Showing Off the Neighborhood

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Stephen King is known for the small-town settings of his horror novels, but other novelists also find plenty of horror in small-town settings, including Dan Simmons (Summer of Night), Robert R. McCammon (Boy's Life), Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Still Life with Crows), Dean Koontz (Phantoms), and, of course, Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes).

It's not hard to see the appeal of such stories.

Small towns are, in a way, an extension of home, as the term “hometown” suggests. In the past, especially, whether realistically or naively, many families left their doors unlocked at night and allowed their kids to roam the neighborhood at will, the single caveat “be home by dark.”

A community, we like to think, is a safe place, like home. It's a place full of friends, we like to believe. It's a place where everyone knows everyone else. There are, in small towns, interrelationships of many kinds: familial, romantic, friendly, neighborly, commercial.

One of the challenges that writers face when a small town is the setting of their novels is familiarizing readers with the community. Lots of people live in the town, people of various statuses, living on different streets, and performing different functions. Sometimes, those we think we know are actually strangers—perhaps dangerous ones—and those we don't know all that well turn out to be heroes. In a small town, anything is possible.

But how to introduce the town and its people, the townspeople? How to show their relationships to others? How to indicate their own hopes and dreams, fears and uncertainties?

In other words, how may readers be shown about town?

Writers tackle this task in several ways. Here are a few.

 

Still Life with Crows: The authors opt for description:

Medicine Creek, Kansas. Early August. Sunset.

The great sea of yellow corn stretches from horizon to horizon under an angry sky . . . .

One road cuts through the corn from north to south; another from east to west . . . .

A giant slaughterhouse stands south of the town, lost in the corn, its metal sides scoured by years of dust storms . . . .

The temperature is exactly 100 degrees . . . .

Twilight is falling over the landscape . . . .

A black-and-white police cruiser passes along the main street, heading east into the great nothingness of corn, its headlights stabbing into the rising darkness . . . 

Something Wicked This Way Comes: The author moves from character to character:

The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm . . . .

There's nothing n the living world like books on water cures, deaths-of-a-thousand slices, or pouring white-hot lava off castle walls on drolls and mountebanks.

So said Jim Nightshade . . . .

Watching the boys vanish away, Charles Holloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them . . . .

Phantoms: The author uses an eclectic approach, using description, and skipping from one character to another, but employing the dramatic, or “showing,” method rather than the expository (“telling”) method to bot introduce his town and townspeople and to generate and maintain suspense:

The scream was distant and brief, a woman's scream.

Deputy Paul Henderson looked up from his copy of Time. . . .

During the twilight hour of that Sunday in early September, the mountains were painted in only two colors: green and blue. The trees—pine, fir, spruce—looked as though they had been fashioned from the same felt that covered billiard tables. Cool, blue shadows lay everywhere, growing larger and deeper and darker by the minute.

Jenny Paige had never seen a corpse like this one.

The Santinis' stone and redwood house was of more modern design than Jenny's place, all rounded corners and gentle angles. . . .

Whichever technique an author uses—and the few above are but a tiny sample—he or she must make the setting seem “real” (i. .e, believable), provide a sense of “thereness,” create and sustain suspense, introduce the characters (townspeople), and, of course, establish a mystery that's rooted in horror. If, in the process, they can establish theme or symbolism or tone or point of view bigger than those of his or her characters' individual perspectives on life, those are pluses—and big ones.

In a later post, we'll consider how horror movies that feature small-town settings show viewers around their neighborhoods.

For a Writer, Too, Two (Or More) Heads Are Better Than One

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Dusted: The Unauthorized Guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Lawrence E. Miles, Lars Pearson, and Christa Dickson, includes a sidebar concerning “Spike’s Nature” in which the author (presumably Dickson, since she waxes poetic about “the sight of James Marsters half-naked [sic]) suggests that the series’ writers view the same character differently, creator Joss Whedon seeing the vampire as redeemable and Doug Petrie as unredeemable. Other writers also have their own points of view concerning Spike’s nature: “Any attempt to work out whether he’s good, bad, or just going through his second adolescence is doomed to failure,” the author or authors conclude, “because frankly it’s hard to find three episodes in a row which all agree” (203).

In an earlier post, “Writing as a Schizophrenic,” I suggested that one way to layer a character (that is, to give him or her several, sometimes conflicting traits, making him or her a round and dynamic, as opposed to a flat and static, character) is to develop schizophrenia. Not real schizophrenia, of course. Vincent Van Gogh’s ear aside, there’s a limit at which an artist should draw the line when it comes to making personal sacrifices for the sake of his or her art (or the man or woman of his or her dreams). I meant imaginary schizophrenia or, even better, the sprouting of several heads, each with a mind of its own. By adopting different perspectives (political, religious, philosophical, and otherwise) and different points of view even among these perspectives (Democrat, Libertarian, Republican, conservative, moderate, liberal, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheistic, agnostic, dualistic, monistic, materialistic), one could add depth to one’s depiction of a character.

The authors of Dusted suggest another way of accomplishing the same enrichment of one’s characters: imagine him or her the way that several established authors might portray the same character. How might Stephen King depict your protagonist, antagonist, or other type of character? How might Dean Koontz represent the same literary person? How about Robert McCammon or Dan Simmons or Bentley Little? By sketching your character as other writers--and famous or at least well established ones, at that--might see him or her, you can yourself develop a richer understanding and appreciation of him or her. If the character is a complex one, you can even create various scenes that show his or her perhaps conflicting characteristics. Perhaps you started with a cartoon-style hero or villain. Now, he or she has developed into a dramatic persona worthy of William Shakespeare (or maybe King or Koontz, Whedon or Petrie).

The Adaptation of the Gothic

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

South cloister of Gloucester Cathedral, looking eastwards.  By William Avery.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Images of the Gothic no longer haunt us, perhaps, as they did earlier generations. Americans, in particular, do not identify much with aristocratic living or, for that matter, peasantry. Most Americans live in apartments or single-family dwellings. Their houses, although often spacious, are seldom the size of castles, and Americans are more likely to be haunted by natural, as opposed to supernatural, events. War, sickness, broken relationships, the deaths of loved ones, upward mobility, taxes, and the heartbreak of psoriasis are apt to frighten Americans more than things that go bump in the night.

Writers like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Dan Simmons, Robert McCammon, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and James Rollins have survived the decline of fantastic literature in general and of horror fiction in particular by adapting the Gothic in various ways. King and Little bring it to contemporary small-town or rural America, substituting mansions, hotels, universities, and resorts for castles and middle-class neighbors for the peasantry. The nobility is pretty much gone from the picture altogether, with the exception of such stand-ins as occasional politicians, celebrities, and business tycoons. Koontz’s fiction adapts the fantastic and the horrific to modern life, too, but, in doing so, makes both the fantastic and the horrific merely elements of a more inclusive, “cross-genre” body of fiction that includes elements of such other genres as romance, science fiction, adventure, thrillers, and mystery. He even includes, more often than not, a dog of a purer and nobler character than any of his protagonists is likely to develop.

Simmons’ Summer of Night, a slow starter, is a rewarding read similar to King’s It, and other of his early novels tread ground that is likewise familiar to Gothic and contemporary readers alike as well: vampires (Carrion Comfort), ghosts (A Winter‘s Haunting), and even an irate volcano goddess (Fires of Eden). His more recent work, when it has dealt with horror rather than with science fiction, has reworked Gothic themes (Drood) or historical events (The Terror). McCammon’s novels often deal with sociological (The Sting) or psychological (Mine!) themes, especially as they relate to growing up (Boy’s Life). Preston and Child introduce elements of the police procedural and the thriller into their uncanny fiction by having the FBI’s Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast solve unusual, X-Files-type crimes that often take the reader into such exotic locales as museums, subway and sewer systems, cruise ships, Buddhist monasteries, and dream worlds, at the same time acquainting fans with specialized and esoteric knowledge about ancient artifacts, engineering marvels, the maritime trade, the finer points of Zen, and astral projection. Rollins brings special forces personnel into stories set in Amazon jungles, subterranean worlds, and other places similar to those of his literary mentors, the Doc Savage authors, Edgar Rice Burroughs, L. Frank Baum, C. S. Lewis, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne.

The Gothic elements, although transformed, persist not so much in imagery as in mood and tone. Darkness. Shadows. Monstrous faces appearing out of the gloom. Fog. Images of decadence and death. Hints of a stranger, deeper cosmos beyond the familiar, everyday world. Portals to nowhere--and everywhere. Wraiths and apparitions that may be merely imaginary. Intimations of immortality. Mysterious ruins. Beautiful, but deadly, women. Hideous, half-seen shapes. The falling of divine judgment, like lightning, at the stroke of midnight. Time out of joint and space deformed. The themes and images may be interpreted to fit the prejudices and needs of the day, but they remain eternally Gothic, even when they are disguised.

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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.

Generating Horror Plots, Part IV

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman 

 

A careful analysis of the storylines of motion pictures, novels, narrative poems, and short stories in the horror genre discloses recurring plot motifs, or formulae. Here are the some more of them, each of which is complete with one or more examples to get you started on the compilation and maintenance of your own list of such plot patterns.

1. Find the ugly within or among the beautiful. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 2. Develop a continuing theme. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 3. Enact revenge. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 4. Rescue a damsel in distress. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 5. Find the strange in the familiar. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 6. Bring up the past (and relate it to the present). We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 7. Conduct an experiment. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 8. Invade paradise. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 9. Dig up that which has been buried (repressed). We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 10. Bite the hand that feeds you (betrayal). Dante reserved the lowest level of his inferno for those who had betrayed others. For him, the most sinful of sins was disloyalty, perhaps because Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus. Certainly, betrayal, or the biting of the hand that feeds one, so to speak, is a common means of generating storylines, in both horror fiction and other genres. It is the theme that underlies Stephen King’s novel, Cujo, which is more about an unfaithful wife than it is about a rabid dog. Indeed, the St. Bernard himself may function, symbolically, as a representation of the effects upon her family of the betrayal represented by her marital infidelity. In The Others, Grace Stewart, unable to cope with the responsibilities of rearing her children after her husband, Charles, leaves the family to fight in World War I, kills her son and daughter before committing suicide. Certainly, the murder of her children is a betrayal of monstrous proportions, and it is the basis of the movie’s entire plot. 11. Uncover a secret. In this storyline, one of the characters (often the protagonist) has a secret that is discovered by another character (perhaps the antagonist). I employ this method of generating a storyline in my novel, Wild Wicca Women, in which the protagonist’s mother discovers a trunk full of paraphernalia related to witchcraft, or Wicca, in her teenage daughter’s bedroom closet as the mother is putting away her daughter’s clothing, which she has just laundered. Sometimes, the uncovering of a secret coincides with the conduct of an experiment, often by the government, as in Electric Zombies (2006), a film which has a plot similar to that of Stephen King’s Cell (2006), except that Zombies does not leave the method behind the madness unexplained: in Zombies, the government’s use of electronic warfare techniques has unforeseen, and horrific, consequences, turning cellular telephone users into the “electric zombies” referenced by the film’s title. Much the same thing happens in King’s novel, although for no apparent reason (although one of the characters, a precocious boy named Jordan, does theorize that a computer worm or virus may have corrupted the telephone signal). 12. Threaten the near and the dear. Stephen King is a master of this technique, as he demonstrated at the very outset of his career, when, at the conclusion of his first novel, Carrie, he kills off the main character, after making her sympathetic enough to be loveable. The killing off of a beloved character with whom the reader has sent many hours getting to know and like has become a staple in King’s fiction, making his work, along this line, rather predictable. Before one opens the cover of any of his books, it’s a pretty safe bet that one or more characters near and dear to the reader’s heart is likely to be killed, to suffer physical, emotional, or moral harm, or, at the very least, be threatened with such loss. Other writers have since included this motif in their work as well, one of whom, Dan Simmons, kills off the sympathetic boy genius Duane in Summer of Night after building up his character with great detail and care for several hundred pages. An effect of this approach to developing a storyline is to show the reader that no one in the story is safe, necessarily, from the monster. To paraphrase the late Charles De Gualle, it seems that the pages of horror novels (and the screens of horror movies) are full of indispensable characters. Next post, more storylines.

Generating Horror Plots, Part II

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A careful analysis of the storylines of motion pictures, novels, narrative poems, and short stories in the horror genre discloses recurring plot motifs, or formulae. Here are the first three of a baker’s dozen (plus one) of them, each of which is complete with one or more examples to get you started on the compilation and maintenance of your own list of such plot patterns.

1. Find the ugly within or among the beautiful. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 2. Develop a continuing theme. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 3. Enact revenge. We discussed this strategy in a previous post. 4. Rescue a damsel in distress. Perhaps Dean Koontz uses this technique for generating horror plots more than any of his contemporaries, especially in his more recent novels, including The Husband and The Good Guy. In Koontz’s universe, a woman can seldom protect and defend herself, or even find her way through life, without relying upon a strong, competent, able-bodied, and taciturn man. The women’s ineptitude in this regard often cause rather improbable plots on Koontz’s part. Nevertheless, his stories tend to be suspenseful, fun reads. In The Husband, Mitch Rafferty, a gardener, receives a telephone call from his wife’s kidnapper. He tells Mitch to watch a man who is walking his dog across the street. The man is shot and killed on the kidnapper’s orders, demonstrating that he is dead serious about killing Mitch’s wife, Holly, if Mitch tips off the police or fails to provide the hefty ransom that the abductor demands--one which is way beyond Mitch’s financial scope. Fortunately, as it turns out, Mitch’s brother is wealthy, but, of course, the plot twists and turns to the point that the reader wonders whether Mitch will ever rescue Holly or even manage to stay alive himself. The Good Guy’s storyline is similar. This time, the blue-collar worker is Tim Carrier, a stone mason. He’s having a drink at a local bar when a man arrives and, mistaking him for the hit man he’s hired to kill a woman, hands him his $10,000 fee and a photograph of the intended target, Linda Paquette, a Laguna Beach writer (like Koontz himself). Minutes later, the hit man, Krait, enters the bar, mistaking Tim for his client. Tim hands him the money he’s just received, telling Krait that he’s changed his mind about having Paquette killed. Then, he finds the intended target, and he and Paquette flee, the killer on their trail. Fortunately, Tim’s past has well prepared him to be Paquette’s protector, for Krait is an able and relentless, conscienceless killer. Koontz’s modern knights in white armor will uphold the tradition of chivalry, no matter how dead it may be in the everyday world in which the rest of us have to live.

5. Find the strange in the familiar. Two specimens of this approach may be offered, one as much a failure as the other is a success. Although we have discussed them previously, we offer a truncated version of our previous discussions here to demonstrate the technique of finding the strange in the familiar. The failure is the film, The Happening (2008), which was directed by M. Night Shyamalan. As most horror stories of this kind begin, the movie starts by showing a series of bizarre, seemingly inexplicable occurrences: mass suicides and murders by individuals and groups whose behavior is markedly aberrant. As the series of such incidents continue, spreading from person to person, from group to group, and from town to town, various theories are considered and abandoned as to the cause of the strange happenings. Is a bio-terrorist attack behind the events? Is it an epidemic of some kind? A botanist thinks that plants may be responsible for the murder and mayhem, releasing airborne toxins to defend themselves against humanity. The protagonist, a scientist named Elliot Moore, and his wife Alma take refuge with an murdered friend and colleague’s orphaned daughter Hess inside an eccentric old woman’s house as the plants continue to press their attack. Their hostess becomes infected, but they escape her attempts to kill them and, later, leave the house, surprised to find that the attacks have ceased. Three months later, watching TV, Elliot, Alma, and their adopted daughter hear a newscaster warn that the mysterious happening might have been but “the first spot of a rash” to come. Alma discovers she is pregnant, and, as she and Elliot celebrate, another series of bizarre suicides and murders take place in France. The film seeks to find the strange in the familiar, seeing flowers and shrubs and trees, especially those which blow in high winds, to be as menacing as poisonous weeds, but it is difficult to fear vegetation, wind or no wind, and the suspense simply doesn’t build, despite the mad and dangerous behavior of the infected humans whom the plants are bent upon exterminating. The heavy-handed, moralistic environmentalist theme of the movie is about as profound in its delivery as a PETA ad. The plot suffers in other ways, as does the characterization of all the players, but these are matters outside the present concern. A story that is more successful in eliciting the strange within the familiar is Bram Stoker’s short story “Dracula’s Guest.” Stoker suggests, far more subtly and effectively than Shyamalan, that there may be prodigious unseen powers operating behind the scenes, so to speak, of the natural events that take place in a remote stretch of forested countryside outside Munich on Walpurgis Night. Stoker he suggests that a tall, thin man who’d appeared seemingly out of nowhere and vanished as abruptly after frightening the coachman’s horses and leaving the Englishman stranded in the countryside as twilight gathers toward Walpurgis Night may be the unseen watcher, and perhaps also the occult, supernatural force that seems to control such natural forces as the weather, the wolves, the effects of the blizzard, and the hail. Alternatively, a note to Herr Delbruck by Dracula suggests that Transylvanian count himself may be opposed to whatever supernatural force is controlling these forces of nature and that, as this power’s adversary, he is acting, for reasons of his own, as the Englishman’s protector, however short-lived this self-assigned role may turn out to be. Examples of other stories that are more or less successful in seeking the strange within the familiar are Stephen King’s From a Buick 8 and most of the stories by H. P. Lovecraft. Concerning the finding of the strange in the familiar, the reader is advised to peruse the several articles that we have posted previously on Thrillers and Chillers, under the heading “Everyday Horrors.” 6. Bring up the past (and relate it to the present). The past is prologue to the present. Stephen King employs this technique in It, in which an ancient evil makes a reappearance in Derry, Maine, every 27 years. In its last previous appearance, it was defeated by the Losers Club, who reunite as adults to take it on when it makes its next appearance in town. In Summer of Night, a novel that is similar in both plot and theme to King’s It, Dan Simmons’ ancient evil, associated with the House of Borgia, seeks to establish itself in the small town of Elm Haven, Illinois, but it encounters the determined resistance of five pre-teen boys and a street-smart girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Bentley Little also employs the technique of bringing up the past and relating it as prologue to present catastrophes on several of his novels, including The Resort, in which a former nightmarish resort, although razed long ago, somehow determines the fate of a present, nearby resort and what befalls its staff and guests. A movie that takes this tack is Poltergeist, wherein, because a housing development has been built upon an Indian burial ground, there is hell to pay. Stay tuned: We will explore additional horror plot staples in subsequent posts.

Write What You Know (But What Does That Mean?), Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In a previous post, we considered the lives of Hans Christian Andersen and H. G. Wells as examples of authors who “write what they know,” or, in other words, inform their fiction with their actual experiences--and especially a pivotal experience, a turning point--in their lives. The same is true of many other--perhaps, most other--writers, the West Coast Stephen King, Dean Koontz, as well.

In fact, Koontz is a classic case.

Koontz grew up in abject poverty, the son of an abusive alcoholic who, the writer says, taught him everything about how not to be a man. Later in life, when his father was in a serious decline in his health, Koontz not only let him live with him, but also took care of him, not, he says, because he loved him or felt any sense of duty to him, but for his own sake. Koontz never wanted to become the man his father was.

His cruel, sometimes violent, and neglectful father seems to be the basis of many of his novels’ antagonists, not a few of whom demonstrate the behavior of the true sociopath and have no socially redeeming qualities. Most are narcissistic, and some are delusional, imagining themselves to be godlike figures who are above the law.

Like Koontz himself, many of his protagonists have suffered abuse as children, coming from seriously dysfunctional homes or backgrounds, but, again like Koontz, they are financially successful, resolute, compassionate, and sometimes altruistic. They are almost always willing to help a damsel in distress, just as, perhaps, Koontz, as a boy, longed to come to the aid of his mother, who suffered much violence from her husband in order to protect her son. The heroines in Koontz’s novels are invariably of the same mold, and several are single mothers who persevere against poverty and other limitations to bring up their children as best they can. To some extent, they mat even be surrogates for the young Koontz.

Dan Simmons, author of horror and science fiction novels worth reading, also uses his own personal experience to inform his writing. His adult career was spent in elementary education. According to his website, he “grew up in various cities and small towns in the Midwest, including Brimfield, Illinois, which was the source for his fictional ‘Elm Haven,’” the setting of his 1991 horror novel Summer of Night, which features a group of preteens who, one may assume, are much like their real-life counterparts who Simmons knew as his friends during his childhood in Brimfield. Much of the novel’s action takes place in Old Central School, a combination junior-senior high school that is in its last year. Once the current class graduates, the school is scheduled for retirement.

Many of the persons, places, and things featured in his novel had actual counterparts in the 1960’s Brimfield in which Simmons grew up. His younger brother seems to have been the model for Lawrence Stewart, and two of his boyhood friends appear to have inspired Kevin Grumbacher, Dale Stewart, Mike O‘Rourke, and Jim Harlen. Old Central School’s true-life counterpart was Brimfield School, across the street from Dan and Wayne’s (Dales’ and Lawrence’s’) house. The community’s Old Settlers’ Day is featured, somewhat altered, in Summer, as is the Saturday evening free shows that were featured in the city’s downtown bandstand park. His science fiction novels use Simmons’ extensive knowledge of romantic poetry and mythology.

Although he was not a horror novelist, another writer who wrote what he knew is playwright J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. In his case, his personal experience provided more a theme than a formula for his work. According to Wikipedia, Barrie “was a small child” who “drew attention to himself with storytelling.” His mother’s most beloved son, David, died two days shy of age fourteen, while ice skating, a loss that “devastated” his mother, and “Barrie tried to fill David’s place in his attentions, even wearing his clothes”:

One time Barrie entered her room, and heard her say “Is that you?” “I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to,” wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), “and I said in a little lonely voice, ‘No, it’s not him, it’s just me.’” Barrie's mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her.

To pass the time, Barrie imagined himself a pirate.

His early literary efforts, “two ‘Tommy’ novels,” Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1902) “were about a boy and a young man who clings to childish fantasy, with an unhappy ending [sic].” After writing several other plays, Barrie wrote Peter Pan, which George Bernard Shaw described as “ostensibly a holiday entertainment for children but really a play for grown-up people.”

It is not difficult to see the parallels between Barrie’s childhood, during which he impersonated his dead (i. e., lost) brother in an effort to appease his mother’s grief, to gain her attention, and to satisfy his mother’s wish that “her dead [i. e., lost] son would remain a boy forever.”
Peter Pan is a play about a flying boy who, refusing to grow up. leads a group of other lost boys in various activities, including the fighting of pirates.

Like Andersen and Wells, Koontz, Simmons, and Barrie obviously “write (or wrote) what they know (or knew).”

Secondary Antagonists

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Some stories have a main antagonist and one or more lesser, secondary antagonists. The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer was well known for having a Big Bad and a little bad each season except for the first, which was really more like a partial season, since it was comprised of only a dozen episodes. The Big Bad was the villain for the whole season, whereas the little bad was a villain for only a few episodes. The little bad was introduced before the Big Bad, often with several other villains following his or her debut, so as to keep viewers off-balance in discerning which of the several villains might turn out to be the Big Bad. Here’s the way the bads shake out for seasons two through six:

Other works of horror fiction also sometimes employ secondary antagonists.
Stephen King’s novel Carrie’s primary antagonist is Carrie White’s mother; the secondary anatomists are her high school’s bullies. It It, another King novel, the antagonist, a protean shape shifter able to take the form of anyone’s worst fear, is, in effect, its own secondary antagonists while, at the same time, is the novel’s primary antagonist as well.

Dan Simmons’ novel, Summer of Night, has a primary antagonist, and several secondary antagonists: the dead man walking (an eerily silent World War I doughboy’s ghost, huge worms with serrated teeth, a rendering company’s truck spooky driver, and others.

On occasion, a secondary antagonist will work independently of the primary antagonist, whereas, in other instances, he, she, or they will support the primary antagonist, often as a henchman or sidekick, as Spike and Drusilla serve and support Angel in Buffy; as Fritz (often erroneously called “Igor”) assists Dr. Henry Frankenstein in Frankenstein, the 1931 film version of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus; and as Dr. Montgomery aids and abets the criminal “research” that vivisectionist Dr. Moreau performs upon a deserted jungle island in H. G. Wells’ classic 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.

The use of a secondary antagonist can heighten a story’s suspense, complicate its plot (even becoming the basis or bases for an additional subplot or additional subplots), and can multiply and enrich the story’s theme.

Duma Key: The Decline of Horror?

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In recent years, it seems that Stephen King has begun to think of himself as a great American writer who can write simply to please himself. In reality, most of his fiction is apt to be forgotten soon after his demise. One or two books, perhaps, will survive their author. Duma Key isn’t likely to be one, any more than the self-parody that was Lisey’s Story. His latest (and certainly not his greatest) is self-indulgent and pretentious and disappointing as hell.

The protagonist, Edgar Freemantle, loses his right arm and then his wife. He becomes suicidal, and his shrink tells him to seek a change of scenery, which leads him to Duma Key, Florida. Too bad the shrink didn’t tell Edgar to go ahead and end it all. His having done so would have spared readers his endless bellyaching.

At Duma Key, Edgar tries his hand at art. He also meets a lawyer who also wanted to commit suicide (and should have) after his wife and daughter were killed; he did manage to put a bullet in his brain, and although even that didn’t end it for him, at least he made the attempt, which is more than can be said for Edgar.

There’s something supernatural about Edgar’s artistic talent; he can use it to kill or to heal and to paint a mysterious “ship of the dead” that troubles him. From here, the plot, such as it is, sickens further, dying well before the story’s absurd denouement. Suffice it to say that this is another King-size ripoff, involving, this time, a goddess-doll that collects servant-souls and commands the ship of the dead that Edgar spends most of his days trying to paint. After the goddess-doll kills Edgar’s daughter Ilse, Edgar encounters a giant alligator, and--well, who cares, really? Certainly, King doesn’t seem to have.

For the most part, since his own death-defying accident, King’s fiction has become increasing self-indulgent and unnecessarily circuitous, losing any pizzazz, suspense, or horror. They’re just interminably boring. Maybe there’s another book up King’s sleeve that’s worth reading, but he hasn’t written one in the past 10 years or so.

What does this decline mean? If it’s only King’s decline, not all that much, but if his deterioration heralds that of horror fiction per se, then it’s noteworthy--and scary. For many years, King’s name has been more or less synonymous with contemporary horror fiction and with horror fiction that was relatively good. If anything, it’s since become tantamount to wallowing in the slime of narcissism. Dean Koontz, who cut his fangs in the science fiction and horror genres, is pretty much writing cross-genre stuff about as meaningless as Duma Key and Lisey’s Story, recycling the same sad story lines as he’s been using for the last 20 or 30 years. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have discarded everything but Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast and his tiresome ward, Constance. Dan Simmons has gone over to the science fiction side of the Farce, and his writing has become impossibly self-important, denser than Herman Melville or William Faulkner or Henry James on their worst days. Bentley Little has told the same story, in different settings, nearly a dozen times--and still hasn’t figured out how to end the damned thing. James Rollins’ stories, although not horror per se, are page-turners, but, again, each seems much the same as the next, since he writes, as do so many in the genre, according to a fairly rigid formula. Robert MacCammon hasn’t written anything worth reading in well over a decade. True, there’s Speaks the Nightbird, but it’s not worth reading.

It may not be merely King who’s petering out; it may be the whole horror genre. Maybe a moratorium on horror is needed. Maybe the ingredients need to steep a while or new ingredients need to be brewed.

King’s attempt to pass the torch to his son, Joe Hill, is proof that more of the same isn’t going to work; the best thing about Junior‘s book is its title, Heart-Shaped Box. The rest is of the same quality as an expletive deleted.

Unless there’s an Edgar Allan Poe or an H. P. Lovecraft waiting in the wings, the horror genre’s immediate future seems bleak, indeed.

Bleaker, perhaps, even than Duma Key.

Contemporary Horror Fiction Bookshelf

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In other posts, we have dropped the names of several of the horror genre’s greatest authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and H. P. Lovecraft. In addition, in his 10-part series concerning “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft himself lists many additional big names among the masters of the genre. What’s missing is a roster of the names of horror fiction’s contemporary masters. This post fills this gap on the horror fiction bookshelf by naming the names of many of those who are missing in action, so to speak.

A word or two of explanation is in order, though, for those who are new to this type of reading. First, contemporary horror fiction tends, more so, in many cases, than its predecessors, to mix various other genres with its own, so that science fiction, fantasy, detective, adventure, folklore, myth, legend, and even romance and Western elements become part and parcel of the bogeyman stories. That’s quite a literary stew, but anyone who follows any literary genre long enough will find that, along the way, whatever path it takes, it will include, from time to time, not only elements from other types of fiction, but also a good many themes and topics from such academic disciplines as theology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, geography, geology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, botany, zoology, astronomy, history, art, and a host of others. Fiction’s value lies, largely, in fact, in its capacity to impinge upon all these territories, bringing together in dramatic or narrative form, the whole experience of humanity. Horror fiction is no exception. For this reason, expect to find, in the works of the authors whose works belong to the contemporary horror fiction bookshelf many of these other literary genres and academic disciplines. Second, even a list of contemporary horror fiction won’t likely to be exhaustive. This one certainly won’t be. Rather, it offers a roster of many of the names of writers who are writing today whose names would show up on almost anyone’s list of such authors. Once one becomes a fan of horror fiction, he or she will no doubt find additional writers to add to his or her own contemporary horror fiction bookshelf. The names in this post are a start, and a good and reliable one at that. (The works listed are novels; short stories, although, in some cases, they are numerous, are not included in the list.) As with all writers, some of their works are better than others; I have indicated the ones I found to be superior in red font.

Stephen King: Bag of Bones, Black House, Blaze (written as Richard Bachman), Carrie, Cell, Christine, The Colorado Kid (detective, rather than horror), Cujo, Cycle of the Werewolf (illustrated), The Dark Half, The Dark Tower series (seven novels), The Dead Zone, Desperation (companion novel to The Regulators), Dolores Claiborne, Dreamcatcher, Duma Key, The Eyes of the Dragon, Firestarter, From a Buick 8, Gerald’s Game, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Green Mile, Insomnia, It, Lisey’s Story, The Long Walk, Misery, Needful Things, Pet Semetary, The Plant, Rage, The Regulators (companion novel to Desperation), Roadwork (written as Richard Bachman), Rose Madder, The Running Man (written as Richard Bachman), ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Talisman (written with Peter Straub), Thinner (written as Richard Bachman), Tommyknockers. (King’s official website).

Dean Koontz: Odd Hours, The Good Guy, Brother Odd, The Husband, Forever Odd, Frankenstein (three-book series; two have been written to date), Velocity, Life Expectancy, The Taking, Odd Thomas, The Face, By the Light of the Moon, One Door Away from Heaven, From the Corner of His Eye, False Memory, Seize the Night, Fear Nothing, Sole Survivor, Tick Tock, Intensity, Icebound, Strange Highways, Dark Rivers of the Heart, Winter Moon, Mr. Murder, Hideaway, Cold Fire, The Servants of Twilight, Shadowfires, The Bad Place, Midnight, Lightning, Watchers, Twilight Eyes, The Mask, Whispers, The Funhouse, The Voice of Night, The Key to Midnight, The Vision, Face of Fear, Night Chills, Invasion, Dragonfly. (Koontz has also written a number of science fiction novels, the genre with which he started his career. He wrote some of these novels and others under various pen names: David Axton, Brian Coffey, Deanna Dwyer, K. R. Dwyer, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Anthony North, Richard Paige, Owen West, Aaron Wolfe, and Leonard Chris. Although Koontz denies it, some researchers contend that, much to his current regret and dismay, under the Leonard Chris pen name, Koontz wrote a 1970 erotic potboiler, Hung, and, according to Stu Weaver, Koontz may also have written “13 other erotica titles under as many as 5 other pseudonyms.”). Koontz and his dog Trixie maintain a website.

Bentley Little: The Academy, The Vanishing, The Burning, Dispatch, The Resort, The Policy, The Return, The Association, The Walking, The Town, The Ignored, The House, The Store, Dominion, University, The Summoning, Death Instinct (written as Phillip Emmons), The Mailman, The Revelation. Little does not maintain a website.

Robert McCammon: The Queen of Bedlam, Speaks the Nightbird, Gone South, Boy’s Life, Blue World, MINE, The Wolf’s Hour, Stinger, Swan Song, Usher’s Passing, Mystery Walk, They Thirst, The Night Boat, Bethany’s Sin, Baal. (McCammon’s official website is robertmccammon.com).

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child: Relic, Reliquary, Cabinet of Curiosities, Still Life with Crows, Brimstone, Dance of Death, Book of the Dead, Wheel of Darkness, Mount Dragon, Riptide, Thunderhead, The Ice Limit. (Both Preston and Child have also written both novels and non-fiction separately, under their own individual bylines--Child has written Death Match and Deep Storm; Preston has written Monster of Florence, Blasphemy, Tyrannosaur Canyon, The Codex, Cities of Gold, Ribbons of Time, The Royal Road, Jennie, and Dinosaurs in the Attic). The authors maintain a joint website, located at Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child).

James Rollins: Amazonia, Deep Fathom, Excavation, Subterranean, Ice Hunt, Sandstorm, Map of Bones, Black Order, The Last Oracle. (Rollins maintains a website at jamesrollins.com).

Dan Simmons: Carrion Comfort, Song of Kali, Summer of Night, Children of the Night, Fires of Eden, A Winter’s Haunting. (Simmons, who also writes science fiction, thrillers, and mainstream novels, maintains an official website at dansimmons.com).

Everyday Horrors: Cornfields

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Southeast Kansas crop circles captured by NASA satellite

Cornfields don’t seem all that menacing, do they? After all, green stalks standing tall against a high blue sky, tasseled husked cobs full of golden nuggets hanging amid large, elliptical leaves are, for many, one of the symbols of the heartland, right? We speak of wholesome corn-fed girls and boys (and--a note of the eerie enters--corn-fed livestock). However, quite a few movies (and some novels) are set, in part--usually, the terrifying and horrible parts--in cornfields, as is a disturbing scene in my own novel, A Whole World Full of Hurt.

Remember Stephen King’s Children of the Corn? Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night? Jonathan Maberry has also set part of the action of his novel Ghost Road Blues in cornfields. So has Norman Partridge, in Dark Harvest.

Television shows and movies sometimes use cornfields as settings, too, although not all are chillers or thrillers. Smallville is a case in point. I’m Not Scared is another movie set, at times, in cornfields. Others movies that include cornfields as places where the action is include:

High Tension
Freddy vs. Jason: A Match Made in Hell
Hallowed Ground
The Silence of the Lambs
Scarecrow
Jeepers Creepers II
The Corn Stalker
I Walked with a Zombie
The Stand
Night of the Scarecrow
Shallow Ground

Okay, if cornfields spring up as settings in so many horror stories, there must be something horrific about them that’s not obvious enough to present itself upon one’s first consideration of the crop. Ergo, let’s reconsider them.

• They’re vast, covering acres and acres, and the corn stalks are tall--sometimes ten or twelve feet high. When a character is inside one, it’s like being in a forest of regularly spaced trees that go on, seemingly, forever, in all directions, and getting lost isn’t merely easy, it’s almost guaranteed.
• If the good guys can get lost in a cornfield, the bad guys in the cornfield can run into them. Maybe they’re even lying in wait in the cornfield, in multiple places, even, waiting for the lost ones to come their way!
• Other things can be in the cornfield, too--unexpected, nameless, and unimaginable things that are furious at having their territory disturbed and that are ravenous.
• There could be landmines, ditches, craters, and other booby traps in store among the ranks of corn.
• Cornfields can be claustrophobic, because the stalks are close and evenly spaced and, well, just everywhere, like a trap or a vegetative cage.
• At night, cornfields are dark and foreboding. A full moon, especially one moving among dark clouds, isn’t reassuring; quite the contrary, it’s ominous and eerie. The ground is uneven, and the cornstalks are everywhere, always in one’s face, no matter what direction one may take, and, of course, one is bound to get lost and stay lost. If one’s adversary is human, he will be equipped with night-vision goggles. If the enemy is not human--if it’s an animal, an extraterrestrial creature, a monster, or worse--it will have vision like a cat’s or be able to sense the good guys through its radar sense, like a bat, or sniff them out with their heightened sense of smell, like a wolf.
• Cornfields attract aliens. (Remember Signs?)

What do those strange crop circles mean, anyway, that have popped up in pastures and, yes, cornfields, the world over?

Maybe we don’t want to know.


“Everyday Horrors: Cornfields” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured in Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

Plotting Horror Fiction: The Invasion Plot

copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Note: Refer to "Basic Plots" for other horror plot patterns that are common to this fiction genre.

 

This method of plotting works best for the Invasion plot. Other methods work better for other types of horror plots. We may outline these other techniques in future posts. In plotting, first develop the back story. In horror fiction, this is the true cause of the bizarre incidents that transpire in the story proper. For example, in Dean Koontz’s novel, The Taking, what seems to be reverse-terraforming on the part of invading aliens turns out to be a visit by Satan. The devil’s call is the true cause of the bizarre incidents that occur in the story.

 

In Koontz’s novel. The Good Guy, hints are distributed throughout the story proper concerning the reason that the protagonist is adept with firearms and strategizing. The back story, which is told toward the end of the novel explains why: he is a war hero and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient who was instrumental in rescuing hundreds of hostages from their murderous captors. By delaying the explanation until most of the story proper has been told, Koontz maintains suspense. However, the back story, once it is told, provides a believable explanation as to why the main character is adept with firearms and developing battle plans. 

 

After plotting the back story, start with an everyday situation. Introduce the main character and important supporting characters. Set up the conflict. Establish the setting. Characterize the characters. Let the reader get to know and understand the characters. Let the reader like the ones you want him or her to like and dislike those whom you want him or her to dislike.

 

Dramatize the first of the bizarre incidents. Show it happening. Show it affecting the characters--victims and friends alike. Relate it to the main character’s basic emotions and goals. Perhaps tie it to the protagonist’s past or to the past of the locale--the story’s setting. It may be advantageous to do both. Stephen King does this by making the monster in It appear periodically, attacking a new generation of children in the same town every thirty or forty years. He also has the children who face the monster as preteens return to their hometown, when the monster next returns, to face it again, as adults.

 

Allow other bizarre incidents to occur. Usually, it’s best to let the incidents befall several characters, rather than the same character (although either course is possible), as doing so keeps the reader wondering why the monster is attacking various characters and looking for the common thread that ties the attacks together.

 

Remember that whatever causes or motivates the monster (whether it’s an impersonal force or an intelligent being) must be accounted for--in a believable fashion--in the back story.

 

If your story has a subplot (or two), weave it into the main plot. Often, horror stories have a romance between the main character and another character. Perhaps the main character is the new kid in town, rejected by everyone until he saves the most popular girl in school. Then, he wins her over (but no one else), and they become friends, with her losing her other friends as a result. Possibly, a woman comes to town seeking peace after an especially traumatic experience and, instead, encounters one even more terrifying and dangerous--the monster at the center of your story. Your protagonist will save the day--and her. Maybe there is not romance. Maybe, instead, your main character lacks something--self-esteem, self-confidence, self-respect, or whatever--and his fight against the monster allows him (or her) to gain what he (or she) originally lacked, as Beowulf does. In the poem named for him, Beowulf is considered a weakling who is, as such, unworthy of respect. When, in destroying Grendel and his mother, the warrior shows he’s as strong as he is courageous, he gains the esteem of his people; later, he becomes their king.

 

Of course, a story can have a romantic subplot as well as a plot that involves recognition, or self-discovery. However, you don’t want to have too many subplots, because your story is liable to lose its unity and focus.

 

The main character leads the fight against the monster, protecting his friends and townsfolk from them to the best of his ability. The main character and many others take the initiative at some point in the fight against the monster.

 

At some point, toward the end of the story, your main character must discover the cause of the bizarre incidents. Armed with this knowledge, the main character sets up a battle plan by which to overcome the monster. He or she takes the fight to the monster. This is a common plot convention. Characters in It, The Taking, Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night, Robert McCammon’s Stinger, and many other horror novels seize the initiative once they determine how to slay the monster. 

 

Nevertheless, the monster proves hard to kill, and it may have a trick or two to use against the protagonist and his or her loyal (or, as in Beowulf, not-so-loyal) band.

 

Ultimately, the main character is often triumphant (but he or she need not be). If so, the story frequently ends with an epilogue that suggests that the monster may return or that it may be reincarnated in some new form--in case the writer wants to write a sequel to the original story.