Robert Sheckley’s “Gray Flannel Armor”: A Lesson on Love and Literature

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Published in 2005 by The NESFA Press of Farmingham, MA, The Masque of Manana offers science fiction fans forty one of Robert Sheckley’s often-satirical, always incomparable short stories, one of which, “Gray Flannel Armor,” I discuss here, because it offers a lesson not only in love but also in literature.

The protagonist is a young man named Thomas Hanley whose very ordinariness as an everyman makes him an appealing character. He is also made interesting by Sheckley’s omniscient narrator’s description of him. Hanley’s ordinary nature comes through in story’s first two paragraphs:

Thomas Hanley was a tall, slim young man, conservative in his tastes, moderate in his vices, and modest to a fault. His conversation with either sex was perfectly proper, even to the point of employing the verbal improprieties suitable to his age and station. He owned several gray flannel suits and many slim neckties with regimented stripes. You might think you could pick him out of a crowd because of his horn-rimmed glasses, but you would be wrong. That wasn’t Hanley. Hanley was the other one.

Who would believe that, beneath this meek, self-effacing, industrious, conforming exterior beat a wildly romantic heart? Sadly enough, anyone would, for the disguise fooled only the disguised [i. e., Hanley himself].

The narrator’s description of Hanley, in paragraph five, suggests that Hanley is also an everyman:

Young men like Hanley, in their grey flannel armor and horn-rimmed visors, are today’s knights of chivalry, Millions of them roam the streets of our great cities, their footsteps firm and hurried, eyes front, voices lowered, dressed to the point of invisibility. Like actors or bewitched men, they live their somber lives, while within them the flame of romance burns and will not die (427).

When Joe Morris, a salesman, appears at his apartment’s door, trying to sell him on a subscription to New York Romance Service, assuring Hanley that the “service” that the company provides has nothing to do with call girls, but, instead, will help him to find the woman of his dreams, the protagonist earns the sympathy of readers who, like Hanley, understand how difficult it is for men and women to find romance even in a city of millions. Therefore, they are likely to care enough about his plight (and, by extension, in many cases, their own), and the story’s opening sentence is likely to prompt them to continue to read, promising them, as it does, that, as a result, they will learn how Hanley met “the girl who later became his wife” ((427).

Most of Sheckley’s stories establish a problem for which their characters seek solutions. “Gray Flannel Armor” is no exception: Hanley’s problem is that he cannot meet a fiancée. The solution, he is told, is New York Romance Service, which employs “scientific precision and technological know-how” based upon “a thorough study of the factors essential to a successful meeting between the sexes” (429). These “essential” elements of romance, the salesman says, are “spontaneity and a sense of fatedness” (429). Readers may be curious as to how Hanley meets his future wife, but, like the protagonist himself, they are also apt to be skeptical that romance can be analyzed on the basis of science and secured through technology.

Still, the premise is intriguing, and, in the second scene of the story, the salesman’s claims are put to the test. On a trial basis, Morris loans Hanley “a small transistor with a tiny video eye” by which New York Romance Service can track and coach him in his quest for romance (neither sex nor love is guaranteed, just romance). Directed by a voice he hears through the radio, Hanley goes to a rooftop, where he meets a beautiful young woman who is there stargazing. When he is uncertain as to how to proceed, the voice advises him to talk about “the lights,” which results in the following romantic exchange:

“The lights are beautiful,” said Hanley, feeling foolish.

“Yes,” murmured the girl. “Like a great carpet of stars, or spearpoints [sic] in the gloom.”

“Like sentinels,” said Hanley, “keeping eternal vigil in the night.” He wasn’t sure if the idea was his or he was parroting a barely perceptible voice from the radio.

“I often come here,” said the girl.

“I never come here,” Hanley said.

“But tonight. . . .”

“Tonight I had to come. I knew I would find you” (431).

The voice on the radio next directs him to “take her in your arms,” and, when he opens his arms to her, she steps into them (431).

Although their encounter ends well, in romance, Hanley can’t help but feel that “something about it seemed wrong” (432), and he wonders “how many dreams the Romance Service had analyzed, how many visions they had tabulated, to produce something as perfect” as his seemingly spontaneous and fated meeting of the lovely young woman on a rooftop under the stars (431).

A second date, with a different woman, also ends well, in romance. Guided again by radio, Hanley arrives at the scene of a mugging just in the nick of time and, after saving the beautiful young woman from the muggers, enjoys both a “meeting that was not only spontaneous and fateful, but enormously pleasant as well” and “a wild, perfect, and wonderful” night with her. Nevertheless, he is still “disturbed” and cannot “help feeling a little odd about a romantic meeting set up and sponsored by transistor radios, which cued lovers into the proper spontaneous yet fated responses. It was undoubtedly clever but something about it seemed wrong” (432). He realizes--and his realization is the part of the story’s theme--that “you simply can’t throw strangers together at random and expect the fiery, quick romance to turn into love. Love has its own rules and enforces them rigidly” (434).

Hanley’s insight is confirmed when, walking through a park, his radio silent for once, he encounters a third beautiful young woman. At last, he experiences an “adventure” that seems “truly fated and spontaneous.” However, he soon discovers, that this experience, too, is staged, albeit by a company that employs more sophisticated methods than the use of “a small transistor with a tiny video eye”:

. . . I am your Free Introductory Romance, given as a sample by Greater Romance Industries, with home offices in Newark, New Jersey. Only our firm offers romances which are truly spontaneous and fated. Due to our technological researches, we are able to dispense with such clumsy apparatus as transistor radios, which lend an air of rigidity and control where no control should be apparent. . . (435).

Hanley is so disheartened by the sales pitch that, as he flees the scene, “he plucked the tiny transistor radio from his lapel and hurled it into a gutter” and “further attempts at salesmanship were wasted on Hanley” (435).

At the outset of the story, the narrator promises to show how the protagonist met “the girl who would later become his wife,” and the end of the story makes good on this promise: “It is interesting to note,” the narrator tells the readers, that Hanley was among the last to find a wife in the old, unsure, quaint, haphazard, unindustrialized fashion” (436), i. e., through a blind date arranged for him, and chaperone by, his old-fashioned aunt. Even this natural experience becomes the subject of a scientific study and crass commercialization:

And now one of the Companies’ regular and most valued services is to provide bonded aunts for young men to call up, to provide these aunts with shy and embarrassed young girls, and to produce a proper milieu for all this in the form of a bright, over-decorated parlor, an uncomfortable couch, and an eager old lady bustling back and forth at meticulously unexpected intervals with coffee and homemade cake.

Ironically, the narrator adds, “The suspense, they say, becomes almost overpowering” (436).

The story’s title reinforces the relationship between the narrative’s story and its theme. Hanley (the readers’ stand-in) learns that “you simply can’t throw strangers together at random and expect the fiery, quick romance to turn into love“ because “love has its own rules and enforces them rigidly,” especially when the “romantic meeting is set up and sponsored by transistor radios, which cued lovers into the proper spontaneous yet fated responses.” Fortunately for Hanley, as an everyman he is protected from such artificiality-by-design. He is armored, as it were, by his own everydayness and the conventions and traditions of conduct of such everydayness that are symbolized by his “gray flannel suits and many slim neckties with regimental stripes” (427):

Thomas Hanley was a tall, slim young man, conservative in his tastes, moderate in his vices, and modest to a fault. His conversation with either sex was perfectly proper, even to the point of employing the verbal improprieties suitable to his age and station. He owned several gray flannel suits and many slim neckties with regimented stripes. . . .

If part of the story’s theme is that “you simply can’t throw strangers together at random and expect the fiery, quick romance to turn into love. Love has its own rules and enforces them rigidly,” the rest of it seems to be that it is the interplay between the commonplace and the romantic, not contrived spontaneity and an artificial “sense of fatedness,” that makes encounters and relationships truly romantic.

Sheckley’s story is a more-timely-than-ever satire against dubious dating services and dismal lonely hearts clubs (or today‘s computerized equivalents), some of use (or claim to sue) scientific surveys, psychological testing, personality profiles, and statistical analyses to match strangers. However, “Gray Flannel Armor” is more than a lesson in love; it is also a lesson on literature, for Sheckley’s implicit critique of the absurdity of trying to quantify love is applicable also to fiction. Natural, but unpredictable, plotting creates true suspense, but there is something “wrong” with formulaic stories that are cranked out in assembly-line fashion. That’s a lesson that writers of horror as well as of science fiction (or any other genre) can take to the heart.

Thrillers

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

To date, Chillers and Thrillers has had precious little to say concerning the latter term in its title, having focused, instead, almost exclusively on chillers (that is, horror stories) and such related fare as fantasies and science fiction. In this post, thanks to Charles Derry’s excellent book on thrillers, this oversight is finally corrected.

In the second chapter of The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock, “Thrills; or, How Objects and Empty Spaces Compete to Threaten Us,” Charles Derry identifies the objects that are used, in several films, as symbols, or “visual correlatives”: “The cymbals in The Man Who Knew Too Much,” which represent “the assassination and the whole movement of the narrative”; “the windmill in Foreign Correspondent,” which symbolizes “the arrival of an airplane to take away the villains”; and “the glass of milk in Suspicion,” which signifies “the imminent poisoning of Joan Fontaine [sic]”; and “the blood-stained doll in Stage Fright,” which suggests “an accusation of murder” (21).

According to Derry, other symbolic objects include:

The painting of the Madonna in Obsession, which works as a symbol of the protagonists’ dilemma and the narrative; the escaping balloons in La Rupture, which works as a complex symbol of escape and freedom; Faye Dunaway’s [sic] photographs in Three Days of the Condor, which work as a symbol of trust in a morally bankrupt world; the mirrors in Lady from Shanghai, which work in part as a symbol of the destructive nature of the American woman (21).

In addition to such symbolic objects, thrillers also employ both “ocnophilic” and “philobatic” objects, Derry argues, employing terms coined by Michael Balint in Thrills and Regressions. Essentially, the former type of object is apt to be one among many that are associated with the safety and security of one’s everyday environment, whereas the other (usually one or a few “special” objects) is linked to potential dangers or risks. Examples of the ocnophilic object to which the philobat “clings,“ Derry says, include the lion-tamer’s whip, the tight-rope walker’s pole, the skier’s ski-poles, the conductor’s baton, the soldier’s rifle, the artist’s paintbrush, and the pilot’s joy-stick (25). The ocnophilic object, Derry adds, “is perhaps the antithesis of the safe ‘ocnophilic object’ embraced by the philobat and represents the most overwhelming symbol of the philobat’s inability to get away from objects that are unconquerable and oppressive,” although “the objects that the philobat encounters need not be instantly harmful” (25). Moreover, the philobat may transform a threatening or dangerous oncophilic object into “a co-operative partner” by “showing consideration, regard, or concern about” it, as “Cary Grant [sic]” does in North By Northwest when he :turns the objects at the auction into his cooperative partners and is thus able to escape the villains” or as Paul Newman‘s character does in Torn Curtain when he “allows the paper flames in the ballet set to provide him with inspiration to escape from the theatre” (26). Since the ocnophil equates ocnophilic objects with safety and security, he or she is disturbed when one or more of these objects must be abandoned or he or she is abandoned by it or them. “For the octophil,” Derry says, “the world consist of objects which are separated by terrifying empty spaces,” and, Balint contends, as Derry notes in quoting him, “The octophil lives from object to object, cutting his sojourns in the empty spaces as short as possible. Fear is provoked by leaving the objects, and allayed by rejoining them” (26). For this reason, too, “an object which remains no threatening is a source of much security, and the philobat certainly doesn’t want this object taken away” (27).

Before I had encountered Derry’s book or heard of Balint’s taxonomy of the thriller, I unknowingly described a different type of ocnophilic object in my article, “Taking Away the Teddy Bear,” except that the object was more a state of mind than an object per se. The person (or, perhaps, place or thing) that anchors us to our existence, giving us a reason to go on, despite the vicissitudes of fate and the traumas and crises of life, might be regarded as an ocnophilic object of sorts, for its possession makes us feel that life is worth living. The ultimate “teddy bear,” I suggest is one’s faith in God, which, taken away, results in despair and horror in face of the monster of meaninglessness.

Although neither Derry nor Balint identifies such an object, one might argue, for the existence of anti-ocnophilic, as opposed to both ocnophilic and philobatic, objects as well, which is to say, things--or even states of mind--that remind men and women of persons, places, or things that they find repulsive rather than comforting; an African-American might view a rebel flag in such a manner; a racist, an interracial couple; a homophobe, two men or women holding hands with one another. Rather than finding reassurance in such objects and seeking to retain or to be reunited with them, a character would seek to avoid or discard them. In some cases, an object that is initially regarded as ocnophilic might later be considered anti-ocnophilic, as, for example, one might argue, the monkey’s paw in W. W. Jacobs’ short story first is and later becomes to the elderly couple who come into possession of this talisman.

In the thriller, Derry argues, based upon his reading of Balint, the protagonist fears a “real external danger,” to which he or she voluntarily exposes him- or herself, confident in his or her hope that he or she can survive it. Balint contends that “this mixture of fear, pleasure, and confident hope is what constitutes the fundamental elements of all thrills,” and, likewise, according to Derry, comprise the “three-part progression” of “most suspense thriller plots,” to which may be added thrills “associated with high speed, such as racing, horse-riding, skiing, sailing, and flying”; thrills “associated with exposed [or risky] situations, such as jumping, diving, rock climbing, taming wild animals, and traveling into foreign lands”; and thrills “associated with unfamiliar forms of satisfaction, such as new foods, new customs, and new sexual experiences” (22).

In Thrills and Regressions, Balint coins the words philobatism and ocnophilia to refer, respectively, to the thrill seeker and his or her opposite, who is quite content to avoid thrills of any kind. Using Balint’s terminology and Derry’s insights, one could define a suspense thriller as a story in which an initially ocnophilic protagonist enters the philobatic world of external danger, triumphs over the peril, and is able, thereafter, to balance the extremes of a safe but uneventful existence with the dangerous but thrilling aspects of life.

Although the thriller plot’s emphasis upon a “real external threat” and an ultimately thrill-seeking protagonist suggests that such stories are more likely to be addressed to male audiences, it is clear, given the synopsis of Wait Until Dark, which involves a female protagonist, that this storyline can also involve female protagonists and can be directed toward female audiences:

In Wait Until Dark. . . the ocnophilic and clinging Audrey Hepburn [sic] loses the secure protection of her husband and home base, faces a series of terrifying thrills which she conquers, emerges victorious, and returns unharmed to the security of her husband, although now in touch with her own philobatic abilities and no longer in need of his protection” (24-25).

Indeed, as Derry himself points out,

there are many notable female protagonists in thrillers (as for example in Shadow of a Doubt, Le Boucher, or The China Syndrome) who become adventurers. . . and there are so many female spectators who have been moved by the thriller that it would be wrong to argue that these works are--more than any other popular genre--unusually reflective of sexist male fantasy (29).

In this chapter of his book, Derry also suggests how empty spaces can threaten the philobatic protagonist. For example, Derry contends that “in Wait Until Dark. . . it is precisely the empty spaces that are terrifying to the blind heroine; the empty spaces are blank, and she is unable to maneuver herself from place to place without the help of the anchored objects which make up her world” (26).

Two passages in Derry’s book explain how and why the suspense thriller differs from the horror story. In the first of these passages, Derry, alluding to the observations of both Alfred Hitchcock and William Castle, suggests that the suspense thriller “excludes horror,” just as it excludes “traditional whodunnits and detective films,” because, as Hitchcock insists, “the whodunnit generates a kid of curiosity that is void of emotion, and emotion is an essential ingredient in suspense” and horror often includes “supernatural suppositions” that identify the genre as “outright fantasy.”

For his part, Castle defines horror as the use of a monster to frighten audiences, whereas he defines a thriller as using “an identifiable person” such as someone the moviegoer could actually encounter and with whom he or she could empathize “in jeopardy” so that the audience can “root for” him or her (8-9).

The second passage adds a contemporary, all-too-human monster to the traditional ones that Castle featured in his films: “in certain horror films,” Derry points out, “the ‘monster’ is not a mystical or fantastic creature, but an insane individual who commits crimes,” and “because their murderous protagonists are presented as objects of horror and virtual monsters, films such as Psycho (1960), Repulsion (1965), and The Collector (1965) might most accurately be perceived as belonging to both the suspense thriller and horror genres simultaneously” (324-325). One could argue, indeed, that Dean Koontz’s much-vaunted “cross-genre” novels represent an even greater hybridization of genre fiction, often including, as it does, elements of science fiction, romance, the thriller, and the traditional horror story.

In the table of contents of The Suspense Thriller, and based upon his study of the thriller genre, Derry identifies six specific subtypes and promises (“To Be Continued”) more, perhaps, in a future volume: the thriller of murderous passions, the political thriller, the thriller of acquired identity, the psychotraumatic thriller, the thriller of moral confrontation, and the innocent-on-the-run thriller (vii). Perhaps Chillers and Thrillers will feature more summaries and commentaries upon these chapters of Derry’s excellent book in the future. Stay tuned (so to speak.)

Crowd Control "Under the Dome"

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

After he and Julia consummate their newfound love for one another, Barbie telephonically communicates with Colonel Cox, asking for two helicopters to be sent to the dome.

In the methamphetamine lab behind WCIK radio, Phil (“The Chef”) Bushey and Andy Sanders make plans to resist anyone that Big Jim may send against them, The Chef advising the selectman to aim for their enemies’ heads, since they are apt to be wearing body armor. The Chef has donned the white cross on a rawhide string that Julia saw in her hallucination at the dome generator.

Ollie Dinsmore awakens to a quiet house. Outside, cows in need of milking sound their distress. Ollie cannot find his father, Alden, anywhere, until he approaches the closed door to the room in which Ollie’s grandfather, suffering from the late stages of cancer, died. A note on the door reads, “Sorry. Go to town, Ollie. The Morgans or Dentons or Rev . Libby will take you in” (925). Inside the room, dead father lies supine on the same bed in which Ollie’s grandfather died. After getting sick, Ollie feeds the cows. Then, he decides he will go to the dome and pitch rocks against the invisible barrier. Later, he will return to the farm and bury his father’s corpse near his mother’s grave.

Following Big Jim’s orders to locate Barbie and his supporters, Special Deputy Carter Thibodeau ascertains that Piper Libby Pete Freeman, Tony Guay, and Rose Twitchell are all absent and unaccounted for. He wants to determine whether Rusty Everett is also missing, so he stops by the Everett house. Thurston Marshall is in the backyard, playing with the four children, Alice and Aidan Appleton and Judy and Janelle Everett. Carter viciously twists Linda’s arm behind her back, demanding to know Rusty’s whereabouts. She finally convinces him that she doesn’t know where her husband is, and, after sexually assaulting her, Carter leaves Linda.

Piper allows Norrie Calvert to make contact with the dome generator, and the girl verifies what Barbie has suspected: the aliens who have imprisoned them under the dome and who observe them over a distance of light years, are sadistic extraterrestrial children. Although the aliens hear Norrie when she asks them why they are keeping them prisoners and observing them, the townspeople’s captors, she says, didn’t bother to answer her question because they “just didn’t care” (935). As Piper and Norrie discuss the extraterrestrial youth, the helicopters requested by Barbie arrive.

Troops unload the helicopters’ cargo: “dozens of Air Max fans with attached generators” (936). Colonel Cox is unable to transport any fans to “the [Highway] 119 side” (937) of the dome because the aircraft cannot enter the airspace above the barrier. Barbie briefs Colonel Cox as to what is happening under the dome.

As Linda Everett and her charges, Judy and Janelle and Alice and Aidan, wait for Thurston Marshall to snip sections from the lead roll behind Burpee’s department store, “a police loudspeaker” announces a new restriction upon the townspeople: “CARS ARE NOT ALLOWED ON THE HIGHWAY! UNLESS YOU ARE PHYSICALLY DISABLED, YOU MUST WALK” (942). It seems that daily, and even more often, the freedoms that the people of Chester’s Mill take for granted are taken away, without due process, as Big Jim Rennie and his cronies continue to take advantage of the crisis represented by the descent of the dome. Again, the parallels to the Obama administration’s continuing power grabs, although probably unintended by King, are hard to miss. Thurston insists upon leaving the metal snips at the scene, in case others need them, but he forgets to do so, stuffing them into his belt. Remembering Carter Thibodeau’s sexual assault against her, Linda, exasperated at Thurston’s slowness, jerks the shears from his belt to return them to their hiding place herself and, as she does so, “a vehicle slid in behind the van, blocking access to West Street, the only way out of this cul-de-sac” (943). At first, because Linda has been afraid of Carter or other police officers cutting off their escape from town, the reader assumes that the vehicle may be a police car; however the vague way in which the omniscient narrator describes the means of transportation (as a “vehicle,” rather than as a police car) implies that there is no cause for such an assumption.

As the townspeople walk toward the Dome Visitors’ Day meeting place, Carter joins Big Jim in the selectman’s air-conditioned Hummer, and, as the politician characterizes the people he serves, his contempt for his constituents and fellow citizens is as plain as his arrogance (an arrogance, one might add, that seems more typical than not of many actual elected officials and bureaucrats): “They want food, Oprah, country music, and a warm bed to thump uglies in when the sun goes down” (944). Carter’s new status is demonstrated when Big Jim invites the police chief, Peter Randolph, who passes by, to join them, but to sit in the back, not the front, seat.

The vehicle that cuts off Linda and her passengers is the hospital’s ambulance, van driven by Douglas Twitchell. Rusty has telephoned the medical staff and told them to abandon the hospital and get out of town. Accompanying Rusty are Ginny Tomlinson, Gina Buffalino, and Samantha Bushey’s baby, Little Walter--more of King’s remnant of the townspeople, his chosen ones who will help to defeat the human evildoers who have corrupted Chester’s Mill and the sadistic aliens (if aliens they actually are) who have isolated the town under the dome so they can watch the horror show. When she’s told that Main Street is impassible, Linda says she has no intention of driving down that artery, because it passes the “cop shop” (947) and specifies her route, which will be via West Street to Highland. The reader wonders whether Linda’s conveying of this information will be significant or whether it is just the sort of idle chatter in which human beings, under stress, sometimes engage.

Chief Randolph insists upon leading the attack against the methamphetamine lab, to which Big Jim agrees, although the politician insists (several times) that he attack the site by way of the access road that leads through the woods, so as to be able to blindside The Chef and Andy Sanders. (The reader immediately anticipates that Chief Randolph will not do so and will consequently jeopardize his mission). The reader also learns, as he or she probably surmised much earlier, that Big Jim plans to replace Pete Randolph with Carter Thibodeau as the new police chief. Indeed, Big Jim hopes that the present police chief will be killed in the raid.

With Carter’s mention of the stale air as he entered Big Jim’s Hummer (“The air smells like a frickin ashtray” [943]), King reminds his reader of the worsening atmosphere under the dome, and he does so again, as Linda and her passengers, leaving town, almost encounter Big Jim, and she swerves off the street: “She parked on someone’s lawn, behind a tree. It was a good-sized oak, but the van was big, too, and the oak had lost most of its listless leaves” (949).

Once Big Jim and Carter return to Town hall to watch their fellow citizens congregate at the Dome Visitors’ Day site, Linda speeds out of town. Big Jim has ordered Carter to instruct Thurston Marshall that he is forbidden to leave town, and Carter hopes that he may also have another opportunity to sexually assault Linda, but, as his quarry escapes, he will be too late to accomplish either Big Jim’s or his own mission.

As the townspeople gather at the Dome Visitors’ Day site, it is apparent that many are unprepared for a day in the sun. They fail to bring protection from the sun’s rays, to bring drinking water, and to refrain from eating foods that will make them thirsty later in the day. Big Jim’s failure to provide portable toilets or emergency medical personnel, equipment, and vehicles is also apparent. The day is shaping up for catastrophe, just as Big Jim hopes and intends. Still, Special Deputy Henry Morrison does his best to keep order and provide needed services, even dispatching Special Deputy Pamela Chen to the school for a bus to use to transport the sick and lame, if not the lazy, back to town at the end of the day. The lack of crickets’ “singing” (958) advertises, once again, the devastating effect that the dome is having on the town’s enclosed atmosphere.

As they watch the townspeople assemble at the Dome Visitors’ Day site, The Chef and Andy Sanders, armed with military assault rifles and hand grenades, make last-minute plans to stand off and defeat the attackers they believe will come to shut down the amphetamine lab. The Chef will hide inside “the Christian Meals on Wheels truck” and engage their attackers if they arrive by way of the access road, as he suspects they may, while Andy will keep watch “out front” (960). If either of them whistles, the other will run to his aid.

Barbie and the others atop Black Ridge watch the townspeople trek toward the Dome Visitors’ Day site and observe the hospital ambulance as it makes its way up the mountain, toward the McCoy cabin. Barbie, Joe McClatchey, and Julia Shumway say that they can feel the aliens watching them.

Big Jim and Carter also watch, on television, as the crowd surges forward, crushing the ones in front against the side of the invisible dome. Special Deputy Morrison and his fellow lawmen fire their pistols into the air, restoring order, as they order the crowd to spread out along the side of the dome rather than to bunch up against it. Stephen King’s favorite news source, CNN, and three of his favorite journalists, Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, and Candy Cowley (Dome Visitors’ Day is such a huge event that it takes all three reporters’ talents to cover the story properly, it seems), report the happening.

On the outside of the dome, the soldiers are unable to prevent the arriving family members and friends from “stampeding” toward their trapped loved ones, and “one” visitor is “killed in this stampede and fourteen. . . injured, half a dozen seriously” (964). Others, implanted with “various electronic medical devices” are killed by the dome itself.

King’s omniscient narrator’s description of the nearly riotous manner in which both the dome’s visitors and victims act, stampeding like wild cattle, or sheep without a shepherd, recalls Big Jim’s characterization of his constituents as “ants” or “sheep” that need to be taken care of by more responsible leaders, or “shepherds.” In his depiction of the men and women inside and outside Chester’s Mill, King seems to agree with Big Jim’s assessment of human beings. Many of his characters arrive without water or proper protection from the sun. They have given little thought to the best foods to bring. Overcome by their emotions, they rush forward, crushing or trampling one another, when there is no need to behave in such a mindless and injurious fashion. Possessed of a mob mentality, they react only to gunshots and profanity. Without someone, whether it is Deputy Henry Morrison or Big Jim Rennie, many of the townspeople would be unable to take care of themselves or their families. It is only the few, King implies, who are able to fend for themselves: cunning, but self-serving and unscrupulous men of audacious daring, such as Big Jim; those who have police or military training, such as Barbie, Henry, and others; those who have the love and compassion that it takes to put the needs of others, such as family members and friends, ahead of their own safety and welfare; and, curiously, those who, like Ollie Dinsmore, have endured great suffering. It is as if having lost his family, Ollie’s eyes are opened to the absurdity of life, both in big and small matters. When he sees seventeen-year-old Mary Lou Costras carrying her infant son to the Dome Visitors’ Day site, Ollie “wonders if she’s insane, bringing a kid that small out here in this heat, without even a hat to protect its head” (953), a point that is seconded by Henry:

“I think there’s a Red Sox hat in the back of my car,” Henry says. “If so, would you take it over there?” He points to the woman Ollie has already noticed, the one with the bareheaded baby. “Put it on the kid and tell that woman she’s an idiot” (954-955).

In viewing the congregating townspeople, Ollie’s loss and grief also allow him a detached, if not entirely objective, rather resigned and, perhaps, cynical view of Dome Visitors’ Day: “Ollie thinks what a slow, sad walk they are going to have once the hoopla’s over” (953). He then returns “to the job at hand,” the burial of his father, who committed suicide last night or early this morning.

King may well be right in his assessment of crowd psychology; both psychologists and other writers, including Mark Twain (in his portrayal of the mob that Colonel Sanders turns away in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), offer similar observations. He may also be right in declaring that some judge others by themselves, as the rather foolish Police Chief Pete Randolph does in having assumed that Deputy Freddy Denton would be angry at him for assuming command of the methamphetamine lab raiding party, a tendency that, King suggests, is illogical, given to error, and potentially risky: “He has expected grief from Freddy for taking over the head honcho role but there is none (Peter Randolph has been judging others by himself all his life), but there is none)”; instead, the wily Freddy thinks, “This is a far bigger deal than rousting skuzzy old drunks out of convenience stores, and Freddy is delighted to hand off the responsibility” (965). Again, King is on the money in this observation , too, but it’s one that he doesn’t apply to himself, apparently, because his fiction is littered with references to pop culture experiences, artifacts, and events that he seems to believe his readers have also experienced and either enjoyed or not, as King himself has enjoyed them or not, and, of course, he is stridently insistent that CNN is the best (and maybe the only authentic) news source in America, if not the world, and that Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, and the rest of the CNN team can deliver the story better (and, of course, more truthfully) than any other reporters on the planet. Of course, an author must judge others--his characters--by his own personal attitudes, beliefs, emotions, ideas, values, and biases, because he or she is the one and (usually) only individual on hand with whom to consult as he or she writes a novel. The “others” whom he or she thus “judges” are, after all, mere creations of the author’s own imagination, including his or her evaluations of real persons’ conduct and speech, since fictional persons are always based, to some degree, on actual human beings. When King, in “judging others by himself” gets it right, he’s a masterful psychologist; otherwise, he tends toward self-indulgence and personal prejudice. The fact that he gets it right only part of the time is what will probably prevent his acceptance by scholars as a truly great writer, although, on the other hand, it’s doubtful that many of them would classify him as a mere hack. King is more like Edgar Allan Poe was judged to be, by James Russell Lowell, “three-fifths genius and two-fifths sheer fudge” (A Fable for Critics), and, as such, will likely occupy the middle ground between the extremes of the literary genius and the literary hack. Still, in all, that’s not a bad place to be for a writer who admits that his work is “the equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”

An interesting point about the Dome Visitors’ Day scene, which occupies much of the space from pages 950 to 968, is that there are clear divisions of the action , discernable by which group of characters and which settings occur as the narrative’s action progresses: Special Deputy Henry Morrison, at the site itself; Ollie Dinsmore, burying his father on the family farm; Barbie and his coconspirators at the old McCoy cabin atop Black Ridge; Marta Edmunds watching TV in her Uncle Clayton Brassey’s farmhouse, while the deceased homeowner’s corpse keeps her company; The Chef and Andy Sanders at the meth lab behind the Holy Redeemer Church, awaiting the police’s raid; Chief Randolph and his deputies planning their raid before watching the Dome Visitors’ Day events unfold on TV at the police station (on CNN, of course); the police in transit to the church, having forgotten their helmets and Kevlar vests. To this point in his story, King has tended to subdivide such action into relatively brief, numbered scenes, rather than to include the such potentially stand-alone segments in one, continuous narrative block. One of the effects of this decision is to unify the action while keeping various settings and casts of characters before the reader’s mind, emphasizing that, although divided in purpose, behavior, attitudes, beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives, the townspeople are one community, living in one town--for the present, at least. There is every indication that this solidarity is superficial rather than real and that the threat to Chester’s Mill will soon fragment the town.

King uses the same divide-and-separate tactic with regard to the two platoons of police officers who approach the methamphetamine lab behind the Holy Redeemer Church, where The Chef and Andy Sanders are waiting to ambush their attackers, keeping the reader apprised now of what is happening with one or another of the advancing teams of officers and now of what is occurring with regard to either The Chef or Andy. As a result, the pace is kept brisk and the suspense mounts. King is surprisingly good at describing fight sequences, although, one suspects, he has seldom been in physical altercations and has certainly never participated in either police or military combat operations. The power of the imagination is a wonderful thing, especially when it is bolstered, as King’s often is, by expert consultants and research. The ranks of the advancing police officers are quickly thinned as first The Chef and then Andy decimate their numbers with fire from their AK-47 assault rifles. Among the casualties are Chief Randolph (killed by Andy) and Deputy Freddy Denton (slain by The Chef), the force’s two veteran officers and onsite leaders. They die with the same cowardice that has caused most of the special deputies except Aubrey Towle to flee for their lives. As writers of tales of the wild West are fond of pointing out, it takes a special sort of man to face another armed man--someone like Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday. There’s a big difference such writers point out, between shooting at unarmed targets or wild animals and facing an armed man who can shoot back an, in doing so, possibly kill his adversary. Courage under fire is a prerequisite to such conflicts that neither Chief Randolph, Deputy Denton, nor most of the special deputies can boast: “They weren’t cops at all, Chef saw; just birds on the ground too dumb to fly”:

With this homily and call to judgment, Chef opened fire, raking them from left to right. Two of the uniformed cops and Stubby Norman flew backward like broken dolls, painting the high trash grass [sic] with their blood. The paralysis of the survivors broke. Two turned and fled to the woods. Conree and the last of the uniformed cops booked for the studio. Chef tracked them and opened fire again. The Kalashnikov burped a brief burst, and then the clip was empty (974).

Frederick Howard Denton, aka Baldy, wasn’t thinking about anything when he reached the back of the WCIK studio. He had seen the Conree girl go down with her throat blown out, and that was the end of rational consideration. All he knew was that he didn’t want his pictiure4 on the Honor Wall. He had to get under cover, and that meant inside. There was a door. Behind it, some gospel group was singing “We’’ Join Hands Around the Throne.”

Freddy grabbed the knob. It refused to turn.

Locked.

He dropped his gun, raised the hand which had been holding it, and screamed: “I surrender! Don’t shoot, I sur--”

Three heavy blows boxed him low in the back. He saw a splash of red hit the door and had time to think, We should have remembered the body armor. Then he crumpled, still holding onto the knob with one hand as the world rushed away from him. Everything he was and everything he’d ever known diminished to a single burning-bright point of light. Then it went out. His hand slipped off the knob. He died on his knees, leaning against the door (975).

He [Andy Sanders] killed both Bowie brothers and Mr. Chicken with his first fusillade. Randolph he only winged. Andy popped the clip as Chef Bushey had taught him, grabbed another from the waistband of his pants, and slammed it home. Chief Randolph was crawling toward the door of the studio with blood pouring down his right arm and leg. He looked back over his shoulder, his peering eyes huge and bright in his sweaty face.

. . . “Please don’t kill me! Randolph screamed. He put a hand over his face.

“Just think about the roast beef dinner you’ll be eating with Jesus,” Andy said. “Why, three seconds from now you’ll be spreading your napkin.”

The sustained blast from the Kalashnikov rolled Randolph almost all the way to the studio door (978).

Aubrey manages to wound The Chef, but is killed by Andy. As Melvin closes in on the drug addicts, they detonate the explosives by pressing a button on the garage door opener that The Chef has rigged as a detonator.

The explosion sets off another, tremendous explosion, this one of the ten thousand gallons of propane that Big Jim and his cronies had stockpiled at the church for use in making methamphetamine. Barbie, watching with the others of his group, think, “Now we’re under the magnifying glass” (982). King’s townspeople turn their attention to the godlike reporters of CNN for word as to what has just happened, but, for once, even “America’s news stars,” Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, Candy Crowley, Chad Myers, and Soledad O’Brien, are unable to fathom what has just happened--it’s that huge. The firestorm that results from the explosion rolls across the town, blackening the sky under the dome and catching fire to the town and countryside. Pamela Chen recommends that the townspeople who have congregated at the dome board the bus so that they can speed through the advancing firestorm. Although Special Deputy Morrison doesn’t share his colleague’s optimism, he agrees to her plan.

King’s omniscient narrator devotes a length paragraph to describing the vast damage the raging firestorm does to Chester’s Mill. Peace Bride is “vaporized,” the walls of the police department implode before its bricks shower into the air. The statue of the town’s founder is “uprooted,” and “the buildings along Main Street explode one after another,” incinerating Food Town and “rolling down main roads, boiling their tar into soup” (987) as it spreads everywhere under the dome. Big Jim and Carter have taken refuge in the Town Hall’s bomb shelter, but many other residents have nowhere to ride out the fury of the firestorm. The sky is dark with birds trying to escape the inferno, and animals flee, colliding against the transparent barrier, “the lucky animals” dying, “the unlucky ones” lying “sprawled on pincushions of broken bones, barking and squealing and meowing and bellowing” in agony and terror (988).

Ollie Dinsmore helps himself to the oxygen in his father’s death chamber and takes refuge in his farm’s potato cellar.

Barbie and the others atop Black Ridge return to the McCoy farmhouse, Barbie understanding that the firestorm may exhaust the air supply available toy the under the dome.

With “about a dozen townsfolk” aboard the bus, “among them. . . Mabel Alston, Mary Lou Costas. And Mary Lou’s baby. . . . Leo Lamoine” (990), Chaz Bender, Pamela Chen, and Henry Morrison at the wheel, the bus rams through the firestorm’s wall, but, before it clears the fire, “the windows implode and the bus fills with fire” (991).

Barbie and his party reach the dome, where they ask the soldiers to turn on the huge fans the helicopters had transported to the scene, and the fans force a “faint breeze of clean air. . . through the barrier” (994), as the fire continues to burn “behind the,,” its fury unabated.

Whatever could go wrong has gone wrong. In the last fifty pages, King has thrown a Western-style shoot out between a posse and a pair of outlaws and a cataclysmic firestorm at his trapped characters; death and destruction appears everywhere, and the air inside the dome is barely breathable. Even the plants and the animals have not been spared, but lie dead or dying in terror and agony, and, with seventy-seven pages left to read of the story, the reader suspects that the worst is yet to come.

A Peculiar Form of Suspense “Under the Dome”

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Julia Shumway and Jackie Wettington have something in common: a crush on Colonel James O. Cox, whom they consider good-looking (Julia) and forceful (Jackie). For her part, Rose Twitchell prefers CNN’s Wolfe Blitzer, who “can,” as far as she’s concerned, “eat crackers in my bed anytime” he wishes (765). King’s own admiration for the journalist is clear, as is his respect for CNN. Everyone, it appears, from the patrons of Dippy’s Roadhouse and the clientele of Sweetbriar Rose restaurant watch the news channel, as does Second Selectman Big Jim Rennie, the novel’s antagonist. Any newscasts that occur during Under the Dome’s action are those that are transmitted by CNN. Even the hospital staff listen to CNN. It’s tuned in, with John Roberts broadcasting, when Rusty Everett has his run-in with Big Jim. Indeed, on the rare occasion that King refers at all to his beloved CNN’s chief rival, FOX News, it is with derision. For example, when one of the FOX News team dares to ask Colonel Cox a question during the press conference that the military man calls, one of King’s characters is delighted to see the journalist put in his place. The colonel has just told the press corps that the Army has “established a no-go-zone around the Dome” because of a concern that “the Dome might have” unrecognized “harmful effects” in addition to the hazards that it is known to possess:

“Are you talking about radiation, Colonel?” someone called.

Cox froze him with a glance, and when he seemed to consider the reporter properly chastised (not Wolfie, Rose was pleased to see, but that half-bald, no-spin yapper from FOX News), he went on (762).

The reader is apt to note, with dismay, that King apparently does believe, after all, in a simple, black-and-white world in which the good guys are his guys (Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Barbara Starr, John Roberts) and the bad guys are not. It is regrettable that someone who’s written so many books for so long, about so many issues, albeit through the medium of fiction, rather than as a journalist, would still perceive politics, journalism, social, and military matters in such an unsophisticated manner.

Like his character, Linda Everett, he apparently believes that “there are sides“--two of them--in news reporting, at least, just as it is clear that he has definitely chosen his side. Obviously, King has every right to take sides--Under the Dome is his novel, after all, and its world is his world--but the reader who doesn’t share his biases is apt to resent his arrogance in assuming that CNN is respectable and that FOX News is the home of “yappers.” Moreover, such a reader is likely to wonder how such biases affect the thought processes of his characters, one of whom admits to having an almost romantic crush on Blitzer. Is one reading a liberal/Democrat novel or a non-partisan novel? If it’s not necessary to insert a particular political point of view into the story, one has to wonder why King does so. The term “self-indulgent” comes to mind, as it does, in the reading of such novels as Lisey’s Story and Duma Key. Please, Mr. King, the reader might want to plead, especially if he or she is a moderate, a conservative, an independent, or a Republican, just tell the story; a paean to CNN and the liberal point of view is not needed or particularly desired.

During “CNN BREAKING NEWS,“ Colonel Cox‘s press conference is announced. The colonel has called the conference to make life difficult for Big Jim and to frustrate the selectman’s push for increased political power as he, like Rahm Emmanuel, seeks to take full advantage of the crisis represented by the mysterious dome’s descent over the isolated town of Chester’s Mill, Maine. He does so by announcing a Dome Visitors’ Day and by calling upon Big Jim to answer such questions from the press corps (or from those who are allowed to ask questions), such as whether there are “any plans to add a press conference” (asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer); why Big Jim, rather than Colonel Barbara, is in charge under the dome (asked by Wolf Blizer); whether Big Jim would bother to attend such a press conference when he is reportedly involved in criminal activities or “financial mismanagement” (asked by NBC’s Lester Holt); whether it is true that Colonel Barbara has been arrested for serial murders (asked by CBS’ Rita Braver); and whether Barbie could have been “jailed to keep him from taking control as the President ordered” (asked by PBS’ Ray Suarez). (No questions are accepted from FOX News representatives. Apparently, Colonel Cox found the one about radiation impertinent.)

Following the press conference that Julia, Jackie, Rose, and others of Barbie’s supporters watch at Sweetbriar Rose, King’s omniscient narrator transports the reader to the jail, where Barbie is allowed to interact with Deputy Manuel Ortega, lest the reader forget completely about the passive protagonist. In this scene, Barbie comes off as even weaker and more ineffective than he has seemed so far. In fact, during the scene when he was shown as willing to drink from the cell’s toilet bowl rather than to faint from dehydration and the omniscient narrator shared with the reader Barbie’s past training in black ops, hand-to-hand combat, and interrogation techniques, referencing his service in Iraq, Barbie, who single-handedly bested four tough thugs in the parking lot outside Dippy’s Roadhouse, seemed as rough and ready as John Rambo.

Since then, however, much of the military toughness of the colonel has seemingly dulled. He’s been in jail since page 533, mostly being verbally and physically abused and subjected to the childish pranks of his jailers (who have salted his drinking water, for example, and contaminated his cereal with spit and boogers). He’s succeeded in very little otherwise, except to have stashed his pocketknife inside his bunk’s mattress. During this scene, Ortega, upset by Colonel Cox’s press conference (and, no doubt, by Wolf Blitzer’s questions), threatens Barbie with his .45, leaving Barbie shaken and sweating: “Barbie leaned back against the wall and let out a breath. There was sweat on his forehead. The hand he lifted to wipe it off was shaking” (768).

Barbie looks weaker yet because of the reader’s inevitable comparison of him, the passive protagonist, with Big Jim Rennie, the active antagonist. While, it may be argued, Barbie is--or can be--tough and is courageous, and that he has advanced hand-to-hand and perhaps martial arts skills, he seems to lack the passion for goodness that Big Jim has for evil. Big Jim is a determined, relentless adversary, who uses imagination, audacity, and intelligence to pursue his goals. He is also courageous and resourceful, organized and efficient, confident and defiant. A natural leader, Big Jim commands loyalty, inspires both respect and fear, and exhibits political acumen. Although he is contemptuous of others, seeing them as weak or dependent and he is involved in crime, including not only the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine, but also murder, Big Jim inspires the reader’s grudging respect in the same way that a Mafia godfather or a third-world strongman might do. He is glamorous, impressive, and powerful, a commanding figure with genuine presence. The passive Barbie, although he has shown that he can fight and is mentally tough as well as physically strong, doesn’t seem to be nearly as imposing as the villainous Big Jim.

Barbie comes off even less heroic when his passivity is juxtaposed to physician assistant Rusty Everett’s confrontation with Big Jim Rennie as he checks on his patient’s condition following Big Jim’s admittance to the hospital for treatment of his arrhythmia. Rusty has already confronted Big Jim once, in the selectman’s office, demanding an account as to what became of the propane that was stolen from the hospital, extracting from Big Jim the promise to investigate the matter, which, along with Big Jim’s decision to shut down his illegal drug operation, results in the return of two stolen tanks. Now, the courageous, if naïve, Rusty confronts the politician about a much more serious matter, declaring “I know you killed Coggins” (778), telling him about the baseball stitch marks he has seen on the Reverend Coggins’ face, which match those on the gold-plated baseball in Big Jim’s office, and demanding that Big Jim and Andy Sanders “step down” and allow Third Selectman Andrea Grinnell to “take over” the government of Chester’s Mill. However, Rusty crosses the line, morally and legally, when he threatens to withhold lifesaving medication from his patient if Big Jim refuses to “step down.” Unfortunately, Rusty is no match for his unscrupulous and murderous foe, who has concealed Deputy Freddy Denton and his bodyguard Special Deputy Carter Thibodeau in his hospital room’s bathroom. Having heard Rusty threaten to withhold the drugs that would keep Big Jim alive unless the politician agrees to resign from office, they are able to charge Rusty with extortion. In addition, they add the trumped-up charges of resisting arrest and attempted murder. They also allege that their prisoner, Colonel Barbara, or “Barbie,” “put him up to it” (782). After ordering Freddy to retrieve his cellular telephone, which Rusty had pocketed, Big Jim steps on Rusty’s left hand, seemingly breaking three of his fingers. (Actually, they are dislocated, although the fifth metacarpal of his hand is broken.) The physician’s assistant is then jailed, three cells down from Barbie, and the contrast between the assertive medic and the passive soldier is made even more striking, as, despite extreme pain, Rusty pulls his dislocated fingers, except for the pinkie, back into place, even managing to joke about his condition as he does so, saying he needs to “fix” his middle finger, as he “may need it” to flip off Big Jim and his cronies (788). Although Rusty no doubt acted rashly, both times that he confronted Big Jim (as he did when he seized the dome genberator), he has hardly made the situation any worse than it already is. The question is whether Barbie, jailed for over 250 pages now, has made anything better.

In any case, concerned that the jail is bugged, Barbie mouths the news to Rusty that, tomorrow night, a rescue is to be mounted, intelligence of which Rusty is already aware. Barbie adds, still mouthing the words, that they will require a safe house in which to stay following their escape, and Rusty thinks that, “thanks to Joe McClatchey and his friends. . . he had that part covered” (789).

King is a master storyteller with a long history of writing bestsellers, so it seems unlikely that he would be unaware of the apparent passivity of his jailed soldier. Barbie was promoted to the rank of colonel as the president’s “inside man.” He has displayed impressive combat skills in his fight against the four thugs who attacked him outside Dippy’s Roadhouse. He can be resourceful (he hid his pocketknife inside the jailhouse bunk’s mattress and drinks from a toilet bowl), and he is trained in close combat, interrogation, and black ops skills. He is respected by Colonel Cox, a “forceful” man. However, King’s having kept him in jail for a fourth of his novel, wherein he’s the frequent butt of jokes and jibes and has been physically assaulted and threatened with death on several occasions as well, makes Barbie seem more pitiful than admirable, as does Rusty’s manly, take-charge conduct, juxtaposed to Barbie’s apparent acquiescence to his foes. It will take extreme acts of heroism before the end of the story for Barbie to redeem himself as the hero whose past training, experience, and action has led the reader to believe he is capable of being. Perhaps King can pull it off. After all, he is a master storyteller with a long history of writing bestsellers. Still, the reader wonders, which is, in its own way, another, if rather peculiar, form of suspense.

Knowledge, Ignorance, Surprises, and Suspense "Under the Dome"

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Earlier in the story, flowers that one of Linda and Rusty Everett’s daughters, Judy and Janelle, picked for their mother were dying, and now “the twin oaks in their front yard” apparently are dying as well, their “leaves hanging limp and moveless [sic], their bright colors fading to drab brown” (691). Like the fauna (and the human population, some members of which have had seizures and hallucinations and others of which appear to be going insane), even the flora under the dome is being adversely affected by the pollution-gathering barrier. The suggestion is that, if the dome remains in place much longer, cutting off the town from the rest of both nature and civilization, the consequences will be dire, indeed, for plants, animals, and human beings alike.

The evil spread by Big Jim Rennie and his cohorts is also having dire effects upon the people of Chester’s Mill. Two citizens, Angie McCain and Dodee Sanders, have been killed by Junior Rennie, and two others, the Reverend Lester Coggins and Brenda Perkins, have been killed by Big Jim himself. Several townspeople were injured, some seriously, during the riot at, and looting of, Food Town. Samantha Bushey, beaten and raped by Special Deputies Frank DeLesseps, Melvin Searles, and Carter Thibodeau, while Special Deputy Georgia Roux assists by holding the victim down and urging her colleagues on, shoots two of them (Frank and Georgia) before killing herself with the same handgun and leaving her eighteen-month-old son Little Walter a virtual orphan, given the indifference and madness of his methamphetamine-addicted father, Phil (“The Chef”). The descent of the dome has killed several animals and human beings as well, including Claudette Sanders, the late wife of First Selectman Andy Sanders and the father of the late Dodee. Rory Dinsmoore’s ill-advised attempt to shoot his way through the dome with a high-powered rifle cost him first an eye and then his life.

Adding to the horror of these deaths is the townspeople’s ignorance as to the cause of the dome and its descent and of the cause of the madness that grips some of the townspeople (The Chef, Junior, and Big Jim himself, among others). One cannot fight what one does not understand, and the inability to protect and defend oneself and others increases one’s sense of helplessness and desperation.

So far, the protagonist, Colonel Dale (“Barbie”) Barbara (jailed since page 533), and his supporters have discovered little of the truth behind the bizarre events that have transpired and continue to transpire in their town. Joe McClatchey and his friends Norrie Calvert and Benny Drake, using a Geiger counter supplied to them by Barbie before Barbara was jailed, have located what they believe may be the generator that created and sustains the dome. Physician’s assistant Rusty Everett, in having examined the bodies of the Reverend Lester Coggins and Brenda Perkins, surmises that the former was struck by a baseball and that the latter’s neck was broken. The former chief of police and Brenda’s late husband, Howard (“Duke”) Perkins, an early victim of the dome, has compiled a file of incriminating evidence concerning Big Jim’s theft of public funds and manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine. The townspeople also know that neither the direct hit of a pair of Cruise missiles nor the dousing of the dome with an experimental acid capable of melting solid rock had any effect on the barrier. In addition, they have a few fairly strong suspicions about some of the strange incidents that have happened since the dome’s descent. They suspect that Big Jim organized the Food Town riot as an excuse seize more power for himself and to further bolster the ranks of Chester’s Mill’s finest. They suspect that he is behind the arson that resulted in the burning down of newspaper owner and editor Julia Shumway’s business and residence. They suspect that Big Jim has framed Barbie for the murders of his and Junior’s victims. Samantha Bushey identified Frank DeLesseps, Melvin Searles, Carter Thibodeau, and Georgia Roux as her attackers, although they denied her allegations and have never been charged, arrested, or tried.

That’s what, to date, the townspeople know or suspect. They don’t know the origin or the nature of the dome, although there are plenty of theories as to how it came to be and who may be responsible for its descent. Some believe it is the work of extraterrestrials. Others think it is the result of a terrorist attack by a rogue nation. Still others suspect that the United States put the dome in place, using its own citizens as subjects of a sinister experiment. Perhaps the dome is the invention of a criminal genius, some suppose, or a living entity, others imagine.

Once again, the characters’ partial knowledge and total ignorance, coupled with rumors and suspicions (some founded, some not) increase their fear and sense of helplessness while, at the same time, heightening the story’s suspense.

But King also arouses the reader’s suspense by extending the population of the town in an unusual manner. In an earlier scene, King surprises the reader by including the dead among the living in his catalogue of the townspeople of Chester’s Mill who did not witness the phenomenon of the falling pink stars, as if he were suddenly writing a sequel to Our Town or Spoon River Anthology. The effect is startling, and shows that, even after all these years, King can surprise his readers.

Now, in a scene out of The Sixth Sense, one of his characters--and a canine one, at that--Horace, Julia Shumway’s Corgi, hears a voice as he eats popcorn spilled by Andrea Grinnell, with whom Horace and Julia are staying, following the loss of Julia’s home and business to the Molotov cocktails tossed by Big Jim’s henchmen. As the dog is eating the spilled popcorn he has found under an end table, he encounters the file of incriminating evidence against Big Jim Rennie that the late Police Chief Perkins had gathered. His widow, Brenda, at Barbie’s behest, had taken it to the third selectman for safekeeping. Andrea, in seeking to kick her addiction to pain pills cold turkey, had promptly forgotten her visitor’s visit. Apparently, both Andrea and Julia have also forgotten the file itself (since neither of them mentions it again or looks for it.) As Horace comes across the file, however, he hears the voice:

. . . Horace was actually standing on his mistress’ name (printed in the late Brenda Perkins’s neat hand) and hoovering up the first bits of a surprisingly rich treasure trove, when Andrea and Julia walked back into the living room.

A woman said, Take that to her.

Horace looked up, his ears pricking. That was not Julia or the other woman [Andrea]; it was a deadvoice [sic]. Horace, like all dogs, heard dead voices [sic] quite often, and
sometimes saw their owners. The dead were all around, but living people saw them
no more than they could smell most of the ten thousand aromas that surrounded
them every minute of every day.

Take that to Julia, she needs it, it’s hers (694).

Unfortunately, Horace is confused, thinking (yes, King’s mutts are quite good at cognitive activity, in their own doggy way, much as are the canines that frequent rival writer Dean Koontz’s cloyingly sentimental fiction), and the Corgi, able to distinguish between “peoplefood” [sic] and “floorfood” [sic], thinks that it is “ridiculous” to imagine that Julia would. . . eat anything that had been in his mouth,” and, in his confusion, the misplaced file remains undiscovered--at least, by the human characters--and Horace himself forgets “all about the dead voice [sic]” (695).

Why does King include this scene? Is it simply to remind the reader of the file’s existence and that it is still available to the enemies of Big Jim Rennie? If so, there are other, simpler and more expedient ways to accomplish this end. In fact, King has reminded the reader of the file’s existence, if not its specific location, several times already, through characters’ dialogue concerning the file. Obviously, King does not want the file to be discovered yet, because Julia was about to do just this when she turned away from the end table under which it lies, concerned about Andrea as the selectman began to make gagging sounds, prior to regurgitating her morning’s “raisin bun”:

She bent to look into the gap between the couch and the wall.

Before she could, the other woman began to make a gagging
noise. . . (695).

If the purpose of the scene isn’t for Julia to find the file, why did King write it? Why did he bring forth the ghost of Brenda Perkins to tell Horace to take the file to Julia? In regard to the answers to such questions, the reader, at this point, is left hanging, so to speak, but King has certainly raised the question as to why he has deliberately emphasized, once again, as he had in including the dead among the living in his listing of the names of those residents of Chester’s Mill who had not seen the fall of pink stars, a link between the living and the dead. He deliberately introduces an element of the supernatural when such an intrusion is not necessary to the telling of his story and is, in fact, even a bit disconcerting, requiring, as it does, yet an additional suspension of disbelief, beyond that needed to accept the sudden dropping down of a mysterious, transparent “dome“ over an entire town. In doing so, he sets up the expectation that, sooner or later, this connection between the living and the dead of Chester’s Mill will have narrative (and, perhaps, thematic) significance. Of course, in setting up the reader’s expectation that he will deliver on his implied promise to account for this link between the quick and the dead, King also generates a ton of suspense.

Seizures “Under the Dome”: Unity and Suspense

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Several of the characters in Stephen King’s latest novel, Under the Dome, suffer seizures. Some are thought to be petite mal epileptic seizures; others are presumed to be cause by too much exposure to the sun; still others are said to result from too much excitement. (Only later does physician’s assistant Rusty Everett suggest that the seizures may be “a side effect of whatever force is powering the Dome” [396]).

Among the children who experience such seizures are sisters Judy and Janelle Everett, Little Walter Bushey, and Aidan Appleton. Judy, Janelle, and Little Walter are children of Chester’s Mill residents Linda Everett and Samantha (“Sammy”) Bushey; and Aidan is the orphan son of an out-of-town mother who is killed by the descent of the dome.

Their seizures are accompanied by murmurings about strange visions. “Stop Halloween,” Janelle warns, “you have to stop Halloween.” Judy reports, “The pink stars are falling,” adding “it’s so dark and everything smells bad” (389). Little Walter hasn’t had a visionary experience, as far as anyone knows, but, at only 18 months, he may not be able to articulate any such hallucination or prophecy if he has had one. Nevertheless, the reader learns, from Ginny Tomlinson, a nurse at the local hospital to which Sammy took her son after his crib collapsed (and she herself had been gang-raped): Little Walter, she tells the Reverend Piper Libby, is “your basic healthy eighteen-month-old, but he gave us quite a scare. He had a mini-seizure. It was probably exposure to the sun. Plus dehydration. . . hunger. . .” (384). (It is also from Ginny that the pastor learns that Sammy was raped; the pastor quickly accomplishes what no one else has been able to do, extracting from Sammy the names of her rapists.)

A few pages later, Aidan has the same bizarre vision as he experiences a seizure:

“He’s having some kind of seizure,” Carolyn [Sturges] said. “Probably from overexcitement. I think he’ll come out of it if we just give him a few m--”

“The pink stars are falling,” Aidan said. “They make lines behind them. It’s pretty. It’s scary. Everyone is watching. No treats, only tricks. Hard to breathe. He calls himself the Chef. It’s his . He’s the one” (391).

Upon recovering, none of the children remembers seeing, hearing, smelling, or saying anything unusual. However, their seizures and their hallucinations, like the migraine headaches that Junior Rennie suffers, suggest that something is very bad, indeed, in Chester’s Mill and that, as bad as things may be, events are likely to get worse soon. Halloween and pink stars point to something sinister. According to Aidan, the Chef is the one responsible for the coming catastrophe, whatever it might be. The last time the reader encountered the Chef, he was lurking about inside the methamphetamine laboratory that Big Jim Rennie and Andy Sanders operate behind Christ the Holy Redeemer Church. The pastor of the church was also a partner in the manufacture and sale of the illegal drug before Big Jim killed him. Police officers Jackie Wettington and Linda Everett, who had checked on the church, the parsonage, and the church’s radio station missed the Chef:

A door neither woman had noticed eased open at the back of the studio. Inside were more blinking lights--a galaxy of them. The room was little more than a cubby choked with wires, splitters, routers, and electronic boxes. You would have said there was no room for a man. But The Chef was beyond skinny; he was emaciated. His eyes were only glitters sunk deep in his skull. His skin was pale and blotchy. His lips folded loosely inward over gums that had lost most of their teeth. His shirt and pants were filthy, and his hips were naked wings; Chef’s underwear days were now just a memory. It is doubtful that Sammy would have recognized her missing husband. He had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in one hand (he could eat only soft things now) and a Glock 9 in the other.

He went to the window overlooking the parking lot, thinking he’d rush out and kill the intruders if they were still there; he had almost done it while they were inside. Only he’d been afraid. Because demons couldn’t actually be killed. When their human bodies died, they just flew into another host. When they were between bodies, the demons looked like blackbirds. Chef had seen this in vivid dreams that came on the increasingly rare occasions when he slept.

They were gone, however. His atman had been too strong for them.

Rennie had told him he had to shut down out back, and Chef Bushey had, but he might have to start up some cookers again, because there had been a big shipment to Boston a week ago and he was almost out of product. He needed smoke. It was what his atman fed on these days.

But for now he had enough. He had given up on the blues music that had been so important to him [as he had given up on sex, too, according to Samantha, his wife, in favor of his drug of choice] in his Phil Bushey stage of life--B. B. King, Koko and Hound Dog Taylor, Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf, even the immortal Little Walter. . . he had even pretty much given up on moving his bowels, had been constipated since July. But that was okay. What humiliated the body fed the atman.

He checked the parking lot and the road beyond once more to make sure the demons weren’t lurking, then tucked the automatic into his belt at the small of his back and
headed for the storage shed, which was actually more of a factory these days. A
factory that was shut down, but he could and would fix that if necessary.

Chef went to get his pipe (320-321).

Judy, Janelle, Aidan, and Little Walter are not the only ones to have had seizures, the reader later is told: according to the omniscient narrator,

During the first fifty-five hours of the Dome’s existence, over two dozen children suffered seizures. Some, like those of the Everett girls, were noted. Many more were not, and in the days ahead the seizure activity would rapidly taper down to nothing. Rusty would compare this to the minor shocks people experienced when they came too close to the Dome. The first time, you got that almost electric frisson that stiffened the hair on the back of your neck; after that, most people felt nothing. It was as if they had been inoculated (424-425).

King associates characters through their sharing of a common environment, through their sharing of a common experience, and through such relationships to one another as those of family, friendship, and business. In addition, a few are associated with one another more particularly than others. For example, not only do Judy, Janelle, Aidan, and Little Walter share the common environment of Chester’s Mill, but they are also connected by the seizures they suffer and by the resulting hallucinations they experience. Samantha and her son Little Walter are also connected to Phil (“The Chef”) Bushey, the one whose “fault” some yet-to-occur catastrophe related to Halloween and the falling of pink stars it is (according to Aidan). They are a family, and, the reader suspects, they will somehow oppose one another during the future incidents of which the children, during their seizures, seem to predict will occur.

In one case, a character--Junior Rennie--is associated also with the dead, both the “girlfriends” he has killed and whose company he keeps, in the dark pantry of one’s home, and the Pastor Lester Coggins, whose body he has hidden with those of Angela McCain and Dodee Sanders after his father killed the pastor. There are hints of necrophilia between Junior and the female corpses. Junior suffers frequent migraines, and he often retreats to the makeshift tomb when such a headache seizes him, and he always feels better, he asserts, after spending time with his “girlfriends.” Not only do such associations unify the plot of King’s sprawling novel, but they also add to the story’s suspense.

Other loose threads of the plot also intrigue the reader. What, if anything, will happen to Samantha Bushey? Her attackers warned her not to tell anyone about the brutal assaults they committed against her; nevertheless, Sammy identified them to the Reverend Piper Libby. Will the children be cured of whatever causes their seizures? Will Big Jim Rennie succeed in his bid to wrest more power from the community’s residents? Will he and his son Junior get away with the murders they’ve committed? Will Third Selectman Andrea Grinnell be able to beat her addiction to pain pills? Will Big Jim and Junior be able to frame Dale (“Barbie”) Barbara for the murder of the Reverend Lester Coggins? Will Barbie connect the stolen propane tanks with Big Jim’s methamphetamine manufacturing operation? Will the dome ever be destroyed? These questions, and those related to the ethical issues that King raises early in his novel, are at least as compelling as a video game, a TV program, a movie, or surfing the Internet.
　
It isn’t long before Judy’s visionary experience proves prophetic. . . .

Generating, Heightening, and Maintaining Suspense

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

To create suspense, signal to the reader that something dire is about to happen. Use dramatic irony so that the reader knows more (namely, that something dire is about to happen) than the protagonist knows. Alternatively, situational irony can be employed to mislead the reader into thinking that something other than what does, in fact, occur is likely to happen. (As I point out in “The Others: A Masterpiece of Situational Irony,” this film does a superb job of using situational irony to create, heighten, and maintain suspense.)

A writer can employ the journalist’s technique to generate and develop suspense as well, asking who? what? when? where? how? and why?

Who is to be subjected to the dire circumstances, situation, or event? By identifying several characters as being liable to suffer from an impending crisis, the writer allows the reader to sit on pins and needles, so to speak, waiting to see which potential victim must endure the expected catastrophe. By making one character stand out as nobler or more sympathetic or more likeable than the others and another as more ignoble, unsympathetic, or unlikable, the writer can increase the reader’s anxiety, making him or her wonder whether doom will befall the former or the latter character.

What may happen can also be a means of generating, heightening, and maintaining suspense. By being vague about the nature of the threat or by identifying several possible catastrophes, the writer can make the reader fret over which one will occur. The suspense can be increased, too, by offering a range of possible cataclysms, from mile (a flash flood, say) to wild (perhaps a tsunami), any of which may occur.

When will the tragedy befall the characters? This question will keep the reader turning pages long past bedtime. Alfred Hitchcock spoke of the efficacy of making his audience sweat by making them wait. He used the example of a time bomb of which the audience was aware is set to explode at a predetermined, not-too-distant moment. Oblivious of the danger, the protagonist goes blithely about his or her business, possibly, the audience fears, until it is too late.

Where will the calamity take place? If the reader knows but the protagonist does not and his or her itinerary includes the location of the impending disaster, the reader will grow more and more anxious as zero hour approaches and the main character is on a path that may put him or her in harm’s way.

How will the catastrophe occur? If we know and know, moreover, how to circumvent or stop it, we may anxiously wait to see whether the hero or the heroine figures out how to save him- or herself (and, possibly, the world) in time or are incinerated, eviscerated, bludgeoned, or otherwise unpleasantly dispatched.

The question of why a villain chooses to commit murder, mayhem, genocide, or some other dastardly crime may not be as immediate a cause of suspense as other questions may be, but the reader will want to know what motivated the antagonist, and the reader will read on, anticipating that, at some point, usually toward the end of the narrative, the writer will make everything clear.

The use of dramatic and situational irony, coupled with the use of the journalist’s who? what? when? where? how? and why? Questions will help the author of horror stories, including you, generate, heighten, and maintain suspense!

Characterization: A Filmmaker’s Contribution

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Filmmakers are neither novelists nor short story authors, but, like both, directors are committed to bringing characters to life for their audiences. Because moviemakers cannot directly explore characters’ thoughts through a narrator’s exposition or the character’s own stream of consciousness or interior monologues, they must rely upon other techniques. These techniques, used by a novelist or a short story writer, can enhance and support traditional narrative techniques of characterization, offered to readers by means of description rather than camera work.

Here’s an example of how Alfred Hitchcock conveys emotion on the screen; he is discussing a scene from his movie Sabotage:

It was a supper table. The man complained about the color of the greens. All I did was to show the close-up of the woman, about ordinary bust size, and the man the same. Sometimes the man from her eye-line, sometimes the woman from his eye-line. That was all we were concerned with. The most important aspect of the scene was her hand. It was essential to play up her using the carving knife. She carved meat with it, and then found herself helping him to vegetables with the carving knife. She realized what was wrong. Then I showed her hand dropping the knife, trying to get rid of it, and then having to pick it up because more meat needed carving--and dropping it with a clatter. Then immediately a close-up of the man hearing the clatter. Then the woman’s hand clasping and unclasping over the handle of the carving knife. All we saw was a foreground of a table; glasses, and cutlery, and her hand hovering. Then back to him. He got up, and the camera tilting [sic] up with him. He realizes his danger. I never bothered to show the room, and I allowed that man to go right past the camera towards the woman; and, then again he comes to her and he looks down, and the camera goes right from him, following his thought, down to the knife and her hand still hovering over it. And then he makes a grab and she gets it first. Then the two hands: her hands win. And then all you see is two figures, and the man gives a cry and falls (Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. Sidney Gottlieb [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995], 186-187).

In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe explains why the end of a story is all-important in determining how the rest of the narrative is structured and told. Hitchcock subscribes to a similar notion. For him, every scene and every montage must be carefully and deliberately worked out, often with storyboards, before it is committed to film: “The director,” Irving Singer, declares, “must have a prior conception of the response he wishes to achieve and how it can be evoked,” for, otherwise, the Sabotage montage of which Hitchcock speaks would have come to naught. Indeed, Hitchcock himself argues, “To have shot all that in a long view would have been useless. It had to be made up of these little pieces. With a first-class director the final cutting is a simple job, if he has constructed the scene in his mind in advance and knows what he wants to achieve” (Three Philosophical Filmmakers [Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004], 10-11).

According to Hitchcock, Singer says, “there are two primary uses of cutting or montage in film: montage to create ideas and montage to create violence and emotion.” In his discussion of the Sabotage scene, Hitchcock explains how he used montage to perform the latter objective; Singer offers an example of the director’s use of this technique to create the former: in Rear Window, Singer contends, Hitchcock creates ideas (that is, depicts a character’s thoughts on film) by “cutting back and forth to what James Stewart sees (and shows in his facial expressions) as he watches what is happening outside his window” (13).

Besides his views as to how to create thought and emotion on film, Hitchcock also had specific thoughts as to how characters should be represented. According to Singer, the director rarely achieved suspense in his films as the result of relating it “to someone’s character”; rather, “it is because we immediately perceive the innocence and (most often) friendliness of some ordinary person in his movies that we are lured into feeling concerned about what might happen to him or her” (129).

For Hitchcock, characters, like actors, were necessary evils, as it were, to the filmmaker’s true purpose, which was to create and project suspense and other forms of emotion. “His innocent victims,” Singer contends, “ordinary people who sometimes end up doing heroic acts, rarely behave as they do because of abstract thought or sensory need or even passionate impulse.
They flee from imminent danger or engage in a secretive and solitary mission that pits them against something that is determined to destroy them. The drama concludes when they succeed, for then nothing perilous remains to prolong suspense” (230).

The appeal of such characters, Singer suggests, is in their very ordinariness, for they represent stand-ins for audience members who, as ordinary people themselves, lead ordinary lives: Do we really care about the happy married life that the threatened couples will now presumably enter into? Not at all. We were fascinated by them only because they were surrogates for ourselves as imperfect human beings, and of all other persons who have also so much to fear in mere existence, which seems forever poised to victimize every finite creature (231).

Hitchcock had definite ideas about female characters and villains, too. His ideas about female characters are clearest, perhaps, in the type of actress he preferred to direct. He sought “elegant women,” Singer says, “even ‘ladylike women’ . . . rather than sexy fleshpots,” preferring “Nordic types because their sexiness is deeply hidden in them and must be discovered instead of being flaunted,” and “he thought that stylish actresses. . . have the greatest range of cinematic expressiveness,” although, as raw materials, so to speak, “they too would have to be molded, even manipulated by him, in order to perform as he desired” (65-66).

Hitchcock wants his audience to see his villains as realistic, believable characters. To this end, Singer says, the filmmaker “give[s] his villains a pleasant, often suave and seductive appearance as opposed to his innocent protagonists,” which, Singer believes, “keep[s] his thrillers from degenerating into horror films” (231).

In a previous article, I listed various ways by which novelists and short story writers depict their character’s personalities. To these techniques may be added the montage that Hitchcock uses, represented on the page in images conveyed through description rather than as pictures filmed by a camera and projected onto screens by projectors.. Interspersed or alternated with traditional narrative methods of characterization, the cinematic montage, effected through description and, indeed, exposition, can add a dimension to novels and short stories which is present at this point more in cinema and theater than anywhere else.

Retake

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

One of the things I enjoy reading about is how businesses solve problems. When the business involves storytelling, the reading is, for me, all the more interesting.

Consequently, reading about how Merian C. Cooper, the executive producer of Son of Kong (he had also produced King Kong, of course) was told that he had to limit himself to a budge to a budget of $250,000 (originally $238,000), solved the problem of making the movie on a shoestring, as it were, was fascinating.

What he did was to “scale the project back considerably,” Ray Morton recounts in King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson. This scaling back required Cooper to revise “the script, condensing and simplifying all the way through,” so that some scenes were eliminated altogether and the film’s action sequences were combined or juxtaposed without the originally intended transitions. For example, Morton writes:

To save money on recreating the native village and the Great Wall, the scenes set in the village were eliminated--the natives would nor confront the landing party on the beach and refuse to allow them to come ashore, forcing them to row around the island looking for a landing spot. When Denham’s party finally did land, it would be right near the site of the temple, eliminating the need for any lengthy treks through the jungle. The remaining jungle and temple scenes were all consolidated so that they would take place in just two primary locations. . . (95).

Short story writers and novelists don’t face such restrictions, because they don’t have to film their stories. However, by imagining that they are forced, by the vagaries of the economy, the whims of studio executives, or other unanticipated problems, to make similar changes to their plots, settings, or cast of characters, such writers could learn (or hone) their skills in plot development, description, and characterization, which is always a good thing.

Imagine that you are plotting a story about a radio talk show host, while operating a metal detector, which he does as a hobby, finds an artifact in the Nevada desert. It is inscribed with odd characters. Suspecting that the piece may be worth a fortune (and that it may even be of an otherworldly origin), the man attempts to decipher the strange characters inscribed upon the relic. He is unable to find the characters in any of the sources he consults at a major university. Finally, he decides to copy them onto a sheet of paper and take the paper to an anthropologist at the same university. Unable to identify or decipher the characters, the anthropologist consults a linguist. The linguist is a consultant for a secret government project which is recording a history of an alien species in its own language--the strange characters on the artifact that the talk show host found--and the linguist alerts the government that the talk show host has discovered the object that was lost decades ago. The talk show host is taken for a ride by government agents who inform him that the government has confiscated the artifact and threaten him not to divulge anything about his discovery. After going into hiding, the talk show host tells everything to his audience during a show and promises to share the characters with the world in the hope that someone somewhere can decipher them and interpret the message on the artifact that the government has confiscated.

So far, so good, you think.

But, then, out of the blue, you are told that your story cannot feature either an alien species or the government. You have to shoot a retake, as it were, to provide another explanation for the mysterious characters.

Perhaps you come up with something like this: a radio talk show host, while operating a metal detector, which he does as a hobby, finds an artifact in the Nevada desert. It is inscribed with odd characters. Suspecting that the piece may be worth a fortune (and that it may even be of an otherworldly origin), the man attempts to decipher the strange characters inscribed upon the relic. He is unable to find the characters in any of the sources he consults at a major university. Finally, he decides to copy them onto a sheet of paper and take the paper to an anthropologist at the same university. Unable to identify or decipher the characters, the anthropologist consults a linguist. The linguist identifies the characters as belonging to a lost tribe of ancient mystics. Finally able to interpret the characters, the linguist says that they are the words to an incantation that supposedly summons The Nameless One, which he believes is the tribe’s guardian daemon. On his show, the radio talk show host recites the linguist’s “wild story” and reads the translated text aloud, joking that he hopes he hasn’t thereby summoned the tribal daemon.

You’d now have two explanations for the origin and significance of the characters. As a result, you can create a more sophisticated plot. For example, perhaps the linguist’s account of the artifact’s characters is a deliberate falsehood, told to deceive the talk show host as to the true origin and significance of the inscription, which is that it really is a history of an alien species, written in their own language, which the government wants to cover up. When he subsequently learns the truth, the host can then tell everything to his audience during a show and promise to share the characters with the world in the hope that someone somewhere can decipher them and interpret the message on the artifact that the government has confiscated.

By further tweaking the original storyline, you can add more twists to the plot. Maybe your imaginary studio executive says he wants the host to advertise the characters on billboards before he announces the truth bout his discovery on his radio show, and, in major market areas across the country, the strange symbols appear on billboards, without explanation (ore perhaps with the caption, “Curious? Listen to KXYZ radio’s Hot Talk.” At first, you may think the exec’s demand asinine, but what can you do but humor him. You revise your plot, incorporating the billboards. In the process, you must explain why the talk show host posted the message on billboards rather than just explain things on his radio show.

Maybe his show is local, but he wants a national audience. Maybe he wants to protect himself against possible reprisals by the government or the aliens (or both). Maybe he is trying, as it were, to smoke the extraterrestrials out of their hideout, wherever it may be.

In this manner, by forcing yourself to plot and revise, shooting “retakes,” as it were of scenes and acts that you’ve already filmed (that is, written), you may facilitate your creativity as a writer, develop less straightforward (and predictable) plots, heighten suspense, and compose more sophisticated and complex plots.