Showing posts with label grave robber. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grave robber. Show all posts

Monday, January 11, 2010

Quick Tip: Let Your Setting Suggest Your Characters

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

A middle school literature textbook presents three lines of dialogue between two characters, asking students to imagine the words spoken in several very different settings, thereby hoping to impress upon them the importance of setting in establishing a context for how what is said is said. This is an interesting approach, and one that can also work for horror writers (or authors of any kind). For example. Imagine these lines of dialogue spoken in a cemetery:

Character A: Where’s Henry?
Character B: He has to be here, somewhere!
Character A: Yeah, it’s not likely he’s wandered off anywhere.

Is Henry a corpse?
Now, imagine the same lines of dialogue spoken in a supposedly haunted house:

Character A: Where’s Henry?
Character B: He has to be here, somewhere!
Character A: Yeah, it’s not likely he’s wandered off anywhere.

Did a ghost get Henry?

In a lifeboat on the open sea:

Character A: Where’s Henry?
Character B: He has to be here, somewhere!
Character A: Yeah, it’s not likely he’s wandered off anywhere.

Did Henry, perhaps delusional, leap overboard while the others slept?
In a spaceship:

Character A: Where’s Henry?
Character B: He has to be here, somewhere!
Character A: Yeah, it’s not likely he’s wandered off anywhere.

Did an alien stowaway capture or kill Henry?
Remember that almost every situation that involves more than one character (and some scenes which involve only one character) is likely to have at least two, and sometimes more, points of view, which allows at least two lines of development for the dialogue. For example, visitors to a cemetery (or even grave robbers) might enquire as to Henry’s whereabouts--or the whereabouts of his grave--concluding that he must be somewhere nearby, since corpses cannot “wander off anywhere,” or Henry could be another of their group, a third visitor (or grave robber). For that matter, Henry could be the son, or even a pet dog ,of one of the characters. Likewise, in the haunted house, Henry could be a ghost hunter or a ghost. He could be one of a group of homeless men who has suddenly somehow disappeared or a police officer who had been, a moment ago, investigating the place with his partner and a couple of backup police officers. Maybe Henry isn’t a delusional shipwreck survivor; instead, maybe he is a character in the delusion of one or more of the survivors and, as such, exists only in their fevered dreams. Likewise, Henry may not be a member of the spaceship’s crew or a passenger aboard the spaceship; he could be a live specimen of an extraterrestrial species that the astronauts have captured and are bringing home to earth for study. He could be a criminal who is being transported to a prison planet. He could be the one and only mechanic who is able to repair the ship’s faulty impulse-drive before the craft falls into the planet it’s orbiting.

By exploring other possibilities than the one that comes first to mind, a writer can perhaps surprise, shock, or even horrify, the reader. The writers of The Others do just this, suggesting to their audience that the protagonist, Grace Stewart, and her children and servants are being haunted, whereas, in fact, as incidents toward the end of the film show, it is she, her son and daughter, and the servants who are the ghosts who are haunting the house’s mortal residents. Imagining the same lines of dialogue spoken by characters in different settings is a way to accomplish similar sleights of mind.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

How To Rob A Grave

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Verisimilitude means "true to life," and it's a quality that enhances any story, those of horror included, as it helps in the suspension of disbelief if a fantastic tale is believable in its mundane circumstances. Therefore, should an author of such fiction assay to write a story about grave robbers, he or she ought to be familiar with the extraction methods of such ghouls.


Resurrectionists, as they were known in merry old England. supplied the vast majority of the corpses that medical schools needed for their anatomy courses, the dissection of dead bodies being outlawed except when capital punishment furnished the bodies. There were never enough executions, so the schools were in a constant need of fresh corpses. Body snatchers supplied this need. They used two methods to do so.

In one, a small opening was created, above the coffin. A manhole-size opening was then made in the casket, a rope was secured around the corpse, and the body was pulled free of the grave.
Since family members often mounted a watch upon the graves of their dearly departed and placed various obstacles in their way, such as criss-crossed iron bars, the resurrectionists adopted the strategy of opening the earth some distance from the targeted corpse, dug a narrow tunnel to the coffin, and withdrew the body from the end of the casket, pulling it through the tunnel. The disturbed earth was several yards from the violated coffin and, being of relatively small size, was difficult to spot.

Ed Gein, the Plainfield, Wisconsin serial killer upon whom such fictional killers as Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill are based, collected bodies and body parts from the graves he robbed in the Plainfield Cemetery and the Spirit Land Cemetery a few miles north of Plainfield. To collect just the heads, as he sometimes did, he simply twisted the neck back and forth until it snapped. He never sawed off the head, he said, because he never took a knife, a hatchet, or a saw with him on his after-hours forays into the local cities of the dead.

According to "Stealing Lincoln's Body," by Thomas J. Craugwell, a pair of would-be grave robbers, commissioned by Jim Kennally, tried to rob the grave of Abraham Lincoln, but they made the mistake of including two police informants as assistants, and the undertaking was botched when one of the detectives who were lying in wait for the robbers accidentally discharged his firearm. Kennally's men fled, only to be arrested a short time later at their hideout.

As a result of the attempted robbery, Lincoln's body was exhumed and reburied inside "a steel cage, lowered into a vault, and covered with cement."

According to "The 1876 Attempt to Steal Lincoln's Body!", therobbers, Terrence Mullen and John Hugehs, were actually counterfeiters, but their "chief engraver," Ben Boyd, had bee arrested; the theft of the president's body was to have provided a means of liberating Boyd and of generating a recovery fee of $200,000.

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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