Hop-Frog: A Story of Reversals

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

 

As a rule of thumb, a writer introduces his or her story’s protagonist before the antagonist makes an appearance. One reason for doing so is that people respond most strongly to the person they meet first, especially if the individual seems to be a decent sort of a soul, as protagonists, even self-conflicted ones, usually are, just as readers tend to most remember whatever they read first. After all, since the narrative is the story of the main character, it makes sense to introduce the protagonist first, before any other character takes the stage (or the page). Another reason for introducing the main character first is to establish clarity. Introducing the protagonist first makes it clear to the reader, from the outset, whose story is being read or told. 

Occasionally, however, this rule is violated, as is the case in “Hop-Frog,” Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of humiliation and revenge. Poe starts his tale by introducing its antagonist, or villain, a nameless, sadistic king who delights in abusing his fool, Hop-Frog.

An example of the monarch’s cruelty is the jester’s nickname. In an apparent attempt to curry favor with their liege, the king's “seven ministers,” aware of the ruler's delight in unkindness, named the jester “Hop-Frog” to make fun of his peculiar style of locomotion: “In fact, Hop-Frog could only get along by a sort of interjectional gait--something between a leap and a wriggle--a movement that afforded illimitable amusement, and of course consolation, to the king.”

Such a problem would elicit pity and sympathy from a nobler person, but the king is obviously well pleased with the wittiness of his ministers’ naming the fool’s for the effect of his unfortunate disability. The king also enjoys tormenting Hop-Frog directly. The dwarf and a fellow citizen, Tripetta, also a dwarf, were abducted from their homeland and given, as if they were but things, rather than people, “as presents to the king, by one of his ever-victorious generals.”

Aware that Hop-Frog misses the friends whom he was forced to leave behind and aware, furthermore, that the fool is unable to drink wine without suffering from near madness as a result, the king directs his jester to drink to in the honor of his “absent friends.”

When the wine and the thought of his “absent friends” has the effect upon Hop-Frog that the king has anticipated, the king thinks the jester’s grief and miserable state of intoxication amusing: “It happened to be the poor dwarf's birthday, and the command to drink to his 'absent friends' forced the tears to his eyes. Many large, bitter drops fell into the goblet as he took it, humbly, from the hand of the tyrant.”

The king responds with cruel laughter: "'Ah! ha! ha! ha!' roared the latter, as the dwarf reluctantly drained the beaker. 'See what a glass of good wine can do! Why, your eyes are shining already!'"

The king’s malice is also seen in his abusive treatment of Tripetta. When she intercedes with the king on the behalf of Hop-Frog, upon whom the monarch seeks to force still more wine, the king “pushed her violently from him, and threw the contents of the brimming goblet in her face.”

The vulgarity of the king and his sycophantic courtiers, vis-à-vis the grace Hop-Frog and Tripetta, is a second reversal in the story. Not only has Poe introduced the villainous king before he’s introduced the heroic fool, but he has also traded the stereotypical natures of these two characters, making the noble king vulgar and the low fool courteous.

These reversals effect much of the story’s irony. Customarily, a reader would suppose the king, rather than a jester, to be the refined and cultured sophisticate. In fact, the comedy of the fool is often ribald and crude, involving the same sort of humiliating practical jokes, at times, as those that the king performs.

The king’s humiliation of Tripetta is the story’s inciting moment, for it is this act of outrage upon her that inspires Hop-Frog’s plan for revenge, as, ironically, he tells the intended victim: “just after your majesty had struck the girl and thrown the wine in her face--just after your majesty had done this...there came into my mind a capital diversion .” Thus, the king, in a sense, is undone by his own sadistic nature, for it is one of his acts of mindless cruelty that inspires Hop-Frog’s scheme to kill him in a fashion that is at once both spectacular and horrible.

Traditionally, regardless of the king’s character or the morality of his deeds, if he orders the execution of one of his subjects, for any (or no) reason, the subject would be killed, no questions asked. In “Hop-Frog,” however, it is the fool who, in another reversal, becomes the executioner of both the king himself and his toadying courtiers. What’s more, Hop-Frog accomplishes his vengeance of Tripetta’s honor with impunity, thereby further humiliating the monarch and his noble friends, since he escapes punishment for having, in essence, assassinated his own and Tripetta’s tormentors. Each of these reversals heightens the story’s irony.

Hop-Frog’s revenge is extremely violent and horrible. Had Poe not prepared the reader to accept this act as just, albeit appalling, the reader’s sympathy for the crippled dwarf and his beloved Tripetta would likely not withstand the gruesome deaths that he causes the king and his courtiers to suffer. Instead, the immolation of the nobles would have been regarded, in all likelihood, as being too extreme and it would suggest that it is Hop-Frog who is the true monster, rather than his adversary, the king’s own cruelty notwithstanding.

The reader accepts the justice of Hop-Frog’s execution of his tormentors for several reasons. First, the odds are against Hop-Frog. He is a mere court jester. His adversary is a monarch who enjoys absolute power. Readers support an underdog. 

Second, the king is cruel. He is, in other words, a sadist. Many times, he has abused Hop-Frog simply for his own amusement and, perhaps, to show off in front of his courtiers. He is not above insulting even someone as beautiful, kind, and harmless as Tripetta, although he must know that doing so will both hurt her and offend Hop-Frog. He has no regard for their feelings.

Third, Hop-Frog outsmarts the powerful king, and readers favor one who, through the use of nothing more than his or her wits, can outsmart another, especially if the other occupies a position of far greater social status, authority, and power. If one such ordinary person can accomplish such a feat, perhaps others--the reader included--can do likewise. Certainly, many will have harbored fantasies of doing just such a thing.

Fourth, Hop-Frog, like Tripetta, is a dwarf. He is literally smaller than the king, and, figuratively, he is a common person, one of the little guys, so to speak. Hop-Frog is physically weaker, too, than his larger tormentors. Nevertheless, he uses his brain to overcome their brawn, a feat that always gains admiration and respect among those in similar circumstances.

Fifth, Hop-Frog is crippled. His severe handicap, the object of the king’s scorn and ridicule, make him ill-matched to take on the king. Nevertheless, the intrepid dwarf does so--and wins.

Sixth, Hop-Frog is shown to be a sensitive and caring person. He loves Tripetta, and, when she is insulted, he is also hurt, and he vows revenge, even at the risk of his life.

Perhaps the reader would not overlook Hop-Frog’s murder of the king and his courtiers in a such a horrible manner if only one of these conditions or characteristics mitigated against the horror of the deed, but there are at least six extenuating facts, as enumerated herein. Together, they seem to be warrant enough for the reader to ignore the stupendous horror of the dwarf’s immolation of his live victims.

Other horror stories often include a reversal, usually in the form of the surprise, O. Henry-type ending. A good example is “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs and “The Red Room” by H. G. Wells, both of which have been posted in Chillers and Thrillers. In these stories, the plot suggests a certain type of ending as likely, or even as seemingly inevitable, but then surprises the reader with the substitution of a different ending but one that is, nevertheless, logical and satisfying.

For example, in Wells’ story (which, incidentally, is a clear precursor to Stephen King’s story, “1048”), a skeptic stays overnight in an allegedly haunted room. Despite his doubt as to the reality of the supernatural, he experiences increasingly frightening incidents until, bursting from the room, he strikes the door frame. He turns, confused, and reels into various furniture until he knocks himself unconscious.

The reader is led to assume that the room truly is haunted and, then, Wells offers what, in effect, is a punchline of sorts: the room is haunted by the fear of those who, believing the chamber to be haunted, occupy the place: “Fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms.”

The Others, a horror film, also has such a twist: the residents of a haunted house turn out to be the ghosts, just as the apparent ghosts turn out to be the house’s human inhabitants. Such reversals are still marginally effective, if rather overdone, but stories such as “Hop-Frog” are rare in their sophisticated employment of plot reversals, and such stories are correspondingly enriched.

Statistics Don't Lie

According to Google, these are the most popular Chillers and Thrillers posts so far from 2021 and 2020. In case you missed them, click the link to any you care to read.

"Man Overboard” by Sir Winston Churchill: A Commentary

Describing Images of Horror, Part II

 

Describing Images of Horror as a Means of Enriching Narrative Possibilities

 

Available NOW on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited: On the Track of Vengeance

 

 Talking Pictures: Plotting through Image Analysis and Imaginative Elaboration

Secret Motivations

 Three Girls Walk into a Forest, and . . . .

 

 Edgar Allan Poe's “King Pest”: Analysis and Commentary

 “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” by William Wordsworth: Analysis andCommentary

 “Leda and the Swan” by William Butler Yeats: Analysis and Commentary

 “Long-Legged Fly” by William Butler Yeats: Analysis and Commentary

 “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe: Analysis and Commentary

 

 “The Snake” by D. H. Lawrence: Analysis and Commentary

 Gigantic Horrors

 Truly Monstrous: The Electric Eel

 Truly Monstrous: The Alligator Snapping Turtle

 

 Horror Again (and Again): Increasing Your Audience by Using Universal Themes

 

 Zombies: A Questionable Scientific Explanation

 

The Z Plot

Inspiring Ideas and Insights from the Matriarchy

 

“The Last Halloween”

 

 Freaks of Nature (and Applied Science)

 Erotic Horror, Japanese Style

 Damsels (and Villains) in Distress

 The Not-So-Gentle Sex

The Tzvetan Todorov Plot

Vocational Horror: The Tools of Its Trade

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 

A device often used to generate plots is to imagine a vocational role that, given a dark twist, produces unusual, horrific goods or provides equally bizarre, terrifying services. Stephen Kings; characters include writers (“1408,” Bag of Bones, The Regulators, Misery); painters (Duma Key); politicians (Under the Dome); a shop owner (Needful Things); a former police officer (Black House) and prison guards (The Green Mile); journalists (The Colorado Kid), government agents (Firestarter), and military personnel (The Tommyknockers), among others, whose wares and services are anything but mundane—or safe.

Other writers of horror have used the same technique. Bentley Little, King's “poet laureate of horror,” is a great example. His novels' protagonists include a mailman (The Mailman), store clerks (The Store); a homeowners association (The Association); resort staff and guests (The Resort); an insurance agent (The Policy), teachers (The Academy, University); and others.

In part, such fiction—what we might designate as vocational horror—works because it is associated, as it typically is in King's works, with forces equipped with vast resources, investigative abilities, access to the general public, political power, are backed by the authority of the state, or are imbued with supernatural or paranormal power (King) or perform essential services, operate in remote locations, or, again, enjoy supernatural or paranormal power (Little).

Another reason that vocational fiction works is that it is based on a twist, or a perversion, of the normal purposes of offering goods for sale or a perversion of the normal functions of a service, as is almost always the case in Little's satirical novels, synopses of a few of which suggest the nature of his twists:

[The Mailman:] “the strange new mailman is up to something sinister, an idea bolstered as people in town start receiving increasingly disturbing hate mail” (Wikipedia).

[The Store:] “customers are hounded by obnoxious sales people, and strange products appear on the shelves. Before long . . . [is] taking over the town!”

[The Association:] “Members of the neighborhood's Homeowners' Association, a meddling group that uses its authority to spy on neighbors, eradicate pets and dismember anyone who fails to pay association dues and fines” (Publishers Weekly).

[The Resort:] “[At] the exclusive Reata, an isolated resort in the Arizona desert, . . . . unnerving encounters with strange employees, wild parties in empty rooms and bizarre sex antics in the family restaurant prompt . . . key characters . . . to think about leaving early. Yet the Reata's magnetic pull essentially brainwashes all the guests into believing that their odd experiences are normal” (Publishers Weekly).

[The Policy:] “Recently divorced Hunt Jackson, his new wife, his co-workers and his best buddy from high school . . . are continually harassed by a pesky insurance salesman [who] tries to convince them to purchase bizarre policies protecting them from the law, their bosses and even death, and if the clients refuse, inexplicable consequences usually follow” (Publishers Weekly).

[The Academy:] “Students and faculty who embrace [a school's new] charter get steadily darker and more sadistic; teachers and students who oppose the charter find strange things happening and people disappearing; and the school seems to have taken on a life of its own” (Publishers Weekly).

The Ending of the Tale

 Copyright 2021 by Michael Williams

In this post, Michael Williams concludes his remarks about writing a well-plotted story along the lines laid out by Aristotle. Thank you, Michael, for your contributions to Chillers and Thrillers!

In his Poetics, Aristotle points out that the end of a story should be both logical—in other words, the cause-and-effect relationships that have existed among the incidents of the plot throughout the drama (or narrative) should be maintained—and emotionally satisfying. The end of the story, in other words, should “make sense,” both intellectually and emotionally. Otherwise, the audience (or readers) are apt to be disappointed. He used the example of the deus ex machina, or “god of the machine,” a device employed, in his opinion by inferior playwrights, for ending a play for no other reason than that the playwright wanted the story to end. An actor portraying a deity was suspended upon a rope, which was lowered by a stagehand situated out of sight, above the stage, to descend onto the boards and, by dint of divine fiat, bring the drama to its conclusion. Often, the conclusion had little or nothing to do with the performance prior to the descent of the god of the machine. The expression deus ex machina has come to mean, therefore, a “tacked-on ending.”

 

Unfortunately, in genre fiction, some authors, including Stephen King, have sometimes tacked on just such arbitrary and unsatisfying conclusions to their novels, an offense that is especially annoying in volumes of the length that King writes. The violation is all the more offensive when, on a previous page, the author has already provided several other, more plausible possible causes of the novel's many apparently otherworldly incidents, as King does in Under the Dome (a 1,074-page tome).

 

Bentley Little, once praised by King as “the horror poet laureate,” is notoriously lax about ending his novels well. When it comes to endings, he puts little or no effort into writing a conclusion that makes sense of the mysteries of his plot and in no way satisfies his readers, especially when his books are really rehashes of the same formula. How many times can readers stand another slight variation on a worn theme, especially when there is no meaningful (and, often, no intelligible) resolution to his books' conflicts, no meaningful motivations for their characters' actions, and no discernible theme?

To read such books is to understand not only the wisdom of Aristotle's demand for an intellectually and emotionally satisfying ending, but also to see what the lack of such an ending does to a book as a whole. Playwrights and novelists ignore Aristotle's advice at their own peril.

 

If the beginning of a book shows characters undergoing a quest, the end must show them fail or succeed in discovering the object or, perhaps the truth, they have sought (Dorothy discovers that happiness is in her own backyard).

 

If a novel sets forth a mystery to be solved, the end must solve the mystery—and the solution has to fit the facts and account for any apparent contradictions and red herrings (Paula Darnell's Amanda Trent always explains to the readers of her A Fine Art Mystery series not only who committed the novels' murders but also how and why the dastardly deeds were done).

If a tale showcases a series of bizarre incidents, these incidents must be explained through logic; through scientific knowledge, theory, principles, or verifiable empirical means; or through other pertinent and convincing evidence (after presenting us with an invisible creature in “The Damned Thing,” Ambrose Bierce is good enough to explain to us why the creature is invisible).

 

If beginning a story in media res avoids providing a context for incidents, the end of the story must establish this context (we may not know why characters are being attacked by supernatural creatures during the beginning of AWhole World Full of Hurt, but we learn the reason [and a whole lot more] by the novel's end).

Only when these tasks have been accomplished will readers be satisfied that they have read the full, complete story.

 

Michael Williams's Twisted Tales series, consisting, at present, of Tales with a Twist, Tales with a Twist II, and Tales with a Twist III, is available on Amazon. Not only are they entertaining, but they're also textbooks on how to write fantastic flash fiction!

 

Lens Crafters, or Yggsdrasil: A World Among Worlds

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 Like other genre fiction (and, indeed, art in general), horror fiction is mostly a matter of metaphor. A story is a mirror, reflecting the inner “person” of the protagonist; a crowd, representing a community or a nation opposed to the protagonist; or the environment, symbolizing nature or nature's Creator. Depending on its underlying metaphor, then, horror fiction (and, again, art in general) is, thus, either psychological, sociological, naturalistic, or theological, aligning with the traditional, if rather sexist, categories of story conflict once known as “man vs. himself,” “man vs. man,” and “man vs. nature,” to which I would add “man vs. God.” In rare instances, all these categories may be represented in a single story.

Although writers certainly often write stories in several, or all, of these categories, I list a few writers and their stories for each of these classes of fiction, as identified by types of conflict, by way of example:

• Psychological (“man vs. himself”): “Berenice,” “The Fall of the House of Usher” (both by Edgar Allan Poe)

• Sociological (“man vs. man”): Misery by Stephen King and Intensity by Stephen King.

• Naturalistic*: “The Strange Orchid” and The Island of Dr. Moreau (by H. G. Wells) and Carrie (by Stephen King)

• Theological: The Taking by Dean Koontz; Desperation by Stephen King; The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

• Psychological, Sociological, Naturalistic, and Theological: “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane

*Naturalistic includes stories which feature paranormal, rather than supernatural, abilities, the difference between the two sources of empowerment, as I use these terms, being that the the paranormal, since it is natural, is or, at some point may become, explicable through the exercise of reason or through scientific knowledge, while the supernatural is, by definition, inexplicable by either rational or empirical means, because it transcends nature altogether.

 

Although it is possible, perhaps, that, one day, writers may invent or, more likely, discover a metaphor in addition to those of the psychological mirror, the sociological crowd, and the naturalistic environment (in Crane's story, the ocean is the environment), it may also well be that these three metaphors exhaust the modalities of understanding the human situation. If such is the case, there remains an avenue for gaining additional insights into our lives as human beings involved in our own minds and behaviors, the actions of others, and the eventualities of existence within the world and to further explore what it entails and means to be a human being in a vast nebula of time and space. This remaining avenue is not one road, but many, which don't simply branch, but also interweave, much as do the branches and roots of Yggsdarsil, the sacred tree of the Norsemen: each worlds unto themselves, they are also, at the same time, each a world among worlds.

Many of these worlds are subjects of departments or schools in colleges and universities throughout the world: fine arts, sciences, and related disciplines, some of which are, more specifically: anthropology, biology, business, chemistry, computer science, earth science, economics, engineering and technology, geography, history, language and literature, law, mathematics, medicine and health, philosophy, performing arts, physics, political science, psychology, sociology, social work, space science, theology, and visual arts. Are there other worthy disciplines that provide a foundation and a framework for artistic development in general and horror fiction in particular? Of course. The ones listed are merely examples.

To use a metaphor, such disciplines are lenses. They focus or disperse the light of understanding each in their own peculiar ways. To see a story's idea or its characters, its action, its setting, its structure, its implications, its conflicts, or its theme through the lens of philosophy is very different than to view the same element of the same story through the lens of law, the lens of medicine and health, or the lens of politics, and those stories that examine the same aspect of a story, of horror or otherwise, as Crane's “The Open Boat” does are stories that enrich perception and, sometimes, understanding. By seeing a story through various lenses, a writer renews the approach of fiction, or literature (or, again, art in general). Stories, even about familiar tropes and themes, become new again, because they offer fresh insights by their authors' willingness to look anew at them, through a variety of lenses. Such renewal is apt to be not good just for the souls of readers and writers but also for genres themselves.

 

Why, through a story, should a writer and a reader explore just one world, when there are (more than) nine?

Getting to Know Them: H. P. Lovecraft

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Recently, I have begun reading biographical sketches of the masters of horror fiction. (Should you care to join me in this interesting and entertaining pastime, Ranker provides a good list of such authors.)

I read, most recently, about H. P. Lovecraft.

During a period of poverty, he subsisted on nothing more than a loaf of bread, a chunk of cheese and a can of beans.

Throughout his life, he corresponded with a good many people, including writers he mentored through his letters, whose ranks include August Derleth, Donald Wandrei (The Web of Easter Island), and Robert Bloch (Psycho).

As a child, he believed that the gods of ancient Greek mythology were real, while the Judaeo-Christian God was merely a myth (S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence), and he later turned to astrology as his guiding light. Once interested in anatomy (as well as chemistry), his passion for the former ended when he encountered the puzzling topic of the human reproductive system (Joshi).

Throughout his early years, he suffered several bouts of depression and “nervous breakdowns.” Perhaps he feared suffering the same fate as his father Winfield Scott Lovecraft, who was institutionalized when Lovecraft was a youth; it seems that Winfield had been given to doing and saying strange things” prior to his commitment (Joshi).

He married Sonia Greene, whose work as a milliner earned her a good income. After two years, their childless relationship ended, when they separated. Lovecraft's assurance that they were divorced allowed Sonia to marry again, but she discovered, later, that she was, in fact, still married to Lovecraft and, as a result, was guilty of bigamy.

Greene wrote the short stories “The Horror at Martin's Beach” and “4O'Clock.”

He was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Oswald Spengler, Robert W. Chambers, Lord Dunsany, and Algernon Blackwood.

According to a variety of critics, his fiction is replete with such themes as forbidden knowledge, otherworldly influences, innate depravity, the rule of fate, threats to civilization, white supremacy, the potentially negative effects of scientism, an emphasis on polytheism, “cosmic indifference,” superstition, and an imaginary and recurrent geography unique to his fiction. He has been criticized for racism, homophobia, misogyny, and parochialism. His writing is not highly regarded by literary critics, although Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Bentley Little, Joe R. Lansdale, Alan Moore, F. Paul Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Neil Gaiman, and others name Lovecraft as a major influence on their own conceptions of horror fiction and their own writing.

Although he lived forever on the brink of absolute poverty, Lovecraft's cosmicism has influenced horror fiction.

Werewolves: Three Scientific Explanations

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Chillers and Thrillers has devoted quite a bit of space to several articles on Tzvetan Todorov's insightful analysis of the literary fantastic. At this point, despite the oversimplification that results, we can say, for Todorov, the fantastic usually resolves itself into the explained and the unexplained. The former he calls “uncanny”; the latter, “marvelous.” Only when there is no resolution, one way or another, does the fantastic remain fantastic.

In our first post in this series, “Ghosts: A Half-Dozen Explanations,” we include a few examples of each type of story.

We also noted that, to write such a story, an author must allow either of two understandings of the action: either reason or science can explain the phenomena, bizarre though they may, as natural events or the strange phenomena are beyond explanation and, as such, may actually be of an otherworldly or supernatural origin. The tension between these two alternatives creates and maintains suspense. It is only when the story shows that the action is natural (explicable by reason or science) or supernatural (inexplicable by reason or science) that the story itself is no longer fantastic, but either uncanny or marvelous, respectively.

It helps, therefore, to know how scientists explain seemingly fantastic phenomena, such as (for example) ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and zombies.

Werewolves are, like most beasts, especially hairy. Sometimes, so do human beings, due to hypertrichosis, a genetic disorder that results in the covering of the face and body in thick hair resembling an animal's fur. Before genetics was understood (about the turn of the twentieth century), this condition could have led people to believe that victims of hypertrichosis were men or women who'd transformed into wolves—in other words, werewolves (in Old English, “wer” means “man” and “wulf” means “wolf”).

Porphyria, a condition mentioned in a previous post, could have contributed to people's belief, in earlier times, in werewolves: the condition “is characterized by extreme sensitivity to light (thus encouraging its victims to only go out at night), seizures, anxiety, and other symptoms.” (Often, scenes of people transforming into werewolves include behavior that closely resembles seizures, as does this scene from the movie The Howling [1977].)

A medical condition known as clinical lycanthropy is more about the mind that the body: it causes its victims to believe that they are werewolves, which, in turn, causes them to act accordingly. Serial killer Peter Stubbe is a case in point. He believed he owned “a belt of wolfskin that allowed him to change into a wolf.” His confessions to his murders were extracted under torture, as his “flesh was . . . ripped out with hot pincers and his limbs [were] crushed with stones.”

Once again, scientific accounts of the werewolf phenomenon offer suggestions about characters, including therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, police officers and detectives, medical doctors and specialists, and even torturers. In addition, the offices of these personnel might occur as settings in some scenes, but, depending on the century in which a story is set, settings might also feature dungeons, torture chambers, prisons, or mental asylums. Of course, forests are a virtual certainty with regard to the settings of such stories.

There have been many movies about werewolves, including Silver Bullet (1985), which is based on Stephen King's 1983 novella Cycle of the Werewolf. Such imaginary beasts have also been popular with well-known short story authors, Robert Louis Stevenson (“Olalla” [1887]), Algernon Blackwood (“The Camp of the Dog” [1908]), Bram Stoker (“Dracula's Guest” [1914)], and Robert E. Howard (“Wolfshead” [1968]). Alexander Dumas wrote a novella on the subject, The Wolf-Leader (1857), and Guy Endore penned a novel, The Werewolf of Paris (1933). (There's even a werewolf romance subgenre!)

 Studying these stories will show readers how such writers give new blood, so to speak, to a truly ancient horror trope.

In our next post, we'll take a peek at what science says about zombies.

"Shadowed": An Amusing Vignette

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Shadowed (2020), directed by David F. Sandberg, star his wife, Lotta Losten, and five shadow people. The plot is simple:

A woman (we'll call her Lotta) reads in bed. Her light goes out. She sits up quickly, on the edge of the bed. She hears a noise. Worried, she activates a small flashlight that she takes from the drawer of her bedside table. The beam illuminates a single, flat dish on the beside table. But two shadows show on the wall behind the table: the shadow of the dish and the shadow of a jar. As the shadow of the jar indicates, she picks up the invisible jar and then drops it back onto the table. She hears another noise. A shadowy woman sits in the chair near the foot of Lotta's bed. Lotta tosses a blanket on the bed over the shadow woman in the chair. The blanket falls onto the chair, assuming the shape of the chair's contours, suggesting the shadow woman has vacated her seat. Her bedroom door opens of its own accord, showing the hallway outside her bedroom. Lotta stands in the darkness of her bedroom. She approaches the bedroom's doorway. She enters the hallway. She follows the hallway to another part of the house, pausing near the foot of the stairs leading to the house's second story. A shadow of a man stands hunched over in front of a closed door. The shadow man twists, before turning quickly toward Lotta, and snarls, The shadow man continues to transform into a more clearly human shape. The shadow man rushes toward Lotta. She runs back down the hallway to her bedroom. Closed, her bedroom door is presumably locked. Trapped, Lotta turns when she hears a sound behind her. Five shadow figures—three women and two men, one of the which holds a shadow hatchet. Lotta mutters an unintelligible word or two—maybe “David” or “keep back.”

Some people believe that shadow people are spirits; others believe that they are beings from other dimensions. Some suggest that shadow people are evil; others think that shadow people are either friendly or neutral toward human beings. Scientists suggest that such figures may be hallucinations caused by sleep paralysis, and methamphetamine addicts have reported seeing shadow people as a result of sleep deprivation.

Sandberg's 1:48-second film doesn't provide many clues by which to decipher its message, if there is one. The view of the leaves of a tree through the small window in Lotta's bedroom indicates that it is nighttime. The bed is still made, and she is fully dressed, except for her shoes, and she is, we later learn, downstairs, possibly in the guestroom, which is sparsely furnished with a bed, a bedside table, a simple lamp, a fireplace, and a vaguely seen larger piece of furniture visible for a moment in the sweep of her flashlight beam as she turns toward the shadow woman in the chair. The only decorative items seem to the the dish on the bedside table. Such a sparsely furnished and relatively small room is obviously not the master bedroom. She wears no wedding ring, so, apparently, she is unmarried.

The bedroom door appears to open by itself. Later, it appears to have closed and possibly locked itself. We do not see any shadow people when these occurrences occur, and no other characters are present to provide us with a point of view other than Lotta's own. Therefore, it is possible that the shadow figures are nothing more than the products of her hallucinations, perhaps brought on by sleep deprivation: although it is night, she has neither undressed (except to remove her shoes) nor donned pajamas or a nightgown. She does not appear to be in her own bedroom, but in the guestroom. Instead of sleeping or trying to sleep, she reads.

At first, there is only one shadow person—a woman. Then, there is a shadow man. The first shadow person, the woman, does not behave in a threatening manner, but the shadow man rushes Lotta. Finally, there are five shadow people, three women and two men, one of the latter of whom holds a hatchet. The hatchet and the menacing manner of the five shadow people, as well as Lotta's fear of them and her attempt to flee from them and to return to the sanctuary of the guestroom suggest that they are hostile toward her and intend to harm her, although it is impossible to determine how they can do so, since they lack material substance. Their only means of attack seems to be to frighten Lotta to the extent that she injures herself by fleeing from them: she could run into a wall, into furniture, or trip and fall, as the narrator in H. G. Wells's short story “The Red Room” does.

 

Or are the shadow people immaterial?

They would seem to be, but the jar that Lotta picks up and then drops on the bedside table seems real enough and material enough. Although it appears to be invisible, its shadow rises on the wall as she lifts the object and “falls” on the wall when she returns the object to its original position on the tabletop. It is real enough and tangible enough to cast to block the light of the flashlight, real and tangible enough to cast a shadow. If the shadow jar is real, if it is tangible, the shadow people could be real and tangible as well. We do not see them exert force, but that does not mean that they are incapable of doing so, and Lotta certainly believes they are capable of harming her.

We must conclude that if the shadow people exist, they are definitely invisible and they could be tangible. However, we have no proof and no reason to believe that the shadow people are anything more than products of Lotta's hallucinations. They do not disturb anything. They do not move anything. They leave no trace of their presence, as far as we know—no footprints or fingerprints. They do not speak. True, the shadow man that Lotta sees as she stands at the foot of the stairs seems to undergo a transformation of sorts, as he twists and twitches and lifts his seemingly outsize head becomes more clearly human. But these apparent changes could be merely the effects of Lotta's imagination or results of hallucinations.

As we have seen in previous posts, Tzvetan Todorov categorizes fantastic literature, of which horror fiction is a type, into three varieties: the fantastic, the uncanny, and the marvelous. A story, he says, is uncanny if its incidents can be explained through scientific knowledge or through reason. It it remains inexplicable in such terms, it is marvelous. Only a story that cannot be resolved as being either uncanny (explicable) or marvelous (explicable) remains fantastic. For example, Wells's “The Red Room” is uncanny; Stephen King's short story “1408” is marvelous; and Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw is fantastic. Since science can explain the phenomena that trouble Lotta as effects of sleep paralysis or sleep deprivation (or, for that matter, a wild imagination), Sandberg's short must be reckoned an exercise in the uncanny.

Although Shadowed doesn't have a plot and is not, therefore, an example of flash fiction, it does achieve one of the tasks that Edgar Allan Poe sees as critical in horror fiction. It creates a single emotional effect (“The Philosophy of Composition”). Of course, Poe believes that a story must accomplish more than the creation of a single, unified effect. It must have a plot, for example, as all of his own tales certainly have. To produce an effect, of fear or disgust or horror or terror or any other emotion suitable to horror fiction, all the elements of the tale must work together to lead to and maximize the effect with which the story ends, and these other elements include, among them, a plot.

A couple of the criticisms that Mark Twain directed at James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales can be said of Shadowed: “A a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere, and “the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there” (“Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses”). Shadowed is a handsome, well-executed vignette, but it is not a short story, even of the length of a flash fiction narrative. It may entertain for a minute or two, but it cannot truly satisfy anyone who takes his or her horror—or his or her drama—seriously.