of both writing and horror that are later exhibited more fully in Dracula.

Rabindranath Tagore: “The Hungry Stones”

At first, puzzling, Tagore's exotic tale is finally downright spooky.

Mark Twain: “Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning,” “Mrs. McWilliams and the Burglar Alarm,” “The Invalid's Story”

No, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) is not a horror writer, but he could have been!

H. G. Wells: “The Cone,” “The Red Room”

If you never fully appreciated Wells's artistry, both of these stories will show you that the man was the equivalent of an impressionistic painter who used words, instead of brushes, on pages, rather than on canvases. Wells is a true master!

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilde's novel, like so many others, is far better than the movie adaptations of it. Everything complements everything else: plot, characters, setting, theme, and tone.

William Butler Yeats: “Leda and the Swan,” “The Second Coming”

More suggestive than definitive, Yeats's poems are often intimations of terror that escapes even his mastery of the language; his poems haunt their readers--haunt them and, maybe, change them. (You have been warned!)

Note: For additional writers of horror, you may wish to consult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_horror_fiction_writers

“An Ordinary Day, with Peanuts”: Shirley Jackson on The Problem of Evil

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

One way to gain insight concerning horror writers’ fiction and the techniques that the writers of such literature employ is to study actual specimens of the genre. Chillers and Thrillers has already examined such stories in some detail, including H. G. Wells’ “The Red Room,” Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” and Charles Dickens’ “The Signal-man.” In addition, Chillers and Thrillers has considered the film The Descent and Stephen King’s novel Under the Dome in thorough detail. As a result of these studies (and others that are note quite as detailed), much concerning the art of writing horror fiction has been learned and shared. Perhaps these studies have also suggested the critical tools, techniques, theories, and approaches that one can take, on his or her own, to better understand the tricks of the trade. Chillers and Thrillers will continue to “murder” these stories in order “to dissect” them, so that this blog’s faithful followers and occasional readers can gain and share whatever insights Chillers and Thrillers may offer, beginning with Shirley Jackson’s masterful tale, “An Ordinary Day, with Peanuts.”

Her story opens as the omniscient narrator introduces the unlikely protagonist, Mr. John Philip Johnson, sharing with the story’s readers Johnson’s view of the world. It is unduly optimistic--naively optimistic, one might suggest--like that of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, whose view of the universe as representing, despite its moral and ontological limitations, “the best of all possible worlds,” an optimism that is attacked, quite effectively, each in his own way, by writers as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Young Goodman Brown”), Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire (Candide), and the Marquis de Sade.(Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue). Leibnitz’s view of the world is assailed, again, in part, by Jackson, in “An Ordinary Day.”

Mr. Johnson’s view of the world is (or, at least seems to be) much like that of Voltaire. Johnson, like the philosopher who wrote “Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil,” apparently believes that this is “the best of all possible worlds” (although, as readers will soon learn, appearances of belief, as of appearances otherwise, can be deceiving). Jackson, through her narrator, supplies hints that her protagonist’s ostensible optimism may not be supported by the actual state of the world. For example, he has had to have his shoes resoled, and this “resoling” suggests that the universe is not the perfect place that it may, at times, appear to be, for the fact that Mr. Johnson’s soles have worn out, needing to be replaced, suggests that good things even as trivial as the soles of shoes--and, perhaps, as significant as the souls of men and women--can degrade. This intimation of entropy, of erosion, of gradual degradation, if not of evil, is reinforced by the narrator’s reference to the sidewalk upon which Mr. Johnson steps as he leaves home as being “dirty” and by the narrator’s observation that only “some” of the people at whom Mr. Johnson smiles bother to return his smile.

Although his kindness wins them over, at first, other characters are not nearly as trusting of Mr. Johnson as he seems to be of them. When he offers a child the carnation he has bought for his lapel, the baby’s mother studies him “for a minute” before smiling at him, as her innocent child has done, upon the receipt of the flower, suggesting that she, having experience of the world, does not, unlike her child, automatically trust strangers bearing gifts. This mother’s initial distrust of Mr. Johnson is mirrored, a few moments later, by another mother’s suspicion of him when he offers to watch her child for her while she tends to the men who are moving her furniture. (The rest of the small crowd gathered at the scene are more interested in inspecting her worn furniture than they are in lending her a hand.) Her suspicion--she “turned and glared at him distrustfully”--prompts him to add, “We'll sit right here on the steps.” The child, a boy, is allowed to go to Mr. Johnson, who offers the lad a “handful of peanuts” from his pocket. The boy initially refuses the offered peanuts because “his mother did not allow him to accept food from strangers.” While the mother supervises the movers, Mr. Johnson reassures the boy that he will like his new home in Vermont. As he goes about town, having chosen a random route (“he did not follow the same route every morning, but preferred to pursue his eventful way in wide detours, more like a puppy than a man intent upon business”), Mr. Johnson does one good turn after another to all whom he encounters, including animals: he feeds a peanut to “a stray dog” he encounters on his way.

Jackson’s narrator frequently advises readers of how good Mr. Johnson himself feels, possibly as a result of his optimism and possibly as a result of the good deeds that he does. For example, as he sets out from home, at the beginning of the story, “Mr. John Philip Johnson shut his front door behind him and went down his front steps into the bright morning with a feeling that all was well with the world on this best of all days, and wasn't the sun warm and good,” and, after he watches the woman’s son, he steps “happily. . . Feeling the warm sun on his back and on the top of his head.”

He matches two young people who are too much in a hurry and too concerned with work to live their lives, paying them for the day they will miss by going on a date, the expenses of which Mr. Johnson pays in advance. He continues to offer peanuts to those whom he meets--a gull, a panhandler, a bus driver--and advises a couple who are seeking an apartment to rent of the vacancy left by the mother and son who have moved to Vermont. (This act is especially helpful in such big cities as New York, in which finding any apartment is difficult.) His good deeds continue until it is time for him to return home:

After his lunch he rested; he walked into the nearest park and fed peanuts to the pigeons. It was late afternoon by the time he was ready to start back downtown, and he had refereed two checker games, and watched a small boy and girl whose mother had fallen asleep and awakened with surprise and fear that turned to amusement when she saw Mr. Johnson. He had given away almost all of his candy, and had fed all the rest of his peanuts to the pigeons; and it was time to go home. Although the late afternoon sun was pleasant, and his shoes were still entirely comfortable, he decided to take a taxi downtown.

On his way home, he saves a taxi driver from losing money on a horserace. After the driver agrees to take the money home to his wife that a fare had given him to bet on a horse, Mr. Johnson gives the driver another ten dollars to bet on a different horse on another day, convincing the driver that astrological signs are against the horse winning the race that the driver has been tipped about the horse’s winning.

Finally, arriving back at his apartment, Mr. Johnson is greeted by his wife. They enquire as to one another’s day. He tells her that his has not been difficult; hers, she says, has been only “so-so.” She then recites the incidents of her day: she “accused” a woman at a department store “of shoplifting,” “sent three dogs to the pound,” “quarreled” with a bus driver and complained about his conduct to his supervisors. Based upon Mr. Johnson’s kind and considerate behavior throughout the day, readers are apt to think that Mr. Johnson would be horrified by his wife’s conduct. Therefore, his reaction comes as something of a shock. “Fine,” he says, and then, observing that she looks “tired,” suggests that they “change over tomorrow”--in other words, she will play the angel to his devil.

The story ends upon the same sort of commonplace note with which it began, as Mr. Johnson, enquiring as to what is for dinner and told “veal cutlet,” replies, “Had it for lunch.” The ordinariness of the lives of this couple, each of whom does good or evil in the course of their daily lives and is able, by a mere act of the will, to alternate between these modes of conduct enhances the story’s horrific quality, for it suggests that anyone and everyone--people as seemingly normal and ordinary as Mr. Johnson and his wife--can be either good or evil, or, indeed, both, and the duality of all human beings as agents, simultaneously, of both good and evil is the message of Jackson’s story. Men and women, Jackson suggests, are capable of choosing to be good or evil--or, at least, to act in good or evil ways. They have free will.

Her story suggests how much good or evil can be done by seemingly insignificant acts of kindness or malice. Mr. Johnson’s matching of the young couple might result in a happy, lifelong marriage between a young woman and a young man who, before, were in much too great a rush to earn a living to appreciate life or, indeed, themselves or other people, just as Mrs. Johnson’s accusation (perhaps unfounded) of a shopper’s theft could become a lifelong impediment to the individual, should a conviction result, in seeking employment or retaining a position. Obviously, most people would agree that it is better to do good than to do evil, but, Jackson’s story also suggests that, given the choice of behaving one way or the other, most people choose to behave both ways, either simultaneously or alternately, and that those who are suspicious of other people’s seemingly good intentions may, therefore, have good reason, indeed, to be suspicious. To choose to do good only at times is to choose to do evil, for to truly choose to do good would mean to renounce evil entirely--something that people do not seem to want to do or, perhaps, to be capable of doing.

Readers may be reminded of the lesson that Goodman Brown learns in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” that all men and women are both good and evil; that sin is innate and inescapable; and that all human deeds, therefore, are, even when good, tainted with evil. It is this theme, the idea of original sin, that Leibnitz’s optimistic philosophy ignores and that Jackson’s story, like “Young Goodman Brown,” Candide, and Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue ultimately underscores.

Horror Fiction: In Search of a Transfusion of New Blood

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

It would seem that horror fiction, based as it is upon the appearance and elimination or neutralization--or the attempted elimination or neutralization--of various threats, would be a permanent fixture of literature, that its place among narrative and dramatic works would be secure, that its life, as it were, would be as eternal as some of its paranormal or supernatural antagonists’ existences. Oddly, such may not be the case. Fans of horror fiction may, someday, have to find their chills and thrills elsewhere than in pages or on film footage that is devoted to the horror genre.

It’s not that the world itself is any less dangerous a place today than it was in times past; if anything, the world is, in some ways, more dangerous than it has ever been before. (In other ways, of course, it is far safer.) Plenty of various threats remain. The problem seems to be that the authors of short stories, novels, and screenplays continue to write about the same old monsters: beasts, demons and devils, ghosts, ghouls, vampires, werewolves, witches, zombies, and the like, or, when they do, rarely, experiment with something new, as M. Night Shyamalan did in The Happening, the experiment is frequently less than chilling and thrilling and is likely, in fact, to be a dud, as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening certainly is.

For a while, Stephen King, almost single-handedly, revitalized the horror genre by bringing ancient (and sometimes contemporary) horrors to modern, small-town America. Indeed, the townspeople of Castle Rock, Derry, Jerusalem’s Lot, and Chester’s Mill are themselves shown to be, in their own ways, as monstrous and threatening as any of the paranormal and supernatural threats that appear in King’s fiction. However, even innovation, vigorously applied, soon breeds clichés (and, in King’s particular case, tends to produce quite a bit of smug, condescending, and self-indulgent diatribes against Republicans, conservatives, and fundamentalists, to name a few of the author’s favorite targets, among the corpses that typically litter his literature).

Out with the old threats and in with the new seems to offer a solution to the tried and trite, but this solution poses a problem of its own: from whence are horror fiction’s new nightmares to come? There are but two general sources for threats: internal and external. Internal, or psychological, threats are apt to be derived from either reason gone wrong, which is to say madness, or from emotion gone awry, or hysteria. The wellsprings of external threats seem, at first glance, to be both more plentiful and more diverse, but, in fact, they are limited as well, being either social or natural (unless one includes the supernatural realm as a dimension of reality). With only two types of threat, the internal and the external, at their disposal, horror writers seem limited, indeed, as to the sources for things that go bump in the night. Monsters, after all, cannot (yet) be ordered from mail-order catalogues or bought from fiendish supply warehouses.

What horror writers can (and should) do is what writers of other genres of fiction do: expand their concerns to beyond that of simply the introduction of monsters or monstrous threats and include areas of concern to human beings as human beings, which is to say, to matters that pertain to ethics, aesthetics, ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, theology, history, science, politics, art, athletics, economics, and so forth. Instead of the monster’s being the story’s be-all and end-all, he, she, or it should be subordinate to the story’s human characters, who, too often, exist (but seldom live) as only the antagonists’ targets and victims. Although horror fiction authors treat of such matters in a superficial way at times, few of them make human concerns the primary consideration of their short stories, novels, and screenplays. Writers who do treat such concerns with the depth and complexity that these matters deserve may well find themselves among the celebrated few whose works are among the best narratives and dramas of any genre, horror or otherwise, including William Shakespeare s’ Hamlet or Macbeth, Dante’s Inferno, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Charles Dickens’ “The Signal-man,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and The Jolly Corner, Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque, William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily,” Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds. Moreover, and more importantly, horror fiction will be a much better genre and one that is well worth reading (or watching).

Famous Writers and Director’s Quotes, With More or Less Direct Application to the Theory and Practice of Writing Horror

Ambrose Bierce

• Edible--good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
• Impiety--your irreverence toward my deity.
• Mad--affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.
• Ocean--a body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man--who has no gills.
• Politeness--the most acceptable hypocrisy.
• Pray--to ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
• Success is the one unpardonable sin against our fellows.
• The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
• There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.
• To apologize is to lay the foundation for a future offense.
• When you doubt, abstain.

Ray Bradbury

• Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it. First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down.
• The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance--the idea that anything is possible.
• Touch a scientist and you touch a child.
• We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
• You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

John Carpenter

• Evil hiding among us is an ancient theme.
• To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.
• What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.

G. K. Chesterton

• A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
• A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
• All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
• An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
• Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
• Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
• Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
• Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.
• Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
• Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
• It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
• If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.
• Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
• Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a mustache.
• Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
• Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
• Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
• The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.
• The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
• The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
• The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
• The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.
• The purpose of compulsory education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
• The simplification of anything is always sensational.
• The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
• The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
• The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
• Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.
• There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
• There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
• Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
• When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
• With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

Wes Craven

• A lot of life is dealing with your curse, dealing with the cards you were given that aren't so nice. Does it make you into a monster, or can you temper it in some way, or accept it and go in some other direction?
• I have a lot of fans who are people of color. I think, if nothing else, I kind of understand that sense of being on the outside looking in, culturally.
• The first monster you have to scare the audience with is yourself.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
• All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.
• Easy reading is damn hard writing.
• Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
• Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
• The founders of a new colony, whatever utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
• We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
• What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

Alfred Hitchcock

• Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
• Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.
• The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
• The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.
• There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

Stephen King

• I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.
• It's better to be good than evil, but one achieves goodness at a terrific cost.
• No, it's not a very good story--its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
• We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

Dean Koontz

• A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.
• Because people see violence on the movie screen, they're not going to go out and hold up a liquor store and kill somebody. It really doesn't correlate.
• Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time.
• Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text.
• I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.
• I have been reading Stephen King since Carrie and hope to read him for many years to come.
• I have to admit that when I watch a movie in which there is no moral context for the violence--I find that offensive. I think that's potentially damaging to society.
• I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well.
• If I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored.
• Never, never try to scope the market.
• Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.
• Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.
• The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original.
• Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.
• We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another.
• The idea of true evil has been blown away.
• What we do as a society is seek simple answers.
• When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

C. S. Lewis

• An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
• Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
• Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
• Humans are amphibians--half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
• If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
• If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
• Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
• Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
• Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
• The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
• The safest road to hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
• The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
• We are what we believe we are.
• What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Joyce Carol Oates

• If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
• Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
• Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.
• Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Flannery O’Connor

• All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
• Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
• I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.
• I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
• It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
• Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
• The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
• The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
• To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
• When in Rome, do as you have done in Milledgeville.

Edgar Allan Poe

• Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
• I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
• I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
• It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
• The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
• The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
• They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
• Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

Anne Rice

• Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.
• First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.
• I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.
• I'm always asking questions.
• I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on.
• Re-telling the Christian story is the essence of my vocation. That has been going on since the Evangelists in one form or another.
• The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught.
• The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.
• Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds.
• We're frightened of what makes us different.

Steven Spielberg

• All of us every single year, we're a different person. I don't think we're the same person all our lives.
• I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.
• I never felt comfortable with myself, because I was never part of the majority. I always felt awkward and shy and on the outside of the momentum of my friends' lives.
• You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project.
• Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.

H. G. Wells

• Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
• Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.Some people bear three kinds of trouble--the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.
• The past is but the past of a beginning.
• There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
• What really matters is what you do with what you have.
• You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

Mad Science

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

There’s been an uneasy alliance between science and the imagination ever since alchemy became chemistry and astrology gave way to astronomy, because science, and its daughter, technology, are, to mix metaphors a bit, double-edged swords. They cut both ways.

On one hand, as Richard Nixon demonstrated to Nikita Khrushchev in the famous “kitchen debates,” science and technology can enrich individuals’ daily lives, making mundane tasks easier and life in general more convenient.

On the other hand, the same body of knowledge that results in washing machines and microwave ovens and personal computers also delivers such monstrosities as machineguns, napalm, and atomic bombs.

With the advent of science fiction, could horror’s use of the mad scientist--or, sometimes, just mad science--and its inventions be far behind? The short answer is, No. Thanks to this hybrid organism, we have such takes as Algernon Blackwood’s “Entrance and Exit,” Christopher Blayre’s “Aalila,” Bernard Capes’ “The Moon Stricken,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Los Amigos Fiasco,” Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Dancing-Partner,” Jack London’s “The Amateur M. D.” and “The Shadow and the Flash,” Edward Page Mitchell’s “The Ablest Man in the World,” “The Man Without a Body,” and “The Senator’s Daughter,” W. C. Morrow’s “The Monster Maker,” Edith Nesbit’s “The Haunted House,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, and H. G. Wells’ “Under the Knife,” to name only a few.

In “The Los Amigos Fiasco,” a condemned man benefits from a town’s attempt to electrocute him. “The Ablest Man in the World” is a cyborg with a clockwork brain. In The Purple Cloud, Adam Jeffson, surviving a global catastrophe after returning home, alone, from an expedition to the arctic, discovers he is the last man alive. Set in 1937, “The Senator’s Daughter” predicts pneumatic tube travel, electric heating, home-printed newspapers, food pills, suspended animation, and other technological marvels that are matched by the social changes he forecasts, which include women’s suffrage and interracial marriage. The surgical patient in “Under the Knife” develops clairvoyance and has a both near-death experience, followed by an out-of-body experience, after his surgeon severs a vein. “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” causes him to learn that science can deliver benefits, such as eternal youth, that may not be all that beneficial.

Interested parties, which may include you, can access these stories at Horror Masters.

Writing As A Schizophrenic, Part I

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

“Two heads are better than one,” it’s been said (although, apparently nature or God disagrees). If we can’t each be equipped with a couple of heads at birth, a couple of personalities, residing in the same body, may be a workable alternative, as schizophrenia could allow a person to take a team approach to writing short stories, novels, narrative poems, screenplays, or whatever. Of course, actually developing schizophrenia may not be as easy as desiring it. Therefore, we need to find another work-around.

Rest in pieces. I think I have just the solution: philosophical, as opposed to psychological, schizophrenia.

Here’s how it works.

Start by identifying your story’s theme. In the interest of the soul of wit, I’ll take a shortcut. Using the biography of Ed Gein, the guy who inspired Norman Bates (Psycho), Leatherface (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs) as an example, one could argue that the indifference of the community toward him is somewhat to blame for his career as a serial killer and grave robber. This would be the theme of such a story, then: the apathy of a community toward its individual members can create a monster.

Next, briefly summarize various views concerning the responsibility, if any, that a community has for its individual members. These differing views provide the perspectives of the extra heads that nature or God denied us at birth. They’re the voices of the personalities that we’re developing as a result of our nascent philosophical schizophrenia.

We might include Hillary Clinton’s idea that “It takes a village to raise a child.” We might remind ourselves of the fate of Kitty Genovese, the woman who was attacked and killed as her neighbors looked on from their apartment windows, afraid to “get involved” by intervening or by calling the police. We might include the faith-based view of Jesus. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” one of the apostles asked, prompting him to tell the parable of the good Samaritan.

According to the first view, a community’s members have a responsibility to act together to benefit its children. Why? Hillary doesn‘t say, but, presumably, it’s because the community’s own future health and welfare depend upon the rearing of children who have been educated, socialized, and otherwise nurtured.

The fate of Kitty Genovese suggests that a society that fails to protects its individual members is not only morally at fault but also may face social, political, and moral dissolution.

Jesus declared that God is love and that those who do his will also will to love their neighbors. Therefore, they should not be selfish.

However, not everyone agrees that the community has a responsibility to act on the behalf of its individual members. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and Aleister Crowley, each in his own way, believed that selfishness is a virtue.

Nietzsche believed that life need not have any intrinsic value and that people either affirm or deny it by their deeds, according to their own tendencies; morality, he said, is merely the means by which the powerful control the weak.

Rand believed that the right and proper thing for people to do is to pursue their own values and promote their own lives.

Crowley believed that there is only one law that governs human behavior, which is to “do as thou wilt.”

Our philosophical schizophrenia has enriched our theme. Instead of our writing a simple story with a perhaps-simpleminded moral, we have the opportunity of writing a richer, probably longer narrative that has philosophical height, depth, and breadth. Several characters in the same story, for example, might represent a different view of the topic at hand, as in Twelve Angry Men. The short story that we’d had in mind originally might develop into a novel. Alternatively, it might become several short stories, each of which examines the same theme in a different way, as many writers often do.

Another example? Sure, since we already have one, in another post, “Evil Is As Evil Does.” In that post, we suggest that horror writers in different times and places, often identify as monstrous, or evil, the menaces that seem most to threaten the worlds in which they live, and we suggested that, for the following writers, these were among the chief evils of their respective days:

• Nathaniel Hawthorne: sin
• Edgar Allan Poe: passion (especially coupled with madness)
• H. P. Lovecraft: cosmic indifference to humanity
• Dean Koontz: humanity’s indifference to humanity
• Stephen King: anything that threatens one’s local community

Bentley Little: the indifference of bureaucratic organizations to individuals’ needs

This list, which, again, could profitably be expanded, gives us six heads, instead of one, and helps us to see evil in a more complete fashion than we might were we to limit ourselves to our own ideas as to what constitutes wickedness. The results could be a complexitication and enrichment of our own views and of our fiction.

Writing as a schizophrenic has its rewards.