Showing posts with label Christian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Christian Explanations of Vampires, Werewolves, and Witches

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

When Christianity became the dominant religion of the Western world in 313, beginning with Emperor Constantine's proclamation of the Edict of Milan, new explanations were provided as to the origins and natures of various monsters for whom their origins and natures had differed during per-Christian days. This post traces these developments with regard to a few of the monsters that are staples, as it were, of horror fiction.

 


The Dunwich Horror by Tatsuya Morino. Source: pinktentacle.com

For example, the Russian Orthodox Church regarded vampires as once been witches or who had rebelled against the faith (Reader's Digest Association's “Vampires Galore!” However, an account of vampires was included in the second edition (1749) of Pope Benedict XIV's De servorum Dei beatificatione et sanctorum canonizatione suggested that vampires existed only in the imagination.

 

Portret van de theoloog Augustin Calmet by Nicholas Pitau. Source: Wikipedia

On the other hand, French theologian Dom Augustine Calmet was of the opinion that vampires, in fact, did exist, his research suggesting that “one can hardly refuse to credit the belief which is held in those countries, that these revenants come out of their tombs and produce those effects which are proclaimed of them.”

The opinion of the Pope and of Calmet seems to represent, in general, the beliefs of the populace: either vampires were imaginary or they were revenants (animated corpses returned from the grave).

 

 
A German woodcut of werewolf from 1722. Source: Wikipedia

The Church's stance, as expressed in the fourth-century Capitulatum Episcopi was that belief in werewolves marked one as an “infidel,” since God alone had the power to transform one species, such as human beings, into another, such as wolves.

During the Middle Ages, however, theologians took their cue from Augustine, who seemed to believe in the possibility of werewolves.


Illustration of werewolves from Werewolves of Ossory by Gervase of Tilbury. Source: Wikipedia 

In Werewolves of Ossory (c. 1200), Gervase of Tilbury suggests that such human-animal transformations, including of men and women into wolves, having actually been witnessed a number of times, should not be lightly discounted as having occurred.



Source: ebay.com

Other medieval works contended that God punished sinful men and women by transforming them into werewolves and assured readers that anyone that the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated would become werewolves (Ian Woodward, The Werewolf Delusion). Both God and saints had the power to effect the transformations of humans into werewolves, as St. Patrick was alleged to have done in regard to the Welsh King Vereticus.

 

 Witches Sabbath by Francisco Goya. Source: reddit.com

According to Protestant Christianity, the witch, another monstrous figure, known to both the ancients and the people of the Middle Ages, gains her power—and most witches are female—by entering a contract with a demon (M. M. Drymon, Disguised as the Devil: How Lyme Disease Created Witches and Changed History).

Although Christian explanations of vampires, werewolves, and witches developed over many years, changing or emphasizing certain various features over others at times, it is clear that, in general, such creatures were products of dark magic or of sinful behavior, such as rebelling against God, blasphemy or heresy, entering contracts with demons, or practicing pagan faiths.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Nature and Nurture: Character and Setting as Destiny

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman


Why did you throw the jack of hearts away?
It was the only card in the deck I had left to play. -- The Doors

During the O. J. Simpson trial, observers claimed that, on his defendant’s behalf, attorney Johnny Cochran played the “race card.” Dancing with the Stars critics said that, in an effort to endear herself to the show’s audience and judges, contestant Marie Osmond played the “sympathy card.” Historians claim that the cards that Wild Bill Hickock was playing, which contained aces and eights, comprise the “dead man’s hand,” because he was shot to death while gambling with them.

These allusions are based upon the old analogy that compares one’s personal attributes and assets to the hand that one is dealt at birth. Life, according to this view, is not just any game; it's a card game. It’s a gamble. The stakes may vary, but the goal is always the same: to play the cards one has been dealt to one’s best advantage in the hope of winning the pot.

Even before poker, the life = game equation was popular. The Tarot deck is based upon this notion, and, as a result, its devotees claim, the Tarot hand that one is dealt can foretell his or her future, or fortune.

Beowulf, a poem that is interesting for many reasons, shows us the same thing that a study of Greek mythology discloses: humans, like the gods themselves, were subject to the whims of fate. To paraphrase Alexander Pope, Zeus (or Beowulf) might propose, but it was the Fates (or fate) who disposed of the issues, or determined the outcome of the events, of the day. In the days of ancient Greece, the Fates, envisioned as three sisters, were the ones who decided how events would play out. In Beowulf, the Fates have become fate, an impersonal force, much as the Norse goddess Hel became the impersonal place, hell, in Christian belief. Nevertheless, in both the worlds of the ancient Greeks and of the medieval Norsemen, Geats included, it was not the gods or humans who had the final say as to how incidents or actions, including their own, would turn out. There was a power higher than theirs, to which their own wills were subject.

Beowulf was told and retold for centuries before it was finally committed to paper. The person who wrote it down for posterity was a Christian, and, upon the pagan folkways and beliefs evident in the poem, the scribe overlaid references to Christian faith and doctrine. As a result, there is an uneasy alliance between the pagan and the Christian world views that is incompatible and conflicting. Some may suppose that this duality of vision weakens the poem, but it may be argued that the juxtaposition of these two Weltanschauung, in fact, enriches the narrative. The poem shows what the Norse philosophy of life and social values were before their Christian conversion and what they were becoming during, and would be after, this conversion. For example, before, Beowulf attributed his victories over his foes to fate; afterward, he credits them to God’s will. This twofold attribution of success indicates that, gradually, the idea that it is an impersonal fate that determines the affairs of humans was being replaced by the belief that God’s will is the determinant of such outcomes. In other words, fate becomes God's will. The doctrine of predestination develops this idea with rigorous logic, making humans little more than automatons whose behavior consists of little more than actions that are programmed from the beginning--that is, from eternity--by the will of God.

In the pagan world, the cards one is dealt would have been said to have been dealt by the Fates or by fate. In the Christian world, it is God who deals the cards.


A person might be dealt any of the 22 Major Arcana cards or the 14 Minor Arcana cards of the Tarot deck. All of these cards signified and brought about particular things. Today, people don’t usually think of a person as having any particular set of cards of such a predetermined nature in the hands that fate or God deals to him or her. Instead, whatever personal attributes and assets a person has or accumulates are usually considered the cards that he or she has been dealt. Over time, the cards in a person’s hand may change as one is lost or another is acquired. Were we to apply this concept to Beowulf, we might say that his cards included courage, unusually great strength and stamina, martial prowess, longevity, wisdom, loyalty, compassion, great wealth, popularity, and kingship. When circumstances warranted his doing so, he might play one or more of these cards. In his fights with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon, he played his courage, strength and stamina, and martial prowess cards; as king, he played his loyalty, compassion, and wisdom cards.

Human destiny is complex and impossible to know in advance. Life seems to be a gamble. We also sometimes do not know the full extent of our personal attributes and assets until we are, as it were, called upon by circumstances to use them. We are not always privy to every card in our hands; sometimes, some must be played from a face-down position. Luck (in pagan terms) or divine will (in Christian terms) has a role to play as well. By using such metaphors and analogies as life = gamble, life = game, and one’s personal attributes and assets = a hand of cards, we reduce these complex sets of incidents, circumstances, and actions to simpler, more understandable ideas. Whether any of these ideas is objectively true is perhaps unknowable, but they are, at least, true to one’s sense of how things are and of how things work. They seem to explain. They make sense to us emotionally, if not rationally.

What does all this have to do with character and setting? Writers play God (or fate) when they write stories. The writer is the one who deals the cards that the characters must play, giving or withholding this personal attribute or that individual asset. It was the writer--and the group of storytellers before him--who gave Beowulf his courage, unusually great strength and stamina, martial prowess, longevity, wisdom, loyalty, compassion, great wealth, popularity, and kingship, just as it was Charles Dickens, for example, who gave Ebenezer Scrooge his greed and stinginess, his callous disregard for others, and his capacities--at first unrealized--for compassion, sympathy, and love.

The cards that writers deal to their characters represent the genetic inheritance of these imaginary persons. But genetics is only one influence, as scientists remind us, that affects--and determines--behavior. We’re products of our environments as much as we are the products of our genes. Both nature and nurture make us who and what we are and who and what we become.

If the personal attributes and assets of the individual character represent his or her genetic inheritance, as it were, what represents the character’s environment? In fiction, the setting is the time, the place, and the cultural milieu into which the character is born. The setting may be past, present, or future. It may involve a tyranny, a theocracy, a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a democracy. It may be secular or religious. It may be amoral, moral, or immoral. It may be a universe or the microcosm of a total institution, such as a boarding school or a prison. It may be a metropolis or an island. It may be urban, suburban, or rural. It may be a rain forest or a desert, a castle or a shanty, this world or another planet in a galaxy far, far away; it may even be heaven or hell. Obviously, if a character were born into or lives in any one of these settings, his or her development would differ--in many cases, radically--from his or her development in another setting. Beowulf, both because of the cards he’s dealt and the time and place in which he lives, is a very different character than Ebenezer Scrooge!


By giving characters specific attributes and assets and by setting their lives in particular times, places, and cultural milieus, writers mimic the genetic and environmental aspects of human existence, providing their imaginary people with the gifts of nature and nurture that actual humans receive from evolution, geography, and culture. Whereas, for people, these gifts are likely to be seen as the effects of accident, luck, or grace, there’s no doubt as to who provides them to fictional characters, and they are given deliberately so that each character can fulfill his or her role in the drama the author has determined to create. The writer, depending upon one’s perspective, is, for his or her characters, fate or god.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

News You Can Use

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Newspapers may or may not be dying, but, until they do (if they do), one of them, USA Today, as I have indicated in previous posts, provides, in its “Across the USA” column, bite-size morsels of news that horror writers can use: these tidbits provide the imaginative horror writer plenty of food for thought. Of course, you have to be a bit twisted to add the right imaginative (and imaginary) twist to these items, transforming them from prosaic fillers into storylines with potential to frighten and repulse.

Here, as in other, similar, earlier posts, are my own takes on these tidbits. (First, the tidbit; from the September 12, 2011 issue, page 8A; then, the imaginary take on it.)

Item 1: Texas: Longview -- As children, their parents dressed them in identical outfits and for 18 years they shared a bedroom. The Kent quadruplets have turned into young women who are students at East Texas Baptist University. “I’m looking forward to just growing while I’m in college,” Kinsey Kent said. “Since we aren’t together as much, we have the opportunity to grow as individuals.”
Twist: This is an interesting idea. The main question, for me, is how will the four sisters change, now that they can become themselves? Will some change for the better and some for the worse? What type of horrible transformations are in the (Tarot?) cards for these young women? Witches? (That would be an ironic possibility, given their attendance at a mainstream Christian college!) Vampires? Werewolves? This tidbit is one a horror writer can--or should be able to--really sink his or her teeth into!

Item 2: Utah: Salt Lake City -- A West Valley City man has been sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for the beating death of his girlfriend. Third District Judge Judith Atherton handed down the sentence to Thomas Valdez, who was found guilty of first-degree murder in July. Police found Maralee Andreason dead on march 9, 2010, from blunt force trauma to the head.
Twist: So, he clubs her in the head, killing her, and he’s charged with murder in the first degree--and he gets off with 15 years to life--and the judge who hands down the sentence is herself a woman? Why did Thomas receive such a relatively puny sentence? What was his girlfriend like that would justify such treatment of her killer? I mean, there must have been some hellacious extenuating circumstances! Was she a witch? A vampire? A werewolf? (Probably neither of the latter two, because a club’s not going to kill a vampire or a werewolf all that easily, so the most likely scenario, of these three possibilities, is that she was a witch, but what did she do, put a curse on her boyfriend? If so, why?) There’s a story here, somewhere, and it could be a humdinger!

Item 3: Vermont: Stratton -- New York City area residents are gathering Tuesday for a fundraiser to benefit the Stratton Foundation’s Flood relief Fund. New York City escaped serious problems when Tropical Storm Irene came through, while Vermont was hit hard.
Twist: A politician should “never let a crisis go to waste,” the Democrats recently observed. What was Irene if not a crisis, if not for the Big Apple, for Vermont, at least? The fundraiser sounds noble, but when’s the last time a New Yorker was noble? Never! That suggests that New York City area residents may be raising money, but it’s probably to fund something dark and sinister. Maybe they are planning to build underground concentration camps in which to incarcerate--uh, I mean, house--pesky homeless people and are using Irene as an excuse to raise big bucks. They’ll give a smidgen of the money they raise to Vermont and keep the rest to improve the subway (by building subterranean homeless “shelters”).

Item 4: Washington: Spokane -- A 25-year-old man accused of murder was found dead in his jail cell. County Sherriff’s Sgt. David Reagan said deputies discovered Tristan Jordan on Saturday morning when they went to his cell to serve him breakfast. Cause of death will be determined by the medical examiner.
Twist: He’s locked in a cell. Let’s assume that he didn’t kill himself. What did? What could get into his locked jail cell, and how did it manage the feat? A demon? A monster that can take the form of solids, liquids, or gases, one that came through the ventilation system or the pipes, as a gas or as water, and then turned into a solid--solid steel, maybe?--and delivered a little brunt trauma to the prisoner’s head, maybe? There are other possibilities, too. Maybe he was poisoned by his jailers for some reason. Hey! I’m just saying. . . . I mean, weren’t they on their way “to his cell to serve him breakfast” when he was “found” dead?

Item 5: West Virginia: South Charleston -- State Police unveiled a 45-foot-long mobile command center that will help them manage special events and respond to disasters. It has satellite phone technology, weather radar systems, and a planning room. Its official rollout will be Oct. 15 at Bridge Day events at New River Gorge.
Twist: Are you freakin’ kidding me? A “45-foot-long mobile command center,” fully loaded with satellite technology, “weather radar systems, and a planning room”? This sucker has a mission other than the “official” one of supposedly lending a helping hand at “special events” and aiding “disaster” victims. It has “UFO Chaser” written all over it, that’s what I think. But nice try with the references to “special events” and “disasters.” The cops are hunting for spaceships and aliens--they just don’t want the state’s taxpayers to know what they’re really funding!

Item 6: Wyoming: Powell -- Weeks after Glenn French’s death, farmers gathered to harvest the fields he planted in the spring. “It’s a community effort of people who saw a need and filled it. And it’s a tribute to my brother,” Larry French said. “He was one of the kindest people I ever knew.”
Twist: What did Glenn plant, and how many acres of it is there? Is the crop marijuana, perhaps, or something more exotic, like seeds that fell out of the sky, on a meteorite that landed in the south forty a couple of years back? Maybe it’s a whole passel of man-eating plants like the one in the Little Shop of Horrors or flowers similar to H. G. Wells’ “strange orchid.” Whatever it is, it must be one hell of a crop to have managed to get the whole community to turn out, hoes in hand.

Item 7: U. S. territory: Guam -- Police arrested four men and two minors as part of an investigation into the stabbing death of three men. The adults are Benny Sam Robert, Osupwang Jery Muritok, Jeff Pedro, and Vimson Menisio.
Twist: What linked these four men (and two minors), and why did they stab three other men to death? What was in it for the killers? A common reward of some kind, or something different for each of them? Was it just money? Or maybe some deep, dark secret, maybe about the tire identities of the killers, that was best taken to the grave. Something about voodoo, maybe, or Satanism, or human sacrifice? The apocalypse is always a possibility, too, if all other ideas fail. Find the link between the killers or between the killers and their victims, and you find the story.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Beyond Blood, Guts, and Gore

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Often, we think of horror fiction as a visceral genre, focusing, as it frequently does, on blood and guts and gore. However, the best horror fiction transcends the merely physical and addresses, albeit usually symbolically, those dimensions of our existence that are peculiarly human: the theological, the philosophical, the social, the psychological, and the technological. We are more than bodies. We are ghosts. We are spirits. We are souls. We believe in God, we think about the implications of our perceptions and beliefs, we organize as societies and nations, we emote, and we use tools of spectacular complexity and variety. The best horror fiction addresses these aspects of our existence.


One reason that William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) is a great novel (and a movie, released in 1973) is that it explores the problem of evil and the meaning of true faith, showing that, more than being mere belief, such faith involves trust in God; love for God, for oneself, and for others; and the needs to forgive and to be forgiven. The novel also suggests that evil is not only real but that it is also of a spiritual, rather than of a psychological or a social, nature (although evil may be expressed psychologically or socially--or in other ways).


Part of the reason that The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) is a good, if not great, film, is that it is both theological, questioning whether God and the devil actually exist or are merely metaphors for experience that is not fully understood, and philosophical, asking whether human beings should consider themselves to be nothing more than one of the many products of evolution. There are consequences for both world views, the movie suggests, and it is the filmmaker's intent to force a decision for or against one worldview and its consequences or the other Weltanschauung and its consequences. According to the film's director, Scott Derrickson:

What I wanted to do was write something that wasn’t propaganda, wasn’t about trying to persuade people to think the way that I do, but recognize the fundamental importance of that question, the central question — does the spiritual realm exist? Is there a devil, and more importantly, is there a God? And if so, what are the implications of that? I don’t care what you believe — those are questions to be reckoned with… Everyone has to answer that question. And in some ways everyone lives their life based on what they believe about that question.

Many of Stephen King’s novels examine the effects of community life upon the residents of small towns, focusing upon the pressures upon, and the consequences to, individuality and personality that social mores, traditions, and expectations tend to exert and have; among the best of these novels, perhaps (but by no means the best of King‘s work to date), are Carrie (1974), Needful Things (1991), and Under the Dome (2009).


Perhaps the best-know and certainly one of the artistically finest horror films that delves into the mysteries of the human personality is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which is based upon Robert Bloch’s novel of the same title (1959). How much of our behavior as adults is shaped by our childhood experiences, and, in particular, by the hand that rocks the cradle? If the challenges of childhood and adolescence take different avenues than is typical or normal, might a boy grow up to be a monster rather than a man? “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” Norman Bates declares, but, clearly, in his case, this was not true. Why? The film perhaps leaves more questions unanswered than answered, despite the psychiatrist’s explanation of the protagonist’s behavior at the end of the film, but it brings to the attention of its millions of viewers the importance of seeking answers to questions of nature and nurture, of learning and genetics. In the process, the film makes it quite clear that people are more than merely food for worms, for machines, whether of flesh or of steel, operate according to their design, without being affected by the attitudinal, emotional, or other cognitive functions that are peculiar to creatures that have been created in the image and likeness of God.


Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed (1977), in which a computer impregnates a woman who gives birth to a cyborg infant, explores the implications of the human-technology dynamic, admittedly taken to rather absurd extremes. It’s a reworking, of sorts, of the Frankenstein motif, wherein the monster is, quite literally, a ghost in a machine, but one of technological, rather than of divine, conception and origin. A 1977 movie, of the same title, directed by Donald Cammell, is based upon Koontz’s book.

It is interesting (and, one might add, significant) that several of these novels and movies are based, allegedly, at least, upon actual events. The Exorcist is based upon a titanic spiritual battle that Blatty heard about during his college daysThe Exorcism of Emily Rose is based upon the horrific experiences of  Anneliese Michel. Although Carrie is an entirely fictional work, the protagonist, Carietta (Carrie) White, is “based on a combination of two girls in King's past; one of them went to school with him, the other was a student of his,” Timeline’s Internet article “Carrie becomes King‘s debut novel,” points out:

The young girl King went to school with lived down the street from him when he lived in Durham, Maine. King recalls, in an interview with Charles L. Grant for Twilight Zone Magazine (Apr 1981), “She was a very peculiar girl who came from a very peculiar family. Her mother wasn’t a religious nut like the mother in Carrie; she was a game nut, a sweepstakes nut who subscribed to magazines for people who entered contests . . . The girl had one change of clothes for the entire school year, and all the other kids made fun of her. I have a very clear memory of the day she came to school with a new outfit she'd bought herself. She was a plain-looking country girl, but she'd changed the black skirt and white blouse--which was all anybody had every seen her in--for a bright-colored checkered blouse with puffed sleeves and a skirt that was fashionable at the time. And everybody made worse fun of her because nobody wanted to see her change the mold.”
Needful Things, King says, was inspired by the excesses of televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker, and Under the Dome’s villain is based upon Vice-President Dick Cheney--as King sees him, of course. Psycho is based upon the murderous Ed Gein.

(It is also interesting and probably significant that several of these writers and filmmakers are Christian: Blatty is a Catholic, Derrickson is a Protestant, King is a believer but differs in his belief from traditional Protestants, and Koontz is a Catholic.)

Basing one’s fiction, entirely or in part, upon real-world people, situations, or events is one way to ensure that one has realistic, believable fodder upon which to base one’s theological, philosophical, social, psychological, and technological explorations, examinations, insights, and criticisms. That it is possible to do so underscores one of the points of horror fiction in general--and perhaps the biggest point of them all--which is that human beings, both actual and fictional, are more than blood, guts, and gore. There is a spiritual as well as a physical dimension to human existence; if there were not, horror itself would be impossible and there would be neither novels nor movies based upon this emotional reaction to external and internal evil that, like goodness, is both transcendent and immanent to human beings themselves.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Sex and Horror, Part 4

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman


The werewolf doesn’t figure large in Jason Colavito’s Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, in part, perhaps, because, as a horror icon, the werewolf was never as popular as such other monsters as vampires, witches, demons, and ghosts. In most werewolf fiction, the beast’s origins are seldom explained except to say that his existence is said to be due to a person’s having been bitten by a werewolf. Where the first werewolf came from, no one seems to know for sure or, if someone does, he or she isn’t saying.

The very mystery of the wolf is itself intriguing, for, often, the less we know concerning a person, place, or thing, the more interesting he, she, or it seems to us. The lore of the werewolf is sparse. A bite transforms someone into the monster. The beast transforms at the onset of the full moon (and, indeed, perhaps is transformed by this moon). It prowls by night, seeking whom it shall devour. Only silver bullets are fatal to it. Some werewolves have been the servants, but never the pets, of vampires.



Colavito makes reference to vampires’ keeping of werewolves as servants, as is the case in The Return of the Vampire, a 1944 film in which Bella Lugosi plays “a vampire” who “holds sway over a servant he has turned into a vampire”:


The vampire is Armand Tesla, who was once an eighteenth-century scientist but whose mastery o science led him to become an undead vampire. . . . Tesla re-enslaves his werewolf and uses his powers to stalk the family of Lady Jane Ainsley. . . .

. . . But Lady Jane uses psychology to reason with the werewolf, whom she rescued from lycanthropy once before. When a Nazi bomb knocks out Tesla, the werewolf drags the body into the sunlight, where the vampire melts away, freeing him from Tesla’s control (210-211).
Although Colavito doesn’t discuss the symbolic significance of this monster, it’s a fairly safe bet that the werewolf represents the animal nature of human beings. He is the beast within all of us, the animal that struggles to be free. From a scientific point of view, human beings are, after all, themselves animals of a higher order, perhaps, than the so-called lesser animals, the lions and tigers and bears, oh, my, and werewolves, like lamia, centaurs, minotaurs, sphinxes, mermaids, and other human-animal hybrids, represent the connection that human beings share with other predators.

Christians may accept the existence of demons, witches, and even ghosts, but most would be likely to draw the line at accepting the existence of werewolves. Such creatures, they would probably argue, are merely imaginary.

At best, werewolves represent a secular depiction of the animal instincts and impulses that human beings are said, from an evolutionary point of view, to have more or less repressed in the interests of civilization, culture, and society. They embody, in their shaggy forms, passions unrestrained, and may suggest an abandonment of the spiritual in pursuit of an unadulterated indulgence of the fleshly appetites, and, therefore, a denial, implicit or otherwise, of the soul

Moreover, werewolves are predators. They embody “nature red in tooth and claw,” suggesting that the world really is a jungle wherein species survive only if they are the fittest of their kind. As animals, werewolves are powerful and fierce and hard to beat. However, as humans, werewolves, one might be tempted to suppose, leave a lot to be desired. Aren’t they all but brainless, with fetid breath, terrible table manners, and worse etiquette? Aren’t they but brutes, pure and simple, reminders of what, perhaps, our forebears were, millennia ago, and what we may, should we devolve, be once again? So might men and women, as higher animals, suppose, but human beings are not allowed even this conceit, for, as The Return of the Vampire makes clear, these beast-men can reason, act in their own best interests, and even exact revenge against their cruel, but supposed, betters. Stronger, with greater stamina, and ferocious, werewolves are also capable of thinking and of forming beneficial relationships with others while punishing adversaries.

For Christians, there is no such animal. Instead, the equivalent might be an animated corpse--not a zombie per se, nor a mummy, nor a vampire--but someone more akin to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient mariner or Adam after the fall, a person who is spiritually dead. In other words, someone very like modern men and women, more dead than alive and completely without tail or fangs or fur.

But a werewolf? For Christians, there’s no such animal. Or is there?

According to some accounts, God Himself might punish sinners by transforming them into wolves, and some of those whom the church excommunicated were believed to become werewolves. Likewise, saints could curse men and women, transforming them into werewolves (“Werewolf,” Wikipedia). However, such accounts are relatively sparse. For the most part, werewolves are and remain secular creatures more akin to evolutionary theory than to theological doctrine.

If, in psychoanalysis, the superego substitutes for the moral commandments of God (or, alternatively, for heaven or righteousness), the ego for the free will exercised by human beings (or, alternatively, earth or corrupted virtue) , and the id for the devil (or, alternatively, hell or sin), the fate of those whom God curses by transforming them into werewolves seems to represent, in a Freudian reading, a psychotic obsession with sex and death, or eros and thanatos, the life instinct and the death instinct. The werewolf is a creature that is immersed in his or her own animal nature, in his or her own id, in his or her own sexuality. He or she is a figure half alive and half dead, just as he or she is a figure half human and half animal.

In the Christian reading of the same figure, the werewolf is a figure of the damned sinner, whom God has cast into the hell of him- or herself, cursed forever to remain the beastly, unrepentant sinner he or she has become, most likely long before God placed the lycanthropic curse upon his dying soul.


Note: In Part 5 of “Sex and Horror,” I will consider another icon of the genre, that of the witch.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Sex and Horror, Part 3

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman


From a Freudian point of view, ghosts often appear to represent sexual repression. They are appetites that, although suppressed, refuse to be banished and tend to haunt those whom they afflict, returning again and again to trouble and disturb those upon whom they would assert themselves. Such is the case--or may be the case, at any rate--with regard to Henry James’ classic novel, The Turn of the Screw, in which it is debatable as to whether the story’s apparitions are in fact specters or figments of the governess’ own mind. In Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, Jason Colavito lays out the dichotomy of the novel's criticism (and its resolution) in succinct fashion:


Scholars are divided in their opinion of what “really” happened in The Turn of the Screw, falling into two camps. One holds that the story is a tale of a ghostly haunting, taking at face value the governess’s story. The other camp believes the governess insane and that the story is the record of her hallucinations and madness. Edmund Wilson, the eminent twentieth century critic, inaugurated this school of thought in a 1938 essay calling for an explicitly Freudian reading of the novel in which the governess is treated as a “neurotic case of sex repression.” By this reading, the towers of Bly House are phallic symbols, and the governess is acting out repressed sexual rage at the patriarchy, as represented by Miles and his (absent) uncle. As Willie van Peer and Ewout van der Camp have noted, however, these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive and can both be true. In fact, the Freudian interpretation is quite clever but forgets that fiction is, well, fictional, and therefore can play by its own rules. In the world of The Turn of the Screw it may just be that Freudian interpretations are the false reality and ghosts are the truth that Freudian theories unfairly obscure. Since it is a novel, and not an autobiography, we can never know (136).

From a Christian point of view, ghosts are real (in a post-resurrection appearance to His disciples, Jesus assures them that He is not a ghost). Some regard them as the souls of departed (that is, dead) persons who are allowed to tarry on Earth for a time before continuing their journey to heaven (or possibly to hell). Others contend that ghosts are really demons in disguise. While the former may attempt to warn unbelievers of the consequences of their unbelief, the latter may seek to deceive the living and draw them away from God. (The nature of the ghost of Hamlet's father--as actual ghost or as demon in disguise--and its motives are questions that have considerable importance to the plot of Hamlet.) In either case, ghosts are considered potentially dangerous, and Christians are forbidden to summon them. (There may be reason to believe that the ghost who appears in Hamlet may be a demon in disguise, rather than the soul of the prince’s slain father).

Accordingly, the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw may be the souls of the deceased spirits of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, former servants who had had a sexual affair with one another while in the employ of the uncle of the two children, Miles and Flora, who has entrusted their care to the governess. The governess supposes that the ghosts may have sexually molested one or both of the children, but the novel is ambiguous; it could be that she herself is obsessed with the children’s sexuality and is tempted to molest them, blaming her compulsions upon the supernatural specters that she imagines she sees. Alternatively, the ghosts may be demons who have disguised themselves as ghosts in order to deceive the governess and draw her away from God. However, she never seems to be overtly or especially religious, or, for that matter, Christian.

There is a second possibility for a Christian interpretation of the story, that of Robert Heilman, who argues, in “The Turn of the Screw as Poem,” namely, that--

The story is virtually a morality play, involving the typical conflict of divine and demonic agents fighting for the soul of Everyman. The garden at Bly is the Garden of Eden; Miles and Flora are Adam and Eve in a state of prelapsarian innocence; Quint corresponds to folklore descriptions of the Devil; the governess is both an angel sent from God and a Christ-like mediator. By the end of the story, the Fall has occurred, but at the last minute the governess exorcises the demon from Miles’s soul and thereby saves him. Other apparitionist critics have expanded and rounded out this interpretation; the only character left unaccounted for is Miss Jessel, who too often is seen as merely the artistic counterpart to Quint. Miss Jessel, as cohort of Satan, is probably the Lilith in the Judaeo-Kabbalistic tradition who united with Adam and brought forth the race of demons, imps, and fairies (Rictor Norton, “Henry James's The Turn of the Screw,” Gay History and Literature, 1971, 1999, updated 20 June 2008).
Either interpretation, the Freudian or the Christian, makes of the novel both more and less than it seems to be in itself, for the story, capable of prompting both interpretations (and others), makes sense from both points of view but exhausts them rather than being exhausted by them. As usual, it seems that the way by which one interprets literature indicates at least as much about the interpreter as it does the interpreted. For Freudians, the story is about sex, because all things are reducible to sex. For Christians, the same story is about sin and redemption, because the world itself is a product of creation, sin, and redemption.

For me, it is clear that the Christian understanding of the story is richer and more complex than the psychoanalytical one, for life is more than sex and requires, to be appreciated properly, a world view that embraces both spirit and flesh (and both eternity and time) rather than simply the erotic impulse and its effects. The Freudian interpretation is reductive and simplistic; the Christian, expansive and intricate--rather like The Turn of the Screw (and life) itself.


In Knowing Fear, Colavito also discusses Richard Matheson’s novel, Hell House, a sort of revitalization of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, in which a team of paranormal investigators led by a scientist named Dr. Barrett descend upon a reputedly haunted house to ascertain whether it is actually haunted. The investigation is financed by “a dying millionaire,” Rolf Randolph Deutsch, who seeks assurance, in the existence of ghosts, should their presence in “the old Belasco mansion” be proven, of life after death (297).

It is clear that the spirits in the novel represent sexual lust, for, as Colavito points out, they are “decadent Jazz Age ghosts whose debauchery and sexual excess corrupted them into evil.” Their leader was “Emeric Belasco, the house’s builder and leader of the debauchery.” However, it was through the application of both science, and not sorcery alone, that Belasco corrupted his guests:

Belasco, it transpires, was a genius who studied deeply of the sciences and the dark arts, including the occult, and used his powers to mentally dominate his guests and turn them toward sensuality and destruction as part of his experiments and almost anthropological studies in evil. Under his auspices, men and women became like animals. . . and the guests killed and ate one another as they reveled in freedom and joy (298).
Dr. Barrett “is a skeptic about spiritualism,” attributing the Dionysian activity of the supposed ghosts to “energy” derived from “unconscious human powers.” In the course of the investigation, the investigators are sexually molested and assaulted by the spirits in the house, or, as Dr. Barrett contends, as a result of “the unconscious minds of the psychics” he employs and the telekinetic attacks they launch. For their part “the psychics believe Belasco’s shade is controlling a number of ghosts who commit the assaults” (298).

The novel’s resolution indicates that it is Belasco himself, “who survived death to continue his experiments in evil,” and Dr. Barrett’s weapon against the “electromagnetic radiation emitted from the [human] body” does its trick so that “Belasco’s power fades away,” suggesting, Colavito says, that the novel’s author intends the story’s theme to be that “the faith-based world of the mediums’ belief must bow before science”; their powers seem, after all, to have been grounded in physical, rather than spiritual, reality, products of “electromagnetic radiation,” and not demonic activity: “in the end even the most horrible of supernatural nightmares is reducible to natural law” (299).


There seems to be one major flaw in Matheson’s argument. His resolution remains ambiguous as to which force, Dr. Barrett’s scientific materialism or Dr. Belasco’s metaphysical dualism, is stronger--or, for that matter, ultimately true--for, as Colavito points out, the former’s triumph against the latter notwithstanding, Belasco’s continued existence after death indicates that “Dr. Barrett’s theories are wrong” and that “personality does survive death.” Therefore, although Dr. Barrett was able to shut down Dr. Belasco’s evil experiment by using his “Reversor, a gigantic machine that uses electricity to cleanse a space of . . . electromagnetic radiation,” the machine wouldn’t have been needed at all had Dr. Belasco not survived death and proved, thereby, that ghosts are, in fact, real. Therefore, it might be argued, Belasco’s use of both scientific materialism (as represented by his studies “of the sciences” and his conduct of “experiments and almost anthropological studies in evil”) and metaphysical dualism (as represented by his use of the “dark arts, including the occult”) indicate that he, not the materialistic Dr. Barrett, was right concerning his belief in the realities of both matter and spirit. In spite of his own efforts to dismiss a belief in ghosts as naïve, it is the belief in materialism that, the story indicates, is the truly naïve point of view regarding the nature of reality.

The ghosts of Matheson’s novel are both physical and spiritual, like the universe itself, which is precisely the view, concerning the nature of reality, that Christian thought itself argues. Ironically, Matheson’s novel seems to prove what it sets out to invalidate. Not only are the ghosts--or ghost, actually, for “the entities in the house” turn out to be “in fact but one--Emeric Belasco himself”--the source of the mischief, but they are also proof of the ability of the human soul to survive physical death (299). The ghost in the novel is himself a rather reluctant apologist, of sorts, for the Christian view of reality as consisting of both the physical and the spiritual.



Note: In Part 4 of “Sex and Death,” I will take a look at another horror icon, that of the werewolf.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Mapping the Monstrous

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman


In Monster (2005), Frank Peretti includes a map of his novel’s setting, which he updates at the end of each chapter. His use of this device accomplishes several narrative purposes. It orients the reader as to what takes place, when, where, and to whom, even as characters’ actions and narrative events change. It thus reinforces the idea that something is happening, that actions and events are unfolding. The map also adds verisimilitude, or a sense of reality, to the story, for its narrative landscape is charted, just as a real-world stretch of territory might be. The map also implies that the action of the narrative is significant, because only important events are recorded on a map.

The publisher of Monster notes, in a word to the reader, that the novel’s “custom maps,” updated “at the end of each chapter,” are included “to help you keep track of all the action.” So much action occurs between the novel’s covers, the publisher’s statement suggests, that the reader will need a visual representation of the setting just “to keep track” of it all. However, the publisher also suggests that, “even with maps. . . you will still find it hard to guess where things are headed.” The map, in other words, may orient the reader, but it will certainly not inhibit the plot’s imaginative meanderings, and, the maps notwithstanding, one should expect the unexpected: “Just when you think you have things figured out, Peretti’s imagination takes you down an unexpected route. . . and you realize there are more layers to the story than you imagined.”

A map, as Wikipedia observes, “is a visual representation of an area” which emphasizes “relationships between elements” that share a common space. Of course, there are many types of maps--aeronautical charts, contour maps, political maps, nautical charts, road atlases, pictorial maps, and others--but each is a depiction of a region, often terrestrial. That is, they enclose a space, thereby framing it, as it were, and making it special.

Maps cannot show every feature of the territory to which they correspond, so the mapmaker must select those features that the map will include, meaning, of course, that others must be excluded. In including some, while excluding other, features of the environment, the cartographer creates an image of the true world, and, of course, the mapmaker could be honest and straightforward or devious and duplicitous in depicting the terrain, its features, and their relationships to one another. A map is only as reliable as its maker. In other words, a map, like a storyteller, can be, as it were, an unreliable narrator.

Maps are often (but not always) scaled, so that an inch of map surface represents a much larger, corresponding surface of the actual terrain that the map represents. The map in Monster is scaled such that one inch of map surface equals ten miles of terrestrial surface. (Unfortunately, Peretti does not always honor his map’s scale.)



As the story progresses, more and more features are added, such as would not appear on any ordinary map of the area in which the story takes place--the deep forests of Idaho--suggesting that the novel’s maps are, indeed, as the publisher describes them, “custom maps.” The features that most maps include--highways, a river, creeks, a lake, forests, dry creek beds, trails, a resort, a dangerous “rock face”--are all present and accounted for, forming the relatively stable background, so to speak, against which foreground objects are added, subtracted, and rearranged as the story’s action progresses (although some settlements, towns, and directions to cities that do not themselves appear upon the maps are occasionally added as well). The stable landscape features are the relatively permanent, the more-or-less fixed, the comparatively reliable.

The foreground features, which are mostly technological or manmade, change; they appear, vanish, or reappear in other locations. Against the relatively permanent backdrop of nature, human and technological activities, temporary and tentative, shift and move. Like the scale--and, indeed, the map itself, as a mere “visual representation” of reality--the human attempt to chart the previously unknown--the difference between background and foreground features seems to represent the difference between the fixed and the determinate and the fluid and the free, or between fate and the freedom of the human will, just as it also suggests the gap between the known and the unknown and the monstrous and the human.

The shifting of the symbols on the map suggests that it’s not easy--and it may not even be possible--to truly represent reality, for, despite the stability of the known and the understood and, indeed, of the given features of nature, so to speak, there are always changeable and changing features which represent human freedom and behavior, including the products of
both--technological artifacts.

It would be unfair to divulge the secrets of Peretti’s impressive novel by describing the changes that occur with regard to the foreground objects that his ever-changing “custom maps” depict, for they both offer clues as to the story’s action and the direction that the plot takes. However, for the sake of further elucidating our idea as to the narrative significance of the map in mapping the monstrous, we shall address a couple of these shifting features.

One is the campsite of a young couple, Ted and Melanie, which, represented by a symbol of an Indian teepee in silhouette, doesn’t make its debut on the map until the end of chapter six, at the end of Service Road 19, which makes its first appearance along with the campsite. Both the service road and the teepee remain on subsequent maps, but the label, “Ted & Melanie’s campsite” vanishes, never to be seen again (until the final map, that is, representing, perhaps eternity), signifying that the couple is gone and that their campsite is now merely an abandoned location, not even marked, or labeled, as such anymore (until, again, the last map).

Likewise, at the end of chapter eight, Sing’s mobile lab appears on the map, parked, as it were, alongside the north shoulder of Highway 9, near the settlement labeled “Three Rivers.” On the map at the end of chapter nine, however, the settlement of Three Rivers, represented by a cluster of buildings in silhouette, remains, as does the text that labels it, but Sing’s satellite-dish-equipped van, labeled “Sing’s Mobile Lab,” has been relocated to the east of Road 228, west of Lost Creek and north of Abney & Tall Pine Resort, reflecting the character’s drive south.

Other, more critical objects are also represented, both on previous and subsequent maps as well as this one, but, again, it would be unfair to identify or discuss many of them for fear of spoiling readers’ pleasure in discovering these clues for themselves.

What is clear, however, even without an exhaustive detailing of the symbols’ appearances, disappearances, reappearances, and relocations or removals, is that the use of these “custom maps” adds interest, on several levels, to a novel that is exciting throughout and thrilling at times. The maps seem to help the reader to pin things down, but, as the publisher rightly observes, Peretti, nevertheless, succeeds in surprising the reader, time after time.

A map is not a journey, but it can suggest, at least, the terrain and its features, both relatively permanent and comparatively dynamic, and it can, when it involves a monster, suggest that there may be a disconnect between appearances and reality, between the known and the unknown, between the certain and the dubious, between fact and fiction. The maps in Monster are part of its fictional universe, and they both satisfy and frustrate the reader’s search for meaning and certainty. There is more to life than meets the eye, these maps suggest, and more to be taken upon faith than can be ascertained by reason.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Presto! You Have a Plot!

Copyright Gary L. Pullman
 
It’s fairly easy to plot a contemporary horror novel if you know the formula, which is also fairly simple--quite simple, in fact, consisting of three phases:
  1. A series of bizarre incidents occurs.
  2. The main character discovers the cause of the bizarre incidents.
  3. Using his or her newfound knowledge as to the cause of the bizarre incidents, the main character (usually assisted by others) puts an end to them (often by killing a monster).
With this formula in mind, all a writer has to do is to:
  1. Establish the cause of the series of bizarre incidents; if the cause is human or humanoid (for example, a monster with a will and personality), give it a plausible motive for its actions.
  2. Make a list of the bizarre incidents that will occur.
  3. Establish the means by which the main character learns the cause of the bizarre incidents.
  4. Have the main character use this knowledge as to the cause of the bizarre incidents to put an end to them.
  5. It helps (but is not mandatory) to associate the monster or other cause of the bizarre incidents with a real-life horror.

In a nutshell, that’s all there is to plotting the contemporary horror novel.

Let’s conclude with an example (Stephen King's Desperation):

  1. Establish the cause of the series of bizarre incidents. The demon Tak escapes from the caved-in mine in which he has been imprisoned for several decades and battles God, seeking to demonstrate its superiority to the Christian deity.
  2. Make a list of the bizarre incidents that will occur. In Nevada, a dead cat is seen nailed to a highway sign. An abandoned recreation vehicle (RV) sits alongside a lonely stretch of highway, its door flapping in the breeze. A sheriff, acting crazy, arrests a couple on trumped up drug charges, threatening to kill them on their way to jail. The nearest town, Desperation, seems abandoned, except for the corpses that litter the streets. The sheriff has arrested several other individuals, also on false charges; among his prisoners are the members of the RV family, whom he supposedly rescued from (non-existent) gunmen. Vultures, scorpions, wolves, and other animals, under the sheriff’s telepathic control, attack people. A preteen prisoner, David Carver, miraculously escapes from jail, afterward performing additional miracles (using a cell phone with a dead battery and multiplying a supply of sardines and crackers). The demon Tak, who is behind the series of bizarre incidents, serially possessing the sheriff and others as he wears out their bodies, fears the preteen. Strange idols cause sexually perverse thoughts and feelings in those who touch them.
  3. Establish the means by which the main character learns the cause of the bizarre incidents. A character who has witnessed several of the bizarre incidents that befall his town tells David and the others in their party about the demon that has escaped from the caved-in mine and how it possesses one person after another.
  4. Have the main character use this knowledge as to the cause of the bizarre incidents to put an end to them. Assisted by others, David reburies Tak inside the collapsed mine.
  5. It helps (but is not mandatory) to associate the monster or other cause of the bizarre incidents with a real-life horror; for example, the monster of cause may symbolize such a real-life horror. Tak could represent social anarchy and its consequences.

Presto! Flesh out the skeleton of your story, possibly adding a related subplot or two, and you have the plot for one scary horror novel (especially if you happen to be Stephen King.)

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Writers’ Considerations: Readers’ Likes and Dislikes

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

While it is true that a writer should not let his or her writing be determined solely by readers’ observations (i. e., likes and dislikes) about his or her work, any more than a politician should allow his or her politics to be solely determined by public opinion polls, it is also true that a writer (or a politician) has an audience whose interests he or she disregards at his or her own peril. Since a writer writes for an audience (or audiences, since one is apt to consist of professional critical and another composed of amateur fans), he or she should understand what his or her readers like and dislike about his or her fiction, and an astute reader, whether professional or amateur, can, and frequently does, offer valid observations from which all but the most insulated and arrogant writer can profit.

In doing so, one is advised to keep in mind the adage about following the money trail; some reviewers offer uncritically positive views because they are selling the book. One should also weed out blatantly unfair comments, especially on the negative side, as well. Be mindful, too, that some observations will be diametrically opposed to others, as when one reviewer calls the plot “boring” or “predictable” and another sees it as “well-paced” or “surprising.” (I tend to winnow out such contradictions unless there are many more on one side than there are on the other.) Also be careful to reject comments that are nothing more than superlatives (“rich plot”) or their opposites (“stupid plot”) which are so general and vague as to be meaningless.

This enterprise also offers a handy dandy way of distinguishing which features of a story female readers like or dislike and which male readers enjoy or find objectionable, and one can tell, just by eyeballing the lengths of the respective “Likes” and “Dislikes” columns, whether the book, in general, seemed to receive more favorable than unfavorable comments. (Admittedly, this is not a scientific approach, but it works reasonably well as a rule of thumb for those writers who lack the time, money, expertise, equipment, and laboratories in which to conduct the bona fide experiments that scientific research requires.)

Occasionally, younger readers will offer a review of the book without having finished reading it. Of course, this is not acceptable for most readers outside the circle of their peers, but it offers writers one advantage. Most writers, especially mystery writers and horror writers, present their readers with a red herring regarding the cause of the plot’s events, saving, for near the end, the true cause. For example, in The Taking, Dean Koontz suggests that aliens who seek to terraform the Earth in reverse, to make it hospitable for the army of their kind which is to follow, are responsible for the horrific incidents he details, whereas, in fact, the true cause is something else (an invasion of demons). According to the half-baked reviews of the adolescents who submit their takes on Desperation before they have finished reading King’s novel, the cause of the strange goings-on in the story is the madness of a police officer. Their reviews show that King has succeeded, with these reviewers, at least, in his sleight-of-mind suggestions that the strange and uncanny events are caused by something other than their true cause, which, as it urns out, is not a “mad cop,” as one reviewer believes (and as King has led him to suppose), but a demon, Tak, who has escaped from a caved-in mine and who now seeks to show his superiority over God, whom Tak regards as merely a competitive deity, rather than the one and only Supreme Being.

As an example of this approach, this post offers the following “likes and dislikes” of a number of readers of Dan Simmons’ novels The Terror and Summer of Night and of Stephen King’s Desperation. Obviously, the same two-column-table approach could be applied to any other writer’s work, recent or previous, including one’s own.

The Terror by Dan Simmons

Summer of Night by Dan Simmons

Desperation by Stephen King


In case you were wondering (you probably weren’t), my own takes are that Summer of Night is well worth reading, The Terror is nigh unreadable, and Desperation is one of King’s best books ever. The reasons for these assessments, in nutshells, are Summer of Night's realistic and believable recreation of America as it was for many during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, sympathetic characters, effective chills and thrills, and an interesting back story concerning the history of the bell that focuses and draws the ancient evil to the novel’s unsuspecting and enchanting town; The Terror's needless detail about the most minute aspects of everything nautical and historical, characters who are difficult to get to know, much less to care about, and a lack of overt action during most of the story; and Desperation's sympathetic and believable characters (always a strength in King’s fiction), an interesting antagonist, high stakes, the religious and moral dimensions, and, of course, the chills and thrills. Concerning Desperation, it was difficult to find any negative comments among horror fans.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Paradise, Heroism, and the Eternal Return: A Formula for Both Myth and Horror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Much of the argument and many of the insights that Paul Nathanson shares with readers of his Over the Rainbow: Secular Myths of America can be applied to the horror genre. Taking a leaf from Micea Eliade, Nathanson points out that the cosmos--the orderly system that originates from chaos as a result of divine creation--represents the “familiar world,” whereas chaos corresponds to the world of the unknown, which is inhabited by “ghosts, demons, and foreigners.” We can apply Nathanson’s observation, by way of Eliade, to the garden of Eden versus the great wilderness beyond it. Into the familiar world of the cosmos, Nathanson observes, the unknown can erupt, via kratophanies, hierophanies, and theophanies; the unknown, like the sacred, can also be repeated through myths and rituals. The sacred becomes a way of orienting a tribe or a nation, Nathanson states; it delineates that which is desirable by separating the sacred and the profane or the sacred and the secular.


There is always a sacred center to the world, Nathanson, echoing Eliade, points out. This center, the axis mundi, is often a “mountain, city, temple, palace,” or island, whereat are met heaven, earth, and hell. The revelation of the sacred is the revelation of the real.

The axis mundi need not number one; there can be several, or even many, of these sacred centers. As Nathanson points out, every spatial hierophany or consecrated space is “equivalent to a cosmology.” There are, after all, many sacred mountains, cities, temples, palaces, islands, groves, wells, hills, and other such centers of the sacred life. However, all such places have something in common, Nathanson says. In existential terms, they form a “sacred cycle in which cosmogonic events” are experienced anew from time to time “through the ritual reenactment of myths by which man recreates,” or repeats, “the act of creation” that is represented by the sacred calendar and year; these mystical rituals reenact the original creation of the gods.



In religion, to be real is to have meaning, Nathanson contends, and for a ritual act to have meaning, it must symbolically repeat its sacred, prototypical event, whether spatially or chronologically, since the cosmos is the prototype, or archetype, of reality itself. The harmony of the cosmos is desirable and to be embraced; the disharmony of chaos is undesirable and is to be rejected. Moreover, Nathanson observes, the cosmic interpretations of reality are both communal (Israel, the Church) and individual (the Jew, the Christian). This twofold character of the cosmos led the question of whether paradise is future and otherworldly or here and now.


According to Nathanson, the tension between these two possible understandings was never resolved, but has been allowed to enrich the concept of paradise, as does the possibility of one’s understanding it in either literal or figurative terms. For example, we can glimpse eternity from within time (before our own individual deaths) or paradise from within history (before the end of history). Indeed, as religious faith declines, utopias sometimes take the place of paradise, just as the idea of progress replaced the idea of providence, with destiny being seen as something better than, rather than a return to, the origins of things.


By definition, the city, in ancient times, was a walled enclosure, and by including some persons and things, it also excluded others. That which was within the walls was part of the sacred place, paradise. That which was without the walls was part of the secular or the profane world, and, as such, was, as it were, exiled, condemned, or damned. With this understanding before us, it is easy to comprehend why Nathaniel exercised such passionate devotion in the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls following his return from the Israelites’ dispersal into Babylon.

The difference, Nathanson says, between paradise lost and paradise regained is the snake: in the former, it is present; in the latter, it is absent.

In horror fiction, these themes are often invoked, whether overtly or symbolically. There is the sacred center, or axis mundi; myths and rituals, or their equivalents; and an orientation toward that which is valued and that which is devalued; there is inclusion, and there is exclusion. For example, we can also apply this concept to Heorot, the hall of Danish fellowship, and to the wilderness, inhabited by the monstrous, outcast Grendel that lay beyond its walls. Likewise, think of Eden, Jerusalem, or, for that matter, Yggsdrasil or the Hellmouth. Just as Grendel and his mother (and, later, the dragon) are alive and well in the fallen world of the Danes’ Heorot (and, later, in Beowulf’s own realm), they are absent in these regained versions of these sacred centers. They have been not banished or exiled, but destroyed, just as, in Buffy, the Hellmouth is destroyed (although, as it turns out, there is another elsewhere).

Paradise shifts from the garden to the Promised Land to the frontier, Nathanson points out, and is, at present “located. . . in outer space.” It is also invaded, or overrun, for a time, and is abandoned in favor of a new paradise or until the pilgrims’ return. The interval of the sojourn is one of maturation if not, indeed, perfection, so that, as the sojourners move into a new paradise or return to their home, it is they, not the sacred center, that has changed. They have become the home that they sought elsewhere, sinners become saints, just as Beowulf earned immortality by his heroic deeds or Buffy passed her powers to hundreds of other “potential” slayers.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Mystic Mansion: A Sequel to Saturday's Child



copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Synopsis

Mystic Mansion: A Sequel to Saturday’s Child

Crystal Fall and her friends discover that the horrors of Nazi Germany didn't end with Adolph Hitler. An ancient artifact, which he believed empowered him and his Third Reich, has been discovered, and its awesome power has been unleashed in a mysterious mystic mansion. Can Crystal Fall and her friends save the world. . . again. . . even if, as Fran Newell believes, God is not on their side? For readers who have graduated from R. L. Stine but aren't quite ready for Stephen King, this novel and its prequel, Saturday's Child, are perfect reads!

Support independent publishing: buy this book on Lulu.

Sample

Prologue

The blonde-haired woman sat hunched against the concrete wall of the underground bunker.

The bunker was one of many in the two-story complex fifty feet below the Chancellery Building. She had the run of the complex, but she preferred to be wherever her soul mate led. At the moment, he was here, planning the army’s defenses.

Now thirty-three years old, she was considered a handsome woman. Only ten years ago, she had been strikingly beautiful, but the last decade had been expensive. It had cost her not only her beauty, but also her youthful lust for life and, very nearly, her sanity.

Now, as she sat in the dank subterranean shelter, she studied her life’s companion, the odd-looking man with the odd-looking mustache who sat hunkered over a table, surrounded by Army officers and staring at maps.

How different life had seemed when, at twenty, she’d met him at Heinrich Hoffman’s photographic studio! He’d struck her, even then, as somewhat odd-looking. She’d mentioned to her sister Isle that he wore a “funny mustache and carried a big felt hat.” At the same time, though, she’d been struck with the air of authority that virtually radiated from him. Even then, he had carried himself with an arrogant pride. He had seemed a man of destiny.

When he’d asked her to become his domestic partner, she’d left Heinrich’s employ. Over the years, she’d gone from living in an apartment in Munich to a villa in the same city, and her lover had provided her a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. Life for the former photographer’s assistant was good. Her perception, it appeared, had been correct. Her paramour seemed to be a man destined for greatness, indeed.

Nevertheless, during the next decade, although her material existence continually improved, her emotional and spiritual health declined. She read cheap novels, watched romantic films, and alternated between exercise and brooding inactivity. Her appearance became increasingly a concern to her, and she assured and reassured her mate that she would stand by him, even unto death.

To her, he would confide his most intimate fears and concerns. One was that he would lose the source of his power, the Spear of Destiny, as he called it.
As a youth, long before he had come to power, he’d stood in the Hofburg Treasure House, where the holy relic was on display, staring intently at the wondrous weapon—the spear that the Roman soldier Longinus had used to pierce the side of the crucified Christ.

According to the lore associated with this spear, it was imbued with Jesus Christ’s passion. It was steeped in the very agony and ecstasy that Christ had experienced while hanging on the cross. Consequently, the spear was said to equip its possessor with enormous power to do good or evil.

Now, it was 1945, and their enemies had surrounded them, forcing them to retreat to this last refuge.

Leaving the conference at the table, he came to her. “It is still not too late,” he said, passionately. “You can save yourself, my darling. I have yet within my hands the power to secure your life, your future. I have ordered you to go. Now, I beg you.”

“Have you accepted your advisors’ counsel that you should flee to the mountains around Berchtesgaden?” she asked.

Without hesitation, he replied, “My place is here.”

“As is mine,” she declared.

“No, you must save yourself!”

Eva Braun smiled at his thoughtfulness, at his love. “It is better that ten thousand die,” she replied, “than that you be lost to Germany!”

She had said this when she’d heard that millions of Jews were being tortured and exterminated and that millions more were scheduled for such a fate. It was necessary, he had explained to her, to feed the demons with which he was in allegiance. They thrived on misery and human suffering. Under his regime, the demons had fattened and had rewarded him accordingly. His rise to power had been meteoric.

He averted his gaze, not wishing for her to see the emotion that her words had engendered within him. Her fierce devotion was moving.

“Then you will not go?”

She shook her head. “My place is at your side.”

“This is no game,” he told her bluntly. “This is the end. We will die.”

“Then,” she said defiantly, holding his gaze with hers, “we will die together.”

He kissed her hand before returning to his generals.

Eva thought of the sacrifices that he had made in leading his country to its glorious destiny as the Third Reich.

The First Reich had lasted for well over two hundred years, from 700 to 936, from the time of the Merovingian kings to the time that the Vikings threatened to tear the empire apart. The First Reich had blossomed under Charlemagne, who had also possessed the Spear of Destiny. It was not until long after his death that the First Reich was divided into the five duchies of Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Lorraine and a long period of weak kings ruined the glory that had been the First Reich.

By 1860, Germany had been divided into the German Confederation of thirty-nine states. The Second Reich began when Kaiser Wilheim I was crowned. Thereafter, through warfare and political machinations, a succession of leaders established the Weimar Republic at the end of World War I, and the Second Reich came to its end.
Some time between or during the first empires, the Spear of Destiny passed into the hands of the Hapsburg family, who displayed it in a kind of museum, the Hofburg Treasure House, in Vienna, along with their other regalia.

In 1933, the German Reichstag burned down, and the communists were blamed, giving the Nazis the opportunity to capitalize on the German people’s fears and limit their rights under the Weimar Constitution. Wondrously, Hitler then secured the authority to enact laws without parliamentary action, and the beginnings of his rise to power began as the Nazi Party became the only legal political organization in the state and the rights of other groups were methodically repressed through the Gestapo’s brutal tactics. Now, Hitler was able to pursue his dream of a Master Race exercising world dominance.

Behind the scenes at every turn, Hitler had wielded the Spear of Destiny. Always, the miraculous weapon had inspired visions in which Hitler had seen his dreams unfold. Even as a youth, he’d visited the Hofburg Treasure House to see the wonderful artifact, standing for hours before the ancient weapon, spellbound by it.
As soon as he’d risen to power, Hitler had taken the spear as his own, and it had both guided and empowered him ever since.
Now, however, something was wrong.

The enchantments were failing.

Hitler himself had lost faith in his glorious dream of the worldwide rule a pure Master Race.

Eva Braun shook her head in disbelief. Despite Der Führer’s words, she could not believe that the end had come. She could not believe that they would die.

How could their dream end this way?

The Spear of Destiny assured her paramour’s success, had it not? For years, the spear had led him to victory after victory until his dominion over the entire world seemed inevitable.

Nevertheless, the Russian army had done the unthinkable, forcing them to retreat to this subterranean bunker.

She looked at the spear, which Hitler had set against the wall near his seat at the head of the table. Its point glowed blood-red, as bright and glorious as ever.
They would not be defeated—not now, not ever!

Had not the Reich created an elite force of commandos, the Werewolves, to disrupt the enemy? No less a personage than Goebbels had vouchsafed the sanctity of the
Werewolves’ mission, asserting in his radio messages that “Satan has taken command."
He had sworn, further, that “"We Werewolves consider it our supreme duty to kill, to kill, and to kill, employing every cunning and wile in the darkness of the night, crawling, groping through towns and villages, like wolves, noiselessly, mysteriously” to wreck vengeance on the Reich’s would-be conquerors.”

The bunker shook. The bare light bulb in the suspended fixture swung madly back and forth as a thick cloud of earth and concrete dust billowed within the close confines of the chamber that, Eva believed now, for the first time, might actually become their tomb.

“My Führer, you have received a telegram,” an aide announced, presenting the message to Hitler.

Hitler slit open the sealed communiqué and read the text:



My Führer!

In view of your decision to remain in the fortress of Berlin, do you agree that I take over at once the total leadership of the Reich, with full freedom of action at home and abroad as your deputy, in accordance with your decree of June 29, 1941? If no reply is received by 10 o'clock tonight, I shall take it for granted that you have lost your freedom of action, and shall consider the conditions of your decree as fulfilled, and shall act for the best interests of our country and our people. You know what I feel for you in this gravest hour of my life. Words fail me to express myself. May God protect you, and speed you quickly here in spite of all.

Your loyal
Hermann Göring



Hitler flung the telegram aside, color rising through his neck and reddening his face. His countenance was transformed. Where moments before had appeared the features of a man, there was now something indubitably demonic about the twisted visage. He pounded the table with his fist, glaring at the officers surrounding him.
“This is treason!” he cried. “This outrage will not be brooked!”

The officers looked fearfully at one another or averted their gaze altogether, glancing at the tabletop or the floor.

Eva also averted her gaze.

She hated to see him like this, during one of what she had come to regard as his “fits.” Lately, it seemed, he was having more and more of these fits.

During such moments, he was transformed, and the inner, hidden beast within came to
the fore in all its savagery.

He turned to his top aide. “Borrman, send a reply at once! I want Göring to understand that I regard his message as an act of treason for which he deserves no less than death. However, in deference to his previous long-term loyalty and service to the Reich, I will spare his life, provided that he resign immediately.”
Martin Bormann nodded. “It will be done, Führer.”

As the aide started to turn, Hitler stopped him. “I want him arrested at once! See to it that the S S receive the order.”

“Yes, my Führer.”

Another artillery shell struck near the Chancellery Garden. The bunker filled with
a thick, choking dust.

The point of the spear seemed just as bright and luminous, Eva thought.

They could weather the Russians’ assault.

Their elite Werewolves would prevail.

The Spear of Destiny, after all, was still in the hands of the Reich.
She consoled herself with the thought that the spearhead still shone as brightly as ever.

Didn’t it?

Then why, she wondered, had Hitler earlier allowed all but essential personnel to leave the bunker complex?



A few days later, Eva and her beloved took time to marry.

“I wish that I could be a proper bride for you,” she apologized.

Hitler held her face in his hands. “I wish that I could have given you the world.”
The officiating officer awaited Der Führer’s command. There was little time to waste on pleasantries. More and more of the Russian’s artillery had been striking closer and closer to the Chancellery.

Without taking his eyes off his bride, Hitler gave the official permission to begin, and he and Eva were wed. In death, if not in life, they would be married, at least.

“I regret that we cannot have a proper honeymoon,” the groom said.

“My entire life with you has been a honeymoon.” She replied.

“I am sorry, my darling, but I must return my attention to—“

“There is no need to apologize,” she said, shushing him.

Yesterday, he had sent for Luftwaffe General Ritter von Greim, who had arrived through a barrage of Russian ground fire, landing his plane in the street near the bunker complex. In the process, the general’s foot had been injured, but he was here, now, and that was all that mattered for, today, Hitler would name Greim as Göring's successor, and the general would become the field marshal in command of the Luftwaffe.

Yesterday, Hitler had performed a more unpleasant duty. Word had reached him that S S Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had resorted to treason as well, attempting to negotiate with the accursed Allies. Himmler had even offered to surrender some of the Reich’s western armies to the American general, Eisenhower!

Hitler’s rage had frightened even Eva. He’d ordered Himmler’s immediate arrest and, to make an example of what would befall such traitors, he’d had S S Lt. Gen. Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s personal assistant in the bunker, taken to the Chancellery Garden and summarily executed. When she’d heard that her brother-in-law had been shot on Hitler’s command, Eva supported her paramour, repeating what had become almost a mantra. “It is better that ten thousand die,” she had sworn, “than that he be lost to Germany!” It was, perhaps, this expression of her uttermost devotion to him that had persuaded Hitler to marry her.

Hitler, however, had not been the same since the disastrous defections of Göring and Himmler. The latter’s treason affected Hitler more than anything in his late career. Himmler had been a trusted confidant from the beginning. “Faithful Heinrich,” Hitler had dubbed him. Next to Eva, there was no one in whom Hitler trusted as much. He had allowed himself to put his faith in this one man above all others, and Himmler had sought to betray that trust in the end, when he perceived his own life to be endangered. Hitler had meant nothing to the coward! The Reich had meant nothing. Only the worthless life of Heinrich Himmler had counted in the end.

It was Himmler’s betrayal that made Hitler understand that, Spear of Destiny or no Spear of Destiny, the Reich would fall and he would die.
All that remained within his power was to determine the manner of his death. It was unthinkable to allow his enemies to execute him.

If die he must, it would be by his own hand.

“Bring me Blondi,” he ordered.

“Yes, Führer,” Borrman replied, fetching Hitler’s favorite dog. Hitler commanded that Blondi be administered a lethal dose of poison. When the animal died a few minutes later, Hitler and the others in the bunker knew that the toxin was effective, and he handed capsules to each of his female secretaries. “I wish that I had better parting gifts,” he said. “At least these will allow you to die with dignity, rather than at the hands of our accursed enemies.”

By now, it was common knowledge that the Russians were only blocks away from the Chancellery. Their artillery fire had begun to score direct hits.
To her horror, Eva had seen that, at last, the bright spearhead was dimmer—much dimmer than it had been even days before.

Along with her groom, she had come to accept the inevitability of the loss of the war and the failure of the Reich. She did not wish to live in this world any longer if her husband could not rule it absolutely. She was prepared to die. Taking her husband’s hand, she walked with him through the gloomy bunker, into their private chamber, having bid farewell to Bormann, Goebbels, Generals Krebs and Burgdorf, and the other staff.

Soon afterward, those outside the couple’s chamber heard a gunshot.

Bormann and Goebbels entered their room.

Hitler’s body lay sprawled upon the couch. He had shot himself in the right temple. Blood ran from the wound, streaking his cheek with its crimson stain.

His bride was also dead, but she had died from having swallowed the same poison that had killed Blondi.

Outside, Russian artillery rounds continued to rain down upon the Chancellery Garden.
Bormann and Goebbels ordered the bodies of Hitler and Eva carried to the Garden, saying “Douse them with gasoline.”

Nazi soldiers poured the fuel on their bodies, and the corpses were ignited. The fire raged, dancing furiously. The roasting corpses blackened in the blazing inferno. The air filled with the sickening stench of burning flesh.

Bormann and Goebbels presented stiff-armed Nazi salutes.

From time to time, the soldiers poured more gasoline onto the fire. The blackened bodies crackled and sizzled in the flames.

“I think they’re done,” one of the officers observed dryly.

The soldiers removed the blackened corpses, wrapped them in a tarpaulin, and buried them in a shallow grave.

The Third Reich had fallen to the combined might of the Allied forces.

In the subterranean bunker, the Spear of Destiny rested against the wall. Its head no longer glowed. It had the dull, lackluster appearance of flint.



Fran Newell tossed and turned.

A full moon was high in the star-studded heavens, peering through the tangle of twisted limbs that the mimosa tree outside her bedroom window stretched into the sky.

Fran’s heart beat fast, and she panted for breath. Her arms flailed.

Shadows shifted in her bedroom as the night breeze gently lifted and tossed the mimosa branches. The soft fragrance of the pink powder-puff blossoms wafted through Fran’s open window.

Fran opened her mouth to scream—but, then, she saw him—the white-robed figure stood before her. A dazzling white light emanated from within him; he was its source.

Fran slunk backward, frightened.

She heard his voice. It was gentle, peaceful, full of love. Fear not.

What frightened Fran even more was that she hadn’t seen his lips move. The light
was so bright that she could not see his face clearly; it was like a sun—so brilliant that it hurt her eyes to look at it directly. Somehow, she knew that his lips hadn’t moved—yet he’d spoken to her; she’d heard his voice.

“W-who are you?” she stammered.

I am Alpha and Omega, he said, the Beginning and the End.

Wasn’t that a verse from the Bible? Fran thought. Wasn’t that something that Jesus was supposed to have said? What would Jesus want with an atheist like me?

Your time has not yet come, the voice informed her. You shall live to serve me. Your eyes shall be opened, and you shall see.

Fran frowned. What was that supposed to mean? She wondered. There was nothing wrong with her vision. I see just fine, she thought.

You shall see visions; you shall prophecy in my name.

Okay, Fran thought, this is all too weird. I’m going to wake up now!

Abruptly, the dazzling figure was gone, and Fran felt an enormous pain in her head.

She heard another voice. We have a pulse!

Fran gasped, sitting upright in her bed, the disheveled counterpane in tangled mounds. The moonlight shone through her window. Her teddy bear lay beside her, and she clutched it to her chest. “It was a dream” she told the plush animal, “just a dream.”

It was a dream inspired by a reality, though. Unknown to her best friends, Crystal Fall, Dee Dee Dawkins, and David Lewis, Fran hadn’t merely suffered a concussion during their battle with Dr. Trask and his hypnotized servants in their bid to take control of Edgar Allan Poe High School and its students’ minds. When Randy Sheffield had shoved her headfirst into that bank of lockers, Fran had sustained injuries that had actually killed her—if only for a few moments. At first, she’d attributed her strange dream about the brilliant figure in white to a “near-death experience,” but research showed that, whatever had happened to her, she hadn’t had such an experience, even if she had been clinically dead.

No, her research showed that, other than seeing a shining figure in white, she’d experienced few of the common characteristics associated with a near-death experience. Fran had felt no calmness (she’d been frightened). She had heard no buzzing sound, and she had felt no tingling sensation. There’d been no awareness before the dream that her soul had separated from her body (Fran believed, in fact, that there was no soul). She’d fallen through no dark tunnel. She’d felt no ecstasy. She hadn’t met bewildered spirits. She hadn’t seen a beautiful garden.
She hadn’t watched a filmstrip of her life that highlighted missed opportunities to lend others a hand. She’d met no deceased friends or family members. There’d been no sightings of celestial cities of light.

Yes, she had encountered a Being of Light and, yes, she had been sent back to this world with a mission—but, to her mind, two out of more than a dozen possible characteristics did not constitute a near death experience.

It had been only a dream, induced by the powerful sedatives she’d been administered in the emergency room.

It had been just a dream.

Then, the emergency room team had revived her.

Thereafter, she’d lain in the hospital for a week, recovering.

Except that she hadn’t recovered—at least, not completely.

The dream or vision or whatever she’d had while she’d been clinically dead continued to haunt her.

There was no God.

Jesus had been only a great teacher and a superior moral leader. Certainly, if there were no God, Jesus couldn’t have been the Son of God. That was just a myth.

So how did she explain the figure that had said, I am Alpha and Omega?

Obviously, it had been a hallucination, the effect of chemicals in her brain, or misfiring synapses, or something. There was no reason to think that it was actually Jesus Christ who’d appeared to her in another realm somewhere beyond this world.
Ockcam’s razor, she reminded herself, was the sensible position to take with regard to such a dubious hypothesis as her being visited by God in the flesh: “Never needlessly multiply hypotheses.” The simplest explanation was to be preferred.
There was no need to bring in the supernatural to explain something for which natural causes could account.

Sure, she’d been dead—for a few minutes—and she’d seen a brilliant, shining man in a white robe that had quoted the Bible, but it had been her own mind creating the imagery and the words, just as her mind created dreams during sleep.

Again, Fran frowned. Why should I, an atheist, dream about Jesus Christ? The question was unsettling, and Fran shivered. Perhaps, she thought, she wasn’t as immune to superstition as she’d supposed. Maybe part of her—a deep part beyond logic and emotion—believed despite her disbelief. What was it that Blaise Pascal had said? “The heart has reasons that reason does not know?”

Even if hallucination could explain the figure in white, what about the other visions—those that she’d had while she’d been wide awake—those that had been of future events—those that had come to pass?

She had tried to repress the memory of these visions, had tried to deny them, but she couldn’t.

The little boy who’d fallen from the tree house in his back yard—he had fallen, just as she’d foreseen. It had been in the newspaper. Wasn’t she responsible for his injuries, his paralysis? After all, she had known—or had seen, at least—and she had done nothing to report the impending catastrophe. Now, the boy had lost the use of his legs forever.

A week later, she’d had a vision of the hornets’ nest in the woods near Eureka Creek—and of the girl taking a shortcut home being stung by the hornets—stung and stung and stung. How many times had the newspaper article said? “Over a hundred.” Luckily, the girl had lived but, again, couldn’t Fran have prevented the calamity? Hadn’t the shining, white-robed figure told her as much?

Your eyes shall be opened, and you shall see.

Fran’s denial had resulted in a boy being paralyzed and a girl being stung nearly to death.

That was absurd!

There was no God.

She was sure of it.

God couldn’t exist—not in a world of suffering and pain, not if God was, as Crystal Fall had assured her, omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent. How could a loving God countenance starving babies and famine and pestilence and railroad accidents and tornadoes and disease and insanity and paralyzed boys and hornets stinging girls and teenage girls dying because they’d been shoved by a brainwashed, hypnotized zombie into a bank of high school lockers? If God existed, he’d have to be a sadist, not a loving God.

On the other hand, what if there is a God? she asked herself.

What if Job had been right in his answer? What if, despite evil, pain, and suffering, God is good and all-powerful and has reasons for allowing bad things to happen to good people? To a cat, it may seem evil that its master won’t let it out, but its owner may know that this apparent evil could save the pet from being squashed to death beneath a car’s tires or from being torn apart by a pack of wild dogs. Maybe God, being all-knowing, knows a thing or two that people don’t. Maybe people should trust him, as Job had argued, saying, “The just shall live by faith.”

Fran thought of the latest vision she’d had. The vision had involved Crystal’s discovery of a dead body in the park they called “The Swamp.”

What if that happened, too?

“It won’t,” she told her teddy bear. “There is no God.”

She recalled her visions of the paralyzed boy and the bee-stung girl.

Coincidence, Fran decided.

The high, full moon seemed to grin at her from its vantage point among the stars.

Support independent publishing: buy this book on Lulu.

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.

It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.

What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”

Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.

As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.

Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:

Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.

Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.

According to Todorov:

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).
Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).

Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.

My Cup of Blood

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:

Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.

Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.

Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.

Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).

Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.

Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.

Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.

A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.

A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.

Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


Popular Posts