Showing posts with label genre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genre. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 10, 2021

The Middle Course

 Copyright 2021 by Michael Williams

  

In this post, Michael Williams contributes another superb article, full of insights, concerning the inner workings of plots related to all genres of fiction. (Thank you, Michael!)

 


Writers in various genres have tried-and-true ways not only of beginning, but also of continuing, stories, of extending them though their narratives' middle courses, of connecting the beginnings of the tales with their endings.

Let's review some of the traditional ways in which writers accomplish this objective while maintaining, or even heightening, suspense.

 

In Desperation, after gathering his characters together, Stephen King uses various mechanisms of repetition to keep his novel moving along while maintaining or heightening suspense, among which techniques are—

  • Adding new arrivals to the ranks of Sheriff Collie Entragian's captives;

  • Increasing characters' personal stakes in the conflict between Sheriff Collie Entragian and the demon Tak. (For example, David's kid sister “Pie” is killed);

  • Requiring Tak to “jump” from one possessed person to another after the demon's intensity physically destroys one after another of his temporary hosts; and

  • Following one bizarre incident with another.

     

The middle of Dorothy's quest involves the use of such tactics of development as—

  • Frustrations of her desire to return home to Kansas by various means, including the Wicked Witch of the West and the Witch's minions' attacks; problems associated with the Wizard (fraud), the Scarecrow (lack of self-confidence), the Tin Man (susceptibility to rust), and Cowardly Lion (cowardice), and Toto (aggression); and problems associated with herself (passivity, dependence, uncertainty); and

  • Dorothy's ignorance of her ruby slippers' power to transport her home at any time.

     

Geoffrey Chaucer extends The Canterbury Tales by—

  • Descriptions of each of the characters;

  • Each character's telling of a tale;

  • Other characters' reactions to the tales; and

  • Arguments among the characters.

 

The movie Armageddon develops the middle of its plot by—

  • Having the characters undergo training;

  • Teaming Americans with Russians;

  • Missing the landing point;

  • Performing drilling operations;

  • Exploding methane gas;

  • Dying (on the part of most of the landing party).

Many detective stories advance their plots by—

  • Showing the interviewing various suspects;

  • Disclosing clues (or red herrings)

  • Otherwise investigating a crime (usually a murder).

In horror stories, the middle of the narrative often progresses by—

  • Expanding the area involving the initial situation to include other towns, a whole country, or the entire world;

  • Introducing new characters (often victims);

  • Seeking clues as to the nature and origin of an unfamiliar or alien creature, force, or situation; and

  • Varying the types of threats;

  • Fending off attacks.

Falling Down uses these methods to get from A (the beginning) to Z (the end):

  • Introducing new characters;

  • Providing examples of moral, economic, and political decline;

  • Developing the contrasting parallel personal lives of William Foster and Detective Martin Prendergast;

  • Escalating Foster's aggressive behavior; and

  • Visiting various areas of the city.

In developing the middle of a story, writers keep these purposes in mind:

  • The beginning of the story must connect to the end of the story in a logical, emotionally satisfying way, and the middle of the story is the connector between these two points;

  • The middle of the story's incidents are related through cause and effect;

  • The middle of the story must escalate the conflict and, therefore, the suspense;

  • The middle of the story must be appropriate for the story's genre (for example, things allowed in horror aren't usually welcome in a romance);

  • The middle of the story (usually, the middle of the middle) contains the plot's turning point;

  • The middle of the story is developmental: it develops elements introduced by the story's beginning: multiplies horrors [Desperation], complexities a quest [The Wizard of Oz]; more fully characterizes its players [The Canterbury Tales]; increases an already difficult challenge [Armageddon]; exemplifies a character's point of view [Falling Down];

  • The middle of the story's tone must be appropriate to the story's genre and theme.


For examples of these techniques in action, so to speak, check out Michael Williams's own tales of horror, fantasy, and suspense, the Twisted Tales series: Tales with a Twist, Tales with a Twist II, and Tales with a Twist III.

 

Monday, October 14, 2019

A Word to the Wild

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

It is both entertaining and informative to type a word associated with the horror genre in one's favorite Internet image browser and see the resulting pictures. (Personally, I prefer Bing.)

"Creepy"
For example, I typed the word eerie. As a result, images of fog-enshrouded woods, a tunnel, a full moon gliding among clouds in a dark sky, and several abandoned houses appeared. (Other pictures showed up as well, but not in any number.)


"Eerie"

The results suggested the question, What is eerie about these pictures? What is eerie about—

  • fog-enshrouded woods,
  • a tunnel,
  • a full moon gliding among clouds in a dark sky
  • abandoned houses?

These objects are not eerie in themselves.


"Eerie"

They are only eerie as symbols, as representations of physical conditions and limitations and, at times, emotional conditions. For example, fog reduces visibility; it “blinds” us to some extent. When we are robbed of our senses in a wilderness (woods), we have cause for disquiet. Unable to see, we are unable to defend ourselves.


"Eerie"

Likewise, even the loners among us crave society to some extent. We are social creatures—and for good reason. Friends and acquaintances don't merely relieve us of loneliness and boredom; potentially, at least, they are also a source of protection and assistance. If a friend doesn't know first aid procedures, he or she can telephone for paramedics if we are ourselves disabled for some reason. A house, as a home, is a sanctuary in which family members live, united by love which includes concerns for our safety and well-being. An abandoned house suggests that the family who abandoned the house are gone; so is the security blanket of our parents and siblings. We are cast out, alone, and vulnerable.


"Eerie"

What about the tunnel and the full moon gliding among clouds in a dark sky?

Such images will suggest one set of ideas and emotions to one writer and another set, perhaps, to another author. However, in most instances, words connoting horror will themselves find visual expression in the images on the Internet. In so doing, they can help writers of horror isolate the fears and anxieties of their readers and to tap into those feelings by describing settings that contain what we may call the elements of horror.

Try lots of words and their synonyms.

Here are a few results using words other than 'eerie.”

Frightening


Grotesque



Horrible



Sunday, April 14, 2019

Plotting by Phrase

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman


Language is the chief connection between our minds and the world at large. It is the means by which we perceive and conceive ideas, interpret experience, and communicate our attitudes, beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and values. In civilized society, it takes the place (at times) of assault and warfare in which not discussion of differences, but might, makes right.

In addition, language contains nuggets of wisdom, encapsulated knowledge, hard-won understanding, good advice. Often in the form of clever or pithy phrases, language is a reminder of what has been found to be true or useful, and, with some thought and imagination, offers a treasure trove for writers in search of ideas. Since Chillers and Thrillers is devoted to horror fiction and to, well, thrillers, this post considers a few of the phrases that could inspire plots for stories in these genres.


The first is “Nantucket sleigh ride,” which is defined as:

An obsolete and dangerous method of whale hunting in which a small boat manned by rowers and a harpooner, or a series of small boats tied together, would be attached to a whale by means of a harpoon and would then be towed by the creature at high speed across the water's surface, until the whale eventually became exhausted.


Although it's unlikely that such a technique is used today, it (or something similar to it) could be used, with a gargantuan monster of some kind substituting for the whale. Think of a group of sledges, instead of boats, fastened together and attached, perhaps by a harpoon, to a Tyrannosaur rampaging across eastern Alaska, western Canada, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, California, Arizona, or western Mexico (areas all once part of the island of Laramidia).


The object of such an enterprise might be the same as the Nantucket sleigh ride of yesteryear: to tire one's prey so that it could be killed (or captured, perhaps). How'd the T Rex come to reside in modern-day western North America? That's a matter for a different post, although the cloning of dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park certainly might point the way, as could the discovery of a live specimen tucked away in the corner of some as-yet undiscovered niche of Canada, Alaska, or Mexico (id such a place still exists).


The term “miner's canary,” referring to “a caged bird kept caged in mines because its demise provided a warning of dangerous levels of toxic gases,” also suggests so,me plot possibilities. In a horror story or a thriller, the canary, of course, wouldn't be a canary; it would be a person or even a group of people, maybe a whole town of people. Unknown to them, their community might be located at the edge of a dangerous area, perhaps one that is radioactive; perhaps one in which a group of hostile extraterrestrial creatures are held captive; perhaps one in which the portal to another dimension exists, leaving he earth at risk of invasion by the bizarre, but highly developed, inhabitants of this otherworldly plane—or whatever other scenario one's imagination develops.


My spider sense is tingling,” a phrase that has entered the language courtesy of Marvel Comics's The Amazing Spider-Man, also suggests a possibility or two—for me, alas, just one: suppose a person had a “spider sense,” an intuitive perception that danger was nigh and that this sense had a physical way of conveying its impressions, such as causing—I don't know—say, a tingling sensation?



But then, this person develops paranoia (backstory needed; see the video clip, above), which sets his or “spider sense” tingling for any, all, and no reason, so that he or she constantly perceives him- or herself to be in imminent danger. If this person is also a highly trained assassin or warrior, danger might well ensue—but because of his or her paranoia; in other words, this character becomes the source of danger he or she perceives.

Plenty of the other phrases listed on the Phrases website, mixed with a bit of imagination, can produce similar ideas for plots. Visit the site, and dig in!

Sunday, March 3, 2019

Developing a Sense of Horror

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman


Yesterday, as I walked through the house, I imagined the defensive and offensive actions that various inanimate objects might take in response to environmental stimuli if the objects were imbued with personalities, intelligence, and will.



Sound crazy? Perhaps, but personification can be an important source of inspiration and a significant way of developing one's sense of horror.

Here are a few of the ideas I conceived:



Ceiling: offense = inaccessibility (it's a cathedral ceiling); defense = allowing parts of itself to fall upon intruders (or perhaps divesting itself of such "accessory items" as ceiling fans or light fixtures); alternatively, a ceiling (or a floor) can look deceptively solid, only to be insubstantial and, therefore, dangerous

Floor: offense = strength and solidarity of tiles; defense = allowing individual or sections of tiles to break and slide, making an intruder's footing precarious



Cabinet: offense: closed exterior (like that of a turtle's shell)--also, drawers can contain some pretty dangerous items; defense = hiding (the articles of a cabinet are "hidden" when the drawers are closed)

Toilet: offense = closed exterior; defense = elimination of threat by "swallowing" action (and, okay, yes, maybe odor). (By the way, toilets have been known to explode!) (You probably don't even want to consider the possibilities that Porta Potties present!)

Stove = offense = strength, weight (it's not easily moved), and durability; defense = destruction by fire (or gas)
 


Refrigerator/freezer: offense = strength, weight, and durability; defense = cold or freezing temperatures. (In the hands of master storyteller Stanley Kubrick, who directed The Shining, a freezer can help to disorient characters and viewers alike, adding to the sense of confusion and anxiety.)

Curtains: offense: able to sustain considerable damage without total destruction; defense = able to incapacitate by wrapping around an intruder and to kill by strangling him or her. (Curtains of various sorts have also been used in other ways in such movies as Psycho and Hide and Seek.)



Mirror: offense: as Lewis Caroll (and others) have taught us in Through the Looking-glass, mirrors can be gateways to other worlds, some of which are strange and terrifying, indeed; wardrobes can also be portals to other worlds, of course, as C. S. Lewis has demonstrated in The Chronicles of Narnia); defense: shattering into sharp-edged, pointed shards

Wallpaper: offense: it looks harmless (but appearances can be deceiving); defense = it can drive a person insane (Charlotte Perkins-Gilman demonstrates how, in "The Yellow Wallpaper")



By imagining the offensive and defensive capabilities of the everyday objects in a house, a writer can exercise his or her creative abilities; at the same, time, he or she might conceive of a few ideas (by adding a bit of exaggeration, for effect) for a haunted house story. The familiar, everyday world is the source of horror, as often or not, in this genre.



Friday, September 23, 2011

"Terminal Freeze," Blow By Blow

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

I just finished reading Lincoln Child's novel, Terminal FreezeIt's 320 pages long.  I read it in five hours.  That's 64 pages an hour, or a little more than a page a minute.  I'm not bragging, just making a point.  By using the same method that I use, you can read novels quickly, too.  Why would you want to do so?  You can read more of them, gaining a better perspective on either an individual's entire collection of work, a better understanding of the entire genre itself in which he or she works, or a better appreciation of both an individual author's work and the genre to which the work belongs, all with a minimum investment of time.  In addition to reading the novel, I also wrote one-sentence summaries of each of its chapters as I went, so that, by the time I'd read the entire novel, I had a summary of the entire story, which enhances my memory of what I've read and provides a handy dandy means of evaluating and critiquing the novel, should I ever wish to do so.

If you'd like to follow the method of my madness (or the madness of my method), here's what I do when I want to speed up the reading process:

  1. First, read the blurb. A blurb is the text on the inside of a hardback book’s flyleaf (the paper cover in which hardback books are usually wrapped) or on the back cover of a paperback. by reading them, you’re saving yourself from having to read maybe fifty, or even 100, PAGES of the novel itself, and you will know the main character’s name, the setting, the basic storyline, and the names of lesser, supporting characters.
  2. Realize that a chapter can be summarized in one sentence. Then, read the chapter only until you can summarize it in one sentence.
  3. After each chapter, write a sentence that summarizes what it presented
  4. Keep a list of characters’ names, brief phrases that identify them, and the names of the places in which the action takes place.
  5. Skip most of the description and exposition. Read just the dialogue. By reading just the dialogue, you will be able to keep track of the story well enough to summarize it. Only dip into the descriptive or expository blocks of text when you need to do so to reestablish a sense of continuity and context--maybe twice or so every four or five chapters. You will find that you are skipping entire pages of the text and still know what’s going on.
  6. After reading and summarizing each chapter and updating your list of characters and settings, stop! You are done with the book. 

Here is the result of my application of this process to Terminal Freeze:

Chapter 1: The face of a melting glacier near Alaska’s Mount Fear falls away, revealing the mouth of an ice cave.

Chapter 2: Scientists exploring the cave find a monstrous beast (a gigantic cat) frozen in the ice.

Chapter 3: Although Usuguk, who travels south with his people, warns the scientists to leave the region, declaring that they have trespassed upon holy land, defiling it with their presence, the scientists refuse to leave.

Chapter 4: Kari Ekberg, a Hollywood location scout, arriving at the scientists’ research station to prepare for a docudrama about the discovery of the frozen beast, is given a tour of the facility--except for the northern section, which is off limits to her and everyone else, including the squad of soldiers who maintain and guard the post.

Chapter 5: As they escort Ekberg to the ice cave to see the beast, two scientists, paleoecologist Evan Marshall and evolutionary biologist Wright Faraday, explain their expertise to her.

Chapter 6: In an underground bunker below Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains, Jeremy Logan, allegedly a professor of medieval history, reads a secret memorandum concerning the deaths of a team of scientists who had been encamped at Mount Fear.

Chapter 7: Emilio Conti, the executive producer, begins filming on location, explaining that the host of the docudrama will arrive before the crew ascends Mount Fear to cut the beast from the ice--live, on camera, before millions of viewers.

Chapter 8: The Hollywood team’s legal representative, Wolff, shows the scientists a contract that their leader, Gerard Scully, signed, authorizing them to extract and thaw the beast’s carcass, on live television, despite the scientists’ objections.

Chapter 9: Using a laser and a diamond-tipped drill, the television crew extracts a block of ice in which the beast is entombed from the ice cave’s wall and transports it to a climate-controlled vault to thaw before the eyes of their television audience.

Chapter 10: Conti interviews Marshall, dramatizing the setting and dialogue, but angering the scientist when he asks him about his “dishonorable discharge” from the army, despite his having been awarded the Silver Star, and his refusal to carry a weapon, and Marshall refuses to cooperate further.

Chapter 11: Faraday reports to his colleagues that tests he’s conducted indicate that the beast is not the saber-toothed tiger they’d supposed it to be; it is at least twice the size of such an animal.

Chapter 12: An examination of the carcass--or what can be seen of it inside the block of ice--proves inconclusive as to the animal’s identity.

Chapter 13: The docudrama’s host, Ashleigh Davis, arrives, by helicopter, along with her trailer, which has been trucked in aboard an eighteen-wheeler driven by Carradine, an ice road trucker.

Chapter 14: Logan, identifying himself as a hitchhiker, who was picked up by Carradine on his way to deliver Davis’ trailer, introduces himself as the scientists gather to watch the docudrama host film a sequence of her show outside the climate-controlled vault.

Chapter 15: Marshal awakens to discover that a hole has been cut through the floor of the climate-controlled vault.

Chapter 16: Wolff locks down the compound so he can investigate and recover the carcass stolen from the vault, but the new arrival, Logan, is nowhere to be found.

Chapter 17: Faraday, having taken pictures of the hole in the vault’s floor, determined that the hole was made from above, not from below, as Wolff had supposed, which indicates that whoever sawed the hole through the floor knew the combination to the vault’s lock.

Chapter 18: Conti believes that the carcass was stolen through an act of sabotage to be disposed of and vows to make a documentary of the crime, asking Marshall to star in the film.

Chapter 19: Logan tells Marshall about the recently declassified memorandum concerning the deaths of the scientists at Fear Base.

Chapter 20: Josh Peters relieves McCoy Tyner, searching the compound for the carcass of the beast, and is attacked from behind and knocked unconscious.

Chapter 21: Faraday and the team’s graduate assistant, Ang Chen, tell Marshall of test results they’ve obtained on ice from the cave in which the creature was encased: it seems to contain ice--and a microscopic view of the photograph Faraday took of the hole in the floor suggests that the hole was made from teeth, not a saw, as if it had been chewed through.

Chapter 22: Logan reconnoiters E Level of the research facility, where he encounters the military leader, Sergeant Gonzalez, who tells him that the facility’s off-limits section had “extra berths” in it “that no military ever used” and is rumored to have involved the mauling by a polar bear of scientists who were involved in top secret work.

Chapter 23: After Marshall and his team’s computer scientist, Penny Barbour, put Conti, Wolff, and Ekberg on notice that the filmmakers will be sued if they libel or slander the scientists in their docudrama about the climate-controlled vault’s having been sabotaged, they inform the Hollywood executives that one of their men, Josh Peters, has been “torn apart” beyond the compound’s “security fence.”

Chapter 24: At Wolff’s request, Marshall examines the body, concluding that a polar bear could have killed Peters, but Wolff still insists that the creature’s carcass was stolen in an act of sabotage and suggests that Peters was killed to frighten the rest of them from continuing the Hollywood team’s search for the missing creature.

Chapter 25: Intent upon making a revised docudrama of the creature‘s theft and Peter‘s supposed murder as part of the sabotage of their original film, Conti sends one film crew to photograph the fearful reaction of the rest of the crew to the news of Peter’s horrific death and a second crew to film Peters’ corpse before it is put into cold storage.

Chapter 26: Logan discovers a notebook--perhaps a journal--that one of the scientists on the earlier, catastrophic, aborted mission kept while at Fear Base.

Chapter 27: A he prepares to leave the room in which Peters’ corpse is temporarily stored., having photographed the body, cameraman Ken Toussaint encounters “the face of nightmare.”

Chapter 28: Faraday reports to Marshall his suspicion that the ice that encased the creature was unusual and melted below the freezing mark, allowing the animal trapped inside, which may have been alive rather than dead, to escape after its ice prison had melted.

Chapter 29: Trying to pitch a screenplay to Davis, Carradine escorts her to her trailer, where they hear a loud knocking, which turns out to b Toussaint, hanging from one of the trailer’s window awning support arms, who, although he first appears dead, screams, “It plays with you! And then when it’s finished playing--it kills.”

Chapter 30: Toussaint, who has survived the attack upon him, describes his attacker as huge and equipped with many teeth; Peters’ corpse is missing; Wolff refuses to allow Carradine to drive the crew to safety in Davis’ trailer, which he offers to tow behind his eighteen-wheeler.

Chapter 31: Logan tells Marshall that the dead scientist’s journal hints at horrific events at Fear Base, and Marshall decides to take a snowmobile to visit the Tunits to see whether they can shed any light on the incidents, past and present, that have occurred at the research facility.

Chapter 32: When Allan Fortnum returns from shooting images of the Hollywood crew’s horrified reactions to Peters’ death, Conti gives the cinematographer his next assignment: stand by to film the monster as it tears its next victim apart--but Fortnum refuses to be party to this outrageous task.

Chapter 33: Both Davis and PFC Donovan Fluke, who escorts to her new accommodations, which are closer to those of the military troop attached to Fear Base to afford her better protection, are attacked by the monster.

Chapter 34: Visiting the Tunits’ settlement, Marshall finds it deserted except for Usuguk, who has remained behind to speak to the scientist, certain that Marshall would come.

Chapter 35: Sergeant Gonzalez orders the camp evacuated; everyone will ride in Davis’ trailer, which Carradine will tow with his eighteen-wheeler; meanwhile, Gonzalez plans to hunt for the beast; when Marshall returns, his colleagues plan to meet with him; only Conti and Ekberg refuse to leave, staying to film yet another revised docudrama.

Chapter 36: After Marshall tells Usuguk how he had accidentally killed his friend during the war in Somalia and had refused to cover up his mistake, thereby earning a dishonorable discharge, Usuguk agrees to accompany him on his hunt for the creature, but only as an unarmed advisor--and the shaman won’t share what he knows about the slaughter of the earlier scientific expedition party.

Chapter 37: Sergeant Gonzalez and his two men, Marcelin and Phillips, remain at Fear Base to hunt the beast after everyone else but Creel, Faraday, Scully, Marshall, Logan, Conti, Ekberg, and Wolff leaves in Davis trailer, which is towed by Carradine’s big rig.

Chapter 38: Conti and Ekberg plan to follow the soldiers, filming their hunt of the creature.

Chapter 39: Marshall returns to the nearly deserted research facility with Usuguk and learns of the monster’s killing of Davis and Fluke; Usuguk tells the others that he was the sole survivor among the earlier research party, “the one who got away.”

Chapter 40: The military troop, commanded by Sergeant Gonzalez and accompanied by Creel, the roustabouts’ foreman, follow the beast’s bloody tracks through the base‘s power station, and it attacks the group, killing Creel, after which Gonzalez retreats.

Chapter 41: Usuguk, a former soldier who had been stationed at Fear Base, tells the others how another, smaller spirit-beast killed the scientists of the earlier expedition and declares that the larger one awakened by the present expedition is an invincible and immortal guardian of the mountain in which Fear Base is installed--it cannot be killed, but it will kill them all.

Chapter 42: After crossing a frozen lake, the tractor-trailer is caught in a gust of wind that slams it into a rock and breaks one of the fuel tanks; the other tank is only one third full, and there is not enough fuel to take them the rest of the way to their destination, Arctic Village.

Chapter 43: Inside the base’s power station, the soldiers try to electrocute the creature, but to no avail.

Chapter 44: Following the soldiers, Conti, Wolff, and Ekberg find the bloody trail and Conti films Ekberg’s reaction to seeing the head that the monster had ripped from Creel’s body.

Chapter 45: Faraday finds that the monster’s white blood cell-rich blood makes it impervious to bullets but is hypersensitive to--and may be killed by--sound, so maybe they can convert the secret wing of the base into an echo chamber; meanwhile, Sergeant Gonzalez’s attempt to raise Conti and Ekberg on the radio is unsuccessful.

Chapter 46: Conti, having forbidden Ekberg to respond to Gonzalez’s radio call, orders Wolff and Ekberg to investigate a stairwell with him, and they feel pressure inside their skulls as the monster approaches them through the darkness.

Chapter 47: As Usuguk tells the party his people’s legends concerning the monster, Gonzalez, Sully, Marshall, Faraday, Phillips, and the shaman find an already-built echo chamber in the secret section of the facility.

Chapter 48: The creature kills Conti, but Ekberg escapes.

Chapter 49: Ekberg radios Marshall, advising him of Conti’s death and of her own risk, and, while Scully seeks batteries to operate the echo chamber’s sound equipment, Marshall rendezvous with Ekberg to protect her from the monster and lead her back to a site outside the echo chamber, where the monster can be ambushed.

Chapter 50: As the monster pursues them, Marshall and Ekberg retreat toward the ambush site, only to learn that no batteries are available and that the scientists have had to connect the sound equipment to a power source inside the echo chamber itself, which is farther than Marshall had anticipated.

Chapter 51: The sound equipment fails to stop the creature (as does a barrage of bullets), which attacks Scully, who is operating the sonar weapon, and tears him limb from limb.

Chapter 52: Marshall retreats with the sonar weapon into the echo chamber, where the sound is magnified, and, using a different set of “harmonics,” kills the monster with the sound waves, which cause its head to explode.

Chapter 53: Against all odds, Carradine’s big rig manages to haul the trailer to Arctic Village.

Epilogue: Logan suggests that the first beast was the second creature’s pet and that the latter had been searching for the former when it became encased in the wall of the ice cave.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Learning from the Masters: Louis L'amour

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Aspiring horror writers can learn from both popular and mainstream writers, whether they write horror fiction, stories of other genres, or literature of unusually high quality. In other words, both Louis L’Amour and Mark Twain have much to teach any horror fiction author, which brings us to the topic of today’s post.

Louis L'Amour

L’Amour wrote 89 novels and 250 short stories, most about cowboys, lawmen, gunfighters, and other heroic figures of the American Wild West. His first, Hondo, was published in 1953; his last, The Haunted Mesa, in 1987 (although other of his works have appeared posthumously). Anyone with such a long career and such a prolific quantity of bestsellers is someone who has learned how to tell a tale that appeals to a large and loyal audience and is worth studying.


Many of his novels include hand-drawn maps that bring the territories that his stories cover to life for his readers, showing them the towns, drawn in three dimensions, or the hills and mountains or deserts, complete with sagebrush and cacti, through which his intrepid lawmen, outlaws, Indians, posses, and others ride or through which trains, covered wagons, buckboards, or stagecoaches wend their wary ways. By showing only certain towns or terrains in three dimensions, with care given to individual and unique elements and features, and leaving the rest of the maps in two dimensions that include relatively few details, L’Amour heightens readers’ interest in the towns and terrains he does show more realistically on the charts, mythologizing them, as it were, cartographically as well as through his storytelling. (A couple of horror writers who have used maps well to enhance the mystique of their own terrains of terror are Frank Peretti, author of Monster [2005] and Stephen King, author of Under the Dome [2009]. Others horror writers have also included maps of their novel’s terrain--H. P. Lovecraft springs to mind. My Chillers and Thrillers article “Mapping the Monstrous” suggests some of the ways that Peretti’s novel benefits from his decision to may its horrors.)

But let’s return to the topic at hand: L’Amour’s adept use of the opening sentences (“hookers,” as King calls them) of several of his novels and short stories. In the process, we can learn a thing or two concerning how to keep our plights tight, our monsters few, our settings apparent, our suspense high, and our identifications of our genres simple and straightforward.


Rather like an impressionistic painter, L’Amour indicates the scenes of his novels in a few, deft brushstrokes--or pen strokes--or keystrokes: “rocks,” “the Mohaves,” “sky,” and “buzzards,” in the opening sentence of his novel Callahan, paint an image of the desert: “Behind the rocks the Mohaves lay waiting and in the sky, the buzzards.” He accomplishes the same feat, setting his scene (and indicating the genre of his story) in the few choice words of his first sentence of The Burning Hills: “On a ridge above Texas Flat upon a rock shaped like a flame, a hand moved upon the lava.” His descriptions, even when actually static, reporting past deeds, seem active, recalling the past as if it is happening as his narrator speaks: “We came up the trail from Texas in the spring of ‘74, and bedded our herd on the short grass beyond the railroad” (“End of the Drive,” End of the Drive). Likewise, by including active meteorological conditions, L’Amour can, again, make otherwise static scenes seem active, even intense: “Heavy clouds hung above the iron-colored peaks, and lancets of lightning flashed and probed” (“The Skull and the Arrow,” End of the Drive).

He is just as adept at setting scenes, creating suspense, characterizing characters, and hooking his readers when he describes towns and townspeople as when he pictures solitary heroes in isolated or desolate landscapes far from civilization: “He lay sprawled upon the concrete pavement of the alley in the darkening stain of his own blood, a man I had never seen before, a man with the face of an Apache warrior, struck down from behind and stabbed repeatedly in the back as he lay there” (The Broken Gun).


L’Amour knows when to add a simile, a metaphor, a personification, an allusion, a rhetorical question, or another figure of speech to spice up writing about mundane things when the writing itself might, otherwise, be mundane: “The night brought a soft wind” (Brionne). “Dawn came like a ghost to the silent street, a gray, dusty street lined with boardwalks and several short lengths of water trough (Borden Chantry). “When it came to Griselda Popley, I was down to bedrock and showing no color” (“The Courting of Griselda,” End of the Drive). “Who can say that the desert does not live?” (“The Lonesome Gods,” End of the Drive). “The land lay empty around them, lonely and still” (Conagher).


The men in L’Amour’s fiction tend to be lean, mean fighting machines, as quick and effective with their fists as they are with their hands. They have hard-edged, flinty names like Hondo, Callahan, Brionne, Bowdrie, Borden Chantry, Malcolm Fallon, Orrin Sackett, Jim Colburn, and Conagher. Sometimes, they straddle the law, living by the code of the West or a code of their own, more antiheroes than heroes, as is the case, it seems, with regard to Malcolm Fallon, whom L’Amour introduces as “a stranger to the town of Seven Pines” who is fortunate enough to be “a stranger with fast horse,” especially since a drunken band of townsmen have invited him to a necktie party (i. e., a lynching). Out-and-out villains, however, may be violent men of action, but they are also passive products of their circumstances and environments: “They were four desperate men, made hard by life, cruel by nature, and driven to desperation by imprisonment” (“Desperate Men,” End of the Drive). It seems that, in L’Amour’s fiction, desperate men are made, not born; in other words, it is not their fault that they are desperate men; their past experiences have made them so. By contrast, L’Amour’s heroic protagonists defy their environments, take charge of themselves, and become the masters of their own fates, embodying free will.


Although no academic would ever mistake L’Amour for a literary author, he is a literate writer of popular fiction who has learned, of himself, many techniques for accomplishing narrative objectives in ways as interesting as they are succinct, and any aspiring writer, whether of horror or another genre, can learn much from the way that he uses carefully chosen words, phrases, clauses, and sentences to set his scenes, suggest action (even when there is none presently taking place), introducing his protagonists, identifying the time of the day and the season of the year, creating suspense, generating a sense of mystery, stating mundane facts in intriguing ways, describing weather, and spotlighting particular characters among other literary personae. He also shows an adept use of similes, metaphors, allusions, personifications, the rhetorical question, and the tall tale (“My Brother [sic] Orrin Sackett, was big enough to fight bears with a switch,” the narrator of The Daybreakers claims). Adapting L’Amour’s techniques and strategies to his or her own genre and work, the aspiring horror writer can do the same.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Establishing Verisimilitude

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Imagine a woman sitting on her porch, reading a letter. Across a bed of bright petunias, she is being watched, but we do not see the watcher.

Who is this woman? Who wrote the letter, and what is in it? How does she react to its contents? Does she smile, laugh, sigh, weep, shake her head, nod, shrug?

Who is watching her? A man? A woman? Why is he or she watching the woman? Is the watcher a police detective? A mobster? A stalker? A secret protector? Does he or she mean the woman harm or good?

The answers to these questions (which will suggest additional questions) depends on the genre of the story that one is writing. Is it an action-adventure story? A detective or mystery story? Espionage? Fantasy? Romance? Science fiction? Western?

Or horror?

If it’s a horror story, the watcher could be either a predator or a protector. If a predator, it could be an alien (extraterrestrial), an animal, a demon, a ghost, a madman, a vampire, a werewolf, a witch, a zombie, or some other kind of monster, human or otherwise. Depending upon what kind of menace the watcher is, he, she (or it) may or many not respond to the woman’s reading of the letter and to her reaction to its contents.

Were I developing a plot about such a situation, I would opt to make the threat a human one or an intelligent entity, at least, because such an antagonist could respond to the situation, including the woman’s reaction to the letter, and if she is going to be described as reading and reacting to a letter, it would be seem desirable to the make the most of the emotional and dramatic potential of such a scene. Otherwise, why have her read a letter at all? She could just as easily be watched while she waters the flowers, takes a walk, or does any of a hundred other things. Therefore, my watcher must be one of the following: an alien, a demon, a madman, a vampire, or a witch (or, possibly, a ghost). Eliminated would be the animal, the werewolf, the zombie and any type of subhuman monster.

If, on the other hand, the watcher was the woman’s secret protector (secret because, if she know of him, he wouldn’t have to observe her from hiding), he (or she) would have to have a motive that seems feasible to readers. His or her role may or may not be related to the monstrous antagonist. If it is related, perhaps the protective character is a government agent, a demon hunter, a psychiatrist, a vampire slayer, a clergyman, or a ghost hunter or psychic. Obviously, if such were the case, this character would be present to protect the woman from the monster. Perhaps the protector’s awareness that the woman is due to receive a letter from a particular correspondent is the reason that he or she is watching the woman. Maybe the protector wants to see how the woman reacts to the letter’s contents (which, of course, implies that he or she is him- or herself aware of these contents).

The letter’s contents could be the device that links the three characters: the woman, the protector, and the antagonist. Does it announce the protector’s mission (to protect the woman) from a threatening entity (the antagonist)? Does it explain the true situation of which the woman is to play an integral part, a fact of which, until her reading of the letter, she has been unaware? Does the letter warn the woman of the monster that threatens her or will begin to threaten her, if it has not done so before? Could the woman be subject to a post-hypnotic command expressed in the letter she reads?

Why does the antagonist want to abduct or kill the woman? What is the antagonist’s motive for doing so? Is the villain acting alone or as part of a group?

The woman’s role in the situation must not be forgotten. In fact, it is likely that either she or the protective character is the story’s protagonist (unless there is no monster and the watcher is him- or herself the narrative’s antagonist). Was she expecting the letter she now reads or did it come to her out of the blue, as it were? Is the letter from a friend, a family member, an acquaintance, or a stranger? What does the letter say? Why does she react to its contents in the way that she does? Is her reaction appropriate or inappropriate to the news, and why? What else does the reader need to know about her? Is she single? Married? Separated? Divorced? Widowed? Does she work? Is she between jobs (“redundant,” as the British say)? Is she retired or independently wealthy? What predicament is she in? (She must be in some sort of predicament, of course, either now or very soon, for, as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren point out in Understanding Fiction, “no conflict, no story.”)

Of course, the basic situation with which we started--that of a woman’s sitting on her porch, reading a letter while, across a bed of bright petunias, she is being watched by an unseen watcher--could be developed in several ways besides the one I set forth as an example, and the story would, as a result, develop differently in each case, but, by linking the woman, the antagonist, and the watchful protector through the letter, we attain coherence among the characters, which establishes both a sense of narrative logic and believability, or a sense of verisimilitude, as writers and critics--mostly critics--are fond of saying.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Learning from the Masters: Dean Koontz’s Tips for Plotting the Best-Seller

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman
 
In 1981, when Writer’s Digest Books published his How to Write Best-Selling Fiction, Dean Koontz had 25,000,000 copies of his books in print and had earned several million dollars as a writer. Today, he has sixteen times that number of copies in print, or a whopping 400,000,000 --a copy for every man, woman, and child in the United States, with some left over. It’s safe to assume that his fortune has enjoyed a corresponding increase. Koontz is nothing if not (a) prolific and (2) commercially successful. It should go without saying that, when he counsels aspiring writers as to what and how they should write for publication, others should pay attention. Among other topics (or tips) that he supplies in How to Write Best-Selling Fiction, prolific, best-selling author Dean Koontz insists upon the importance of the narrative hook (an opening to the story that captivates readers and makes them want to read further) and plot. He supplies numerous examples of the former and a formula for the latter (although he prefers to call the formula a “pattern”). His example of the narrative hook is the beginning of his own novel The Voice in the Night, in which the antagonist asks the protagonist (both of whom are adolescents), “You ever killed anything?”
This question, asked of Colin by Roy, leads the boys to discuss the killing of “bugs” (Roy admits he likes the way bugs “squish” when he kills them and enjoys watching praying mantises “try to walk” after he has ripped “the legs off” them. Finally, Roy asks, “Ever kill anything bigger than bugs?” and admits that he has done so, “lots of times,” which prompts Colin to ask, “What’d you kill?” (67-68) One must admit that this opening is captivating! Koontz defines the “classic plot” for fiction of all types as being comprised of “four steps”:
    1. The author introduces a hero (or heroine) who has just been or is about to be plunged into terrible trouble.
    2. The hero attempts to solve his problem but only slips into deeper trouble.
    3. As the hero works to climb out of the hole he’s in, complications arise, each more terrible than the one before, until it seems that his situation could not be blacker or more hopeless than it is--and then one final, unthinkable complication makes matters worse. In most cases, these complications arise from mistakes or misjudgments the hero makes while struggling to solve his problems. Mistakes and misjudgments which result from the interaction of the faults and virtues that make him a unique character.
    4. At last, deeply affected and changed by his intolerable circumstances, the hero learns something about himself or about the human condition in general, a Truth about which he was ignorant, and, having learned this lesson, he understands what he must do to get out of the dangerous situation in which he has wound up. He takes the necessary action and succeeds or fails, though he succeeds more often than not, for readers tend to greatly prefer fiction that has an uplifting conclusion (74-75).
Coming from one of the world’s most prolific and best-selling authors, these tips are ignored only at one’s own peril, especially since, according to Koontz virtually every successful writer, from Robert Ludlum to Ernest Hemingway, himself and Stephen King included, employs them (75). Koontz also identifies the five goals he has in mind for “the first scene,” or opening, of “every novel” he writes:
    1. I wanted to grip the reader immediately.
    2. I wanted to introduce the lead character.
    3. I wanted to plunge the lead character into terrible trouble.
    4. I wanted to let the reader know that this was going to be a fast-paced story with lots of suspense. . . .
    5. I wanted to create a strong sense of reality. . . . (84-88).
Koontz also recommends that aspiring writers try to break into the market with a novel, as opposed to short stories; find an agent to represent him or her; write for a mainstream, rather than a genre market; include lots of action in the story; and disbelieve all the rumors about publishers who are no longer seeking quality writing from first-time writers or who refuse to consider anything sent to them over the transom. Of course, How to Write Best-Selling Fiction is almost 30 years old, and a good many things are apt to have changed since those days, but one thing seems to remain clear: if one doesn’t write at least a synopsis and the first three chapters of a novel, one will have nothing to sell, regardless of the vagaries of the marketplace and the economy.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Surrealism and Horror

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman 
 
Michael Gould’s Surrealism and the Cinema (Open-Eyed Screening) offers several insights concerning surrealism that apply not only to movies, but also to products of the horror genre, whether in print or on film. He says, “The image is the basic element of surrealism for it is an image-conscious sensibility (21).” Seeing represents consciousness; to be is to be perceived, and to see is to perceive. However, surrealism is interested in challenging accepted perceptions, interpretations, understandings, and meanings. To do so, it must dissociate or expunge familiar readings and views, that it might make the familiar strange and novel again; it is only by alienating the viewer from the things that he or she views that the surrealist can renew the objects of perception. For this reason, surrealists are generally more concerned with the representative, or the type, rather than with the individual, because the type is a distillation of individuals which stands for the essence, as it were, of the group that the type represents. In this sense, types are symbols, and symbols obliterate the perception of new truths, or understandings, of the things that, collectively, constitute the world or “reality.” This seems to be Gould’s meaning, when he writes:
For Rene Magritte. . . the bowler hat is the symbol of the bourgeois European man, and Magritte’s men in bowlers are all types, without individual personalities. It is the man-in-the-bowler-hat image that excites Magritte, not the man himself (21).
Surrealists deal with types because the artists want to subvert their meaning in order to make them potentially meaningful again, to make them, as it were, pregnant with meaning. Flannery O’Connor suggested something similar, in a different context, when she wrote, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures,” as did Walker Percy, in his use of a dung beetle, in The Moviegoer, to awaken his protagonist Binx Bolling to the wonder of things when they are no longer taken for granted and overlooked. When the world becomes too familiar to us, it is as if it is lost to sight. We have eyes, but we do not see. To be is to be perceived, but we have forgotten how to perceive; therefore, much of the world’s being is lost to us. Surrealists attempt to restore our sight by making the familiar world appear strange again to us, as it is to a young child who lacks adults’ experience:
Surrealism. . . seeks always the. . . revelatory. . . . This calls for a child-like sense of wonderment. Children are so easily surprised because they have so little experience in life. . . (28-29).
How does horror serve the same end? How does horror renew our perceptions of the things of this world, so that we see again that which has become invisible to our jaded eyes? It does so in at least three ways, by offering readers (or viewers) a parade of the bizarre, by confronting them with the monstrous Other, and by whisking them off to a remote, often confining, unfamiliar place.
As we have remarked in previous posts, most horror stories start with a series of apparently unrelated, bizarre incidents. This series comprises a break with the ordinary and the everyday, immersing the reader in a topsy-turvy world in which he or she, along with the protagonist, is alienated from the mundane and the familiar. Everyday objects, scenes, and experiences are juxtaposed to the wild, the incongruous, and the bizarre, which shakes up one’s world--or, at least, one’s experience of the world. The alien alienates; the strange estranges; the weird cuts one off from the familiar and the complacency that often derives from an immersion in the ordinary. The world is no longer safe; it has become dangerous, because, suddenly, the old rules don’t apply, and anything is possible. In a previous post, we cited, as an example of the opening parade of the bizarre, the incidents that comprise the beginning of Stephen King’s novel, Desperation, which we repeat here:
In Nevada, a dead cat is seen nailed to a highway sign. An abandoned recreation vehicle (RV) sits alongside a lonely stretch of highway, its door flapping in the breeze. A sheriff, acting crazy, arrests a couple on trumped-up drug charges, threatening to kill them on their way to jail. The nearest town, Desperation, seems abandoned, except for the corpses that litter the streets. The sheriff has arrested several other individuals, also on false charges; among his prisoners are the members of the RV family, whom he supposedly rescued from (non-existent) gunmen. Vultures, scorpions, wolves, and other animals, under the sheriff’s telepathic control, attack people. A preteen prisoner, David Carver, miraculously escapes from jail, afterward performing additional miracles (using a cell phone with a dead battery and multiplying a supply of sardines and crackers). The demon Tak, who is behind the series of bizarre incidents, serially possessing the sheriff and others as he wears out their bodies, fears the preteen. Strange idols cause sexually perverse thoughts and feelings in those who touch them.
This parade of the bizarre--this freak show, comprised of incidents as well as performers--takes us as fully out of the normal, everyday world as the tornado removed Dorothy Gale from the comforts of home, dropping her in Oz. King lets us know, by exposing us to the uncanny and the eerie, apparently unrelated events that have begun, for no apparent reason, that, in having entered Desperation, we are no more in Nevada than Dorothy was in Kansas after she landed in Oz. In other words, the series of bizarre incidents that begin his story alienate us from our ordinary lives and estrange us from our everyday selves. As if we were inside a gigantic existential kaleidoscope, reality has shifted and sifted, and the mundane world is fragmented and redistributed into unrecognizable shards that are no longer known and familiar. Reality, as we have understood it, has become unreal; therefore, it has become pregnant with the possibilities that result from a renewal--or a newness--of perception.
If a confrontation with a series of bizarre incidents reawakens us to the things of the world by shocking us into awareness as a result of a transformation of the familiar into the strange, a confrontation with the monstrous Other reawakens us to the astonishment of things--or of some things--in themselves, without first making them strange. We tend to ignore most of the sensations and perceptions that our bodies and senses relay to our minds. Otherwise, we would be overwhelmed by the experience of life that inundates us from every direction at every waking moment. We become not only selective, but highly selective. Therefore, our chances of survival may be heightened, but at the cost of losing sight and sound and scent and taste and touch of many of the things that comprise our environment. We reduce the size of our perceived world so that we can deal with it; in doing so, we obliterate from our consciousness most of existence. However, certain things are undeniable; they have presence, even when other things are absent, and they demand to be perceived and, therefore, to be (to be is to be perceived). No one ignores the sight or sound of a rattlesnake, for example, or a bear or a shark. Threats have immediate and vivid presence, a quality that Emily Dickinson captures well in her poem about a snake; the narrator’s shock is evident in her twisted syntax:
A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides-- You may have met Him-- did you not His notice sudden is-- The Grass divides as with a Comb-- A spotted shaft is seen-- And then it closes at your feet And opens further on-- He likes a Boggy Acre A Floor too cool for Corn-- Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot-- I more than once at Noon Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash Unbraiding in the Sun When stooping to secure it It wrinkled, and was gone-- Several of Nature's People I know, and they know me-- I feel for them a transport Of cordiality-- But never met this Fellow Attended, or alone Without a tighter breathing And Zero at the Bone--
Whatever its shape, the monster is always the snake; it is insistently and undeniably present, demanding to be seen and heard (and, possibly, to be smelled and touched or even tasted). Threats stand out to us when nothing else does. By associating the monster with the Other (who is always some rejected aspect of the Self), horror writers confront readers (or viewers) with repressed aspects of their inner selves, with the inner demons of injurious attitudes, self-destructive beliefs, and harmful behaviors. We do not want to look, afraid of what we may see; by embodying those aspects of our inner beings in the forms of monsters that will not be denied, we are confronted with our inner demons; we see them again, and, face to face with the ghost of childhood trauma or a guilty past, with the beast of adulterous desire, or with the vampiric lust for others’ blood, we have the opportunity to see ourselves anew and, perhaps, to overcome the monster within.
The horror film, like surrealist art, breaks the world into fragments in order to make it present and visible to us as something strange and wonderful (or terrible). A series of bizarre incidents leading to a monstrous Other are two ways by which writers of such stories accomplish this feat. The third is the use of a remote, usually confining, setting, which has the effect of cutting the protagonist off from the security of his or her greater community, whether this community is represented by the character’s home, neighborhood, region, nation, or even planet. The protagonist is alone (or possibly with members of a small group), cut off from the police, from military forces, from medical personnel, from fire and rescue teams, from supplies of food and utility services, from communication equipment. He or she is on his or her own, with no one to advise, assist, or intercede. Whether the protagonist lives or dies depends exclusively upon what he or she believes, chooses, thinks, knows, learns, and, in short, does. Moreover, if the isolated space is also sparsely furnished, it may represent a state of existence akin to death, for “clutter,” according to Gould, suggests the opposite state, that of the abundance that is associated with life. In this context, the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, in “Parega und Paralipomena,” as quoted in Surrealism and the Cinema, are extremely evocative:
To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few moments so completely that the commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence (36).
According to Gould’s assessment, the effects of such isolation will result in the isolated surrealist’s attempt to “fill” the resulting “void” in his or her knowledge with his or her own “subject-being”:
Once our old attitudes to the reality around us are removed, the confronting pablum of their presence is also gone, leaving us with new fears, which appear in the form of a lack of definitive answers (a fear of the unknown). It is with his own subject-being that the surrealist tries to fill that void. . . (37).
The fragmentation of, and estrangement from, ordinary, everyday “reality” that surrealism accomplishes is only its first, preliminary work; its task, like that of horror fiction, is completed when it then allows the reader or the viewer to synthesize his or her experience, creating a new interpretation, a new impression, or a new understanding of his or her world and of his or her place in the world, or, as Gould puts it:
Because surrealism makes the mind puzzle and search, it is basically a constructive sensibility, which is bent on tearing down old values and opening up new horizons, and as such, it is a political sensibility (38).
Source:
Surrealism and the Cinema (Open-Eyed Screening) by Michael Gould, A. S. Barnes and Company, New York, 1976.

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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