- Avoid plagiarism. A horror movie poster can inspire, but it shouldn't be copied, even in words. Instead, let the design, the use of color, the images, the text, and the other elements of the poster suggest similar (or even opposite) ideas. It's the ideas you want. Ideas cannot be copyrighted; specific creations based on ideas can, and usually are, copyrighted.
- To describe the pictures you have in mind, don't use the same devices as the posters use. Change the ways you use and “display” word pictures. Instead of a poster's use of red letters in a string of text, describe only a single word, written as graffiti on a wall; in place of a poster's display of body parts next to a cash register, describe them as items among a child's toys; rather than employing a poster's exhibition of a skull made up of images (possibly of characters and settings and actions in the movie the poster promotes), show them as pictures cut out of a magazine as material for a collage: pictures similar to those on horror movie posters can be altered and appear as posters in a pop-up Halloween or Christmas shop. Use your own ideas (not the movie posters' or mine, as described here). How? Use your imagination.
Saturday, March 21, 2020
The Thrill of It All, Part 3
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Area 51
According to its website, Rachel, NV is home to 98 humans. The count of extraterrestrials, or aliens, is unknown. Rachel is also home to the A’Le’Inn, which serves ale (actually, hard liquor and beer) and boasts an inn of sorts (a group of trailers that vistors can rent for the night or longer). The name of the combination restaurant-bar-and-souvenir shop is a play on words. It is also the last local business in the town.
Situated alongside State Road 375 (“Extraterrestrial Highway”), Rachel is the nearest civilian community to Area 51, where top secret projects are conducted on behalf of the Air Force. It is rumored that some of this research may involve extraterrestrial spacecraft, or UFOs, many of which, people claim, have been sighted over the skies above Rachel.
Sorry, but I'm no videographer, especially while driving!
A friend of mine, Paula, and I made a recent trip to Rachel, to visit both the A’Le’Inn and to drive down Groom Lake Road to the signs that flank the entrance to the top secret facility.
Outside the A’Le’Inn, an extraterrestrial visitor and his or her spacecraft, a UFO, are painted on the front wall, and the front door bears the message, “All Species Welcome.” A wrecker equipped with a crane supports a captured or recovered disc-shaped UFO. 20th Century Fox, the film studio that produced the movie Independence Day, donated a time capsule encased in or buried beneath a large block of stone. Behind the bar-restaurant-gift shop trailer are other trailers that, collectively, make up the “inn” portion of the A’Le’Inn.
At the A’Le’Inn, my friend ordered an Alien Burger with cheese, and I ordered a green chili omelet and home fries, which came with buttered toast and home fries. Although we ate a late breakfast (or an early lunch; it was about 11:30 AM), we ordered diet Pepsis to wash down our respective meals. The food was fairly good, as was the service.
The souvenir shop sells alien items of all kinds: tee shirts, ashtrays, banks, mugs, glasses, plaques, masks, and sundry other items. One wall bears numerous photographs of UFOs on a bulletin board sandwiched between the ladies’ room and the men’s room. An “Evidence Room” is decorated with a poster warning of the penalty (death) for trespassing. Also along the wall are three dummies tricked out to resemble aliens. Along the front wall, tee shirts and jackets are available for purchase. The front of the bar is painted with planets and suns protected by panels of Plexiglas.
Perusing a book for sale in the gift shop, I learned that the road to Area 51, Groom Lake Road, is situated about halfway between mile markers 34 and 35. Going back toward U. S. Highway 93, east from Rachel, one comes to mile marker 35 before mile marker 34. The marker is approximately 20 miles east of Rachel. Turning right (heading south) on Groom Lake Road from the Extraterrestrial Highway, one travels for approximately fifteen miles along the unusually wide, well-paved gravel road before reaching the warning signs that flank the road and mark the entrance to Area 51. On the way, one passes a couple of intersecting gravel roads and a lot of cacti and Joshua trees in the uneven desert terrain.
The signs have changed. In fact, the new ones have been placed over the old ones. The latter once warned that the installation commander had authorized personnel to shoot trespassers on sight. The newer signs have toned down the rhetoric considerably, warning only of a fine and/or a prison sentence for anyone who crosses the line into Area 51. (There is no gate, but one is apt to see the camouflage-uniformed security guards in their black reconnaissance vehicle atop a hill overlooking the boundary between civilian and military terrain, which is an eerie sight.)
Overall, my trip (actually, it’s my second) to Rachel and Area 51 (or the warning signs at its border, anyway) was enjoyable. However, it also deflates the mystique of the place. It’s not at all like Hollywood (or UFO fans) picture it. I mean, there’s not even a gate or an armed guard at the entrance to the place! If you plan a drive to Rachel, fill your gas tank in Ash Springs (60 miles east of Rachel) or Tonopah (110 miles northwest of Rachel). Otherwise, you might be walking . . . through alien territory!
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Dean Koontz, Past and Present
Before he wrote horror and cross-genre fiction, Dean Koontz wrote science fiction. Arguably, his earlier stuff is better than his current material. In “Undercity,” which appears in the anthology Future City, edited by Roger Elwood (Trident Press, NY, 1973, pp. 81-95), Koontz extrapolates from contemporary cities, such as Las Vegas, Nevada, using its gambling enterprise and its reputation, as “Sin City,” for vice as the basis for his own criminal world of nefarious Mafia-like criminal characters, the narrator, who goes by the alias Lincoln Pliney, included.
The title of his story is not all that original, but, in the 1970s, many were just as mundane, and what counted was the twist to which an author could put to a then-contemporary situation or state of affairs. Koontz’s story successfully establishes and maintains the allegory of a futuristic “undercity” representing the underbelly of the modern criminal world in which members of rime form an “underworld.” In case one of his more obtuse readers misses the extended comparison, Koontz is careful to have his narrator inform the reader that the undercity replaced what had once been the underworld, a loose confederation of criminals in which characters like Pliney were “feared” and “envied.”
Huge subterranean megalopolises of towering structures, undercities are hives of gambling, prostitution, legalized prostitution, dueling, and other vices. Perhaps in an attempt to thwart crime, the government has legalized most such activities. Adultery is no longer stigmatized, and hired killers need no longer apply, for dueling provides a legal means of settling one’s scores. In fact, if one is challenged to a duel, he or she must accept the challenge, unless he or she has a pass.
Pliney is telling a younger person, referred to throughout the story simply as “kid,” about his day, to show how hard it is to make a living as a criminal in an environment in which most activities that were once outlawed are now legal. To m make a living, he says, an individual must constantly “hustle.” To illustrate his contention, he describes his activities, which, he implies, are typical of any day’s dealings in the undercity.
He started his day with an accomplice, sabotaging Gia Cybernetic Repairs, a robot fix-it plant. Then, he delivered a map of part of the undercity’s sewer system to Gene and Miriam Potemkin, a couple who want to escape from the undercity, despite the rumors that, beyond its protective dome, the atmosphere is contaminated by poisons and is inhospitable to life. They are willing to risk death, they say, to avoid the constricting limits of their environment.
Pliney next visit’s the megalopolis’ garbage dump, where he works with K. O. Wilson, who manages the operation’s first shift, and Marty Linnert, who manages the operation’s second shift, allowing Pliney to skim off valuables from the undercity’s refuse before it is “catalogued and sent up to the city’s lost-and-found bureau.” During this visit, Pliney is able to scavenge rings, watches. Coins, and a “diamond tiara.”
Following his visit to the garbage site, Pliney learns that the sabotaged robot-repair plant has been repaired--by men on his payroll, who have charged an exorbitant fee. He then arranges an illegal marriage between Arthur Coleman, a dominant, sexist man, and his submissive girlfriend Eileen, in defiance of the undercity’s Equal Rights Act, which forbids male chauvinism.
Revisiting the garbage dump, Pliney scavenges “silver dinnerware an antique oil lantern, and a somewhat soiled set of twentieth-century pornographic photographs” worth big money as “comic nostalgia.” Then, he illegally sells an oversize apartment--that is, one that is larger than the law allows a single man--to a customer with a yen for more spacious accommodations than he now enjoys.
The Potemkins are caught by a maintenance crew as they seek to escape through the sewer tunnel on Pliney’s map, and afraid that, during their interrogation by the police, the couple will implicate him in their escape plan, he burns down the office--a front doing business (or not) as Cargill Marriage Counseling--in which he keeps additional escape maps. (During his recounting of this adventure, he tells his listener that he must be careful to avoid arrest, even to the point of wearing “transparent plastic fingertip shields to keep from leaving prints.” It‘s obvious that, as he recites his day‘s activities, Pliney takes every opportunity to lecture the “kid” concerning the tricks of the criminal trade. He is not merely a raconteur; he is a mentor.)
Coleman advises Pliney that he and his girlfriend want to marry this evening, instead of waiting the customary six months to do so, and if Pliney refuses to arrange the ceremony, he will take his business elsewhere. Afraid that Coleman will hire “some incompetent criminal hack who’ll botch the falsification of Eileen’s death certificate,” which is needed before a new identity can be fabricated for her, making her a person without a past that the police can check, and that Coleman and Eileen will be arrested, informing the police about him, Pliney agrees to meet with the couple to “finalize things” that night, although, to do so, he must postpone an appointment with a man who wants to buy a “Neutral Status Pass” that will exempt him from accepting duel challenges.
His meeting with Coleman and his bride to “:finalize things” is the reason, he tells his listener, that he is late getting home. The next day, he says, the “kid” can tag along as he goes about his business, so that he can provide tips as he teaches her “the business.” He adds that he has no doubt but that her late mother would be proud of their daughter, who has all the qualities of a successful career criminal.
Koontz’s tongue-in-cheek story suggests that human beings are innately wired, as it were, to sin. Even if vices were legalized, others would flourish, because it is the nature of men and women to seek that which is forbidden and to indulge themselves in the pursuit of the banned and the prohibited. It is this impulse, he suggests, which explains the existence of both Las Vegas and organized crime, just as it explains the fact that, despite the existence of a “Sin City” and the mob, ordinary men and women, like the everymen and women who populate his undercity, vice, sin, corruption, and crime will continue to thrive everywhere. No city limits can contain the transgressions of the human heart. The undercity is every city. Moreover, Koontz suggests, even if humanity were to legalize activities which are currently illegal, forbidden desires would manifest themselves in the pursuit of objects and activities that would fall outside the laws of even the most permissive societies. The problem is not in the doing, he implies, but in the doer--or the wrongdoer.
That’s quite an impressive theme--original sin--for such a slight story. In this early piece of fiction, Koontz is as deft as ever in sketching characters (he has never been adept at true characterization, such as novels demand), at delivering the surprise ending (the criminal narrator’s protégé is his own daughter), at describing the setting, and at extrapolating from the actual and the familiar to the imaginary and bizarre, abilities which served him well as a science fiction writer, which served him well as an author of horror fiction, and which serve him moderately well as a writer of cross-genre fiction.
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He hasn’t lost his touch, even today, but his fiction has lost some of its heart and soul, as any body of work must do when it is stamped out by the cookie cutter of formula with interchangeable characters, settings, plots, and themes--the same story, time and again, wherein only the names change. In his heyday, which, alas, was yesterday, Koontz could write more engaging fiction than the pap he produces today. “Undercity” is worth many of his current works, although it is but a short story and his current stuff takes the form of the novel.
There’s another plus about “Undercity” that a reader doesn’t get in any of Koontz’s more contemporary works. There’s no dog in the cast.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Surrealism and Horror
For Rene Magritte. . . the bowler hat is the symbol of the bourgeois European man, and Magritte’s men in bowlers are all types, without individual personalities. It is the man-in-the-bowler-hat image that excites Magritte, not the man himself (21).Surrealists deal with types because the artists want to subvert their meaning in order to make them potentially meaningful again, to make them, as it were, pregnant with meaning. Flannery O’Connor suggested something similar, in a different context, when she wrote, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures,” as did Walker Percy, in his use of a dung beetle, in The Moviegoer, to awaken his protagonist Binx Bolling to the wonder of things when they are no longer taken for granted and overlooked. When the world becomes too familiar to us, it is as if it is lost to sight. We have eyes, but we do not see. To be is to be perceived, but we have forgotten how to perceive; therefore, much of the world’s being is lost to us. Surrealists attempt to restore our sight by making the familiar world appear strange again to us, as it is to a young child who lacks adults’ experience:
Surrealism. . . seeks always the. . . revelatory. . . . This calls for a child-like sense of wonderment. Children are so easily surprised because they have so little experience in life. . . (28-29).How does horror serve the same end? How does horror renew our perceptions of the things of this world, so that we see again that which has become invisible to our jaded eyes? It does so in at least three ways, by offering readers (or viewers) a parade of the bizarre, by confronting them with the monstrous Other, and by whisking them off to a remote, often confining, unfamiliar place.
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.
A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides-- You may have met Him-- did you not His notice sudden is-- The Grass divides as with a Comb-- A spotted shaft is seen-- And then it closes at your feet And opens further on-- He likes a Boggy Acre A Floor too cool for Corn-- Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot-- I more than once at Noon Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash Unbraiding in the Sun When stooping to secure it It wrinkled, and was gone-- Several of Nature's People I know, and they know me-- I feel for them a transport Of cordiality-- But never met this Fellow Attended, or alone Without a tighter breathing And Zero at the Bone--
To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few moments so completely that the commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence (36).
Once our old attitudes to the reality around us are removed, the confronting pablum of their presence is also gone, leaving us with new fears, which appear in the form of a lack of definitive answers (a fear of the unknown). It is with his own subject-being that the surrealist tries to fill that void. . . (37).
Because surrealism makes the mind puzzle and search, it is basically a constructive sensibility, which is bent on tearing down old values and opening up new horizons, and as such, it is a political sensibility (38).
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Presto! You Have a Plot!
- A series of bizarre incidents occurs.
- The main character discovers the cause of the bizarre incidents.
- 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).
- 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.
- Make a list of the bizarre incidents that will occur.
- Establish the means by which the main character learns the cause of the bizarre incidents.
- Have the main character use this knowledge as to the cause of the bizarre incidents to put an end to them.
- 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):
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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, November 8, 2008
It Is Necessary to Suffer To Be Beautiful. . . Or Believable. . . Or Interesting
His tongue-in-cheek statement has a serious aspect to it, for it refers to the need of a narrative to depict conflict. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, authors of Understanding Fiction, point out that without such conflict, there is no, nor can there be any, story.
In longer works of fiction, such as epic poems, television series, movies, and novels, the main character is going to be beset by problems. Several, not just one, is going to impede his or her progress toward reaching the goal that he or she has set for him- or herself. Some are likely to be due to circumstances, others to the actions of other characters, and still others to the protagonist’s own internal conflicts. In general, such conflicts will be natural, psychological, social, or theological. Most likely, two or three--or perhaps all--types of conflict will be operative in such a story.
A couple of examples, represented by simple diagrams, will illustrate the point. In the diagrams, the circle represents the character whose name it bears, and the text at the ends of the lines radiating from the circle represent the conflicts, some psychological, some social, some theological, some situational, in which the character finds him- or herself.
The first diagram shows the plight in which the protagonist of Stephen King’s novel Carrie finds herself. On the edge of adolescence, Carrie lives with her mother, Margaret, a mentally disturbed religious fanatic who considers sex to be wicked. Carrie’s mother has never bothered to tell her daughter the facts of life, and, when, while Carrie is showering following a physical education class, she begins her first menstruation, she is horrified to think that she is bleeding to death. Her classmates find her horror a cause for amusement, and, cruelly, they toss tampons at her, chanting, “Plug it up! Plug it up! Plug it up!” Although the teacher puts an end to the girls’ taunts, Carrie is humiliated.
During the course of the seven-year-long series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, protagonist Buffy Summers suffers many a conflict, not only with demons, but with inner demons as well, as the diagram representing her struggles suggests. It is her lot in life to have been “called” as the “chosen one” by The Powers That Be, to protect the world from vampires, demons, and other monsters that slither, creep, or crawl out of the Hellmouth (located beneath her high school’s library) each week. Instead, Buffy longs to live a “normal life” in which, as a teen, she can moon over boys and whine about homework. Over the years, she is unlucky in love (to put it mildly), and a number of people she loves, including her parents (her father through divorce, her mother through death) are taken from her. She herself dies not once but twice along the way.
Writers who want to create fully developed characters who seem lifelike enough to be a tormented soul trapped in the hell that is high school, to serve as latter-day servants of God, or to fulfill whatever other role he or she is assigned should take Whedon’s dictum to heart. Just as it is necessary to suffer to be beautiful, as the French say, it is necessary that the protagonist suffer to be believable and for the story to have interest to its reader, as Whedon says.
Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?
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
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.
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.
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