Leftover Plots, Part V

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Plot Generator XY112G

One way to come up with ideas for short stories and novels is to steal--I mean, borrow--them from other writers. I write of this practice in earlier posts, “Leftover Plots,” parts I through IV. Those articles are more general than this one (and, possibly, future ones, which will focus specifically on the works of horror fiction’s current bad boy par excellence, Stephen King.

I’m not really going to tell anyone how to steal from King (or anybody else, for that matter), of course, because (a) stealing is wrong and ( b) plagiarism can be costly, to one’s reputation as well as to one’s purse.

However, ideas (like titles) cannot be copyrighted. They are free to anyone and everyone, which is why, for example, The Lost World (1925), Jurassic Park (1993), and 10,000 Years B. C. (2008) (or, for that matter, The Land Before Time [1988]), and many, many more movies about either dinosaurs or dinosaurs in conflict with human beings have been made. No doubt, many another will follow.

Often, horror writers throw off ideas for short stories and even other novels in the novels and screenplays that they write. The concepts sometimes fall like sparks from the tail of a fiery comet (or, at least, comets of the type that we generally see in science fiction movies and tend to imagine in the theaters of our minds). King’s novel, Desperation, suggests a few ideas that could become the bases for additional short stories or, perhaps, even novels. Others of his many works offer similar suggestions.

One of these ideas, the one that appeals most to me, is that of someone’s discovery of idols that might or might not be like the images of the false gods that King depicts in Desperation. If one devoted his or her story to only one (or a few) idols, their properties, and the results of human interaction with them, he or she would be apt to write a short story, but were he or she to consider a number of these false gods, their characteristics, and their effects on those who make contact with them, he or she might well produce a narrative of novel, or even epic, scope.

One’s development of this idea would, of course, have to be one’s own; otherwise, borrowing an idea would, in fact, likely become stealing a treatment of such an idea, or, in a word, plagiarism.

In his novel, King depicts his idols as being like “some kind of stone artifact,” and they have a decidedly sexual effect upon those who make contact with them, as Cynthia discovers when she touches one of the idols with “a tentative finger” and “her hips jerked forward as if she’d gotten an electric shock and her pelvis banged into the edge of a table,” making her blush (254-255). King’s omniscient narrator then describes the idol in more detail, indicating that it has an animal shape:

It was a rendering of what might have been a wolf or a coyote, and although it was crude, it had enough power to make them both forget, at least for a few seconds, that they were standing sixty feet from the leftovers of a mass murder. The beast’s head was twisted at a strange angle (a somehow hungry angle), and its eyeballs appeared to be starting out of their sockets in utter fury. Its snout was wildly out of proportion to its body--almost the snout of an alligator--and it was split open to show a jagged array of teeth. The statue, if that is what it was, had been broken off just below the chest. There were stumps of forelegs, but that was all. The stone was pitted and eroded with age. It was glittery n places, too, like the rocks collected in one of the Dandux baskets. . . .

“Look at its tongue,” Cynthia said in a strange, dreaming voice.

“What about it?’ [Steve asks]

“It’s a snake” (255).

The narrator’s description is vivid and detailed, allowing the reader to visualize the artifact readily, which makes the idol seem both more bizarre and, paradoxically, more realistic than it would be had the storyteller merely glossed over the strange artifact with a few adjectives or descriptive phrases.

The idols can make those who touch them experience orgasms; can make them forget their surroundings; and, readers learn a few pages later, can have a devastating effect upon their self-esteem. As Cynthia later tells Steve, when she touched the idol, “it seemed like I remembered every rotten thing that ever happened to me in my life,” and, she admits, its touch made her think of “sex. . . the dirtier the better” (318). Moreover, contact with the idols can spur its victims into acting upon these lusts, as both Cynthia and Steve find out soon enough.

There are other idols than the image of the wolf or the coyote:

He thought at first that there were three odd-looking charms lying in her open palm--the sort of thing girls sometimes wore dangling from their bracelets. But they were too big, too heavy. Not charms, but carvings, stone carvings, each about two inches long. One was a snake. The second was a buzzard with one wing chipped off. Mad, bulging eyes stared out at him from beneath its bald dome. The third was a rat on its hind legs. They all looked pitted and ancient (480).

The artifacts are obviously images of gods or demons, as they have inexplicable, supernatural effects upon those who come into contact with them. At the same time, however, they are tangible; they are material; they have concrete form. Made of stone, they are subject to the long-term effects of natural forces; they erode: they are “pitted and eroded with age,” and they appear “ancient.” Moreover, they can be “broken,” “chipped” and, presumably, destroyed. They have powerful effects upon the humans who make contact with them, but the artifacts are not invulnerable. The

Were another writer to write about such statues, he or she would have to do so in such a way as to make them his or her own creations, with properties different from those whitish King ascribes to his, and with effects that also differ from those that King’s false gods have upon those with whom the carvings come into contact. There are various ways to accomplish this task, which are better left to each individual to determine for him- or herself.

Another idea that spins off, so to speak, King’s novel is the creation of demons out of the whole cloth of one’s imagination rather than to embody such evil spirits on the basis of research concerning demonology. King’s demon is a spirit from another dimension, utterly dependent for incarnation upon possessing the bodies of other, corporeal beings, such as humans or animals. However, the demon’s metabolism is extremely fast, and it soon wears out the body of its host, so that it must possess another and another. His possession results in the deaths of the possessed, whose bodies thereafter enlarge, possibly in response to the greater demands upon the organs of Tak’s greater metabolic rate. Tak is able to exercise control over animals and insects through a power similar to telepathy. He is also able to project his power into the stone idols, or can tahs, that various characters discover in Desperation. When he possesses a human being, the body’s senses, strength, and natural abilities are heightened, although Tak can also perceive phenomena by other, extrasensory means, as when he is aware of the presence of a nameplate inside the Carvers’ recreational vehicle without entering the vehicle of looking through any of its windows (“Tak [Stephen King],” Wikipedia).

By imaging one’s demon (perhaps on the basis of one’s own inner demons or the problems and issues that best society), one is pretty much guaranteed an original creation. This approach is as wide open as one’s own ability to think outside the box of tradition. Where King creates Tak, you or I might create Tik or Paddywack in the same fashion, by using our own imagination or our knowledge of social problems, past or present, to envisioned to embody our own concepts of the demonic, creating one or more demons in our own image and likeness as a result, as King apparently did in writing of the idols in his novel.

Another provocative consideration is what might happen to animals that survive Tak’s telepathic influence? Would their exposure to the demon’s mind have a long-lasting, or even permanent, effect upon them, and, if so, what, exactly, might the animals change? Perhaps they would become monstrous versions of their previous selves, retaining the enhancements of their natural abilities that they experienced as Tak’s cognitive thralls. Would big game hunters ally themselves with demonologists or scientists to hunt down these demonic beasts and capture or kill them?

At the end of the novel, not much remains of the town of Desperation, but what if it--or, rather, another small town, elsewhere, that has experienced a similar catastrophe--remember, be inspired to borrow, not to steal, and make other writers’ ideas your own--were to be rebuilt? With its horrific past, could new horrors occur to the community’s children or grandchildren, a generation or two after the original calamity? King’s novel It suggests that such could easily be the case.

Could the demonic entity that destroyed your first town return to destroy another community? The answer is in King’s simultaneous, mirror-image release of a twin novel, The Regulators, which features many of the same characters as appear in Desperation, but living wholly different lives in a wholly different community.

Other of King’s noels suggest other ideas for additional stories or novels, which, possibly, I will consider in future posts, although not necessarily in a continuous order.

The Protagonist as Leader

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

From the earliest days, since the time that the theory of the four humours was popular among ancient shrinks, the concept of personality types has been popular with psychiatrists and psychologists, and, indeed, the idea that human beings can be pigeonholed as this, that, or the other type of personality remains attractive to some social scientists even today.

One such personality type, they contend, is the leader, who is said to demonstrate specific character traits, or qualities, among which are intelligence, the ability to adjust, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and general self-efficacy (“Leadership,” Wikipedia). Others identify various other traits, among which, according to “Leadership Theories and Summary”), the “central” ones are intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity, and sociability. The matter is much more complex, of course (what isn’t?), but this is the gist of it, as leadership theory relates to personality traits.

The protagonist of a horror story, short or long, is typically a leader and, therefore, he or she will, according to psychology, demonstrate the qualities just mentioned. Let’s consider a few examples of horror fiction protagonists. Do they fill the bill?

David Carver is the protagonist of Stephen King’s Desperation. He’s not one’s typical protagonist; he’s chosen by God Himself to lead the ragtag band of survivors and near-survivors against the demon Tak. To me, he seems intelligent, but not overly so. He is certainly able to adjust to changing situations and shifting responsibilities. He doesn’t appear all that extroverted, but, then, on the other hand, he doesn’t seem all that introverted, either. He is definitely conscientious. Open to experience? Nothing suggests that he isn’t, but he doesn’t seem to seek out new experiences, either. Does he demonstrate self-efficacy? Yes and no: he is willing to obey God, but he doesn’t act of his own accord. He does what he is told to do, and he is willing to allow others to take the lead on occasion. His self-confidence ebbs and flows (as whose wouldn’t who is called to face a demon?). He is definitely a determined soul, and he has integrity to spare.

How does Father Damien Karras, of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, stand up as a leader? Since he is a priest, the reader must assume that he, too, is called by God, for Catholics believe that one is called to the priesthood: he does not choose, but is chosen. Intelligent? Yes, but not more than average, perhaps. Able to adjust to changing situations and expectations? Pretty much. Extroverted? No. Open to experience? Hard to say. Does he demonstrate self-efficacy? He depends more on his mentor, Father Lankester Merrin, and upon God than he does upon himself, although he does take it upon himself to jump out of Regan MacNeil’s bedroom window, sacrificing his life for hers, at the end of the story, so, to that extent, perhaps he demonstrates some self-efficacy. He appears to have little self-confidence, although he shows determination and integrity, despite his crisis of faith.

Like David Carver, Father Karras seems to have some of the traits that psychologists claim a leader must have, but not others. Nevertheless, God has apparently selected him as a leader.

What about Moses, who, at an advanced age, was called by God to lead the ancient Hebrews out of bondage to the Egyptians? Moses does not seem especially intelligent, although he is certainly not stupid. He sometimes has trouble adapting to change. He may be extroverted (or not). He is usually not open to experience: he does not want to be a leader, and he is angry at his people when they began to worship the golden calf instead of Jehovah. He has little self-efficacy, distrusting even his speaking ability and his other abilities in general because of his advanced age. He does appear, at times, to have a fair degree of self-confidence, as might be expected of a high member of pharaoh’s court. He is definitely determined, refusing to take pharaoh’s “no” for an answer, and he is willing to wander about in the desert for forty years, seeking the Promised Land. He is certainly a man of integrity.

Once again, as in the cases of David Carver and Father Karras, Moses appears to possess some, but not other, leadership qualities, but, even so, he accomplishes his mission, where others would be likely to fail.

Let’s conclude our musings upon the psychological theories of leadership qualities with a consideration of Satan, who some scholars contend is the true hero of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. He seems to possess all the qualities of leadership but integrity (the religious would probably add, as a necessary leadership trait, faith in God, so I likewise include it in my consideration); obviously, Satan lacks this quality as well.

Psychiatrists and psychologists who enjoy playing the personality traits game might argue that one need not possess all of the qualities of leadership to be a leader or, perhaps, that one is a more or less effective leader, depending upon the number of leadership qualities that he or she does possess. Such thinkers usually argue from a secular, rather than a religious, perspective, of course, which is a point of view that does not consider theological alternatives.

The Bible’s stories of heroism tend to suggest that God expects faith, or imputed “righteousness,” and integrity, which may be defined, in this context, as the willingness to obey divine commands, more than He demands any other qualities, being more than able Himself to supply whatever those whom He chooses to lead may lack. Indeed, traditionally, He has chosen the weaker, or even the weakest, vessel as his instrument, pouring His Holy Spirit into them so that, in His name and for His sake, they can work miracles, perhaps to demonstrate that it is He, and not those whom He calls, who actually gets the job done.

If a story features a secular protagonist, he or she should be expected to rely upon him- or herself, and, it may be argued, may be more likely to achieve his or her goals if he or she has more, rather than fewer, of the leadership skills that trait theorists have identified, whereas, if a story features a religious protagonist, he or she may well succeed in spite of not having many of these traits, since it is God, presumably, who is acting within and through such a vessel or instrument.

The Devil Is in the Details

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

This morning, I awoke to a naked pillow--a pillow that wore no case. Because my mind was in the receptive state that follows one’s awakening (as it also precedes one’s slumbering)--the best time, incidentally, for conceiving ideas for stories!--I saw something, a detail, which, more likely than not I wouldn’t have noticed at all had I not been in such a receptive frame of mind: a decorative feature. Spaced apart by three inches or so, a series of seven bands of stripes, each of which, starting with one, increased by an additional stripe, appeared upon the pillow’s surface, or skin: one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. Someone had deliberately designed this feature, although chances are that few, if any, would ever notice it and that fewer still, perhaps, would care. It was enough that the designer him- or herself had cared to take the time and trouble to add this pattern to what would have been otherwise blank cloth. Seeing the time and trouble that an anonymous someone had taken to add this design to a fabric that few would ever even notice, much less appreciate, made me think about the significance of detail, especially as it relates to writing horror (or any other genre of) fiction. Not only does the inclusion of such details in one’s descriptions of settings (or the physical appearance of characters’--including the monsters among them) help to create verisimilitude, but detailed descriptions also create mood, tension, suspense, fear, and disgust--in a word, horror. Indeed, a judicious use of details can even produce a somewhat subliminal effect, affecting readers (or moviegoers) on an unconscious level. As they do in many other ways, ancient Greek (and other) myths offer writers, especially of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, a prototype of techniques for developing monstrous characters. Some mythical monsters are hybrids, which merge features from two or more actual animals (the centaur combines man and horse). Others are formed by removing a feature that an actual creature typically possesses (the Cyclops has only one eye). Still others are created by multiplying the attributes that a real animal or human has (the hydra has many heads). In many cases, two or more of these techniques are combined, so that, for example, a griffin combines aspects of the lion (body), the eagle (head), and the dragon (wings). Another trick is to replace one thing with another, as is seen in the Gorgon’s hair, in which serpents take the place of Medusa’s and her sister’s dreadlocks. Although a monster such as the griffin might appear more ludicrous than hideous to modern readers or moviegoers, the point is that a more judicious combination of anatomical parts, more appropriate to today’s sensibilities, could produce startling--and eerie or frightening--results. In the version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which Donald Sutherland stars, an image appears that remains firmly embedded in my brain: a dog with a human, instead of a canine, head! The sight of this sight nearly floored me then, and it haunts me yet. And, who knows but that, soon, we might be confronted with just such a real-life monstrosity, for, with both cloning and genetic engineering present-day realities, anything seems possible. Of course, details apply beyond just the physical environment and the physiological appearances of monsters and other characters. Writers should be specific about the abilities of their characters--and their non-human or monstrous dramatic personae, in particular. Stephen King’s monster in It seems to derive from the shape-shifting Greek deity Proteus, whereas Tak, the demon who inhabits the pages of his Desperation, appears to be something right out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The It villain can take the form and appearance of anyone’s worst nightmare, whereas Tak can leap into and possess anyone’s (or anything’s) body, although, as a result, he causes a biochemical meltdown of his host in not-so-pretty short order. Horror writers, more than any other type of author, need to remember that the devil is in the details.

When the Center Does Not Hold

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep were
vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats

In “The Shopping Mall as Sacred Space,” Ira Zepp, Jr., states his belief that shopping malls represent contemporary and secularized “sacred spaces” that energize human beings. Although his thesis may strike one as highly unlikely, he does mention several points that are worth considering, taking them, for the most part, from the ideas of Mircea Eliade Paul Wheatley. One of these ideas is that human architecture features centers--town squares, or “parks, groves, or recreational centers”--that reflect their archetypal “heavenly counterpart.”

These mystic centers, often circular in design, are separate from the ordinary world surrounding them and are, therefore, potentially sacred, integrating “space at several significant levels,” including “global (cosmic), state (political), capital (ceremonial), and temple (ritual).”

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Jerusalem is an example: “The heavenly Jerusalem, the historical Jerusalem, and the coming Jerusalem are all reflections of a city already found in the mind of God.”

When religious faith declines, religious centers are replaced by secular surrogates, a point made by Zepp in his quotation of Eliade: “To the degree that ancient holy places. . . lose their religious efficacy, people discover and apply other geometric architecture or iconographic formulas.” In the larger community, that of the nation, such surrogate centers include Washington, D. C., the political center, New York City’s Wall Street, the economic center, and New York City’s Broadway and Los Angeles’ Hollywood, as prominent cultural centers.

In addition, various other centers, universities, sports arenas, national and state parks, military bases, state capitals, town halls, railway stations--are scattered, as it were, around the country, at regional, state, and local levels. Many of these serve the general public, but some are more or less the exclusive provinces of those who work in them or frequent them--trucks stops, shopping centers, research laboratories, factories. Zepp lists several such centers in his essay, identifying facilities for conferences, civics, medicine, agriculture, shopping, senior citizens, recreation, and students, all of which incorporate the term “center” as part of their designations.

Horror fiction and other genres of literature, especially those which feature an element of the supernatural or the fantastic, frequently contains such centers, which may be narrative or thematic or both, so it is illuminating to discern what attacks these centers and how and why they are attacked. The enemy without (or within) tells us much about both that which a society holds to be sacred and that which it sees as threats against what it values most as the focus and center of communal life.

Much of Stephen King’s fiction takes place in American small towns. In some of these towns, the church is still active as a sacred center. In Needful Things, ‘Salem’s Lot, and The Cycle of the Werewolf, the church, in its Catholic or Protestant version (or both versions) is active, if relatively ineffective. The Catholic and Protestant churches in Needful Things are both unable to resist the temptations of the devil, as he appears in the person of Leland Gaunt, and, in fact, literally take arms against one another in a riot of violence, death, and gore. In ‘Salem’s Lot, Father Callahan’s religious faith is so weak that the priest is easily overcome by the vampire Barlow, who transforms him into one of his followers, a member of the brotherhood of the evil undead, and, in The Cycle of the Werewolf, the local Baptist pastor, Reverend Lester Lowe, is the story’s antagonist from the very beginning of the story.

In other of King’s stories, the church, if there is one in the town in which the tale takes place, is not mentioned at all. Instead, other places have taken upon themselves the function that such sacred places served in previous, more religious times. However, places that have, in mainstream society, typically taken the place of the church, the temple, the synagogue, and other religious centers, seem to be defunct. Groves, recreational centers, universities, sports arenas, national, state and city parks, military bases, state capitals, town halls, railway stations, trucks stops, shopping centers, research laboratories, and factories may exist, but there is nothing set apart, or “sacred,” about them.

Indeed, as in Bentley Little’s University, The Resort, The Academy, The Store, and similar works of horror, such secular surrogates for sacred objects which have lost their holiness are apt themselves to be centers for demonic or chaotic forces rather than for divine and healing powers. If the sacred center does not hold, neither, horror writers suggest, will their secular surrogates.

King, like Dean Koontz, Dan Simmons, Robert McCammon, and other contemporary horror writers, tends to relocate the sacred center not in surrogate places, but rather in the solitary holy individual or the consecrated few. In some cases, these individuals are not religious in the traditional sense; other times, they are. In Desperation, David Carver is the religious protagonist whose faith carries the day against the demo n Tak. In Koontz’s The Taking, Molly Sloan and her husband Neil fend of the onslaught of Satan and his minions. In Simmons’ Summer of Night, altar boy Mike O’Rourke leads his peers against the ancient evil that attacks his hometown. In William Peter Blatty, Father Damian Karras exorcises the legion of demons who have possessed pre-pubescent Regan MacNeil. These characters are more or less religious in the traditional sense.

In other novels, however, the holy one is him- or herself secular in nature and outlook, although he or she occupies the novels’ surrogate sacred centers and drive the action forward against the evil figures or forces which menace their society, sometimes despite the presence of an active, if ineffective, institutional church. Father Callahan of ‘Salem’s Lot, Sheriff Alan Pangborn of Needful Things, and writer Bill Denbrough of are the secular leaders who lead the forces of a secular society against the menaces that threaten to annihilate them; their religious counterparts prove as ineffective against the antagonists as the churches that they lead.

What about the forces of darkness themselves which attack these surrogate and secular “sacred centers”? What do their natures tell us about the forces which contemporary horror writers view as threatening contemporary secular society? Desperation’s demon, Tak, threatens the community by tempting people to sin and by attempting to destroy their faith in the true God. Therefore, Tak is a threat to the righteousness that results from obedience to the divine will and a threat to faith itself. ‘Salem’s Lot’s Barlow sows seeds of fear and distrust among the small town to which he, an ancient European evil, comes, causing mother to turn against son, wife against husband, and neighbor against neighbor. He is a menace to the moral values and brotherly love that makes a community of a town’s populace, instead of their remaining nothing more than a collection of suspicious and uncooperative residents. Needful Things’ Leland Gaunt likewise pits neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, family member against family member, and lover against lover, disrupting the tie that binds, whether the tie is one of love, friendship, or faith and fellowship. As a man of the cloth turned bestial, Cycle of the Werewolf’s Reverend Lowe is literally a wolf in sheep’s clothing, violating the trust of the flock over which he has been assigned the responsibility for the welfare of their souls. In King’s fiction, as in that of Koontz and many others who mine fiction’s horror lode, the major threat of antagonists, human, monster, and otherwise, is to the community and its individual members and to the spiritual and social glue, so to speak, that hold them together--their faith, respect, concern for moral goodness, personal sacrifice, and romantic and brotherly love.

To discern the nature of the threats in other horror writers’ fiction, first ask what the “sacred center” is that brings the characters together, that unites them, that makes them care for one another, and then ask yourself what is the nature of the beast that attacks this center. Everyone seeks a center to his or her life, as do villages, towns, cities, states, nations, and the world, and, although these centers differ somewhat from time to time and place to place, the ties that bind them are often the same, even if the monsters also sometimes change.

It Is Necessary to Suffer To Be Beautiful. . . Or Believable. . . Or Interesting

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, once told the show’s star, Sarah Michelle Gellar, that, to create interesting television, it was necessary to make her--or her character, at least--suffer.

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.

A social pariah among her peers even before this incident, Carrie continues to be tormented by her schoolmates. However, her life seems about to take a turn for the better when one of the school’s more popular boys, Tommy Ross, asks her to be his date to the prom. Instead, after she is given a taste, as it were, of what it would be like to be accepted by her peers, she is again publicly humiliated when she is drenched in pigs’ blood. She loses control of herself, unleashing, with devastating effect, the telekinetic power with which she was born. Before she is through exacting vengeance, she has killed most of her fellow students and many of the school’s teachers, destroyed the gymnasium, and obliterated her city’s downtown area. Returning home, she has a showdown with her mother, in which she learns that she is the product of her mother’s having been raped. Margaret stabs Carrie, but Carrie kills her before, later, Carrie herself is killed.Another King novel, Desperation puts its protagonist, twelve-year-old David Carver, through his paces, as indicated by this diagram. As a younger child, David had promised God that he would serve him, no matter what God required of him, if God would heal David’s friend, who was dying. God honored David’s prayer, and, now, years later, God has a mission for David: save the captives of the demon Tak, who, having escaped burial in an abandoned mine, possesses the bodies of various residents of Desperation, Nevada. David manages to do so, at the cost of his little sister’s and his mother’s deaths and his father’s near-loss of his sanity. David concludes that “God is cruel.” However, another character, John Edward Marinville, something of a stand-in for King himself, it seems, advises David that God is beyond human understanding and that, although his actions may seem “cruel” to human beings, God possesses many attributes, including, especially, love.

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.

The God of Desperation

Copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both the soul and body in hell. -- Matthew 10:28

Some say that the most frightening character in Stephen King’s Desperation is not the demon Tak or any of his human hosts but God.

The God of Desperation is not the Sunday school God, and he’s inscrutable and alien, unknowable and mysterious. He’s also omniscient and omnipotent. Everyone, it seems, underestimates him, including his servant, the pre-teen David, whom, because God’s power is evident in the boy, Tak fears and loathes.
When one of the characters is hesitant to follow the plan God, through David, lays out, saying that doing so could cost all of them their lives, David replies that God doesn’t care whether any of them lives or dies; all he wants is to stop Tak, and he’s prepared to do whatever he must to accomplish his purpose.

By the end of the story, most of the townspeople are dead, as are David’s family--both parents and his younger sister--and David concludes, “God is cruel.” The reader has seen that Tak rejoices in cruelty as well as death and destruction. What might have happened had the demon escaped from the Nevada desert town? Stopping him, even at so great a cost as the lives of those who resisted the demon, might have been worth it.

Years before, having been released early from school, David had nailed his pass to a tree outside his tree house, hundreds of miles from Desperation. At the end of the story, another character finds the same pass in his pocket and gives it to David. On the pass the words “God is love” appear. Which God seems, cruel or loving, is a matter of perspective, it seems, and perspective, in this world, is always finite.

Tak learns that, far from there being no God in Desperation, as he’d supposed, it was God who, from the beginning, had ordered all the events that transpired since--and maybe even before--the demon escaped from his imprisonment in the collapsed copper mine outside the town. Tak was defeated before he began his campaign of terror. For the demon, God seems to rule by virtue of his might. The God of Desperation is like the elephant in the parable of the blind men. Whatever part of the animal one happens to touch suggests the nature of the animal, but it is none of the things the men imagine it to be; it is more, and other.

By bringing God to Desperation to battle a demon never heard of before, rather than a familiar spirit such as Satan, King renews the mystery and the majesty of God. The God of Desperation is, again, transcendent and unknowable--mighty, cruel, loving, all of these things and much, much more. In Desperation, it is a terrible thing, once again, to fall into the hands of the living God.