Showing posts with label absurdity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label absurdity. Show all posts

Saturday, June 27, 2020

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley: Analysis and Commentary

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman


I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Commentary

The poem expresses the fleeting nature of fame and its ultimate vanity, or futility. It begins with the speaker of the poem recounting his meeting a “traveler from an antique land.” The “antique land” is Egypt, a place steeped in ancient history, tradition, and lore. According to this traveler, “two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ Stand in the desert,” not far from a “a shattered visage” that lies “half sunk” in the sand. Obviously, this had once been a huge statue of a man, whose figure had been carved to stand for all time.

Apparently, the figure was one of authority, for the haughty, contemptuous face that is now half buried in the desert sand wears a “frown,/ And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.” The face is lifelike in the sense that it conveys its real-life counterpart’s arrogant disdain: showing “that its sculptor well those passions read,” passions which “survive” in the features of the stone visage that the artist had “stamped” centuries ago, “on these lifeless things.” Ironically, the statue that was to memorialize the proud ruler has come to ruin in the desert wasteland, a victim of centuries of erosion. It is broken, partly missing, and to some extent buried. It has not stood the test of time very well. Time has not been kind to the memory of the harsh ruler. His memorial has not immortalized him.

On the pedestal, the haughty ruler has left a final address to the world. His last words identify him as “Ozymandias, king of kings,” commanding the mighty who should see his statue to consider his accomplishments and “despair” at ever hoping to rival his own mighty works. These final words, however, are empty and vain. They are hollow and seem to mock the broken, decapitated statue that has long since become nothing more than “a mighty wreck”:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.


Fame is as uncertain as life itself. In pagan societies, even far later than those of the vanished Egypt of centuries ago, people aspired to immortality by being remembered and honored by succeeding generations. We see this impulse as late as the Anglo-Saxon period, in which the hero Beowulf hopes to attain an immortality similar to Ozymandias’ by virtue of his having performed great deeds of courage. Ozymandias, it seems, was more than a mere warrior chieftain. He was “king of kings” who had accomplished peerless deeds. His person had been commemorated with a gigantic statue of stone. Nevertheless, his hopes were all in vain. The sole reminder of his long-ago existence is a crumbling “wreck,” which has been, as it were, not only dismembered and decapitated by the wind and the sand, but also half buried in the lonely desert, “boundless and bare,” that stretches away from the ruined monument on every hand.

If this king’s life has been forgotten, certainly those of ordinary men and women will not be remembered. Centuries after one’s death, what shall it mean that a man or a woman ever lived at all? The poem seems to suggest a pessimistic answer, ending not only as a cautionary tale concerning the vanity of human pride and the futility of memorials as a means of attaining immortality, but also a declaration that human existence is, when all is said and done, what the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre characterized as “absurd.” We live and we die, and centuries later, it is as if we never existed, no matter how great our accomplishments might have been during our lifetimes.

Ozymandias, we should note, is the pharaoh Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt from 1279 to 1212 B. C. His shattered granite statue lies at the site of the Ramesseum, his temple, at Gurna, Egypt, and the “colossal wreck” of his shattered statue has been photographed. The ancient Greeks, who derived “Ozymandias” from one of Ramesses’ many titles, gave him the name “Ozymandias.”

Sunday, March 8, 2020

A Literary Critic Offers Some Tips for Writing Powerful Horror Stories, Part II

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman


In Shock Value; How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror (2011), Jason Zinoman offers some insights concerning John Carpenter's 1978 film Halloween.


Jason Zinoman

The movie is an example of what I refer to as an invasion movie, which I define as the invasion of an idyllic community by a corrupting, external evil (think, as a prototype, The Garden of Eden): “Halloween begins,” Zinoman writes, “with a decidedly normal, safe environment, an idyllic middle-class suburb” (178). During the course of the movie, this “familiar” setting and its “ordinary” character “turns into something ambiguous, confusing, and repulsive,” as “middle-class suburbia is [shown to be] the home of unexplainable evil” (208). However, the suburbs is not the only familiar and ordinary environment in such movies; others include “the beach, the hospital, the bedroom, the prom, the highway,” and “right next door” (208).


At the beginning of the movie, the camera views the action from the perspective of “the predator,” as the audience sees what the invisible intruder sees, but the point of view then alternates back and forth, between “the predator” and the “victim” (180). To differentiate the audience from the killer, the director, John Carpenter, shows them the killer's “knife,” which “reminds us that our perspective,” as members of the audience, “is not the same as that of the killer” (180).


Zinoman provides a couple of theories as to why female characters are more often victimized (and killed) than are their male counterparts, including the greater perceived vulnerability of female characters and the established tradition of the presence of a damsel in distress.


The pleasures of horror are more masochistic than sadistic,” he claims (181), which may be another reason for the tendency of horror movies to feature female characters as their victims. By identifying with the film's victims, rather than with its predator, the audience vicariously becomes victims themselves; if they are males, it would seem (although Zinoman does not say this) that they are also, to some extent, feminized, seeing female surrogates of themselves as vulnerable, weak, ineffective, and helpless. However, viewers, male and female alike, presumably, would also learn, through the survival of the so-called Final Girl, that young women can also be survivors, provided that they possess the personality traits it takes to go toe-to-toe with a monster and win.

Zinoman seems more interested in the nature (or lack thereof) of modern monsters than he does in the implied feminization of male audience members. He contrasts monsters past with monsters present. The former, he suggests, was “a stand-in for some anxiety, political, social, or cultural,” but the latter represent something else entirely.


For example, Zinoman contends, “[Michael] Myers doesn't represent anything . . . Myers doesn't represent the cold calculus of scientific progress or a religious conception of evil” (181), the two sources, traditionally, that are used to explain the monstrous. In the past, the monster has usually been a freak of nature (giant ants or a hostile extraterrestrial life form) (or a freak of the scientific lab [Frankenstein's monster or Mr. Hyde] or a freak, as it were, of the supernatural [the devil or a vampire).


The “New Horror” that was spawned by the likes of Dan O'Bannon, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, William Friedkin, and others, on the other hand, is the face of nothingness. Myers is “defined,” Zinoman says, by “the absence of meaning”; it is “by emptying out all the details from the character [that] Carpenter” creates a monster that contains nothing, a monster of the void, who acts without meaning, without purpose, and “has no motive” (182-183).

Although Zinoman often provides food for thought, he is, at times, a bit Emersonian in his tantalizing vagueness and fails to follow up on some of his intriguing insights, such as the effects of sadism as a perspective and, indeed, a technique of the cinema and his insight that the presence of female characters as victims may tend to feminize male members of the audience. Both ideas are stimulating and rich in possibilities, but they are largely undeveloped. Nevertheless, after Shock Value, readers won't be the same moviegoers they were before they encountered Zinoman's highly interesting and suggestive study of “New Horror.”

Monday, March 21, 2011

Not-So-Gratuitous Nudity, Part 2

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman


Context helps to determine how onscreen nudity registers--how, in other words, a moviegoer interprets its significance--and the context depends, in large part, upon the movie’s genre. For example, nudity in a romantic movie will be interpreted quite differently than nudity in a horror movie. However, context is more refined than simply a type of fiction would determine. The setting of the movie and other elements also suggest how onscreen nudity should be interpreted.

In Re-Animator, Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton) is shown lying on her back, upon a steel examination table that is covered with a light-blue sheet. She could be in a hospital, coming to, or going from, surgery, but her situation is actually far worse: she is in a morgue, an unwilling potential participant in a madman’s quest for reanimation.

Surgery is frightening because its outcome is uncertain. Often, patients survive operations and thrive. Sometimes, however, they die on the operating table or, if they survive a botched surgery, they live out their days horribly disfigured or disabled.

As frightening as a hospital tends to be, however, a morgue is much more unnerving, for morgues are, by definition, associated with death. To be on a metal table in a morgue is anything but reassuring--especially under the conditions in which Megan finds herself.
 

Whether her attacker is a demon or a poltergeist is unclear, but Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) emerges from an assault by an invisible rapist with bruises and injuries (The Entity). Her psychiatrist, Dr. Sneiderman, believes that Carla has caused these injuries to herself and that the “entity” whom she contends attacked her is but a delusion. As a child, she was sexually abused, becoming pregnant as a teenager. She also witnessed the violent death of her first husband. Her psychaitrist believes that these traumatic events have caused Carla to hate herself and to take her hatred out upon herself in violent displays of hostility and rage. However, moviegoers witness the attacks that Carla claims occur, seeing, before their own horrified eyes, the deep indentations in her breasts that the invisible entity makes during one of its terrifying assaults.

The juxtaposition of an invisible predator and a flesh-and-blood victim--and a nude one, at that--creates great tension, as audience members wonder whether they, too, could be similarly attacked by a ghost or demon that no one but they themselves can see--or feel. The indentations in Carla’s breasts, like the bruises and injuries to her body, witnessed by moviegoers, make it abundantly--and horrifyingly--clear that the entity is real, for, if it were not, it couldn’t grip Carla’s breasts, bruise her flesh, or injure her body. By reflecting the reality of the fleshless and invisible monster that assaults her, Carla’s nude and battered body magnifies the viewer’s own fear and dread, for, were the entity’s presence not revealed by these signs of its attendance, it would be easy to suspect, as the psychiatrist does, that Carla is hallucinating. The film does not allow this option. The entity is known by its effects upon Carla’s flesh and is as real, therefore, as she herself. The reality of the entity is the movie’s source of horror.


Evil can appear attractive. This idea seems to be the theme of Innocent Blood, in which Anne Parillaud plays Marie, a lovely, modern vampire. Her lovely, bare body seems to ask, Do bad things come in beautiful packages? Her slender frame, her fetching beauty, and her vulnerable nudity all seem to suggest the same thing: a beautiful young woman--or vampire--is too beautiful to be hazardous to one’s health. Evil is ugly, after all. The beautiful people are not dangerous--even when they are undead. The truth is, of course, altogether different, and much of the film’s horror, revulsion, and suspense is based upon this paradoxical and ambiguous depiction of evil as attractive.
 

In Cat People, legend has it that a werecat transforms into a leopard when it has sex with a person, regaining its original human form only when it kills a person. The film plays upon fears of both incest (the werecats are incestuous) and bestiality, with the nude and sensual bodies of Irena Gallier (Nastassja Kinski) and zoologist Alice Perrin (Annette O’Toole) temptations that Irena’s brother Oliver, who is also Alice’s colleague and boyfriend, is unable to resist. Their nudity gives flesh, as it were, to the horrific temptations of incest and bestiality that haunt the decadent Oliver--indeed, their nakedness may well likewise tempt the viewer who, as voyeur, more or less willingly watches these dark and twisted, if sensual and seductive, sexual obsessions and acts.


Good girls don’t have sex. They don’t get naked, either, except in socially sanctioned places and situations, such as the shower or their doctors’ offices. This belief, whether founded in reality or naivetĂ©, is the basis for the shock that moviegoers feel when an actress with a wholesome image like that of Katie Holmes (The Gift) disrobes onscreen, and this shock, one may argue, is transferred to the girl-next-door character that she portrays--or, at least, appears to embody, as Holmes does in playing the innocent-looking, but sexually promiscuous, Jessica King, the local high school principal’s wholesome (-looking) fiancĂ©e. Her nudity and her innocent image contrast sharply, reminding filmgoers, once again, that, far from always inhabiting an ugly form, evil can, indeed, cut a strikingly beautiful figure; appearances can be deceiving.


Mathilda May may look a bit pale, but she also looks the very picture of health. Young and beautiful, she seems far too innocent and lovely to be a bloodsucking fiend, but, as a female vampire in Lifeforce, she is just that--as she proves again and again, flitting bat-like, from one host to another to relieve them of their life force. Beauty is, once again, a red herring, or false clue, suggesting that, in seeking evil, one must look elsewhere than the lovely face and form of Mathilda May, when, in fact, in her beautiful countenance and figure, they have encountered both true and deadly evil.

In horror films, nudity is a reminder of humans' (including moviegoers’ own) mortality; as a blatant exposure of the flesh, nudity can also highlight its opposite, the invisible spirit; nudity can signify the attractiveness of evil; and nudity, especially the nudity of a beautiful young, but wicked, woman, can suggest the absurdity of believing that beautiful people must also be good people.

The display of naked bodies in horror movies can, and does, accomplish more, as I will demonstrate in additional, future posts concerning the genre’s not-so-gratuitous nudity.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

"The Flowering of the Strange Orchid": A Cautionary Tale

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

“The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” is a cautionary tale, the moral of which may not be so much that it’s not nice to fool with (or try to tame) Mother Nature as it is that Nature, despite her beauty, can be, and often is, treacherous, dangerous, and even deadly. The storyteller alludes to a study by Charles Darwin in which the naturalist discovered that “the whole structure of an ordinary orchid-flower was contrived in order that moths might carry the pollen from plant to plant.” The moth was important, in this scheme, as it were, only with regard to its role as a courier or, more accurately, a midwife. In the case of the strange orchid of H. G. Wells’ short story, the same seems to be true of human beings: the orchid collector Batten died that the orchid could live. The plant feeds upon blood, and it was Batten’s blood that it fed upon, killing him. The natives of the Andaman Islands preserved Batten’s collection of orchids, including the hemophiliac flower, until the dead collector’s colleague, an ornithologist, returned from a trip he had undertaken into the island’s interior to retrieve the flowers and bring them back to England.

Wells’ story is a slap in the face, so to speak, to those who believe that the universe is a product of divine design. Human beings, who fancy themselves the crown of God’s creation, are no more important or purposeful than the strange orchid that would survive by bleeding them to death, as it had Batten, whose death had been blamed on “jungle-leeches.” In fact, human beings are but a food source for the orchid, just as moths are midwives, so to speak, according to Darwin, to “an ordinary orchid-flower.” In themselves, human beings are often of little, if any, true value to the cosmos they inhabit, as the narrator’s description of the protagonist, Winter-Wedderburn, indicates:

He was a shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man, provided with just enough income to keep off the spur of necessity, and not enough nervous energy to make him seek any exacting employments.
Instead, Winter-Wedderburn busies himself with a hobby, the growing of orchids in his “one ambitious little hothouse,” a pastime no more significant or beneficial to humanity than any other such amusement as collecting “stamps or coins,” translating “Horace,” binding “books,” or inventing “new species of diatoms.” Everything that human beings do to pass their time is insignificant, Wells seems to imply, because human beings themselves are insignificant, just as are the orchids that the protagonist grows or any other life that the earth has spawned. The universe is absurd; therefore, everything in it, including life in general and human life in particular, is also meaningless and without value. As Winter-Wedderburn himself says, “Nothing ever does happen to me,” and the things that do happen to others are of no real significance; during the past week, Harvey, an acquaintance of Winter-Wedderburn, to whom things do happen, “picked up sixpence. . . his chicks had staggers. . . his cousin came home from Australia. . . and he broke his ankle.”

Nevertheless, plants, like human beings, struggle to survive, the strange orchid extracting blood from its hosts as “an nary orchid-flower” attracts moths to carry its pollen among itself and its neighboring plants. The functions of organisms, whether the collection of coins or stamps, the raising of orchids, the attraction of pollinating moths, or the bleeding of human hosts, are all without any more purpose than the absurd struggle of the species for its survival.

Ironically, believing that it was “jungle-leeches” that drained Batten’s blood, the protagonist tells his housekeeper, the strange orchid may have been “the very plant that cost him his life to obtain,” and, at the end of the story, it is his own death-struggle with the orchid that, giving him something to talk about, revitalizes his pathetic existence, saving his own life, as it were. His housekeeper rescues Winter-Wedderburn from the orchid, as it feeds upon his blood, allowing him to live to tell the tale:

The next morning the strange orchid still lay there, black now and putrescent. The door banged intermittingly in the morning breeze, and all the array of Wedderburn’s orchids was shriveled and prostrate. But Wedderburn himself was bright and garrulous upstairs in the story of his strange adventure.
As is often the case with Well’s shorter fiction, the true horror is beneath the surface of the story, not so much in the incidents as in what they suggest. In this case, the story’s action implies that human existence, which occurs in an absurd universe in which the struggle for existence is meaningless, is purposeless and pathetic. What would have been lost had the strange orchid’s flowering led to the death of the tale’s protagonist? Very little. His insignificance, like that of the story’s readers, is the true horror of “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.”

Friday, August 8, 2008

Charles Baudelaire’s “Carrion”

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In a previous post, we shared several relatively short poems that express horrific themes. In this post, we share Charles Baudelier’s “Carrion,” a strange rhyme, indeed, and appalling.


First, the poem; then, the commentary:

Remember, my soul, the thing we saw
that lovely summer day?
On a pile of stones where the path turned off
the hideous carrion--

legs in the air, like a whore--displayed
indifferent to the last,
a belly slick with lethal sweat
and swollen with foul gas.

the sun lit up that rottenness
as though to roast it through,
restoring to Nature a hundredfold
what she had here made one.

And heaven watched the splendid corpse
like a flower open wide--
you nearly fainted dead away
at the perfume it gave off.

Flies kept humming over the guts
from which a gleaming clot
of maggots poured to finish off
what scraps of flesh remained.

The tide of trembling vermin sank,
then bubbled up afresh
as if the carcass, drawing breath,
by their lives lived again

and made a curious music there--
like running water, or wind,
or the rattle of chaff the winnower
loosens in his fan.

Shapeless--nothing was left but a dream
the artist had sketched in,
forgotten, and only later on
finished from memory.

Behind the rocks an anxious bitch
eyed us reproachfully, waiting for
the chance to resume
her interrupted feast.

--Yet you will come to this offence,
this horrible decay, you, the
light of my life, the sun
and moon and stars of my love!

Yes, you will come to this, my queen,
after the sacraments,
when you rot underground among
the bones already there.

But as their kisses eat you up,
my Beauty, tell the worms
I've kept the sacred essence, saved
the form of my rotted loves!



Some time after the incident (“the thing we saw/ that lovely summer day”), still haunted, it appears, by the sight, the speaker of the poem recalls having seen, while walking with his lover, the dead and bloated carcass of a maggot-infested beast. In describing the animal’s “corpse” as he reminisces about the sight to his girlfriend, thus keeping alive in his memory the appalling sight, he mixes distasteful images and adjectives that bespeak unpleasant qualities and states with images and adjectives that express agreeable and pleasant characteristics and conditions:

“thing,” “carrion,” “whore,” “sweat,” “gas,” “rottenness,” “corpse,” “flower,” “perfume,” “flies,” “guts,” “maggots,” “scraps of flesh,” “vermin,” “carcass,” “music,” “water,” “wind,” “fan,” “bitch,” “feast,” “offence,” “decay,” “queen,” “sacraments,” “kisses,” “Beauty,” “worms.”

The negative images and descriptive words and phrases suggest his disgust, but, strangely, it is a disgust that merges with attraction. He is fascinated, it seems, with what he considers the beauty of death as it is represented in the concrete and vivid spectacle of an animal’s decomposing carcass. The rotting nature of the body seems to show life’s dirty little secret, as it were: the reality (death, or nothingness) that is hidden at the center of existence.

Nature does not discriminate in its destructiveness to accord with human perceptions and prejudices of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and value and insignificance, but kills and dismantles all. In doing so, it feeds upon itself, life deriving sustenance from the effects of death, as the flies feed upon the carcass and lay eggs that, as “maggots,” can later “finish off/ what scraps of flesh” remain, the crumbs, as it were, of the flies and dogs’ “feast.”

The speaker next personalizes death by applying the lesson he has learned from having seen the dead animal to the eventual fate of his girlfriend, observing that she, too, “will come to this offence,/ this horrible decay,” despite her religious faith, as indicated by the “sacraments,” and “rot underground among/ the bodies already there.” Death will not spare her, any more than it has spared others of her faith or, for that matter, those of no faith. Again, death is indiscriminate in its destructiveness, and neither faith nor disbelief avails against one's demise.

He ends his reminiscence and commentary upon the experience of having come across the dead animal’s rotten and bloated body by foreseeing, as it were, an ironic future situation, asking his lover to imagine herself, conscious despite her death and being devoured by “worms” whose “kisses eat” her, that he, in having survived her (for a time, at least), has “kept the sacred essence” and “saved/ the form of” his “rotted loves.” Moreover, he makes her, his “queen,” an embodiment of “Beauty,” addressing her as such.

This appellation may refer to the last lines of John Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” Keats wrote. Regardless of what these closing lines of Keats’ poem may mean (critics continue to debate the issue), it is truly chilling to suppose, as Baudelaire’s speaker seems to imagine, that the truth, concerning “Beauty,” is that it must, like a lovely woman, end in death, in nothingness, and in absurdity, just as love itself must end.

In such a poem, there is no hope, nor is there any reason to suggest that the repulsive and the beautiful, in the final analysis, signify any difference. If death and destruction are the end of life, of beauty, and of love, death, ugliness, and apathy are no better or worse than one another, and good and evil themselves become but moot and meaningless points.

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

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

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

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.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

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.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


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