Edgar Allan Poe's "King Pest": Analysis and Commentary

Copyright 202 by Gary L. Pullman

King Edward III

The first sentence of the story establishes its setting: it is “about twelve o'clock, one night in the month of October, . . . during the chivalrous reign of the third Edward.”

Edward III ruled from January 25, 1327 to June 21, 1377—about fifty years. From 1361 to 1362, there was a resurgence of the cholera pandemic, so it is on an October night during this two-year period that “King Pest” takes place. (Others suggest that the story's title alludes not to the cholera pandemic but to the bubonic plague, or Black Death.)

As in most of Poe's fiction, the story begins with the general, a night during the reign of King Edward III, and moves to the specific, “two seamen belonging to the crew of the 'Free and Easy,' a trading schooner,” as readers learn that these sailors, Legs and Hugh Tarpaulin, have gone ashore to drink; they are “much astonished to find themselves seated in the tap-room of an ale-house in the parish of St. Andrews, London.”

Poe takes pains to describe both men. Legs is taller than his companion, standing “six feet and a half.” He has “an habitual stoop in the shoulders,” and he is “exceedingly thin.” He has “high cheek-bones, a large hawk-nose, retreating chin, fallen under-jaw, and huge protruding white eyes.” “Solemn,” he is not given to laughter.

Tarpaulin is his opposite, short (four feet) and “squat,” with “stumpy bow-legs . . . unusually short and thick arms”; finny fingers; “small eyes, of no particular color”; a nose which is “buried in the mass of flesh which enveloped his round, full, and purple face”; and “thick” lips that he licks frequently. Tarpaulin regards Legs with “a feeling half-wondrous, half-quizzical.”

Penniless, the drunken sailors flee after seeing a sign forbidding credit, the tavern's landlady in pursuit.

(In England, pubs lower rents to the owners of the buildings their establishments occupy, but, in return, the owners of the pubs pay more for ale and other alcoholic beverages supplied by vendors.)

Parts of London that are infected by the plague are sealed off, the king having imposed a death sentence upon whoever bypasses barriers to rob from stores inside these restricted areas. In fleeing the tavern, Legs and Tarpaulin run down an alley, the end of which is blocked by a barrier, which indicates the presence, ahead, of the plague. To escape the pursuing landlady, the sailors climb the barricade and jump into the street on the other side of it, where a scene of horror meets their drunken gazes:

Had they not, indeed, been intoxicated beyond moral sense, their reeling footsteps must have been palsied by the horrors of their situation. The air was cold and misty. The paving-stones, loosened from their beds, lay in wild disorder amid the tall, rank grass, which sprang up around the feet and ankles. Fallen houses choked up the streets. The most fetid and poisonous smells everywhere prevailed;—and by the aid of that ghastly light which, even at midnight, never fails to emanate from a vapory and pestilential at atmosphere, might be discerned lying in the by-paths and alleys, or rotting in the windowless habitations, the carcass of many a nocturnal plunderer arrested by the hand of the plague in the very perpetration of his robbery.

From inside “an undertaker's shop,” the seamen hear laughter, “shrieks,” and “curses.” Entering the building, Legs and Tarpaulin see an open trapdoor, through which they observe a table bearing “various wines and cordials, together with jugs, pitchers, and flagons of every shape and quality” and a “huge tub” of punch. Seated around this table, upon coffin-trestles, or stands for holding coffins, are King Pest, Queen Pest, and four members of their family, the Arch Duke Pest-Iferous,' the Duke Pest-Ilential,' the Duke Tem-Pest,' and the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest.

Poe takes equal pains in describing these characters as he has in painting the portraits of his protagonists. Each is a grotesque, with exaggerated traits, as the descriptions of the monarchs suggest, their descriptions being typical of the descriptions of the others as well:

King Pest:

Fronting the entrance, and elevated a little above his companions, sat a personage who appeared to be the president of the table. His stature was gaunt and tall, and Legs was confounded to behold in him a figure more emaciated than himself. His face was as yellow as saffron—but no feature excepting one alone, was sufficiently marked to merit a particular description. This one consisted in a forehead so unusually and hideously lofty, as to have the appearance of a bonnet or crown of flesh superadded upon the natural head. His mouth was puckered and dimpled into an expression of ghastly affability, and his eyes, as indeed the eyes of all at table, were glazed over with the fumes of intoxication. This gentleman was clothed from head to foot in a richly-embroidered black silk-velvet pall, wrapped negligently around his form after the fashion of a Spanish cloak.—His head was stuck full of sable hearse-plumes, which he nodded to and fro with a jaunty and knowing air; and, in his right hand, he held a huge human thigh-bone, with which he appeared to have been just knocking down some member of the company for a song.

Queen Pest:

Opposite him, and with her back to the door, was a lady of no whit the less extraordinary character. Although quite as tall as the person just described, she had no right to complain of his unnatural emaciation. She was evidently in the last stage of a dropsy [i. .e, edema]; and her figure resembled nearly that of the huge puncheon [an eighty-gallon cask] of October beer which stood, with the head driven in, close by her side, in a corner of the chamber. Her face was exceedingly round, red, and full; and the same peculiarity, or rather want of peculiarity, attached itself to her countenance, which I before mentioned in the case of the president—that is to say, only one feature of her face was sufficiently distinguished to need a separate characterization: indeed the acute Tarpaulin immediately observed that the same remark might have applied to each individual person of the party; every one of whom seemed to possess a monopoly of some particular portion of physiognomy. With the lady in question this portion proved to be the mouth. Commencing at the right ear, it swept with a terrific chasm to the left—the short pendants which she wore in either auricle continually bobbing into the aperture. She made, however, every exertion to keep her mouth closed and look dignified, in a dress consisting of a newly starched and ironed shroud coming up close under her chin, with a crimpled ruffle of cambric muslin.

In A Handbook to Literature, fourth edition, C. Hugh Holman defines “grotesque,” in its literary context, as the depiction of “characters” who are “either physically or spiritually deformed” and “perform actions that are clearly intended by the author to be abnormal” (207). This technique, Holman adds, “may be used for allegorical statement” and “for comic purposes” (207), as, clearly, Poe uses this technique in “King Pest.”

Finding the seamen's entrance rude and their inquiry into the nature of his family's business outrageous, King pest fines the sailors, sentencing Legs and Tarpaulin to drink a gallon of Black Strap “at a single draught—and upon . . . bended knees,” whereupon they will be free to take their leave or to stay as the king's guest. (In other words, King Pest sentences the seamen to be drowned in the ale, after which their bodies will be cast aside, in the undertaker's shop, or be discarded outside,)

It's possible that, drunk, neither Legs nor Tarpaulin understand the king's sarcasm. It is possible, too, that they understand his literal intent all too well but, bolstered by false courage, pretend ignorance as a pretext for braggadocio and bragging. Legs objects that he has drunk his fill earlier, at the tavern he and Tarpaulin visited, but his companion insists that he can drink more and offers to drink both the gallon that Legs has been ordered to drink and the gallon that he himself has been ordered to drink.

However, King Pest declares that his fine must be paid in the manner he has imposed, without alteration.

Tarpaulin refuses to kneel to the king, whom he recognizes as 'Tim Hurlygurly the stage-player.”

Trapaulin's refusal is met by a chorus of shouts, as the king, queen, and the rest of the family cry “Treason!”

Legs floods the undertaker's shop with ale from the hogshead that he breaks after his companion is deposited head-first inside the cask, to drown, and the sailors attack the king and his family, killing the man with the gout, drowning “the man with the horrors,” sending the man in the coffin away on the flood, and leaving the ladies in “hysterics.” Then, Tarpaulin abducts the fat lady in the shroud, while Legs kidnaps the Arch Duchess Ana-Past and the sailors return to their ship, which, presumably, is still anchored in the Thames.

What can be said of such a story?

Robert Louis Stevenson concluded, about its author, that “he who could write 'King Pest' had ceased to be a human being.”

Perhaps Stevenson was unaware that Poe's story is a comedy—a satire, in fact.

Are the story's king, queen, and other family members based on historical persons?

Poe's king is tall and bony; his complexion is “saffron.” His brow is “unusually and hideously lofty.” His mouth is “puckered and dimpled.” Unfortunately, history does not appear to provide us with a description of King Edward III's physical appearance. However, his tomb includes a likeness of him, carved in stone. Since the sculpture purports to represent his likeness, we can assume that it, indeed, resembles the king at the time of his death. Judging by this figure, King Edward III does appear to have been tall and thin, if not “gaunt.” His forehead does not seem especially “lofty.” His mouth is not “puckered and dimpled.”

Queen Pest shares one of the conditions that afflicted Queen Philippa of Hainault (1315 - 1369), but she otherwise does not resemble the true queen, King Edward III's wife, whom historian Ian Mortimer describes:

The lady whom we saw has not uncomely hair, betwixt blue-black and brown. Her head is clean-shaped; her forehead high and broad, and standing somewhat forward. Her face narrows between the eyes, and the lower part of her face is still more narrow and slender than her forehead. Her eyes are blackish-brown and deep. Her nose is fairly smooth and even, save that it is somewhat broad at the tip and also flattened, and yet it is no snub-nose. Her nostrils are also broad, her mouth fairly wide. Her lips somewhat full, and especially the lower lip. Her teeth which have fallen and grown again are white enough, but the rest are not so white. The lower teeth project a little beyond the upper; yet this is but little seen. Her ears and chin are comely enough. Her neck, shoulders, and all her body are well set and unmaimed; and nought is amiss so far as a man may see. Moreover, she is brown of skin all over, and much like her father; and in all things she is pleasant enough, as it seems to us. And the damsel will be of the age of nine years on St. John's day next to come, as her mother saith. She is neither too tall nor too short for such an age; she is of fair carriage, and well taught in all that becometh her rank, and highly esteemed and well beloved of her father and mother and of all her meinie [i. e., small-minded], in so far as we could inquire and learn the truth (The Register of Walter de Stapledon, Bishop of Exeter, 1307–1326).

The condition which Queen Pest has in common with Queen Philippa is dropsy, or edema, or an illness similar to it, from which she expired.

Part of the satire lies in his descriptions of King Pest, Queen Pest, and the other members of the royal household, who suffer from various diseases, such as emaciation, dropsy (edema), delirium tremens, and consumption (tuberculosis). However, the story may not be about the English at all.

Poe supplies a hint of his intention in the story's subtitle, “A Tale Containing an Allegory.” As Dawn B. Sova observes in Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, “each character . . . represents a different type of 'pest,' from the intellectual who produces nothing original to the drunkard” (91).

It seems clear that Poe takes artistic license in describing the characters of “King Pest.” His story alludes to, but is not much based upon, historical incidents and these royal individuals. Its aim is not to narrate history, but to satirize politics and political actors. The targets of Poe's satire may not, in fact, be English at all.

One critic is convinced that the story satirizes “an extremely wet banquet on January 8, 1832, honoring both president Andrew Jackson and . . . the abolition of the national debt.” According to The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition, which cites William Whipple, one of the founders of the United States, King Pest is Jackson; Queen Pest is his wife Rachel; the Arch-Duchess Ana-Pest is Peggy Eaton; “the man with the bandaged leg and cheeks on his shoulders” is Colonel Thomas Hart Benton; “the thin man with the alcoholic tremor” is Francis Blair “of the Globe”; “the paralyzed man in the coffin” is Amos Kendall or William H. Crawford; Tarpaulin is Martin Van Buren; and Legs is probably Major Jack Downing (294).

Along these same lines, A Companion to Poe Studies adds to this interpretation, noting that King Pest is described as “the President of the Table”:

He is tall and gaunt, with a yellow complexion and a lofty forehead, his head decorated with sable plumes. This is Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States (1829-1937) . . . . The story takes place in “the parish of St. Andrew's Stair” [the direction in which Legs and Tarpaulin flee from the tavern's landlady]. The stairway of Jackson's home named “The Heritage,” near Nashville, Tennessee, was named “St. Andrew's Stair.” The undertaker's shop, therefore, must be the kitchen of the White House, and the other persons are the members of the Jackson “family,” including some members of Jackson's Kitchen Cabinet. Queen Pest, the lady with the big mouth, is Peggy Eaton, the wife of Secretary of War John Henry Eaton, whose chastity Jackson defended; Arch Duke Pest-Iferous, who has large ears, is Amos Kendell, fourth auditor (< L. audire, to hear) of the Treasury; Duke Pest-Ilential, who has goggle-eyes, is Francis Preston Blair, Sr., assistant editor of the Frankfort (Kentucky) newspaper, The Argus (giant with a hundred eyes), and editor of the Washington Globe (globus, ball; hence, related to “bulging” or “goggle”-eyes); Duke Tem-Pest, who is cheeky, is Secretary of War Eaton, whose wife became the center of a teapot tempest that split the president's cabinet wide open; and Arch Duchess Ana-Pest, the diminutive, haut-ton lady who is consumptive is Emily Donelson, Jackson's acting First Lady (his wife, Rachel, died ten weeks before his inauguration). Emily died of consumption in December 1836 (126).

Although these interpretations don't agree in every respect, it's clear that both critics believe that the allegory to which Poe alludes in his story's subtitle is, indeed, political in nature and targets American president Andrew Jackson and various members of his political “family.”

Notes

Peggy Eaton and her second husband, Secretary of War John Eaton, were scorned by the wives of Andrew Jackson's cabinet on the basis of unfounded rumors that Peggy had had an affair, which caused her first husband John Timberlake to commit suicide in 1828. (In fact, Timberlake died from pneumonia.) The wives would neither call upon the Eatons nor invite them to parties and other functions. Although Jackson tried to end this “Petticoat Affair,” by forcing the wives to accept the Eatons, their ostracism of the Secretary of War and his wife was supported by Johnson's vice-president, John C. Calhoun. As a result, Jackson supported Martin Van Buren, who had accepted the Eatons. Van Buren's resignation helped to end the scandal, and Jackson replaced his disloyal cabinet members. At the end of Jackson's term, Calhoun was not renominated as vice president, and he resigned. Van Buren replaced him on the ticket as Jackson's vice president and succeeded him as president in 1837.

In The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex in Andrew Jackson's White House, historian John F. Marszalek may shine some light on why Poe describes Queen Pest as having a cavernous mouth that extends from ear to ear:

She did not know her place; she forthrightly spoke up about anything that came to her mind, even topics of which women were supposed to be ignorant . . . .

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Blair was “an ardent follower of Andrew Jackson,” whom the newspaperman “helped” to elect during the 1828 presidential election. A year later, after becoming the editor of the Washington Globe, Blair was doubly effective in influencing politics at the national level, as he also belonged to the Kitchen Cabinet, the president's own unofficial advisory group.

For Untouchables: Masochistic Horror

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In the middle of a pandemic, most of us might not care to read stories involving plagues and pandemics. However, horror fiction appeals to masochistic readers as well as to others and, if the truth were to be told, there is, in most, if not all, of us, a bit of the masochist. Fear is disturbing. It is stressful. It is unpleasant. Paradoxically, however, it is also quite pleasurable to many of us. If it were not, there would be no profit in making horror movies or in writing horror novels or short stories.

Critics and psychologists suggest that the reason that we enjoy horror dramas and narratives is that we know that, despite what happens on the sound stage or on the page, we ourselves, as spectators or readers, are safe. What happens to the victims in the story cannot happen to us. We enjoy the invincibility of the secret voyeur. We watch, untouched and untouchable. That is our power. We survive the slaughter because it cannot do to us what it does to the characters in the movie or the book. (Only, in the case of the coronavirus, we may not be quite as invincible as we might imagine!)

So, for the masochistic supermen and superwomen among us, Chillers and Thrillers suggests a pair of horrific tales by the father of modern horror himself, Edgar Allan Poe. One of the two tales caused Robert Louis Stevenson to opine that “he who could write [this story] had ceased to be a human being.” Which story occasioned this assessment of its author, “The Masque of the Red Death” or “King Pest”? Chillers and Thrillers will leave the answer to this question to you to decide!

The Horror of Objective and Subjective Threats

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Some horror fiction, both on the page and on the sound stage, features threats which are both objective and subjective. Just as objective threats can vary, so can subjective ones. If there is the threat of a loss of limb, or of mobility, or of stamina, or of life itself, there is also the threat of such losses as trust, of scruples, of faith, or of sanity.

These dual threats are depicted or dramatized through conflict: the villain or the monster is the agent by whom the objective threat is presented, and the physical threat, in turn, causes the subjective threat.

 

The outcome of conflict involving these two types of threat is resolved in one of at least seven ways:

1. The protagonist wins, overcoming both the objective threat and the subjective threat.
2. The protagonist partially wins, overcoming the objective, but not the subjective, threat.
3. The protagonist partially wins, being overcome by the objective, but overcoming the subjective, threat.
4. The protagonist loses, being overcome by both the objective threat and the subjective threat.
5. The protagonist overcomes the subjective threat, but the resolution regarding the objective threat remains unknown.
6. The protagonist overcomes the objective threat, but the resolution regarding the subjective threat remains unknown.
7. It remains unknown whether the protagonist overcomes either the objective or the subjective threat.
   
   
   
   
   

In the hands of skilled writers, these seven permutations can seem to multiply, as various twists are put upon each threat and each possible outcome.

Edgar Allan Poe's short stories often involve both objective and subjective threats. The outcome of the stories' conflicts vary across the spectrum of possibilities.

1. The protagonist wins, overcoming both the objective threat and the subjective threat. Hop-Frog and Tripetta, of “Hop-Frog,” not only overcome the threat of violence and possible death at the hands of the cruel king they serve, escaping after immolating the villain and his courtiers, but they also overcome the subjective threats to their pride and self-respect posed by the king's dehumanizing conduct toward them. Their victory is double; they regain both their physical freedom and their autonomy and self-esteem.

2. The protagonist partially wins, overcoming the objective, but not the subjective, threat. The protagonist of Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart” imagines that an old man with a “vulture's eye” is a menace. He vanquishes this perceived objective threat by killing the old man. However, the police, alerted by a neighbor who'd heard the victim's screams, arrest the killer, and readers realize that the protagonist has not vanquished the subjective threat of his own madness—nor is he likely to escape the additional, real objective threat of prison or, possibly, hanging.

3. The protagonist partially wins, being overcome by the objective, but overcoming the subjective, threat. William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist is a good example of this variation. Father Karras is questioning his religious faith until, in an act of self-sacrifice, he bids the devil to forsake a girl he's possessed and possess him instead. However, when the devil makes the jump from the girl into the priest, Father Karras foils his adversary by leaping to his death from the upper-story window of the girl's bedroom, in which the exorcism had been being conducted. Although the objective threat of possession by the devil overcomes Father Karras, the priest retains his faith.

4. The protagonist loses, being overcome by both the objective threat and the subjective threat. During the American Civil War, Second-Lieutenant Brainerd Byring of the Union Army succumbs to his on imaginary fears when, on an isolated portion of terrain over which he stands guard, he encounters a dead enemy soldier. Byring fancies that he sees the Confederate soldier's body moving slowly, stealthily toward him. A captain and a surgeon find Byring the next morning.

He has driven his own sword through his heart, after hacking the dead Confederate's cadaver. The enemy soldier's weapon lies on the ground, unfired, and his body is rotten enough to indicate that he has been dead some days before Byring “killed” him. The fight hinted at in Ambrose Bierce's “The Tough Tussle” has been entirely Byring's own; he has survived neither the objective struggle with the corpse nor his delusion that the body was alive, that the dead Confederate soldier was, indeed, sneaking up on him under the cover of darkness to kill him.

5. The protagonist overcomes the objective threat, but the resolution regarding the subjective threat remains unknown. The protagonist of Poe's “The Pit and the Pendulum” avoids the objective threat—execution—when the Inquisition that has imposed the sentence of death upon him is defeated by its enemies and he is rescued. It is unclear whether he also triumphs over the terrors of helplessness and the horrors of physical and emotional abuse. The story's ending does not say or even imply.

6. The protagonist overcomes the objective threat, but the resolution regarding the subjective threat remains unknown. In H. G. Wells' short story “The Cone,” the protagonist, Raut, avenges himself upon Horrocks, the adulterer who has cuckolded him, by causing his wife's lover to fall into a furnace. The objective threat to his wife's violated fidelity has been ended, but the murderer himself may not as easily be rid of the humiliation and rage that appear to have driven him to this desperate act. Even if he does vanquish these emotions, he may have to struggle with another subjective threat, for he seems horrified at the terrible crime—the sin—he has committed: “God have mercy upon me!,” he prays, saying, “O God! what have I done?”

7. It remains unknown whether the protagonist overcomes either the objective or the subjective threat. Legs and his companion Hugh Tarpaulin escape the mad, self-proclaimed King Pest and his courtiers, who have taken refuge from the plague in the basement of an undertaker's shop, but it is unknown whether the rash sailors also escape the plague that has disfigured the afflicted. They might, in fact, be taking the disease aboard the very ship from which they earlier departed, for the narrator of Poe's “King Pest” informs readers,

the victorious Legs, seizing by the waist the fat lady in the shroud, rushed out with her into the street, and made a bee-line for the “Free and Easy,” followed under easy sail by the redoubtable Hugh Tarpaulin, who, having sneezed three or four times, panted and puffed after him with the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest.

 

If they have not escaped the plague, it is doubtful that they will escape the terror that it will bring and, if the rest of the crew they infect understand that it was they who infected them, it is unlikely that they will escape the ire of their fellow seamen; indeed, a new objective threat may arise, one which costs them their very lives. They may have merely escaped one type of death to flee into hands of a death of another kind.

These seven variations on the theme of an objective threat coupled with an often-related subjective threat provide a fertile foundation for a multitude of treatments so that no story needs to be like another, even if they are based on the same dynamics—or, indeed, a specific dynamic within the seven-fold group of dynamics. Likewise, the same writer can produce a story from any one of the objective-subjective threat pairings or from the same one, treated differently.

Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Feel Safe

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

One of the basic needs to which advertisements often appeal, according to communications professor Jib Fowles, is the need to feel safe. “We naturally want to do whatever it takes to stave off threats to our well-being, and to our families,'” he points out. Like many of the other basic needs, this one, involving the “instinct of self-preservation,” can take several forms. Advertisements based upon this appeal may address concerns about financial security, product durability, and personal health. Of course, the need to feel safe is also one of horror fiction's primary appeals.

But, if we read carefully what Fowles has written, we see that he speaks (or writes) not of the need to be safe, but of the need to feel safe. There is quite a difference between the two. In reality, no matter how much we may prepare, there is no way to be 100 percent safe 100 percent of the time—or any time at all. Even as I am writing this or you are reading this, one or both of us could be struck down by anything from a stray bullet to a falling meteorite or an errant bolt of lightning.

More mundane causes of death and destruction are always at hand, too, such as bacteria, viruses, and plagues. The real world may not throw vampires and werewolves at us, and we probably don't really need to worry about voodoo and magic, but, even without such monsters and forces, ours is a truly dangerous world at all times.

One reason we forget about the dangers that abound is that we have erected fairly reliable defenses against many of them. We employ military and police forces; meteorologists and astronomers watch the skies; scientists and researchers, as well as doctors and nurses (and the good folk at the Centers for Disease Control), wage war against dangerous microbes. Firefighters and emergency medical technicians rescue us from infernos and repair the injuries we suffer from car crashes. I could go on (and on), but I think we'd all agree that, as a society, we've done a good job of shoring up our defenses.

 

English: Vampire killing kit at Mercer Museum, PA.

Русский: Набор для убийства вампиров (Музей Мерсера, Пенсильвания, США)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vampire_killing_kit_(Mercer_Museum).jpg

Generally, that's as true in horror fiction as it is in life (or in life as we like to imagine it, at least). In horror fiction, there are remedies against vampires (crucifixes, garlic, holy water, and wooden stakes) and werewolves (silver bullets). If witches practice black magic, other sorcerers defend against their hexes with white magic: Dormammu may exist, but so does Dr. Strange. No matter the type or the power of evil, there is a more powerful force for good.

An early movie, part science fiction and part horror, offers one of the most memorable examples of the appeal to the need to feel safe. Released in 1933, King Kong shows us that, whether among island natives or due to the technology of the early 20^th century, there were means of not only feeling safe, but of being safe against a 30-foot-tall gorilla.

On Skull Island, the villagers erected a tall, sturdy wall (think of Fowles's observations about product durability) to keep Kong out of their village, and, to placate him, they periodically provide a sacrifice for him. (It seems the wall protects them from Kong, but, as viewers soon discover, the perception of safety is unfounded. Still, the wall makes the natives feel safe.)

When actress Ann Darrow is abducted by the big ape, she's rescued by the intrepid crew of the Venture, who manage, at the cost of the lives of several of their number, to best both a Stegosaurus and a Brontosaurus before rescuing Ann. (To be fair, Kong also does his share to protect Ann, killing both a Tyrannosaurus and a Pteranodon, before pursuing Ann's rescuers back through the jungle to the villager's compound).

Empowered by his feelings for Ann, perhaps, Kong breaks through the gate in the wall surrounding the village, but he is brought down with a gas bomb hurled at him by filmmaker Carl Denham. Technology to the rescue!

In New York City, Kong escapes from a Broadway theater, where Denham has put him on display as “the Eighth Wonder of the World.” Ann is present, but, removed to a room on an upper floor of a hotel, she is safe from the beast—or so everyone believes.

Kong climbs the exterior of the building, seizing Ann, and flees, wrecking havoc along the way. He seeks high ground, as it were, by scaling the Empire State Building, where, technology to the rescue again, he is killed by gunfire from attacking airplanes.

Denham remarks, “It was Beauty killed the Beast.” In fact, however, the audience's need to feel safe is likely the reason that Kong succumbs to the defenses humanity has erected against the various kinds of potential calamity.

King Kong fails to destroy humanity (although he directly or indirectly kills his fair share of us). Like many threats, he is an external one. Edgar Allan Poe made the internal monster, the psychotic killer, a popular villain of horror fiction, who remains a force with which to reckoned as much today as he or she was in Poe's time. For such villains, Psycho (1960) is probably the quintessential horror film.

Norman Bates, who, like Leatherface of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Buffalo Bill of The Silence of the Lambs, is based upon grave robber and murderer Ed Gein, manages an out-of the-way motel. He lives with his mother, who finds women to be contemptible, sordid creatures and wants her son to have nothing to do with them. When Norman is attracted to Marion Crane, a secretary who absconds with her employer's money, Mother swings into action, wielding a knife as Marion showers in her room at the Bates Motel.

Mother is Norman's alter ego, as it turns out, and, when he is arrested, Mother is no longer a threat. Unfortunately, by then, “she” has killed both Marion and Private investigator Milton Arbogast, who comes to the motel (and visits Norman's house, which overlooks the motor lodge), seeking Marion after she goes on the lam.

At the end of the movie, a psychiatrist reassures the audience that, although Norman is certainly frightening and dangerous, his particular problem—he has an alternate personality—is not a mystery, but a known and understood condition. Although Mother is now in complete control of Norman, he can be confined and treated. Psychiatry, aided by the criminal justice system, can protect the public. Knowledge confers the power needed to prevent Mother from ever harming anyone again. It is not technology, this time, but epistemology (and a prison or a mental institution) that comes to the rescue of society.

Indeed, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the holy book of psychology and psychiatry, has charted the depths of this condition; the signs and symptoms are well established, although the causes and the means of treatment of the disorder are not (yet) as well defined. Nevertheless, the DSM-5's clinical language, like its claims of knowledge and understanding, are enough, perhaps, to calm the fears of those who want to feel safe.

Psychology and psychiatry may not be as certain as medicine, but they're better than nothing. Maybe. Without them, we'd have about as much protection from the menace of mad killers as Prince Prospero and his guests enjoyed in Poe's short story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” and, as we may recall, their walled abbey, their desperate drinking, their wild dancing, and their fevered merriment did not stand between them and their demise, courtesy of The Red Death.

Everyday Horrors: Plagues

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

When most people think of the plague, they are likely to think of the bubonic plague, or “Black Death” that decimated the populations of medieval Europe and other parts of the world. Caused by bacteria carried by infected rats and the fleas who regarded their rodent hosts as moveable feasts, the plague killed as many as 30,000,000 Europeans, or about a third of that continent’s population, in the 13th century. About 550 years later, the same disease killed about 12,000,000 Chinese. Although the plague continues to kill men, women, and children today, its death toll has been greatly reduced, there having been a mere 2,118 fatalities in 2003. A handful of individuals in the United States succumb to the disease each year, but “there has not been a case of person-to-person infection. . . since 1924.”

Usually, the plague attacks the lymph nodes, causing flu-like symptoms within three to seven days, including “fever, headache, chills, weakness, and swollen tender lymph glands,” or buboes (“hence the name bubonic”). Today, the plague is treated with antibiotics.

In addition to rats, “many other rodent species, for instance, prairie dogs, wood rats, chipmunks, and other ground squirrels and their fleas,” also “suffer plague outbreaks and some of these occasionally serve as sources of human infection.” In addition,

Deer mice and voles are thought to maintain the disease in animal populations but are less important as sources of human infection. Other less frequent sources of infection include wild rabbits, and wild carnivores that pick up their infections from wild rodent outbreaks. Domestic cats (and sometimes dogs) are readily infected by fleas or from eating infected wild rodents. Cats may serve as a source of infection to persons exposed to them. Pets may also bring plague-infected fleas into the home.

According to a source that the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, does not bother to cite:

The bacteria multiply inside the flea, sticking together to form a plug that blocks its stomach and causes it to begin to starve. The flea then voraciously bites a host and continues to feed, even though it cannot quell its hunger, and consequently the flea vomits blood tainted with the bacteria back into the bite wound. The bubonic plague bacterium then infects a new victim, and the flea eventually dies from starvation.

In The Decameron, Boccaccio provides an account of the plague; even a small excerpt of his narrative conveys something of the horror of the black death:

. . . in men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or the armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg, some more, some less, which the common folk called gavoccioli. From the two said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute and numerous. And as the gavocciolo had been and still was an infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they shewed themselves.

There are other plagues besides the Black Death, a famous series of which were the 10 plagues described in Exodus.

1. Water turned to blood
2. Sky raining frogs
3. Lice
4. Flies
5. Diseased livestock
6. Boils
7. Rain of hail and fire
8. Locusts
9. Darkness
10. Deaths of firstborn sons

Professor Roger Wotton of the University College of London identifies several natural events that might have caused the Biblical floods:

A large storm may have caused the rivers of blood with heavy rain on the dry, baked soil of Egypt causing sediment-rich underlying soils and rocks to flow from tributaries into the Nile, which could also explain the killing of fish.

The fiery hail as described in the Bible could have been large hail and ball lightning that often followed dramatic storms, as could the darkening of skies.

The lice plague could be explained through the sudden mass hatching of lice after rainfall that followed hot and dry weather and the plague of frogs was explained by the emergence of spadefoot toads from hiding places in damp undersoil following a large rain.

The described biblical swarms of flies may have been clouds of biting midges which could have been seen as pestilence that killed cattle and caused boils on humans.

Both the Black Death and the Biblical plagues have inspired both horror novels and films, including Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, Stephen King’s The Stand, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, and The Reaping, among others:

Swan Song:

On the edge of a barren Kansas landscape, an ex-wrestler called Black Frankenstein hears the cry. . . . . "Protect the Child!"--In the wasteland of New York City, a bag lady clutches a strange glass ring and feels magic coursing through her--within an Idaho mountain, a survivalist compound lies in ruins, and a young boy learns how to kill.

In a wasteland born of nuclear rage, in a world of mutant animals and marauding armies, the last people on earth are now the first. Three bands of survivors journey toward destiny--drawn into the final struggle between annihilation and life!

They have survived the unsurvivable. Now the ultimate terror begins.

The Stand:

One man escapes from a biological weapon facility after an accident, carrying with him the deadly virus known as Captain Tripps, a rapidly mutating flu that--in the ensuing weeks--wipes out most of the world's population. In the aftermath, survivors choose between following an elderly black woman to Boulder or the dark man, Randall Flagg, who has set up his command post in Las Vegas.

The two factions prepare for a confrontation between the forces of good and evil.

Dreamcatcher:

Four lifelong friends gather in the woods of western Maine for their annual hunting trip. When they were young, they were bound together forever by an act of bravery involving a fifth friend, whose influence has given these men special powers. Their trip is disrupted when a stranger, disoriented and delirious, wanders into camp, muttering about light in the sky. Before long, the friends find themselves pitted against an alien invasion and must draw on their old friend's strength once again to fight for their lives.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes:

Dr. Anton Phibes, a mad doctor (his Ph.D is in music!). . .was horribly disfigured in an automobile accident while racing to see his wife in the hospital, where she was undergoing unsuccessful surgery that left her dead. . . .

Set in 1925, the plot follows the mad musician as he kills off the surgical team behind the failed operation, using grimly imaginative methods (bees, rats, bats) inspired by the Old Testament plagues Moses called down upon Egypt (it seems Phibes also studied theology while getting his musical degree). . . .

The Reaping:

Investigative scholar Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank) is a debunker of modern "miracles," bringing scientific light to superstition and fraud. But events in tiny Haven, Louisiana, defy even her expertise. There, the 10 Biblical Plagues seem to be reoccurring. And the more she seeks answers, the more she questions her own beliefs.

Not to be outdone (or left behind) by the masters of horror, several science fiction novelists and scriptwriters have also based stories upon the idea of plagues, one of which arrives from outer space (Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain), and another of which resulted from a disease caused by biological warfare. The victims undergo bizarre mutations that transform them into vampire-like creatures. The Omega Man is a military scientist who’d injected himself with an experimental vaccine against the disease. It’s up to him to try to save the world.

“Everyday Horrors: Plagues” is the first in a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured in Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.