The Vagabond Menace

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

The Ancient Mariner relates his tale to the Wedding Guest.

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the character of the same name is presented as a world-weary old man who has the uncanny, perhaps supernatural, ability to hypnotize his listeners, to whom, as an act of penance demanded by a deity, he must recount the cautionary tale of what befell him and his fellow sailors after he shot and killed an albatross for no reason. Many critics consider the bird to represent a symbol of God’s grace, making the ancient mariner’s act similar to the crucifixion of Christ and the mariner’s fate like that of the proverbial, anti-Semitic Wandering Jew, who was punished, as the story goes, for having mocked Jesus as he was hanging upon the cross by having to wander the earth until Christ’s second advent.

This type of character, the vagabond menace, although not necessarily common in horror fiction, has appeared in several stories of this genre. Often a male, this character has no home of his own. Instead, he travels from place to place, under an assumed name, causing havoc and misery (or, less often, averting the same), sometimes as a result of a curse (or as the result of having been assigned a mission). He is not the same as another type of itinerant character, the herald, for he does not go before another, greater character, announcing or otherwise preparing the latter’s way, as, for instance, the Silver Surfer scouts planets for his master, Galactus, to consume. Many times something of a trickster, the vagabond menace almost always has specialized, usually occult, knowledge or wisdom, which he uses to effect his covert plans or, less often, enlighten or rescue others, saving them from the same or a similar doom as that which has befallen them. He may be a force of good, but, more frequently, he is an agent of evil. He may represent a higher power, but he often acts merely in his own interest, according to his own plans, which usually remain unshared until the end of the story if they are revealed at all, although the reader may surmise the motives for the vagabond menace’s actions from clues provided by the writer.

For example, he appears as a houseguest in W. W. Jacobs’ short story “The Monkey’s Paw.” In this tale, he is a traveler who has come to visit parents who have recently lost their son Herbert. He has with him the monkey’s paw of the story’s title, a talisman, or charm, that grants its user three magic wishes.

The wise (or at least knowledgeable) traveler also appears in Stephen King’s novel Needful Things as a shopkeeper who offers customer’s their hearts’ desires--in exchange, if not for their souls, a steep spiritual price that involves both sin and cruelty to their fellow townspeople. That this stranger may be the devil himself is hinted at rather strongly by his past and present, especially his ability to perform supernatural feats. Of course, he is also a wedge between the residents of Castle Rock, Maine, where, in the novel, he most recently sets up shop.

Another King story, Storm of the Century, features a villain of supernatural powers who, again, it is hinted, may be something on the order of a demon, who, getting along in years, visits the island town in search of a protégé who can, when properly trained, take his place.

The vagabond menace also makes an appearance in Shirley Jackson's quirky short story "An Ordinary Day, With Peanuts." This character goes about her day creating as much havoc as possible in as many individuals' lives as she can. At the same time, her husband does the opposite, playing, as it were, the angel to his wife's demon. They discuss their respective days when they get home, and the husband reminds his wife that, the next day, it's his turn to play the loving, caring role and hers to play that of the hateful, malevolent part. (Or maybe it's the opposite; it's been some time since I've had the pleasure of reading this clever tale, and it's not easily found, but the point is that the spouses switch roles, alternately playing the angel and the demon every other day.)

Even Mark Twain makes use of a vagabond menace in his short story “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” a tale that has suspiciously strong similarities to King’s Needful Things. In Twain’s story, the vagabond menace is a stranger who, in passing through Hadleyburg, which has a reputation as an “incorruptible town,” is offended by the deeds of one of its residents. To avenge himself, he offers a bag of gold worth $40,000 to the person who gave him $20 in a time of need and some invaluable advice. To claim the gold, one need only to submit, in writing, to Hadleyburg’s Reverend Burgess, the advice that he or she offered to the traveler. Unknown to the others, each and every resident receives an anonymous note from the stranger that reveals the advice that he was given, and they all submit the same remark to the minister, thereby claiming to be the rightful claimant of the stranger‘s reward. They all run up enormous debts, buying merchandise on credit, knowing that they can easily repay the debts once they have been awarded the gold.

At a public meeting, the townspeople are shamed when Burgess, reading the submitted slips of paper, reveals that all the residents of Hadleyburg have submitted the same bit of advice, but that none of them has submitted the entire statement that the stranger says he was told. They have submitted only the first half: “You are far from being a bad man--go, and reform.” The complete statement is “You are far from being a bad man--go, and reform--or, mark my words--some day, for your sins you will die and go to hell or Hadleyburg--try and make it the former.” Finally, another note in the sack of gold is opened and read. It offers some advice of the stranger’s own to the townspeople whom he has duped and humiliated. They should not be so quick to claim incorruptibility, he suggests, because it is easy to do so when one’s virtue has gone untested. The gold turns out to be lead.

One couple, the Richardses, submitted the same note as all the others in Hadleyburg, but theirs is never read, and they receive the money that the sale of the sack of lead earns at an auction, but they are unable to enjoy their newfound wealth, as they live in constant fear that their duplicity will be revealed. However, their note is never read aloud, the stranger claiming to have prevented this occurrence in honor of a favor the couple did for him long ago. Before the old couple die, Mr. Richards confesses their guilt in hiding the secret that they, too, like all the other residents of their town, lied as to their advice to the stranger. They never gave him any advice or money, but merely wrote the same statement on the slip of paper they submitted in claim of the gold as everyone else had done. Twain ends his tale with the ironic statement, “It is an honest town once more, and the man will have to rise early that catches it napping again.”

The prototypical vagabond menace is Satan himself, the slanderer who appears before God, arriving from his wanderings in the earth, to accuse Job of false piety and devotion to God and afflicts God’s “good and faithful servant, Job” with a series of distressing conditions, including the loss of servants, livestock, and offspring and painful boils all over his body:

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.

And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down
in it.

And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?

Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?

Hast not thou made a hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.

But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face (Job 1: 6-11).

Portals to Hell and Elsewhere

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

If we were to believe fantasy, science fiction, and horror fiction, gateways to hell or other dimensions (if hell is a dimension) are everywhere and range from black holes (The Black Hole) to old-fashioned wardrobes (The Chronicles of Narnia) to mystical hotspots known as hell mouths (Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

These portals have always been interesting, if not fascinating, to me because they represent escapes from everydayness or, in other words, opportunities for adventure that is truly out of this world.

Cemeteries, houses, islands, lakes, mines, prisons, walls--these and many others have been openings to other places, sacred and horrific alike.

One of these portals is supposedly Stull Cemetery, near the Kansas city for which the graveyard takes its name. According to Stull Cemetery: Gate to Hell in Kansas?, a website dedicated to this allegedly unhallowed ground, “Some claim it an evil place; a frightening and even dangerous place--a place with a hidden stairway to hell--a place where Satan comes to visit the grave of his child.” A truly horrifying legend is associated with this burial ground. Another website paints a suitably macabre portrait of the place:

Stull Cemetery, and the abandoned church that rests next to it, is located in the tiny, nearly forgotten Kansas town of Stull. There is not much left of the tiny village, save for a few houses, the newer church and about twenty residents. However, the population of the place allegedly contains a number of residents that are from beyond this earth! In addition to its human inhabitants, the town is also home to a number of legends and strange tales that are linked to the crumbling old church and the overgrown cemetery that can be found atop Stull’s Emmanuel Hill. For years, stories of witchcraft, ghosts and supernatural happenings have surrounded the old graveyard. It is a place that some claim is one of the “seven gateways to hell” (Haunted Kansas: “Stull Cemetery”).

The method by which the legends about Stull seem to have developed is a study, as it were, for aspiring horror writers in how to create a spooky place that seems to be rooted both in history and in the supernatural.

First, the unusual features of the locale and the odd facts concerning it should be identified:

1. The church that once stood on the site was abandoned long ago.
2. The church was finally demolished.
3. The name “Stull” sounds like the more macabre word “skull.”
4. The devil allegedly appears in Stull each Halloween.
5. A headstone in the cemetery bears the name “Wittich.”
6. The few townspeople who continue to live in Stull are taciturn and unwelcoming.

Unusual, bizarre, and horrible, loosely linked alternate causes should be created to “explain” these situations and conditions. According to the present pastor of the new church, built opposite the site of the abandoned, now demolished church, many of the legends seem to have developed as a result of stories made up by students enrolled in a nearby campus of the University of Kansas and on the basis of partial truths and outright falsehoods or the exaggeration of “germs of truth”; others seem to be the offspring, so to speak of newspaper articles concerning the site:




This same two-step process can work for any place concerning which there are a few unusual features:

1. Identify the unusual features of the locale and the odd facts concerning it. (Do a little research concerning the point of interest or recall some of the eerier and odder features of your own neighborhood, past or present.)
2. Using falsehoods, exaggertions, and half-truths (or simple invention from nothing more than one’s own thoughts and proclivities), imagine alternative causes for these events, situations, and conditions that are more otherworldly. (Extrapolate and brainstorm.)

In addition, we recommend a third step:

Use loosely connected alternate “explanations” that are open ended, allowing for the accumulation of still more “legends” based upon falsehoods, half-truths, or creations ex nihilo. These additions can enrich and extend the mythos, allowing for longer works or, indeed a whole series of new stories. For example, Stull Cemetery is said to be one of seven portals, or gateways, to hell. Where are the others? They allow at least that many more stories about these portals and what they may unleash upon the world.

Horror writers do this all the time. Remember the crop circles in Signs? They weren’t mere crop circles; they were signaling devices for extraterrestrials, just as, some say, Stonehenge and the Peruvian Nasca Lines are. How about the chance alignments of towns and landscape features over wide ranges of the countryside? They’re mystical ley lines, some contend. What happened to the lost colony of Roanoke? Historians seem to believe that the colonists either died of starvation and exposure or were absorbed by the local native American tribe. The lunatic fringe, whose ranks the horror writer should consider joining, attributes their disappearance to alien abduction, the same incident that The X-Files’ FBI agent Fox Mulder believes took his sister from him.

Terror Television

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In Terror Television: American Series, 1970-1999, John Kenneth Muir describes the premises upon which many TV series that feature horror as a staple of their episodes’ plots rely. In doing so, he provides horror writers with a means of creating a basis by which to establish and broaden the structure of a continuing series of sequels or an anthology of related or, indeed, interrelated stories.

Let’s take a peek at some of the premises that Muir identifies:



Night Gallery: in an art gallery of bizarre portraits, every picture tells a story. For example, the show’s host, Rod Serling, of Twilight Zone fame, introduces one portrait, from which proceeds a tale in which “a selfish young man yearns for the death of his rich old uncle so he can inherit the family’s incredible wealth,” as a result of which, “a painting in the old man’s estate becomes an instrument of the occult when it starts to reflect terrifying changes in the family graveyard.”

The Sixth Sense: an investigator with ESP experiences “visions and insights” as he investigates cases involving psychic experiences stored in a computerized catalogue. In one episode, a missing-in-action (MIA) soldier communicates by means of automatic writing--in Chinese, yet!--with his psychic sister, to let her know that he is still alive, but someone seeks, through arson and murder, to keep the MIA’s whereabouts secret.

Ghost Story/Circle of Fear: the owner of a haunted house recounts guests’ stories. In the series’ pilot, or initial episode, the owners, having just purchased and moved into the house, hear strange noises; the house, as it turns out, was built upon the gallows upon which an “unrepentant thief” was “hanged,” and, as a consequence--the actual nature of the cause-and-effect link is, as is often the case in horror fiction, tenuous and vague--the house is, as the local librarian confirms--indeed haunted.


Kolchak: The Night Stalker: “Reporter Carl Kolchak” pursues “great news stories” involving “monsters and supernatural phenomena.” In one case, he suspects that the gruesome murders of a serial killer is, in fact, the handiwork of none other than the 130-year-old, original Jack the Ripper.


Twin Peaks: “In the tall, silent woods beyond the northwestern logging town Twin Peaks, an ancient evil dwells” in what the region’s native Americans called The Black Lodge, which may, in fact, be “another dimension,” the source of “pure evil.” The doorway to this dimension can be opened as a result of “planetary alignment” or potential victims’ fear. The Black Lodge’s counterpart, which is believed to be the home of gods, is The White Lodge. Strange characters inhabit Twin Peaks. According to Muir, the show’s writers developed the town, even creating a map of it, before creating its characters.

The X-Files: A psychologist and criminal profiler, FBI agent Fox Mulder believes in the paranormal and the supernatural, investigating the agency’s “backlog” of the X-Files (“inexplicable” cold cases), hoping to learn why his sister was abducted by aliens; his partner is the skeptical physician and fellow agent Dana Scully. Muir points out that the series is based upon ten horror themes: (1) “Trust No One” (government conspiracies and cover-ups), (2) “Freaks of Nature” (animals, mutants, and other monsters), (3) “Foreign Fears” (“ancient ethnic legends” prove to have “a basis in fact”), (4) From the Dawn of Time” (“ancient and prehistoric creatures” enter the present because of “climatic changes,” humans’ “encroachment on their territory,” or their discovery at “remote locations,” (5) “Aliens” (extraterrestrials are “encountered but never validated empirically”), (6) “God’s Masterplan” (elements of Christian belief are “explored as ‘real’ concepts”), (7) serial killers, (8) psychic phenomena, (9) “The Mytharc” (elements of various thematic subsets fuse into a narrative nucleus with a “coherent” story line, and (10) “The Standards” (stereotypical villains from the horror genre, such as vampires and werewolves).

Poltergeist: The Legacy: “Since the dawn of man, a secret organization, The Legacy, has existed to combat the forces of evil, and it’s ‘houses’ are all over the world,” each one of which is populated by heroes “with special skills” who are armed with high-tech weaponry. Poltergeist: The Legacy chronicles “the San Francisco house, a magnificent castle” on “Angel Island.”


Dark Skies: “American history as we know it is a lie to cover up” humans’ war, fought by Majestic-12, a covert agency established by President Truman, which is currently headed by Captain Frank Bach, against a horrific “alien collective consciousness known as The Hive.” The series examines Bach’s decisions and their consequences.

The Burning Zone: “an elite ‘bio-crisis’ team” is dedicated to eradicating ‘disease that threaten to strike quickly and endanger many innocent Americans” in a sequence of attacks known as The Plague Wars. This team also seeks to counter The New Dawn, “a villainous organization dedicated to the annihilation” or humanity and “the supremacy of the Earth’s original life form, a hive-mind,” representing a “sentient virus that has been ‘asleep’ for 15,000 years.” As the series progresses, two of the experts leave the team to “spearhead” important operations in Zimbabwe, “to be replaced by the ‘rebel’ doctor Brain Taft.”

Millennium: this “horror/crime series” featuring “paranormal and supernatural overtones” was based upon a blend of two movies, Seven and The Eyes of Laura Mars.

Man on the Run: a cross between The Fugitive and A Rebel Without a Cause, this series follows the exploits of a “motorcycle slacker who discovers he’s a failed government experiment with a built-in expiration date” in the form of a “computer chip in his brain” that will kill him in a year, when he turns 21, unless he can locate his creator, Dr. Heisenberg, and undergo special “medical treatment.” However, there’s a complication: he’s been framed for killing the man who shared “the truth” with him and, now, he’s pursued by a government agent who is bent upon bringing him to “justice.”

Now that we’ve had a peek at some of the premises that Muir details in his fascinating tour of Terror Television, let’s see whether we can discern a few principles that horror writers can derive from such an admittedly rather abbreviated review.

1. The premise should establish an opportunity for the occurrence of bizarre and mysterious incidents (for example, extraordinary natural events or paranormal or supernatural proceedings) and the arrival and departure of extraordinary beings or forces.
2. The premise should allow a recurrence of a cadre of characters and the ongoing development of one or more themes.
3. The premise should unify fairly disparate elements of plot, setting, and theme.
4. The premise should allow the exploration of diverse types and sources of narrative conflict and character development.
5. The premise should link past and present (and, possibly, future) action.
6. The premise should allow something that is lacking (for example, justice) to be supplied.
7. The premise should suggest, if not explicitly identify, one or more causes for the mysterious and bizarre occurrences that take place within and between the stories or episodes.
8. The premise may involve cover-ups by government agencies, overt or covert, or by private, but powerful and well-financed, organizations.
9. The premise should allow for both natural and occult explanations for and causes of the mysterious and bizarre incidents, forces, and beings.
10. The premise may address topical events or social, political, or moral issues and concerns.
11. The premise may be inspired by a film’s concepts or by combined themes from several motion pictures.
12. The premise should allow for new directions of plot. (For example, Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes a new direction when Buffy Summers graduates from high school and enrolls in college, and The Burning Zone takes a new direction when two of its experts leave the group to head specialized operations related to the main line of investigation.)

Source

Terror Television: American Series, 1970-1999 by John Kenneth Muir, McFarland and Company, Inc., Jefferson, NC, 2001.

Paradise, Heroism, and the Eternal Return: A Formula for Both Myth and Horror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Much of the argument and many of the insights that Paul Nathanson shares with readers of his Over the Rainbow: Secular Myths of America can be applied to the horror genre. Taking a leaf from Micea Eliade, Nathanson points out that the cosmos--the orderly system that originates from chaos as a result of divine creation--represents the “familiar world,” whereas chaos corresponds to the world of the unknown, which is inhabited by “ghosts, demons, and foreigners.” We can apply Nathanson’s observation, by way of Eliade, to the garden of Eden versus the great wilderness beyond it. Into the familiar world of the cosmos, Nathanson observes, the unknown can erupt, via kratophanies, hierophanies, and theophanies; the unknown, like the sacred, can also be repeated through myths and rituals. The sacred becomes a way of orienting a tribe or a nation, Nathanson states; it delineates that which is desirable by separating the sacred and the profane or the sacred and the secular.

There is always a sacred center to the world, Nathanson, echoing Eliade, points out. This center, the axis mundi, is often a “mountain, city, temple, palace,” or island, whereat are met heaven, earth, and hell. The revelation of the sacred is the revelation of the real.

The axis mundi need not number one; there can be several, or even many, of these sacred centers. As Nathanson points out, every spatial hierophany or consecrated space is “equivalent to a cosmology.” There are, after all, many sacred mountains, cities, temples, palaces, islands, groves, wells, hills, and other such centers of the sacred life. However, all such places have something in common, Nathanson says. In existential terms, they form a “sacred cycle in which cosmogonic events” are experienced anew from time to time “through the ritual reenactment of myths by which man recreates,” or repeats, “the act of creation” that is represented by the sacred calendar and year; these mystical rituals reenact the original creation of the gods.

In religion, to be real is to have meaning, Nathanson contends, and for a ritual act to have meaning, it must symbolically repeat its sacred, prototypical event, whether spatially or chronologically, since the cosmos is the prototype, or archetype, of reality itself. The harmony of the cosmos is desirable and to be embraced; the disharmony of chaos is undesirable and is to be rejected. Moreover, Nathanson observes, the cosmic interpretations of reality are both communal (Israel, the Church) and individual (the Jew, the Christian). This twofold character of the cosmos led the question of whether paradise is future and otherworldly or here and now.

According to Nathanson, the tension between these two possible understandings was never resolved, but has been allowed to enrich the concept of paradise, as does the possibility of one’s understanding it in either literal or figurative terms. For example, we can glimpse eternity from within time (before our own individual deaths) or paradise from within history (before the end of history). Indeed, as religious faith declines, utopias sometimes take the place of paradise, just as the idea of progress replaced the idea of providence, with destiny being seen as something better than, rather than a return to, the origins of things.

By definition, the city, in ancient times, was a walled enclosure, and by including some persons and things, it also excluded others. That which was within the walls was part of the sacred place, paradise. That which was without the walls was part of the secular or the profane world, and, as such, was, as it were, exiled, condemned, or damned. With this understanding before us, it is easy to comprehend why Nathaniel exercised such passionate devotion in the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls following his return from the Israelites’ dispersal into Babylon.

The difference, Nathanson says, between paradise lost and paradise regained is the snake: in the former, it is present; in the latter, it is absent.

In horror fiction, these themes are often invoked, whether overtly or symbolically. There is the sacred center, or axis mundi; myths and rituals, or their equivalents; and an orientation toward that which is valued and that which is devalued; there is inclusion, and there is exclusion. For example, we can also apply this concept to Heorot, the hall of Danish fellowship, and to the wilderness, inhabited by the monstrous, outcast Grendel that lay beyond its walls. Likewise, think of Eden, Jerusalem, or, for that matter, Yggsdrasil or the Hellmouth. Just as Grendel and his mother (and, later, the dragon) are alive and well in the fallen world of the Danes’ Heorot (and, later, in Beowulf’s own realm), they are absent in these regained versions of these sacred centers. They have been not banished or exiled, but destroyed, just as, in Buffy, the Hellmouth is destroyed (although, as it turns out, there is another elsewhere).

Paradise shifts from the garden to the Promised Land to the frontier, Nathanson points out, and is, at present “located. . . in outer space.” It is also invaded, or overrun, for a time, and is abandoned in favor of a new paradise or until the pilgrims’ return. The interval of the sojourn is one of maturation if not, indeed, perfection, so that, as the sojourners move into a new paradise or return to their home, it is they, not the sacred center, that has changed. They have become the home that they sought elsewhere, sinners become saints, just as Beowulf earned immortality by his heroic deeds or Buffy passed her powers to hundreds of other “potential” slayers.

Duma Key: The Decline of Horror?

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In recent years, it seems that Stephen King has begun to think of himself as a great American writer who can write simply to please himself. In reality, most of his fiction is apt to be forgotten soon after his demise. One or two books, perhaps, will survive their author. Duma Key isn’t likely to be one, any more than the self-parody that was Lisey’s Story. His latest (and certainly not his greatest) is self-indulgent and pretentious and disappointing as hell.

The protagonist, Edgar Freemantle, loses his right arm and then his wife. He becomes suicidal, and his shrink tells him to seek a change of scenery, which leads him to Duma Key, Florida. Too bad the shrink didn’t tell Edgar to go ahead and end it all. His having done so would have spared readers his endless bellyaching.

At Duma Key, Edgar tries his hand at art. He also meets a lawyer who also wanted to commit suicide (and should have) after his wife and daughter were killed; he did manage to put a bullet in his brain, and although even that didn’t end it for him, at least he made the attempt, which is more than can be said for Edgar.

There’s something supernatural about Edgar’s artistic talent; he can use it to kill or to heal and to paint a mysterious “ship of the dead” that troubles him. From here, the plot, such as it is, sickens further, dying well before the story’s absurd denouement. Suffice it to say that this is another King-size ripoff, involving, this time, a goddess-doll that collects servant-souls and commands the ship of the dead that Edgar spends most of his days trying to paint. After the goddess-doll kills Edgar’s daughter Ilse, Edgar encounters a giant alligator, and--well, who cares, really? Certainly, King doesn’t seem to have.

For the most part, since his own death-defying accident, King’s fiction has become increasing self-indulgent and unnecessarily circuitous, losing any pizzazz, suspense, or horror. They’re just interminably boring. Maybe there’s another book up King’s sleeve that’s worth reading, but he hasn’t written one in the past 10 years or so.

What does this decline mean? If it’s only King’s decline, not all that much, but if his deterioration heralds that of horror fiction per se, then it’s noteworthy--and scary. For many years, King’s name has been more or less synonymous with contemporary horror fiction and with horror fiction that was relatively good. If anything, it’s since become tantamount to wallowing in the slime of narcissism. Dean Koontz, who cut his fangs in the science fiction and horror genres, is pretty much writing cross-genre stuff about as meaningless as Duma Key and Lisey’s Story, recycling the same sad story lines as he’s been using for the last 20 or 30 years. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have discarded everything but Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast and his tiresome ward, Constance. Dan Simmons has gone over to the science fiction side of the Farce, and his writing has become impossibly self-important, denser than Herman Melville or William Faulkner or Henry James on their worst days. Bentley Little has told the same story, in different settings, nearly a dozen times--and still hasn’t figured out how to end the damned thing. James Rollins’ stories, although not horror per se, are page-turners, but, again, each seems much the same as the next, since he writes, as do so many in the genre, according to a fairly rigid formula. Robert MacCammon hasn’t written anything worth reading in well over a decade. True, there’s Speaks the Nightbird, but it’s not worth reading.

It may not be merely King who’s petering out; it may be the whole horror genre. Maybe a moratorium on horror is needed. Maybe the ingredients need to steep a while or new ingredients need to be brewed.

King’s attempt to pass the torch to his son, Joe Hill, is proof that more of the same isn’t going to work; the best thing about Junior‘s book is its title, Heart-Shaped Box. The rest is of the same quality as an expletive deleted.

Unless there’s an Edgar Allan Poe or an H. P. Lovecraft waiting in the wings, the horror genre’s immediate future seems bleak, indeed.

Bleaker, perhaps, even than Duma Key.

The Protagonist's Emotional Arc

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman 

 

As we mentioned in a previous post, every story, whether it takes the form of a narrative poem, a theatrical script, a short story, a novel, or a screenplay, involves a character in a conflict which changes him or her for the better or the worse. This character, the protagonist, usually lacks something that he or she values or is burdened with something of which he or she wants to be relieved. There are many ways by which this simple, but effective, dramatic formula may be varied and enriched, as we shall see in this post.

The character’s emotional arc follows the story’s dramatic structure. According to Gustav Freytag, a story has five parts: exposition, rising action, turning point or climax, falling action, and resolution (a denouement in comedy or a catastrophe in tragedy). In the exposition, the writer provides background information, introducing the main character and major supporting characters, establishing the setting, and defining the basic conflict. The rising action complicates the basic conflict, adding a series of successively more challenging obstacles. The turning point, or climax, reverses the direction of the action. The falling action unravels the conflict. The denouement, or resolution, brings about the comedy’s happy ending, or the catastrophe brings about the main character’s ruin. (A comedy is a story in which the main character is better off at the end of the story than he or she was at the beginning, and a tragedy is the opposite: the main character is worse off at the end of the story than he or she was at the beginning.) The action sequence, or dramatic structure, of the well-made plot is often illustrated by a diagram known as Freytag’s Pyramid:

At the same time, a parallel series of incidents occur within the character’s inner self, or personality. The story starts with the protagonist lacking something that he or she values or burdened by something from which he or she wants to be relieved. In an effort to attain this want, he or she displays increasing competence or incompetence until he or she experiences a moment of recognition in which he or she has an epiphany about him- or herself which equips the character to change his or her course of action. This change in perception, accompanied by a change in behavior, leads to increasing incompetence or competence, which brings about the protagonists’ acquisition of that which he or she had lacked by valued or his or her relief from the burden under which he or she suffered. This sequence of emotional changes can be illustrated by a diagram similar to Freytag’s Pyramid, since the changes parallel the incidents of the plot’s physical and thematic action:

Before we discuss ways by which the moments in the protagonist’s emotional arc may be varied and enriched, let’s look at an example of both dramatic structure, as analyzed by Freytag, and the parallel emotional arc that the protagonist experiences. The film version of The Wizard of Oz offers a familiar instance. During the exposition, we meet the main character, Dorothy Gale, a nineteenth-century Kansas farm girl, her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, their three farmhands, Ms. Gulch, and a traveling fortune teller, Professor Marvel. We learn that Dorothy feels lonely and neglected. Her only friend, she believes, is her pet dog, Toto. Dorothy is dissatisfied with her home and dreams of going to a more exciting and glamorous place “somewhere over the rainbow.” The exposition introduces the protagonist and other major supporting characters, establishes the setting, and identifies the basic conflict, which is psychological. The inciting moment (the incident that initiates the story’s rising action) occurs when Toto escapes Ms. Gulch’s custody (she had been taking him to be destroyed for having bitten her) and, to save him, Dorothy runs away from home, to be caught in the tornado that whisks her, house and all, off to the strange, enchanted land of Oz that lies “somewhere over the rainbow.”

Almost as soon as she arrives in Oz at the outset of the story's rising action, Dorothy becomes homesick and the story’s rising action introduces a series of more and more challenging obstacles for Dorothy to overcome. When her house lands upon the Wicked Witch of the East, Dorothy gains the enmity of her victim’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West, who wants to recover her dead sibling’s enchanted ruby slippers, which have appeared magically upon Dorothy’s feet, and the which harasses Dorothy along her way to the Emerald City. She also meets Glinda, the Good Witch, the Munchkins, and her traveling companions, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. They arrive at the Emerald City, hoping the Wizard of Oz, who resides there, may help each of them achieve what he or she lacks but values: a brain for the Scarecrow, a heart for the Tin Man, courage for the Cowardly Lion, and a trip home for Dorothy and Toto. However, the Wizard refuses to help them until they have returned with the witch’s broomstick. As the foursome travels to the witch’s castle, Dorothy is abducted by their adversary’s army of flying monkeys. Her comrades infiltrate the witch’s company of human soldiers and rescue Dorothy. The turning point, or climax, of the story occurs as Dorothy, to put out the fire with which the witch threatens the Scarecrow, throws a bucket of water on the villain, the witch shrivels to nothingness, and Dorothy retrieves her broomstick. During the falling action, they take the broomstick back to Oz, where the Wizard grants the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion the gifts they’d sought, but is exposed as a charlatan when he is unable to help Dorothy. A moment of final suspense (an instant wherein the audience or reader is left in doubt as to what will happen to the protagonist) takes place when the Wizard leaves her stranded in Oz when the hot-air balloon by which he had arrived in Oz, purely by accident, floats off with only him aboard. Glinda appears and tells Dorothy that, all along the girl has had the power to return home at any time simply by clicking her heels together three times as she recites the phrase, “There’s no place like home.” After a tearful farewell to her friends, she does so, and, as the story’s denouement occurs, she awakens in bed, surrounded by her family and their farmhands, to whom she relates the lesson she’s learned from her experience (the story‘s theme), concluding “There’s no place like home” and that if one cannot find happiness in his or her own backyard, he or she is not likely to discover it anywhere else. We can diagram this same story in terms of the protagonist’s emotional arc, which parallels the physical and thematic development of the story: In the exposition, Dorothy is dissatisfied with her home life, feeling lonely and neglected. She longs for a more exciting and glamorous life “somewhere over the rainbow.”

The inciting moment, during which Dorothy seeks to evade personal responsibility by running away from home, catapults her into the story’s rising action, where she Dorothy, becoming homesick, shows increasing incompetence in resolving her dissatisfaction with her home life by taking upon herself more responsibility for her own fate. The turning point occurs when she matures, taking action on her own behalf, thereby becoming, in principle, if not yet fully, independent and autonomous. During the falling action, she becomes increasing more competent in resolving her dissatisfaction with her home life as she discovers that the Wizard is incompetent and cannot help her to realize her goal. During the moment of final suspense, the audience wonders whether Dorothy will find a way home, now that her hoped-for rescuer has, in effect, abandoned her. The story, a comedy, reaches its denouement as Dorothy realizes that she alone is responsible for making her life satisfying, or “happy,” and she becomes a mature young woman, rather than the girl she’d been at the beginning of the film. Again, the protagonist’s emotional arc parallels the story’s dramatic structure: plot is a means of showing the development of character, and the development of character constitutes, on the figurative or symbolic level, the story’s plot.

Now that we have seen how plot and character are flip sides, as it were, of the same coin (story), let’s consider how we can vary and enrich the formula in which the main character either lacks something that he or she values or is burdened with something of which he or she wants to be relieved.

1. The protagonist lacks something that he or she values; by the story’s end, he or she either gains or does not gain the desired object. (“Object” is used loosely, for the “thing” that the main character lacks and desires may be something quite intangible, such as peace of mind, love, or respect, rather than a material artifact.)
2. The protagonist acquires the thing, and still values it.
3. The protagonist acquires the thing, but values it less than he or she had valued it at first.
4. The protagonist acquires the thing, but values something else more than it.
5. The protagonist acquires the thing, but no longer values it at all.
6. The protagonist fails to acquire the thing, but still values it.
7. The protagonist fails to acquire the thing, but values it less than he or she had valued it at first.
8. The protagonist fails to acquire the thing, but no longer values it at all.
9. The protagonist fails to acquire the thing, and values it even more than he or she had valued it at first.
10. The protagonist fails to acquire the thing, but values something else more than it.
11. The protagonist acquires the thing, but he or she loses it (or gives it away or has it stolen), with any of the consequences identified above following the loss--that is, he or she still more or less values it, no longer values it at all, or values something else instead.
12. In acquiring the thing, the protagonist does not change.
13. In acquiring the thing, the protagonist changes for the better.
14. In acquiring the thing, the protagonist changes for the worse.

The Home and the Lair, or Heaven and Hell

Beowulf and his men prepare to ambush Grendel when he attacks Heorot.

There are only two ways for, or directions of, action: inner and outer, or to and from. Therefore, if, in a horror story, the monster is to be encountered, it must either come to the protagonist and the other characters or they must go to the monster. I like to think of these two means of egress, the coming to or the going forth, as having one’s home invaded by the monster or entering the monster’s lair. In thinking of the comings and goings of the characters (and, make no mistake about it, in horror fiction, the monster most definitely is a character--usually the antagonist) in these terms allows us to consider what writers, readers, critics, and other interested parties (including the monster itself, it may be) regard as “home” and what they regard as “lair.”

In Alien, Lieutenant Ripley and the others of her platoon enter the monster’s lair, which takes the form of a derelict spaceship in which the xenomorph has taken refuge. “Home,” on the other hand, is human civilization, as represented by a detachment of this civilization, in the form of Ripley and her crew.

In Psycho, Marion Crane enters the monster’s lair. This time, the den takes the form of the Bates’ Motel, where she checks in but she does not check out. The monster is, of course, Norman Bates. “Home” is the office and the relatively respectable, if not actually thrilling, life that Marion, an adulteress, left behind when she absconded with her employer’s money instead of depositing it in the company’s bank account as she’d been instructed (and trusted) to do.

In The Taking, a Dean Koontz novel, the monster invades the home, which is really the hometown of the protagonist, writer Molly Sloan. The monster--or monsters, actually, since they turn out, despite the alien disguises, to be Satan and his hellish horde--want their small town in the mountains, possibly because of its scenic location, and, presumably, the world, which they’ve begun to reverse terraform. Their den? The Inferno, of course.

Freddie Krueger comes from outside, to invade the dreams of the children of parents who’d banded together to burn him alive inside a building after they caught him molesting their kids. Although, in A Nightmare on Elm Street, we never see it, his lair must be somewhere dark and damp and slimy, like his mind.

In The Exorcist, the devil also enters from outside, trespassing upon the sanctity and the soul of young Regan MacNeil, whom he possesses so he can levitate her and fly her around her bedroom like a cheap propeller-driven airplane (the propeller being her head, which spins around in a complete circle, often while vomiting pea soup). It beats flying Delta, one must suppose. His den? The Inferno, of course. (Weren’t you paying attention when we mentioned The Taking?)

Carrie White, of Stephen King’s Carrie, is also a trespasser; she invades her high school, carrying with her all the guilt and shame that her mother, a religious fanatic, has been able to heap upon her during a pitiful adolescence in a den not so much of iniquity as insanity. For some teens, home is hell.

The outcast monster Grendel, of Beowulf fame, motivated by his jealousy at the Danish thanes’ fellowship, slips out of his lake, or marsh, to invade the Danes’ home turf, represented by King Hygelac’s court and the warrior’s mead hall, Heorot.

Carl Denham, Ann Darrow, and their entourage, motivated by greed, enter the monster’s lair, an island jungle (or a jungle island) inhabited by the gigantic ape King Kong.

One more example: Species. In this film, alien deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA for short) is mixed with human DNA in an attempt to create a teddy bear. Well, okay, actually the scientists are trying to create a docile alien-human hybrid, which is only a slightly less silly premise. Instead, they get Sil, whom the scientists’ military arm immediately try to squash or quash or something before she can mate with men and produce more and more of her kind. She has killer good looks, so the threat’s as real as if she were Pamela Anderson instead of a weirdo-alien-rapist-phallic woman-femme-fatale-monster-thing.

We could go on and on, but we’ve made out point. There is the home, and there is the lair. The home is invaded by the monster. The lair is entered by the human. (Since we are the humans, we enter, rather than “invade,” although the monster whose den we’ve “entered” most likely regards our trespass upon its domicile as an invasion, which is one reason that it fights.) This perspective, skewed in the favor of humans though it may be, sheds light on what we consider home (the near, the dear, and the familiar) and what we regard as the monster’s lair (far and worthless and bizarre): according to our brief survey, at least, HOME = civilization, the workplace, a respectable lifestyle, one’s hometown, peaceful night's sleep, high school, the king’s court or the mead hall (today, we’d be more inclined to call it a tavern), human society, and the LAIR = a derelict spaceship, a remote highway motel, an invaded town, nightmares, one’s own mind or home when it's invaded or headed by a nutcase parent, a swamp, a jungle island (or an island jungle), and the nightclubs in which the sexually desperate shake, shake, shake their booties. Sometimes, we don’t even know that our homes are our homes, valued and loved, until they’re threatened. If we survive, though, we are apt to appreciate them. . . for a time, at least.