Taking the Scenic Route

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Clayton Tunnel

Would it be more difficult to imagine horror when you are seated amid luxurious surroundings on a clear and sunny day than it might be if you were you crawling, knee deep, through a slime pit, in the fading dusk, with unknown animal noises all around you?

Mysterious settings are keys to creating narrative or dramatic suspense. When the actual surroundings in which one is writing are not only mysterious, but also eerie, they’re a pretty good inspiration for scary fiction.

Why not find someplace off the beaten track, go there, alone, and drink in (or absorb, as by osmosis) the bad vibes; let them chill you, thrill you, and become a part of you, as you let your imagination run wild.

If you don’t have a heart attack, you’ll probably come away with an idea (and maybe a dozen of them) for a spooky chiller or an uncanny thriller.

With the economy the way it is, getting away to, say, the catacombs or your favorite bat-filled cavern may be too dear a journey to make. That’s where your Internet service provider’s images browser can be of assistance. (I prefer Yahoo!, but several others are probably as good.)

Type in the would-be destination of your choice, and, with the click of your mouse button, you’re there. Describe what you see, as well as you can, but don’t merely describe it. See it. Hear it. Feel it. Smell it. If possible, taste it.

Let the scenes depicted in the photographs become one with you, as you become one with each of then in turn. Imagine that you are a character in a story. Why are you there, in the catacombs or the bat-filled cavern, by yourself? How did you get there? What happens to you? (Whatever it is, it has to be horrible or horrific, if you’re writing a horror story.) What happens next?

Stanley Hotel

Similarly, actual horrors sometimes become connected to a place, and the place to which these horrors are connected can itself inspire tales of terror. For example, Charles Dickens is believed to have based his eerie, supernatural short story “The Signalman” on the 1861 Clayton Tunnel crash, and a night as a guest in the Stanley Hotel near Estes Park, Colorado, gave Stephen King much of the material that he needed to write his novel The Shining. “It was like God had put me there to hear that and see those things. And by the time I went to bed that night, I had the whole book in my mind,” he said.

By taking the scenic route, as it were, and merging your consciousness with your surroundings (as they are depicted in the photographs and in your descriptions of them), and imagining that you are your protagonist, your antagonist, or another of your characters, you will create, for your reader, the same suspense and fear, the same horror and terror, the same panic and certainty of doom as you yourself feel.

Guest Speaker: Robert Bloch

Poe & Lovecraft

Robert Bloch, author of Psycho

Comparisons between Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft are, I suppose, inevitable; seemingly, in recent years they are also interminable.

I shall not, therefore, repeat the usual recital of similarities to be found within their work--there will be no mention of black cats, revenants, or Antarctic settings per se.

But at the same time I have no intention of making a calculated bid for attention by deliberately asserting, as some have also declared, that no real resemblance exists aside from superficial employment of stock characters and themes common to virtually all stories in the genre.

To me, this is an untenable statement: Lovecraft, like every writer of fantasy and horror fiction subsequent to Poe, was necessarily influenced by the work of his predecessor--and to certain extent his work needs must be derivative in some slight sense. Actually, Lovecraft's homage to Poe in his essay "Supernatural Horror In Literature," indicates a degree of appreciation and admiration which leaves no doubt as to the profound impression made upon him by the earlier master.

But to me the most fruitful area of comparison lies within an examination of the backgrounds and personalities of the writers themselves.

Consider the facts. Both Poe and Lovecraft were New England born. Both were, to all intents and purposes, fatherless at an early age. Both developed a lifelong affinity for poetry and the elements of a classical education. Both utilized archaisms in their writing styles and affected personal eccentricities which in time became consciously cultivated.

Although Poe spent a part of his youth in England and traveled along the Atlantic seaboard in later life--and while Lovecraft ventured up into Canada and down into Florida on vacations a few years prior to his death--neither man ever ventured west of the Alleghenies. Lovecraft, on one occasion, did skirt them to visit E. Hoffman Price briefly in his New Orleans home, but essentially he and Poe were Easterners. Their outlook was, to a marked degree, provincial; even parochial.

Both men distrusted "foreigners" in the mass: both retained a profound admiration for the English. These attitudes are plainly evident in their work, which is many particulars removed and remote form the main current of American life.

A reader attempting to capture some glimpse of the United States in the 1830-1850 period would gain small enlightenment from the poetry and fiction of Poe.

At a time when the entire nation was engaged in a westward thrust, beginning with the peregrinations of the mountain men and ending with the Gold Rush in the year of Poe's death, one searches in vain for a wet which does not seemingly even exist in his literary compass.

Byronic heroes sequestered in British and continental locales scarcely reflect the American attitudes or aptitudes in the era of Old Hickory, Davy Crockett, the fall of the Alamo, the Mexican War and the growing turmoil over slavery.

Nor would a reader find more typically American protagonists amongst the pendants, professors and regionally-oriented recluses of Lovecraft's tales, in which there's scarcely a hint of the manners and mores of the Roaring Twenties or the Great Depression which followed in the ensuing decade. Aside from a few remarks regarding the influx of immigrants and concomitant destruction of old folkways and landmarks, plus brief mentions of the (intellectually) "wild" college set, Lovecraft ignores the post WW1 Jazz Age in its entirety: Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Al Capone, Valentino, Mencken and the prototypes of Babbit have no existence in HPL's realm. It is difficult to believe that Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a literary contemporary of Ernest Hemingway.

And yet a further comparison between Lovecraft and Poe remains; one of profound importance in any consideration of their work, because it softens any charge that two writers were totally unaware of the actual world and unrealistic in their treatment of their times.

I refer, of course, to their mutual interest in science. Both Poe and Lovecraft were acute observers of the scientific and pseudo-scientific developments of their respective days, and both men utilized thee latest theories and discoveries in their writing. It is only necessary to cite Poe's use of mesmerism, his employment of the balloon hoax, his detailing of data in the Arthur Gordon Pym novella, to prove the point.

Lovecraft, for his part, relies on scientific background material in his Pym-like At the Mountains of Madness, "The Shadow Out of Time" and other efforts; notable is his immediate adoption of the newly discovered "ninth planet" in "The Whisperer in Darkness."

Lovecraft's interest in astronomy undoubtedly led to his increasing interest in other fields of scientific endeavor, just as Poe's early experiences at West Point must have fostered his preoccupation with codes an ciphers. And both men, as professional writers, were well and widely-read in the contemporary work of their day: Poe as a working critic, demonstrates his knowledge in his nonfictional efforts and Lovecraft, in his correspondence, proves himself no stranger to Proust, Joyce, Spengler and Freud.

But the point is that Poe and Lovecraft deliberately chose to turn their backs on contemporary styles and subject-matter and created their own individual worlds of fantasy. In this above all else they were similar.

And in this, above all else, we readers of Poe and Lovecraft are fortunate indeed.

We shall never know, and never care, what Edgar Allan Poe thought of Andy Jackson's "kitchen cabinet" or how H. P. Lovecraft regarded the Teapot Dome scandal. Small loss, when both have given us glimpses of worlds peculiarly and provocatively their very own.

For the final similarity is this--Poe and Lovecraft are our two American geniuses of fantasy, comparable each to the other, but incomparably superior to all the rest who follow in their wake.

This article was first published in Ambrosia #2 (August, 1973), © 1973 Alan Gullette and Robert Bloch. It was subsequently revised slightly by the author and reprinted in H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. S. T. Joshi (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980), pp. 158-160, © 1980 Ohio University Press.

The Horror of the Wax Museum

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

What’s horrible about wax? When it takes the form of a human being, it, like other statues, whether of marble, plastic, or some other material, becomes a stand-in for a body--but it is still. It is stationary. It does not move. It neither smiles nor frowns, laughs nor cries. It utters not a word. It doesn’t so much as breathe.

Were its lungs to move, at least, one might suppose the figure represented by the wax or clay or stone or plastic were merely paralyzed. Without breath, however, there seems no question but that it must be dead. Therefore, we must surmise that the wax figure, like other statues, suggests the dead rather than the living. A wax museum is a mausoleum, a house of death.

However, the figures, we also feel, may be only pretending to be dead. They may breathe when our attention is focused elsewhere. Their hearts may beat in secret. They may grimace, or even gibber, when we are, for the moment, absent, or otherwise occupied. They might even be revenants, returned from the dead, disguising themselves as mere effigies of the quick. Even if they do not move, they may be alive. They may be watching our every move. They may be thinking. They may be communicating with one another by some secret, silent means. They may mean us harm, and, when the moment is right, they may strike, hurting or even destroying us, before we’ve realized what’s afoot.

Wax figures of human form are mirror images of ourselves, but they are silent and still. They seem to mock us with their waxen visages. There’s something unreal about them; at the same time, there is something all too real about them. They are not quite right. They invite our study and our thought. They bid us to consider them, and, in meditating upon their smooth features and their too-bright eyes, to consider ourselves, too, for, in studying them, we study ourselves.

Who was this Winston Churchill, this Joan of Arc, this Abraham Lincoln? Are the stories we’ve heard of them true? Could this man have led England through the blood, sweat, toil, and tears of its World War II years? Did this slip of a girl really defeat the armies both of England and of Burgundy? Was she truly burned alive at the stake before being hailed as a saint? Surely not? How could such cruelty have been possible against a mere girl? Did this tall and gangly man in top hat and tails hold together a nation rent by a terrible civil war which pit brother against brother and North against South, and was a simple bullet in the head enough to bring his craggy, noble features to the ruin of the grave? Looking at their wax effigies, it all seems unlikely. It seems impossible. If the true-life counterparts of these figures could do such amazing feats, perhaps we, who are yet made of flesh and blood, might do likewise, we hope.

But there are horrible figures in wax museums, too, some real, others imaginary, and they also ask us to think of them and of ourselves, reflected off and projected from them. Consider this one, Adolph Hitler. Did this absurd little man with the odd mustache really kill six million Jews and nearly defeat the combined military might of the world? It seems preposterous. Or what about that one, Ted Bundy? Could such a handsome, clean-cut young man really have killed nearly thirty women, one as young as fifteen, without remorse, taking pleasure, in fact, in such monstrous deeds? Perhaps, if so, then such creatures as the vampire, the witch, the werewolf, and the mummy, also depicted in wax and set up in their niches and alcoves, upon pedestals, might also creep in the night or even stalk the corridors and chambers of this very house of wax!

Shadows may precede their footfalls, so we should keep careful watch.

We fear the wax museum for much the same reason that we fear the funhouse, wherein we can see little in the dark until a burst of flame reveals a leering face or a snarling mouth full of fangs. When such sights as these, or a headless corpse, a skeleton, or a dagger in a bleeding heart, are revealed to us, amid the flaring fire or the flashing lightning, we are shocked and frightened, but only because, in our imaginations, we have envisioned monsters much more terrible, much more horrible, much more dreadful. We have, in short, scared ourselves. Half to death, perhaps.

That’s why the house of wax--or, for that matter, a haunted house, a subterranean cave, a remote resort, an abandoned church, a deep forest, a scientific laboratory, or the attics or basements or closets of our childhood homes--frightens us half out of our wits. We create the monsters. We are they.