A Few Parting Words
Not an essay, just some thoughts
Like most of the writers I know, I learned to write by reading, and by going to plays and movies (stories in dialog and pictures—good training for the visual imagination and the plot-and-action sector of the brain). I always adored fantasy and horror, even though—or maybe because—they gave me nightmares; literally. For six months after an older cousin took me to see Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, I would wake up at six in the morning and lie petrified in my bed, certain that the Frankenstein monster was about to lurch around the corner from the hall and into my bedroom. And that was Abbott and Costello, folks.
Well. And Frankenstein’s monster. And the wolfman, and Dracula, come to think of it. But it was Abbott and Costello. What can I say; I have always been rather impressionable. It comes with the territory.
At any rate, just like everybody else (albeit in fear and trembling and with my hand ever ready to whip off my eyeglasses so that the screen became safely blurred and vague) I kept up with the monster movies and the monster reading, too, because I couldn’t stay away (Bud Abbott and Lou Costello have a lot to answer for). I saw poor old “Larry Talbot ” turn into what looked like a gummy bear that had rolled on the floor of a hair salon before clean-up time; I read Mina Harker’s journal and saw all the film-Draculas ever played; I read the Oz books and watched Judy Garland’s Dorothy with her witches, both friendly and evil; and I read Leroux’s fusty, goofy, clumsy novel about the Paris Opéra and went to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage version of that story (once on each coast).
In fact I went so far as to visit the Paris Opéra last time I was in that city, just for its “Phantom” associations.
So it’s perfectly natural that from time to time I should turn to writing stories with strong horror elements, some borrowed, some made up fresh (or what I think is fresh, anyway). I always have a wonderful time doing it and am sorry when the story is finished. Still, I feel like a bit of a fraud when people refer to me as a “horror writer,” because I’m not—not in my mind, and probably not in anybody else’s either.
To start at the lowest end of the “horror” scale, I have to admit that I don’t even read there; I am easily bored and irritated by tales (onscreen or on paper) of victimized, terrified women, or victimized men for that matter; or towns with evil black gunkus oozing out of the light fixtures; or whole “secret” communities of languorous vampires exhibiting all the ennui of confirmed French persons (excepting only the endless smoking of cigarettes and the long, long silences).
Afflicted priests rushing around chasing or being chased by demons (or angels) that speak in funny voices do not turn me on, gangs of cannibal zombies bore me blind, and when I read Steve King I usually skip the blood and gore and look for the social observation, which he does better than anybody else. Frankly, I’ve reached a stage in my life where the drama, the tension, the interest of a story is what happens between the action-packed moments of mayhem. I mean the pauses for breath, when the characters, if they are worth their salt to begin with, understand and attempt to grapple with what the “action” means to them, for them, and about them and those close to them.
Remember a strange little movie called “The Sweet Hereafter”? A school bus crashes into a frozen lake, and the kids are killed. That’s the horror element. The story is of a townful of people left behind and trying to deal with the event in some way that will make it less horrific (and failing). The crash is glimpsed now and again, mostly from afar. It is a glyph, a sign of ruin and despair, but it’s the ruin and despair that are interesting. The bus-crash is just an incident, too sudden and too shocking and too swiftly complete to reverberate much in and of itself.
That, to my mind, is a fine horror-story, albeit of a quotidian kind—no ghosts to speak of, no dripping child-zombies. Except that they are all there, of course—in the voices, the blank or twisted faces, the shocked eyes of the parents. If you perceive them there, and you should.
So I guess the usual run of horror fiction is not my métier.
On the other hand: I love to play. What I love to play with most is some stodgy cultural trope that needs a good shaking to get the dust out of its ears, e.g., a planet of women, say a society of Amazon warriors—only what kind of life would that really be in and of itself, not just as an exotic and perverse locale for our intrepid hero to stumble into, strut his stuff, and teach them (oh, rapture!) how to kiss? How would they, seeing themselves not as perverse at all but as the norm, order their politics, their economy, and their personal lives?
Or the world ends, but suppose all our unhoused souls are indestructible and have to go somewhere else to continue evolving. Or here’s this dashing space pilot with flexible ethics, only she’s driven to seek help on a planet settled not by engineers and scientists but by African market women with deep-rooted customs (and shrewdness) of their own.
Turn ’em upside-down and see what falls out of their pockets, that’s what I say; otherwise you’re just putting hoary old basic ideas through their time-honored paces yet again, and what’s the point of that?
Hence, my forays into what gets classed as horror. I am drawn to fascinating characters or beings that have most often been presented—your monster, your vampire, your werewolf, your witch—as shock material, something to give us a good jolt in the perfect safety of the movie theatre or the chair in the living room beside the good reading light. Nothing falls out of their pockets if they’re not wearing something like their usual clothes (rags; fur; cape). We all know there’s more to them than just the jolt, or they wouldn’t persist in our cultures with such immense verve and color.
So sometimes I get curious about the rest of the baggage your teen werewolf, say, is carrying with her, or your twisted musical genius with the awful face and violent habits.
Luckily, the stories of this type that I love best always set up questions in my mind (maybe that’s why I love them). They are not dead, perfect objects, all shiny and cold, but fertile and warm and messy, fermenting away in my mind long after “the end” has come and gone. I turn the problems of “Dracula,” say, over and over mentally, for the sheer pleasure of remembering how it went and where it was at its most tasty for me.
I think about the answers offered—poor old Larry can never escape his fang-and-fuzz destiny, the Phantom gives Christine to his rival out of sheer nobility—and after a while other possible answers occur to me, and other questions that weren’t asked. Or questions with no answers at all.
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END OF SAMPLE
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