In 1966, director John Frankenheimer turned out a pair of films that could not possibly be more different in subject matter and execution: Seconds and Grand Prix. Frankenheimer did not want to make Grand Prix, but was forced by the studio to do so after Seconds died a miserable death at the box office.
Grand Prix, on the other hand, was a tremendous hit, and remained Frankenheimer's most financially successful film until 1998's Ronin. The script by veteran playwright Robert Alan Arthur (who co-wrote All That Jazz with the late Bob Fosse), ultimately focuses too much on the soap-opera level problems of the drivers and their families, but it's when the film gets on the racetrack that Frankenheimer and cinematographer Lionel "Curly" Lindon (who did a season as Night Gallery's director of photography) blindside you.
When faced with the challenge of filming a lengthy race in such a way to make it interesting for film audiences, Frankenheimer decided he wanted to have the camera become part of the actual race, so he and Lindon designed a special camera and harness that could be attached to the front driver's-side of the car, giving the illusion that the viewer was riding on the hood during the race.
You've seen this same shot about a million times over the years in every car chase that's been filmed. You have John Frankenheimer and Lionel Lindon to thank for it. Until Grand Prix, no director had ever attempted to film a race or chase in this manner; nowadays, a director would feel like a fool not to include at least one such shot in an action film.
Movie Information
Running Time: 179 min.
Rating: PG
Director: John Frankenheimer
Screenwriters: John Frankenheimer, Robert Alan Arthur
Cinematography: Lionel Lindon
Cast:
James Garner: Pete Aron Eva Marie Saint: Louise Frederickson Yves Montand: Jean-Pierre Sarti Toshiro Mifune: Izo Yamura Brian Bedford: Scott Stoddard Jessica Walter: Pat Stoddard Antonio Sabato: Nino Barlini Francoise Hardy: Lisa Adolfo Celi: Agostini Manetta Claude Dauphin: Hugo Simon Enzo Fiermonte: Guido
1968's The Swimmer (based on the short story by John Cheever) was a labor of love for its producer/star Burt Lancaster. In it he plays a businessman who, at film's start, has decided to spend a bright summer Sunday afternoon making his way from pool to pool, swimming his way across suburbia to his own home. He lives in an upscale and trendy community where everyone knows everyone else in their chosen clique, so it comes as no surprise to anyone when Burt wanders into their back yard and tells them he is swimming home. They laugh. They make martinis. They talk about what a card Lancaster is and what a simply mah-velous party story his little escapade will make. It seems like another Peyton Place soap opera at first.
But then people start asking about his wife and daughters:
"I heard what happened..."
"I was so sorry to hear..."
"How are you feeling now?..."
"I didn't think you'd want to be around anyone for a while, not after..."
What exactly did happen in Lancaster's life that has everyone treating him either with extreme caution or overzealous joviality? Where exactly is he coming from at the beginning of the film? (Our first sight of him comes as he's running in his swimming trunks through the woods, already sopping wet, yet he tells the first back yard gathering he appears in that theirs will be his "first" swim on his way home.) And why can't he tell anyone what he's been doing lately?
These key questions are skirted for the first half of the film, but it's the very lack of ready answers that provides a good deal of tension. Hints are dropped, concerned looks are exchanged, surreptitious gestures made behind Lancaster's back, and soon the viewer wonders about Lancaster's mental stability as, piece by piece, the horror of his life comes together like a jigsaw puzzle that's missing the last piece–which may be the reason The Swimmer is such a turn-off for many viewers: there is no direct and final answer to any of the questions, no last-minute revelation, but if you pay close attention, everything you need to know is there.
Lancaster gives a typically terrific performance, one full of both internal and physical catharses; every pool is a new baptismal fount where he washes away past sins, yet by the time he reaches the next pool, a different load of sins have made themselves known.
Movie Information
Running Time: 95 minutes
Rating: PG
Directors: Frank Perry, Sydney Pollack
Screenwriter: Eleanor Perry
Cast:
Burt Lancaster: Ned Merrill Janet Landgard: Julie Ann Hooper Janice Rule: Shirley Abbott Tony Bickley: Donald Westerhazy Marge Champion: Peggy Forsburgh Nancy Cushman: Mrs. Halloran Bill Fiore: Howie Hunsacker David Garfield: Ticket Seller Kim Hunter: Betty Graham Rose Gregorio: Sylvia Finney Charles Drake: Howard Graham Bernie Hamilton: Halloran's Chauffeur House Jameson: Chester Halloran Jimmy Joyce: Jack Finney Michael Kearney: Kevin Gilmartin Jr.
By its musical structure alone, The Who's Quadrophenia opened my eyes and my intellect to the endless possibilities offered by the metaphor; add to that its compelling and challenging narrative structure, and you've got something that, to my mind, qualifies as a masterpiece.
Quadrophenia centers on a young kid in 1960s England named Jimmy. Jimmy comes from a hard-luck, working class family. He wants to be popular among his friends. He also wants to be a good son, a good worker, and a great lover. In the midst of trying to be all things to everyone, he realizes that he presents four very distinctive personalities to the world over the course of his days: the tough guy, the romantic, the crazy fun friend, and the troubled son. All of these separate personalities are represented by a distinct musical theme, and each personality encompasses only one aspect of the real Jimmy; none of them represent who he is in his heart. On top of all this, he's saddled with having a deeper insight into the human spirit than most people think a person of his station is capable. He admits that even he doesn't know who he really is. Being a confused angry young man with rampaging hormones, it doesn't take long before certain aspects of his other personalities start bleeding over into the parts of his life where they don't belong.
There's much, much more to Quadrophenia's story, but that's the spine of it.
This sounds like a ham-fisted cliche, but hearing this album for the first time changed my life. On side 4 of the album there's an instrumental piece called "The Rock" which remains for me one of the most amazing and moving pieces of music -- and that's music, period, not just rock music -- that I've ever heard.
In Tommy, the central character's epiphany is conveyed through words and music; but in Quadrophenia, it is conveyed solely through music. "The Rock" starts off by repeating each of the four themes separately, then, one by one, begins overlapping them until the four themes blend seamlessly into one, creating a fifth, unique, defining theme as Jimmy finally realizes who he really is.
That was a revelation -- ahem ... uh, er ... discovery -- for the 12-year-old me. Pete Townshend and The Who had pulled an incredible musical sleight-of-hand, created a musical Rubik's Cube that I hadn't even realized existed until the puzzle was completed.
I knew then that I wanted to someday create a piece or body of work that did what Pete Townshend had done with Quadrophenia's music; present you with a group of seemingly disparate pieces/themes that in the end converged into a unified whole that was not only rewarding in and of itself (as "The Rock" most definitely is), but also enriched the sum of its parts.
"The Rock" is a perfect metaphor for what we as human beings strive toward during every moment between that first slap on the ass and the last handful of soil tossed on the lid of the coffin; call it the psychological equivalent of string theory or whatever you will: we strive to bring the various Selves together to form the whole that is uniquely 'me' or 'you', all the while treasuring the journey that has led to this time, this breath, this moment.
A lot -- a lot -- has been written and said about The Manchurian Candidate, the film that put John Frankenheimer on the map as a director. How effective you'll find the film today depends on your personal level of cynicism.
Candidate -- a satire in the truest sense of the word -- deliberately sets out to make the viewer uncertain as to whether or not it's supposed to funny. Admittedly, some of the scenes in the film have an aura of comedy about them which I think was intentional, while others (scenes obviously intended to be serious) unintentionally draw chuckles. Laurence Harvey's British accent seems ludicrously out of place for a veteran of the Korean War, especially since he's supposed to be American, but once you get past his voice, you cannot help but admire his rich, complex performance.
The final sequence, filmed in Madison Square Garden, remains one of the most beautifully edited and unbearably suspenseful ever put on film. (Many critics and film scholars credit Frankenheimer as having created the template for the modern political thriller; viewing such films as Candidate, Seven Days in May, Black Sunday, and the recent HBO film The Path to War -- which is now Frankenheimer's swan song, and a great one, at that -- this accolade seems almost understated.)
Movie Information
Running Time: 126 minutes Rating: PG-13 Director: John Frankenheimer Writers: Richard Condon (novel), George Axelrod (screenplay) Cast:
Frank Sinatra: Capt./Maj. Bennett Marco Laurence Harvey: Sgt. Raymond Shaw Janet Leigh: Eugenie Rose Chaney Angela Lansbury: Mrs. Iselin Henry Silva: Chunjin James Gregory: Sen. John Yerkes Iselin Leslie Parrish: Jocelyn Jordan John McGiver: Sen. Thomas Jordan Khigh Dhiegh: Dr. Yen Lo James Edwards: Cpl. Alvin Melvin Douglas Henderson: Col. Milt Albert Paulsen: Zilkov Barry Kelley: Secretary of Defense Lloyd Corrigan: Holborn Gaines Madame Spivy: Female Berezovo
2004's The Manchurian Candidate
A remake of the 1962 classic was released in July 2004. It's directed by Jonathan Demme ("Silence of the Lambs") and stars Denzel Washington in Sinatra's role as Ben Marco, Liev Schreiber in the Laurence Harvey role as Raymond Shaw, and Meryl Streep as Eleanor Shaw.
In this version, U.S. soliders are kidnapped during the Gulf War and brainwashed. The brainwashers use the Manchurian Corporation as their front, thus justifying the retention of the title even though the Chinese are no longer the villains in this remake.
The movie is decent, not nearly as good as the original, but worth watching. Washington is particularly good; he plays Ben Marco as a man who's gradually falling apart, rather than as a square-jawed hero.
Movie Information
Running Time: 130 minutes Rating: R Director: Jonathan Demme Writers: Richard Condon (novel), George Axelrod (screenplay), Daniel Pyne, Dean Georgaris Cast:
Denzel Washington: Ben Marco Meryl Streep: Eleanor Shaw Liev Schreiber: Raymond Shaw Kimberly Elise: Rosie Vera Farmiga: Jocelyn Jordan Jon Voight: Senator Thomas Jordan David Keeley: Anderson Jeffrey Wright: Al Melvin Sakina Jaffrey: Mysterious Arabic Woman Simon McBurney: Noyle Paul Lazar: Gillespie Alyson Renaldo: Mirella Freeman Adam LeFevre: Congressman Healy Robyn Hitchcock: Laurent Tokar
Seconds is arguably director John Frankenheimer's best film. Based on the excellent novel by David Ely, in it we meet middle-aged bank executive Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph in a masterfully shaded performance) whose life is so miserable he walks as if the earth might open at any moment and swallow him whole. His job drains him of humanity. His marriage is hollow and cold. His self-respect is rattling its last breath. He doesn't know how things came to this. He knows that he was once a decent man but he isn't any longer and he can't understand why. He feels alien to the world around him.
Then one day a stranger in the subway hands him a card with an address written on it; the stranger knows Hamilton's name, and as soon as we see the expression on Hamilton's face, we know that he has some idea why he's been handed this slip of paper.
That night Hamilton is called by a supposedly dead friend. "I have a wonderful new life!" he tells Hamilton. "I'm happy, old buddy, and I want to do the same for you!"
It seems there are these "people" who can give you a new life. A new face. A new voice and identity. They can give you a life where you are successful at the thing you always dreamed of (in Hamilton's case, being a famous artist). It costs a lot, and once the process has begun there is no turning back.
Hamilton, after much soul-searching, decides to go through with it, and embarks on a chilling journey to the secret headquarters where these "people" make arrangements for a new life. (He is taken there in the back of a meat delivery truck–some of the most unnerving black-humored symbolism I've ever encountered.) There he meets with the company president (Will Geer, Grandpa Walton himself, who is quietly and absolutely terrifying in the role) who has created this program. The decision made, the work begins, and soon Hamilton is transformed into the younger, more vital Antiochus "Tony" Wilson (played by Rock Hudson), given a new profession, a new home, a new life. Things are idyllic for a while, but eventually Hamilton's conscience and its questions about his old life drive him to return to his widow in an effort to find out where he went wrong.
Frankenheimer always dealt with extremes in his best pictures, and Seconds is possibly the most extreme film he ever made. His penchant for lean storytelling and muscular pacing is at its peak here, as is his use of his ought-to-be-patented foreground framing technique.
The film's biggest surprise, perhaps, is the performance of the late Rock Hudson. In a role originally slated to be played by Laurence Olivier (who the studio decided didn't have Hudson's box-office clout), Hudson displays a depth and power that viewers of Pillow Talk would never have thought possible.
Hudson's face is a subtle prism of conflicting emotions; every joy, every sorrow, every triumph and regret is there, etched into his expressions like words on a headstone. When something hits at his core, you see it on his face–and not in any heavy-handed, watch-me, watch-me way; Hudson's performance is one of impressive constriction, understatement, and substance, heart-felt and affecting, and (like the superb performance of Tony Curtis in The Boston Strangler) a rare glimpse at a good but limited actor's one moment of true and undeniable greatness–which gives this film an added dose of bitter irony when viewed today: had Hudson lived, would he have wanted a second chance to prove his worth as an actor of substance and power?
Movie Information
Release Date: 1966 Running Time: 107 minutes Rating: R (disturbing sequences and some nudity) Color: B&W Director: John Frankenheimer Cinematographer: James Wong Howe Writers: Lewis John Carlino (screenplay), David Ely (novel) Cast:
Rock Hudson: Antiochus 'Tony' Wilson Salome Jens: Nora Marcus John Randolph: Arthur Hamilton Will Geer: Old Man Jeff Corey: Mr. Ruby Richard Anderson: Dr. Innes Murray Hamilton: Charlie Karl Swenson: Dr. Morris Khigh Dhiegh: Davalo Frances Reid: Emily Hamilton Wesley Addy: John John Lawrence: Texan Elisabeth Fraser: Blonde Dodie Heath: Sue Bushman (as Dody Heath) Robert Brubaker: Mayberry
Sorcerer, made by William Friedkin in 1977 after his triumphs and numerous awards for both The French Connection and The Exorcist, was his own Apocalypse Now: a film that went over budget and took three times as long to film as originally planned, but one denied Apocalypse's subsequent fame, notoriety, and audience interest.
A remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer tells the story of four men, all wanted criminals, who flee to a nameless Third World country to escape punishment, imprisonment, torture, or death. When a devastating oil rig explosion offers the chance to make some big money very quickly (they have to transport old crates of leaking nitroglycerin over 200 miles of treacherous mountain road), each sees a chance to get out of this hell-hole country and forge a new life elsewhere, far from their regrets and old enemies.
Screenwriter Walon Green (who co-wrote The Wild Bunch with Sam Peckinpah) foregoes a script filled with meaningful dialogue and concentrates instead on expressionistic imagery to tell large chunks of the story. This, coupled with Friedkin's flair for jittery realism, gives Sorcerer an effective and gritty documentary feel.
I greatly admire both Sorcerer and The Wages Of Fear, but find my preference leaning toward Friedkin's film, if for no other reason because Sorcerer takes the time to establish these men in their previous lives so the viewer can have some sense of what they've been forced to abandon. Sorcerer possesses emotional layers where Wages opts for the coldly intellectual, and though both films are potentially devastating to the viewer, Sorcerer remains the more humane and accessible of the two.
Movie Information
Release Date: 1977 Running Time: 121 minutes Rating: PG Director: William Friedkin Writers: Walon Green (screenplay), Georges Arnaud (1953 novel Le Salaire de la Peur) Cast:
Roy Scheider: Scanlon/Dominguez Bruno Cremer: Victor Manzon/Serrano Francisco Rabal: Nilo Amidou: Kassem/Martinez Ramon Bieri: Corlette Peter Capell: Lartigue Karl John: Marquez Frederick Ledebur: Carlos Chico Martinez: Bobby Del Rios Joe Spinell: Spider Rosario Almontes: Agrippa Richard Holley: Billy White Anne-Marie Deschott: Blanche Jean-Luc Bideau: Pascal Jacques Francois: Lefevre
Former FBI agent Robert Ressler -- he's the man who gave us the term "serial killer" -- defines "classic" mass murder as involving one mentally-disordered killer in one location who kills 4 or more other people more or less at the same time.
These days, mass murders are taking place more and more in public places like schools and businesses, but it used to be more common for mass murder to be a more private event.
I worked with a janitorial company for several years in the late 70s and early 80s, and one night I was awakened at 2 a.m. by a call from my boss asking me if I would volunteer to join a skeleton crew for an emergency job. The night would pay $300.00 for each crew member. At first, still groggy, I couldn't understand why anyone would turn down 300 bucks for four or five hours of work; then he told me why he had to call and ask for volunteers.
Three days before, a local man had snapped, killing his family and then himself. The family was a somewhat prominent one in town, and the surviving relatives wanted the house cleaned as thoroughly and as quickly as possible. Two of the family members this man had killed (with a shotgun) had been children.
I wound up cleaning the childrens' room.
You cannot help but feel the sick-making silence and overwhelming loss of life when you perform a duty like this. Three times I had to stop work to go outside to either cry or vomit. But I got that room cleaned; I wiped away every trace of those childrens' existence. There was a lot of blood, as well as other liquids, all of them dried. There was also, in places, bits of flesh and bone mixed in with that blood.
When it was all over, we collected our pay and went back to our homes. I fell asleep somewhere around nine a.m. and didn't wake up until well after four. I had thrown my clothes from that night into the corner, along with the work boots I'd been wearing. As I was gathering everything up for washing, I for some reason checked the bottoms of my boots, and found a very small but -- thanks to the mopping I'd done -- still very wet piece of human tissue wedged into the heavy treads.
I got sick all over again. This was all that remained of one of those children. But which one? And from what part of them had this been blasted? Had they died immediately or had they suffered? All this came to me in a rush and I just imploded.
Statistics and definitions don't give you any inkling of the enormity of the pain and loss a mass murder brings, nor of the nightmares the people left behind to pick up the pieces will have to endure.
When I was in the second grade at St. Francis de Sales School in Newark, Ohio, our English teacher, Sister Mary Elizabeth, required that we read aloud on Mondays and Fridays. Coming from a hard-core blue-collar background, reading was not something that was encouraged in the Braunbeck household. Not that my parents discouraged it, but because both of them worked long hours at hellish factory jobs, they were either too tired or too busy with things like bills and home repairs to find time to read much. Neither of them completed high school, and neither of them ran in social circles where "intellectual" pursuits such as reading were the norm.
No, I'm not blaming them, far from it; Mom would always buy me a book if I found one I wanted, and Dad was more than happy to read to or with me. (Aside: Mom was a big Mickey Spillane fan, and read his books whenever she could, but the only two books I ever saw her re-read were Blatty's The Exorcist and F. Paul Wilson's The Keep, which she thought was "... one of the best books I've ever read. I hope he writes another one.")
Okay, so I'm sitting there in English class one Friday, and we're taking turns reading paragraphs from some book -- I wish to hell I could remember its name -- about this kid named Johnny who works odd jobs so he can earn money to go to the movies because he likes to imagine that he's the cowboy hero or brave fighter pilot or smart detective.
Gets to be my turn, and I'm reading along -- slower than the other kids, but smoothly, nonetheless -- when I encounter a word I'd often heard but had never actually seen in print before: "aisle."
I stopped, stared at the word, and tried to figure out how to pronounce it.
Sister Mary Elizabeth made quite a show out of my inability to read this word aloud, so finally, embarrassed beyond belief, I gave it a try.
What I said was something akin to "i-sell."
Everyone laughed. Sister Mary Elizabeth told me to try it again.
I-sell. Again.
I couldn't figure out any other way to pronounce it.
Sister then pulled several other books from the shelf and opened them to selected pages, thrust them under my nose, and ordered me to read about twenty-five different words at her random choosing, all of which I'd heard, none of which I had ever seen in print before, among them "redundant", "envelope", "digestion", "automatic", and -- my personal favorite to this day -- "repetitive".
I missed every last one of them.
And everyone got a dandy guffaw out of that.
Most of the kids who attended St. Francis came from fairly well-to-do families, families who financially contributed heavily to both the church and school, who held positions on the school board or church board, and who got to wear dresses and ties to their jobs and sit behind desks.
I was one of a small handful of kids who came from, well ... not-so well-to-do families, and there was a marked difference in the way we were treated, both by our fellow students and the teachers. If one of the rich students was having difficulties, well, then, hire a tutor, arrange for special sessions with teachers after school, cut them as much slack as possible.
But if one of the poorer students was having trouble ... tough shit. Their families were barely making the quarterly tuition payments, so it wasn't worth anyone's time to give them any extra help.
Three days a week, I was provided with a free lunch because my parents couldn't afford to pay for an entire week's worth. Somehow, Sister Mary Elizabeth managed to work that into her scolding of me in front of the class that day, as well as several observations about the limited selection options available to me for my wardrobe.
"Go sit out in the hall, you're holding everyone else back, you dumb-bunny."
Dumb-bunny. Never forgot that one.
So I went out into the hall and sat there.
Which is how I came to find myself transferred to the "special" English class the following Monday.
Here is what the "special" English class consisted of:
Some assistant coach (or Darrell Sheets, the marvelous, kind man who was the school's janitor) sat at a table in the cafeteria while the rest -- there were five of us -- were seated at another table. On this table was a stack of childrens' books. Twenty of them, in fact. I remember this because these books never changed. Ever.
These were books written for children at the pre-school/kindergarten level.
This is Dick. This is his sister, Jane. Dick and Jane are playing with their Dog, Spot. "Run, Spot, run!" See Spot run. Run, Spot, run.
Goddamn page-turners were these books.
From Grade 2 until Grade 5 that is how I spent my English classes; down in the cafeteria, sitting at a table with four other "special" students, reading the same twenty books over and over. (We were not allowed to bring our own books, we had to read only those that were deemed to be "within" our "ranges of comprehension." At least at the beginning of every year they gave us twenty different books than the year before. Our big exam was to read two of them aloud at the end of the year.)
As a result of this, and the lack of reading time/assistance at home, I read at a first-grade level until the sixth grade. Even then, I was way behind the other kids. (The "special" program had been 86'd at the end of my fifth grade year because they could no longer find assistant coaches or assistant janitors who were willing to baby-sit us.)
I somehow managed to bluff my way through sixth grade English -- I squeaked by with a "C" -- but even that summer, I found that I was still having trouble reading books that, by all accounts, I should have been able to breeze through four years ago.
I was given a reading comprehension test at the start of my seventh grade year.
I was reading at a third-grade level ... and just barely at that.
But I got lucky. My English teacher that year was a terrific guy named David Kessler who had been made aware of my "learning disability" and who, even though he wasn't allowed to give me any extra help either in or outside of class, did provide me with books designed to help me read better. I guarded these books as if they were my life savings. Whenever either of them could, Mom and Dad helped me, or one of the neighbors if I offered to cut their grass. But mostly I had to do it on my own.
By the time I left the Catholic School system at the end of my eighth grade year, I was reading at the fifth-grade level.
For me, it was a personal triumph.
I haven't bothered getting myself tested in decades, because whatever level I'm reading at right now is the level I will read at until I take the Dirt Nap.
But there remain times ....
There were several sections in Dan Simmons's brilliant The Hollow Man that I had to re-read more than once before fully understanding what I was reading. As much as I admire and enjoy the work of Joe Haldeman, Harlan Ellison, and Gene Wolfe, there are times while reading them that I feel genuinely stupid, as if I'm standing there in front of Sister and the class trying to decipher "aisle" once again.
It took me three days to read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, a short novel that many people read in three hours.
To this day, I remain angry about that.
To this day, I still have trouble reading at times, and always will, and that has caused some measure of enjoyment to be subtracted from my life, and that saddens me whenever I think about it for too long, because the ability to read is one of the most precious gifts we possess.
There's a great line from William Goldman's novel The Color of Light: "Life is material; you just have to live long enough to figure out how to use it."
William Faulkner maintained that any child who managed to live past the age of seven had enough material to write books and stories for the rest of his or her life and never see the well run dry; Flannery O'Connor said much the same thing.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that if you encounter any authors who insists that their work isn't in some form autobiographical, they're lying through their teeth.
It's not only outward, chronological events that shape our psyches and determine who we become, but our own internal worlds; imagination, impressions, prejudices, fantasies, regrets, passions, likes and dislikes, all of it is eventually filtered through the writer's sensibilities to make an appearance in their work.
Sometimes a writer has to wait until he or she has gotten enough distance, both emotionally and chronologically, to turn a fiction writer's objective eye on an event. You can't use an actual occurrence from your own life and then defend it to people by saying, "But that's how it really happened." Fiction cares nothing for how an event 'really' happened, only how said event or events fit into the natural progression of the story you're telling.
You have to learn to put your ego aside when you write a story or novel, even if you're using something from your life as fictional fodder; you have to care enough to be quiet. Let the story be your guide, not your desire to inflict yourself and your views on the reader.
Everything is bigger to a child; not only physically, but perceptually and emotionally, as well. A dollar found becomes a discovered treasure. A harsh word becomes a deafening declaration of war. A heap of dirty clothes in the corner becomes a nasty, fanged monster after the lights are out. A paper cut is a knife in the stomach. And a hug from a parent in times of fear becomes Perseus's shield, protecting them from Medusa's deadly power. Everything is amplified in ways adults find hard to remember.
So can you begin to imagine, just for a moment, the terror, the pain, the agony and confusion experienced by a child whose every waking moment is marked by fear and nothing but?
Childhood is over too soon under the best of circumstances; to strip a child of their trust, to despoil them of the belief that those who love you will always protect and never harm you, to commit the obscenity of taking a child and simply, totally ruining their world, to destroy the joy in their hearts ....
It is, in my opinion, the most unpardonable and irredeemable of human crimes. Period.
If you're a fiction writer, you'll see that a lot of editors shy away from stories that involve any harm coming to a child. In some genres, portraying child abuse or child murder is seen as an unbreakable taboo, and to deal with these subjects is to risk your readership if you can even get the work published.
And it often does seem like the lowest of low pandering tactics: you want suspense? To engage a reader's emotions? Then put a child in jeopardy!
And too often it is used as a cheap effect, especially in horror and suspense. Some authors do seem to sit down to write a piece and say, "Oh, I'll throw in a dash of child abuse for added depth." To do that is not only insulting to the reader and a slap in the face to those who dedicate their lives to bettering the existence of children who are in an abusive situation, but it serves to numb people to the plight of these children.
But I believe there's room for honest portrait of it in good fiction. Not to use a tale as bully pulpit or soapbox decrying child abuse, but to genuinely explore how abuse affects the human condition through the eyes of a story's characters.
If you write fiction about child abuse, probably the most important thing to remember is to keep your work from becoming what Ray Garton once called "whacking material for pedophiles." It's a hard thing to keep a graphic scene from becoming inadvertently titillating -- and sometime a story genuinely needs a graphic depiction.
To use what is probably my most uncomfortable example, take "Some Touch of Pity," a novella that appeared in Marty Greenberg's Werewolves. Anyone who's ever read that story remembers the rape scene. I agonized over that thing for weeks, not the least of which because I didn't want any element of that scene to seem even remotely titillating. Marty, God bless him, understood that a graphic presentation of the rape was integral to the story -- the central character relives this moment from his childhood on an almost hourly basis, it's what defined his view of himself, and it's what keeps him standing at arm's length from his own true heart. But Marty said that as the scene stood, it would be just too much for DAW. Understood.
I rewrote the scene so that the reader experienced it only through the sensations and impressions that the child could identify. That's the version that was published in the anthology. It was still effective, but it didn't pull the reader nose-first into the painful, filthy, bottomless pit of the character's suffering. So, when it came time to include the story in my first collection, I restored the rape scene to its original form, which is much more direct, unflinching, and brutal.
God, how I lost sleep over that. I worried that people would read it and think I was simply trying to shock them in the most depraved manner. I worried that readers would find the story offensive and unreadable. Then I realized that, with all the worries I was dredging up, the one which never crossed my mind was: is it necessary to be this graphic?
The story informed me that, yes, it was necessary to present it in this way. I'm relieved to say that, in the years since I published the uncut version, not one person has accused me of being irresponsible in telling the story in the manner that it required. Writing that story was a gut-wrenching experience, but ultimately I think it was worth it.
Memorial Day by Harry Shannon Five Star Press, 2004
For those of you who have read Shannon’s previous novels, Night of the Beast and Night of the Werewolf, it will come as no surprise that his latest novel crackles with the same brittle dialogue and muscular prose he’s been honing over the past few years. What might surprise you is that Memorial Day isn’t a horror novel — at least, not in the commercial/marketing sense.
Memorial Day is very much a noir mystery novel, and with only a few minor bumps along the way, Shannon makes the kind of smooth transition between genres that most writers can only dream about. Reading like a cross between Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show and Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, the novel tells the story of psychologist/television celebrity Mick Callahan, who, as the novel opens, has hit rock bottom thanks to booze, drugs, women, and his own out of control ego. With nothing left and nowhere to go, he accepts a job hosting a radio talk show in his home town of Dry Wells, Nevada. One of the callers to whom he speaks one night is murdered, and Mick–who made his reputation on television partly by investigative reporting–takes it upon himself to track down the murderer.
Fairly straightforward, traditional mystery elements, yes, but what makes Memorial Day stand apart from the majority of first mystery novels is Shannon’s unflinching, lean, and unsentimental portrayal not only of Callahan, but of all the characters who populate Dry Wells. Not only is Callahan trying to get his life back on track, not only is he dealing with a truckload of guilt carried over from his previous life, not only does he make enemies out of seemingly most of Dry Wells’ population, but he’s also dealing with memories of his own abusive childhood that are being brought to the surface as his investigation uncovers tawdry secret after tawdry secret.
These are a lot of character elements to deal with in a novel; that Shannon not only grapples with these elements but resolves them — and does so in a tight 266 pages — but he also draws fully three-dimensional characterizations for everyone in Dry Wells that Callahan comes into contact with. No easy feat, and one cannot help but applaud Shannon’s craftsmanship.
Which is not to say that everything is on solid ground; there are times when a line of dialogue comes off as self-consciously noir-ish ("You might as well paint a target on your forehead", "This town’s got a lot of dirty little secrets", "You move, you die" etc.), one very important clue is delivered in too-obvious manner, and in the final third of novel, Callahan suffers one brutal beating after another, only to quickly recover and come back for more.
But these are, in the end, minor quibbles that do not adversely affect the overall strength and readability of Memorial Day; at best, they reduce a **** novel to ***1/2.
With Memorial Day, Shannon has made a strong and memorable mystery debut. Mick Callahan has the makings of a fascinating series character in the traditional of Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain or Andrew Vachss’ Burke. Personally, I think it’s high time we had a new series character like Callahan, and a new mystery writer as skillful as Shannon. Even if mystery is not your usual cup of tea, I still highly recommend Memorial Day.
100 Jolts: Shockingly Short Stories by Michael A. Arnzen Raw Dog Screaming Press
Those of you who have visited Arnzen's web site, or the Raw Dog Screaming Press site, or have already purchased this book, know that I provided a blurb for the cover, so you can safely assume that this is going to be a positive review. I stand by what I said in my blurb, but decided I wanted all of you to know why I said it.
Of all story forms, the short-short (defined as a story clocking in at 1000 words or less) is by far the most difficult, and the one that can often defeat even the most seasoned writer. The short-short requires a poet's skill at encapsulation of imagery and ideas, as wells as the fiction writer's ability to employ these same elements in the telling of a cohesive and coherent story — and I emphasize those two words because (more often than not) the short-shorts that appear in the horror field are written by folks who mistakenly assume that those terms are mutually exclusive, which they are most decidedly not.
Even the most surreal of short-shorts must adhere to the structure and internal logic of the short story, regardless of how dreamlike and bizarre the prose might be. The late Donald Barthelme was arguably the master of this particular form of story, but with 100 Jolts, Arnzen, without laying claim to it, emerges as the inheritor of Barthelme's crown.
Consider the following story, used here in its entirety:
A Worse Mousetrap
As I type, the mouse climbs my shoulder and leaps into my breast pocket. I laugh when his furry gray head pops out. He twitters his whiskers, watching as I finish my apology. I hug him against my heart. Later, I will sign my note as the rat poison makes it way through my system.
Looks easy, doesn't it?
Trust me, it's not.
In five sentences–count 'em, five–Arnzen not only employs the poet's skill at encapsulation and the storyteller's ability to form a cohesive and coherent narrative, but also manages to leave a great deal of the horror unspoken. This is a complete story in every sense of the word; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; it has a central conflict; and it adheres to the single most important rule of fiction: its central character undergoes a change between the start and the finish. That Arnzen chooses to convey this through subtleties rather than graphic depictions makes it even more effective and affecting, adding a great deal of power to that final line.
Every story in 100 Jolts does this, seemingly effortlessly, time and time again.
One of this collection's most jaw-dropping achievement comes at the very beginning with the section entitled "Skull Fragments"; it contains 12 separate short-shorts, all of which can stand on their own as disturbing horror stories, but when taken as a whole, tell a 13th and even more deeply nightmarish tale.
I think 100 Jolts is a remarkable achievement, and a book that all serious readers of horror fiction should have in their hands and on their shelves.
Sam Peckinpah is the director who redefined screen violence; he is also one of my all-time favorite filmmakers.
He was born in Fresno, California on February 21, 1925 and died of a heart attack in 1984. In between, he was married five times and directed over a dozen ground-breaking films, mainly in the 60s and 70s.
He grew up on a ranch in the California mountains. His father was a judge, and Peckinpah was a rowdy teenager who eventually enlisted in the Marines. He was never put into combat, though.
After his discharge, he discovered theater and eventually got his lucky break in the early 50s when respected Hollywood director Don Siegel hired him as an assistant at Allied Artists. Peckinpah began writing scripts (he helped rewrite and had a small role in 1956's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers") and got his first job directing in 1958 when he did an episode of the television series "Broken Arrow". His feature-length directorial debut was 1961's "The Deadly Companions".
Peckinpah, with films such as "Major Dundee" and "Ride the High Country", easily established himself as a great American director. Critics were quick (before "The Wild Bunch", anyway) to mention his name alongside those of John Ford and Howard Hawks.
Peckinpah hated it.
He hated it because in the "good old" Western the only characters an audience was asked to sympathize wih were, naturally, the good guys like Randolph Scott and Chuck Heston. When the so-called "bad guys" got blown away, it was supposed to make an audience cheer wildly.
Which, as Peckinpah was quick to point out, completely robbed the "Bad Guys" of any humanity whatsoever. Peckinpah was also quick to point out that the "bad guys" in "Shane" were given full identities, so why couldn't this be a trend that could set itself firmly in the American Western?
Because no one is supposed to care about the bad guys.
Peckinpah then set out to make an "anti-Western." A film that, while it might be set in the West, horses and posses intact, had nothing else in common with the type of films he'd been making -- and despising.
That film was "The Wild Bunch". In it audiences met the likes of Pike (William Holden in one of his finest hours) and his gang, a run-down, over-the-hill bunch of outlaws who time and progress has caught up with. They were old, tired, anachronistic, looking for a way out. Audiences learned to sympathize with these men as the film progressed, even side with them and, in the film's historic finale -- almost folklore now -- watch them die in blood-drenched slow motion, every agonized twitch dwelt upon until their mangled bodies lay dead before the camera.
Here was Peckinpah's genius with his bloody ballet of death: he'd made a Western, all right, but he'd shown it from the "bad guy's" point of view, and no one cheered when they died. The black and white way of presenting right and wrong was forever destroyed, and the myth of the American Western was forever debunked.
Peckinpah was then asked why he chose to make the violence so bloody, and why he chose to film it in slow motion. His reply (which I cannot quote verbatim) was something along these lines: "I thought audiences should be given a good, clear look at what they've been cheering all these years."
Peckinpah was accused throughout his career of glorifying violence, but he insisted he was doing the direct opposite: showing how repulsive it was by dwelling on it so much.
Partial Filmography:
"The Deadly Companions" (1961) "Ride the High Country" (1962) "Major Dundee" (1965) "The Wild Bunch" (1969) "Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1970) "Straw Dogs" (1971) "The Getaway" (1972) "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" (1973) "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" (1974) "Killer Elite" (1975) "Cross of Iron" (1977) "Convoy" (1978) "The Osterman Weekend" (1983)
I was in the sixth grade when I decided I wanted to become a writer.
I was not -- big surprise here -- a very social or popular kid. I had a geek haircut and thick, Coke-bottle glasses with dark frames. I wore clashing strains of plaid. I looked like the secret son that Buddy Holly kept chained up in his basement.
One Friday in English class we were given back our spelling tests from the previous day (I got a C -- a pretty typical grade for me then). Our teacher, a great guy named Steve Shroeder, informed us that our next assignment, to be done in class that day, was to select seven words from the test and write a story using those words. Everyone groaned, including me.
Then I picked up my pencil and started writing.
Twenty minutes or so later, everyone else is sitting there staring at their papers and I'm still cranking. I wrote right up until the lunch bell rang.
It was a child's first attempt at a horror story. All about a haunted house and a photographer who snaps a picture of the moment of his own death three days before it happens and doesn't discover it until he's developing the pictures and sees himself standing in his darkroom, looking at a newly developed photograph, while behind him this slimy, awful monster is creeping through the wall behind him. He turns around just in time to see a clawed hand reach for his face. The end.
I figured the story was going to get me in trouble -- I attended a Catholic grade school and most of the faculty -- nuns and otherwise -- thought I was "disturbed." (I lost count of how many times I was called into Sister Barbara's office for a "chat" about "my problems getting along with the others.")
The next day, Mr. Shroeder hands back the papers. He had written a big-ass "A+" in bright red ink at the top of my paper, and on the back of the last page he wrote: "Great story. You should do more."
I had written stories before that I'd kept to myself for fear of how people would react to them. This was the first time anyone had ever read something of mine -- and an adult, no less -- and they'd really liked it. It was the first time in my entire childhood I suddenly felt like I wasn't useless.
I don't know about you, but if I encounter one more horror writer (in most cases, this would be a new writer) who prefaces his or her name with:
"The New Bad Boy/Bad Girl of Horror"
"The New Queen of Terror"
"The New Prince of Dark Fiction"
"The New Court Second-Scribe in Charge of Queasy Sensations at The Pit Of Your Tummy"
... or some-such other b.s. handle designed to draw attention to the writer rather than the work, I'm going to climb a tower with a rifle, I swear it.
(Wouldn't it be interesting to have someone call themselves "The Nice Guy Of Horror" or "The Courteous Queen Of Terror" or "The Really Swell Dude of Dark Fiction"? I'd actually remember that, and would probably seek out their work to read just because they were clever enough to do it.)
Sometimes -- dash, repeat, italicize -- sometime these monikers are created not by the writers themselves, but, rather, by reviewers.
One case of a writer who's employed a moniker he or she didn't create her- or himself is that of John Paul Allen, one helluva nice guy and author of the novel Gifted Trust. A reviewer for that novel dubbed Allen "...the father of nightmares."
An interviewer who read that review used the phrase to introduce Allen, so it comes as no suprise that Allen has used that phrase in publicity releases -- and why the hell shouldn't he? It's an eye-catching, memorable phrase that is going to go a long way in helping potential readers remember his name. He didn't come up with it and decide to label himself, and any writer who's handed an unsolicited blurb like that is a fool not to get as much mileage as he can out of it. Yes, writing a strong novel is damned important, but once the work is published, it all boils down to bidness and marketing, and anything that draws attention to your work can and should be used to your advantage. So, good for John Paul.
However.
I have come across (or been introduced to, unsolicited) a number of writers who, both on-line and at conventions, assume a "persona" not only for the benefit of their readers (assuming they actually have any, as they claim), but for that of other writers and editors, as well.
When asked why they insist on assuming these personae, every last one of them (at least, to whom I have spoken) have answered with something like: "Because I want readers/editors/other writers to remember me. It's a way of making a strong impression."
On the surface, it might be seem like a good answer, but it reminds me of a snippet from a Bill Cosby routine wherein two guys are talking about cocaine usage; the first guy asks the second one, "What's the attraction?", and the second guys answers, "Well, cocaine intensifies your personality." To which the first guy responds: "Yes, but what if you're an asshole?"
If you focus the majority of your energy on perfecting a "persona" so that other writers/readers/editors/artists will remember you, then I guaran-flippin'-tee you that you'll succeed; they'll remember you.
But ask them to name a piece of your work and see what happens; you could probably hear a gnat fart in the silence that will follow. Which is precisely what you'll merit; if you choose to make it all about you rather than the work, then you richly deserve the disdain and/or obscurity that is coming your way.
I can say this without fear of reprisal because I do not have a persona; I barely have a personality. Trust me on this.
Abuse of the first sale doctrine is fairly rampant in the small-press bookselling world. This is a real sore spot with me, and is going to take some explaining, so get comfortable.
You have possibly encountered on-line booksellers who offer copies of books (often books they did not themselves publish) for outlandish prices. I myself have seen copies of my Cemetery Dance collection Things Left Behind going for as much as $1,750.00 (which, by the way, is a good deal more than I received for writing it; not bitching about what Rich Chizmar paid me for it, not at all, but I would dearly love to have more than one copy of my first book but that ain't gonna happen because I can't afford the prices many places are charging for it). The sold-out release of Borderlands 5 turned up at several on-line auctions within days of its publication with bids starting -- starting -- at between $200.00 and $500.00.
There are some who mistakenly think this sort of thing is illegal; it isn't. It is allowed under what's know as the first sale doctrine.
According to Section 109 of the U.S. Copyright Act, whoever first purchases the physical copy of a copyrighted work (a book, a DVD, VHS tape, CD, etc.) has the right to do with that copy whatever they want, including transfer ownership of that physical copy in any manner they choose. They can give it away, sell it to some place like Half-Price Books, or offer it up for on-line auction. The doctrine deals with the physical object, not the intellectual or artistic expression contained within. For more info, read Lucy's article "Why you can rent a novel but not a music CD".
Here's what pisses me off about this: there are some booksellers and individuals who will purchase and hoard multiple copies of a book with no concern for the work, the author, or the work's fans -- they couldn't give less of shit about the quality of the stories or the novel. What they're concerned with is obtaining as many physical copies as possible because (as was the case with Borderlands 5) a particular book might sell out very quickly, and they, in turn, can sell their copies at a price that is sometimes as much as 700% higher than what they paid for it originally.
When confronted with their unapologetic avarice (and avarice it is, make no mistake about that), they will inevitably defend their actions by claiming that they've every right to turn a profit on their investment...and then probably have the nerve to bitch about having to pay four bucks a gallon for gas because OPEC are a bunch of greedy bastards. What's wrong with this picture?
Understand something: I am not condemning specialty-press publishers like, say, Donald Grant, who produce exquisite (and justifiably expensive) limited editions of books geared toward book collectors -- those rare birds who have a deep and abiding respect both for the physical object and the work contained within and who, it should go without saying, can afford these editions. Nor am I condemning any specialty-press publisher who at a later date offers up copies of a book they've previously published at a higher price: after all, it's their product, and if they can find a buyer for their product, more power to 'em.
I am also not condemning those who offer up for auction or re-sale books with the intent of using the money to assist others who are struggling with financial hardship or to fund charity drives.
My problem lies with those who buy books solely for the purpose of re-selling them at obscenely inflated prices so as to fatten their personal pockets just because they can.
No, it isn't illegal, but in my book it is (and always will be) reprehensible and immoral. Which is why I do not buy books from sellers who engage in this practice, be they on-line or in the dealers' room at a con. As far as I'm concerned, it's price gouging if I see a book selling at more than twice its original asking price. I'm not completely unreasonable about this; I realize that booksellers have to make a certain amount of profit to stay in business and cover basic operating costs, so doubling the price of a sold-out or out-of-print book strikes me as equitable and fair, but beyond that -- I walk away.
And God help 'em if they have the nerve to ask me to sign any books for them so they can jack up the price even more.
My pet peeve for the day is people who claim to be an "expert" on horror, or science fiction, or mysteries, or any other literary genre because they've read absolutely everything by just a single famous author in that genre ... and smugly refuse to read anything else.
Odds are, you've met someone who's this type of "expert". You've probably had to endure their homilizing endlessly about their extensive knowledge of the field based on having read only Stephen King or Clive Barker or Robert Heinlein or Robert Jordan or Agatha Christie or Or OR ... (not slamming these writers, get it? Got it? Good.)
And you have undoubtedly heard these "experts" dismiss out of hand any writer who isn't King or Rice or Barker or Or OR... because these "experts" don't want to expand their understanding and appreciation of the rich diversity of fiction offered elsewhere because to do so would be to admit (to themselves and others) that they don't really have the slightest goddamn idea what they're talking about.
For someone to claim they're an "expert" on horror or fantasy or mysteries or science fiction based solely on having read everything written by a single author is tantamount to my claiming to be an "expert" on automobile mechanics because I've read the owner's manual that's stuffed in the glove compartment of my wife's Toyota.
Try this little experiment: the next time you find yourself confronted by one of these "experts", politely interrupt them and ask them how they feel about, say, the influence M.R. James' or Nathaniel Hawthorne's work might have had on King or Rice or Barker or Or OR ... and see how quickly that stops their lecture mid-sentence.
And if they can't answer because it's obvious they've never read (or, in most cases, even heard of) James or Hawthorne or Matheson or Blackwood Or Or OR... tell them to shut the fuck up, then go have an intelligent conversation with someone who has the brains to admit they don't know everything.
In the meantime: read, people. Read lots. And for God's sake, read outside your genre.
This is a low-budget, sleazy, but high-spirited dirty movie from 1980 that has aged less well than many of the B-grade actors who starred in it. Adam West (Batman from the old TV series) is the most recognizable star, appearing as Lionel Lamely. The movie is supposed to show how the first "Happy Hooker" movie got made in Hollywood and is mainly a string of party sequences.
While it's pretty awful to the modern moviegoing eye, it does have a few amusing bits.
My favorite moment happens when Richard Deacon (you might remember him better as Mel, the befuddled producer on The Dick Van Dyke Show) in the role of a shifty Hollywood producer, is negotiating with a certain female author for the rights to film her book; the author tells him that she wants to make sure the essence of her book is captured by the filmmakers, and to this Deacon replies:
"Books, schmooks! Who do you know who reads books? Books are made for coffee tables or for something to look at while you're sitting on the toilet...but movies! Movies are for people with vision!"
I found it funny the first time I heard it, and I find it sharply perceptive now, something you'd never expect from a nervous-Nelly soft-core porno movie.
Movie Info
Rating: R Alternate Title: Hollywood Blue Running Time: 88 minutes Director: Alan Roberts Writer: Devin Goldberg Cast:
Martine Beswick: Xaviera Hollander Chris Lemmon: Robby Rottman Adam West: Lionel Lamely Richard Deacon: Joseph Phil Silvers: Warkoff Charles Green: Lawyer George Lisa London: Laurie
I've been to a lot of science fiction conventions, and while there are always perfectly intelligent, pleasant, courteous, well-read people at such gatherings, you inevitably run into those skiffy fans who are missing a lot in the way of clue.
Here's a list of things these folks have actually said to me at conventions, plus the responses I sometimes wished I'd given:
Q: "You're a horror writer?" *smirks* "So tell me a scary story." A: There once was a writer who killed several innocent people in a hotel lobby because one person too many asked him to tell them something scary and he just snapped....
Q: "What's your name again? Hmm ... never heard of you." A: And what do you do for a living? ... Really? You actually made a conscious decision to make that your life's work? For the love of God, man, WHY?
Q: "So you, like, write that Friday the 13th stuff, huh?" A: So you, like, have a reasonable dental deductible, right?
Q: "Do you know Stephen King? What's he really like?" A: So you, like, have a reasonable dental deductible, right?
Q: "You write horror? Ew!" A: Phuck-u barada nikto.
Q: "I can't write, but I've got a great idea for a book; you can write it and we'll split the money, okay?" A: Oh, MAY I? How long have I dreamed of this moment, when a selfless soul such as yourself would deem me worthy to WRITE SOMETHING FOR THEM while they sit on their ass and do nothing? How long have I prayed for yet ANOTHER person who isn't me to make money off my efforts while I work 3 jobs, turn insomnia into an art form, and eat macaroni & cheese four times a week? BLESS YOU, SELFLESS ONE! BLESS YOU!
Q: "Why are you openly weeping?" (Usually asked after forty-seven minutes of sitting at an autograph table where the only person to approach you is an overweight drunk from the NASCAR convention sharing the hotel that weekend asking for directions to the "sh*thouse".) A: I want my mommy; my mommy reads all my books.
Q: "Oh, I don't read books." A: Then WHAT are you doing here? Oh, you're a hooker? Here's a fifty -- there's a guy over at the autograph table who's openly weeping; go cheer him up, would you?
Early on in Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, one secondary character remarks: "Be content with your lot in life, no matter how poor it may be. Only then can you expect mercy."
No other American director has understood or been able to capture the Mexican "culture of poverty" as unflinchingly as Peckinpah. Though Garcia may not be Peckinpah's best film (it continues to appear on several "All Time Worst" lists), it is without a doubt his most personal. From its lovely opening image (a young pregnant Mexican woman resting by a river, sunning herself) to its harrowing closing shot (a smoking Gatling gun), Garcia is unique, for no other film of Peckinpah's has so seamlessly managed to contain every element this often-brilliant director was obsessed with exploring: love, betrayal, desperation, tenderness in the face of brutality, loneliness, helplessness, anger, the struggle of integrity vs. conformity, friendship, and, of course, the futility of violence.
Peckinpah was accused throughout his career of glorifying violence, but he insisted he was doing the direct opposite: showing how repulsive it was by dwelling on it so much -- and on no film was he more accused of glorifying the violence he claimed to disdain than in Garcia.
The basic story goes like this: The beautiful daughter of a wealthy and powerful Mexican land baron is seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by one Alfredo Garcia, a shameless gambler/drunkard/womanizer. The land baron, El Jefe, assembles his soldiers and declares his outrage at the loss of his daughter's (and subsequently the lessening of his own) honor, and shouts: "Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia!" And like the Knights of the Round Table questing for the Holy Grail, El Jefe's army is off and running.
Into this scenario enters an American expatriate named Bennie (Warren Oates) who is biding his time playing piano in a sleazy Mexico City bar. He is approached by two gangsters he often works for as a bagman (Robert Webber and Gig Young) who have been authorized to offer him a substantial piece of change if he'll hunt down and decapitate Alfredo Garcia. Bennie, despite many indecent instincts he's been trying to kill, accepts the offer, telling them he can use the money to take himself and his girlfriend, Elita (Isela Vega, who remains the strongest female character to appear in a Peckinpah movie) somewhere far away and begin a new life.
Along the twisted way, Bennie proposes to Elita in what is arguably the most heartfelt and sadly moving scene Peckinpah ever filmed. The two run into and overcome several obstacles in their way (yes, I'm being deliberately vague here) before they find themselves at a rotting, neglected graveyard where the careless Garcia, shot by a gambling partner, is now buried.
The first half of this film has the loose narrative structure of an obscure European import; in fact, in places, it gets downright eccentric -- but I still say this film was condemned only because it came from Peckinpah; had it come from a director from New Zealand or France, critics would have drowned it in praise.
"Why does he think of this as a horror movie?" I hear you ask.
Because from the moment Bennie and Elita enter that wretched graveyard in the middle of the night, Garcia employs not only the classic visual elements of old horror movies (circling bats, wolves howling in the distance, misshapen shadows skulking in the background) but its heart and soul surrender to the horrific as well. The shadow-drenched grave robbing sequence is truly nightmarish, and from that scene on, the film begins a fast descent through all nine circles of Dante's Hell as Bennie makes his way across country with Garcia's decomposing head inside a wet burlap bag that is perpetually swarming with flies.
"Just you and me, Al, baby!" says Bennie, who spends the second half of the film slowly going insane. Warren Oates (who was infuriatingly underrated for most of his career) gives a fabulous performance as Bennie, making the man at once repulsive, sympathetic, heroic, romantic, and tragic. His fascinating and complex characterization was easily the best American film performance of 1974, yet was ignored by virtually everyone when it came time to hand out those overrated golden statuettes.
Bennie's "relationship" with Garcia's head gets so creepy by the film's end that I refuse to spoil it for you by going into any more details; suffice it to say that Bennie not only talks to Al, but often stops in the middle of a sentence to listen as Al gives him advice. (And that's not even the weird part.)
I am convinced that John McNaughton drew some of his visual and thematic inspiration for Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer from the second half of Garcia. Watch both films back-to-back and you might think you've just watched then first two movies in an uncompleted trilogy.
Movie Information
Rating: R Release Year: 1974 Running Time: 112 minutes Director: Sam Peckinpah Writers: Gordon T. Dawson, Frank Kowalski, Sam Peckinpah Main Cast:
Warren Oates: Bennie Isela Vega: Elita Robert Webber: Sappensly Gig Young: Quill Helmut Dantine: Max Emilio Fernandez: El Jefe Kris Kristofferson: Paco
A writer friend of mine was busy making final revisions on a story he was planning to submit to an anthology. He asked me if I wold look at his story and offer suggestions and opinions. I read the story over, and while a full 75% of it was rock-solid, the final sequence seemed to me to fall victim to over-ripe melodrama.
Now, instead of just saying outright that the finale was over-baked (and a bit nonsensical), I instead pointed out to him what I saw as the place where the story wandered off the highway. It had to do specifically with the nature of a central character's physical and spiritual metamorphosis mid-way through on which the rest of the story's events were hinged. The precise nature of this metamorphosis, and what the character intended to accomplish with it, were unclear and -- I felt -- because of their nebulousness, robbed the story of any impact; instead, they had chosen to finish things off with a (figurative) loud and histrionic display of horrific fireworks.
I began asking him specific questions about the precise nature of this character's physical and spiritual metamorphosis: what exact physical change was taking place, how it affected the character's ultimate goal, and what that ultimate goal was supposed to be.
"What exactly is the nature of this change?" I asked.
"It's a supernatural transformation," was his reply.
"But a supernatural transformation into what, exactly?"
"I don't know...it's just a supernatural transformation," he again said.
"That's not good enough," I replied. "In order for you to get from the mid-point of the story to a more logical, chilling, and less cartoonish ending, you have to know exactly the nature of this transformation, how it affects the character's psychological and spiritual make-up, and what the character's ultimate goal is once this transformation has been completed."
Now, I thought this was a fairly clear, concise, and thoughtful piece of criticism. My writer friend, after throwing up his hands and sighing loudly in frustration, looked me right in the eyes and said: "Dude, it's just horror! It's not like science fiction where these kinds of specific details matter!"
No, I did not kill him, but I did make it clear that they had not only just insulted and trivialized the horror genre, but also (intentionally or not) my life's work.
I don't know anyone who would enjoy hearing their life's work reduced to a triviality, do you?
Now, in my writer friend's defense, he was dealing with a story that had been giving them problems for a while; so much so that it had been put away and only recently approached again.
I would also add that this writer has not written or read as much horror as he have science fiction and fantasy.
I would also add that he had been having a really, really bad couple of weeks personally, and as a result felt like I was attacking them.
That said (and, yes, he apologized later when he realized the remark -- however off-hand -- had offended me), his comment encapsulated for me, with disturbingly and depressingly crystal clarity, why it is that a lot of horror stories and novels being published are of an at-best journeyman quality.
It's because too many writers think, Dude, it's just horror! Too many writers think that it's okay to just say "...it's a supernatural transformation", and leave it at that, because once you've let the demon out, you don't really need to think about the Hows and Whys and How-Comes; once the Boogeyman is boogying, the details don't matter, just so long as it's exciting or suspenseful or horrific.
Wrong.
It is exactly when the Glop is slurping victims left and right that you most need to think about the details. Every story -- no matter how believable or outrageous its premise -- must follow its own internal logic; it must establish the rules for its own microcosmic universe and then adhere to those rules. Fairly basic stuff, unless you think it isn't necessary to bother establishing those rules in the first place.
Let me give you an example: the first Jeepers Creepers movie. Throughout the story, all we know about the Creeper is: he's a demon (and even that much is left for us to infer, rather than directly established). Nowhere in the first film does the writer bother establishing the Creeper's precise nature; we don't know where it came from, what it wants, why it wants it, or what, exactly, the Creeper plans to accomplish through its actions. As a result of the Creeper's nature and powers never being established, the story leaves it wide open for it to behave however it needs to in order to keep the story suspsenseful.
That's not necessarily a good thing; yes, because neither the audience nor the characters in the film know the Creeper's precise nature, it is impossible to predict what it will do next, and by default that should have generated more suspense...but it doesn't quite work. It's the very unpredictability of the Creeper's actions that works against the second half of the film, preventing it from reaching the dizzying levels of suspense that mark the first forty minutes; if we, the audience, had been given some vague idea of the Creeper's nature, had we been given just a few rules, had just a few details been established, then we wouldn't have felt so much that the writer was simply pulling things out of his ying-yang in order to make the next scene SPOOOOOOOKY.
It's sloppy storytelling, pure and simple.
Conversely, the reason Jeepers Creepers 2 was a much better-written movie was because the writer took the time to painstakingly establish the background elements lacking in the first film; because we did know the Creeper's nature, what it wanted, why, and -- an old trick that always works -- that it was functioning under a time limit, the second film generated and maintained a high level of suspense that was both intense and followed the internal logic set down by the ground rules. No, it ain't Lawrence of Arabia, but on terms of storytelling, it's light-years ahead of the first movie.
If you think I'm making a tempest in a teapot here, consider this: Stephen King went back and revised the first four Dark Tower books so that they better followed the internal logic and ground rules that emerged as he wrote the last three novels in the series; he did this because the details are important; he did this because, as a writer, he was not content to simply let gaffes in continuity remain uncorrected.
He did this because he takes his work very seriously, and part of taking it seriously means that you think about the details, you follow your own ground rules, and you (as the late Theodore Sturgeon so eloquently phrased it) ask the next questions: What is the true nature of the beast? Why does this happen? What does he or she want? What brought them here? Etc.
No, you don't have to offer these answers outright during the course of the story, but you, as the writer, have to know these answers yourself, for if you start your novel, novella, or short story with all the answers already in mind, you'd be surprised at how quickly and clearly your story will follow a logical course of events wherein these answers are shown to the reader through the actions of the characters or the progression of events.
The details are important, folks. They are vital. They are not to be dismissed off-handedly, because it ain't just horror: it's a question of careful storytelling, because it's only through genuine craftsmanship that we can offer readers a much richer and rewarding reading experience than just tossing the details out the window and just being SPOOOOOOOKY.
Ghosts of Yesterday by Jack Cady Night Shade Books, 2003 ISBN: 1892389487 hardcover
Early in 2003, Night Shade Books released a stellar collection of 12 short stories and essays from the superb (and now deceased, sadly) Jack Cady that any serious readers of fantasy or horror should have on their shelves.
Ghosts of Yesterday is the best single-author collection I've read in five years. It's composed of 30,000 words of entirely new fiction, plus pieces that hadn't been in collections before.
Ghosts contains one of the best short stories I've ever read in any genre, "The Lady With The Blind Dog." The story -- like the collection itself -- is by turns thoughtful, sad, frightening, tragic, and, in the end, majestically chilling. You'd also do well to pay close attention to the essay "On Writing The Ghost Story" and the novella "The Time That Time Forgot."
Cady knows how to do it right, and makes the work produced by most of us look like high-school level attempts at Lit-rah-chure. Get it and read it. Do it now. The man's memory deserves nothing less from us.
I immersed myself in Robert McCammon's Speaks the Nightbird for days. I first read it in 2002 when it was released in hardback by River City Publishing (Pocket Books put out the paperback version in 2003). It had been over a decade since McCammon last produced a novel; Nightbird reads astonishingly quickly for its near 700-page length, and McCammon's prose is as smooth, poetic, and unselfconscious as it has ever been.
Writing a period piece like this is never an easy task, but McCammon manages to make the dialogue spoken by the characters ring true in modern-day readers' ears, and his narrative passages easily rank alongside anything written by the Bronte Sisters or Jane Austen; yes, there's a certain--and necessary--austere quality to the language, but McCammon never once gets bogged down by the challenges of this particular brand of prose.
His characterization is crystalline; from the major players to even the smallest supporting roles, not one person who populates this book rings a false note--and considering the size of Nightbird 's cast (were David Lean still alive, he might well be planning this novel for his next gargantuan production), that is no small feat.
The overriding triumph of this genuinely magnificent novel is the utter believability of its core love story (and it should be noted here that, despite the death, hopelessness, and violence that surrounds the cast, there are several different types of love stories that run through this novel, one that easily takes it place in the classical Romantic tradition of Jane Eyre or Silas Marner).
It would have been easy--and arguably justified--to present the love story between Matthew and Rachel in an overly-passionate, smoldering, Sturm-und-Drang manner, playing its inherently tragic aspects to the hilt in the tradition of Victorian drama or grand opera, but McCammon has a much more subtle and affecting way of playing out the romance between his two central characters. They come together because of a mutual alienation with their fellow human beings, and because each is, at their core, a painfully lonely person who each have come to believe they will exit this life without ever having truly loved or been loved, without touching another person, without moving another human being, and in each the other finds a a hard, gem-like flame of hope amidst the madness and squalor of the times in which they are trapped.
You also cannot help but shake your head in wonder at the staggering amount of research that McCammon put into this novel, and in the way he makes this research necessary to the story's unfolding--not just as some expositional dump that screams, "Hey, lookit me! I done did all this here research and I'm gonna cram every last bit of it down your throat!" McCammon doesn't do that here--doesn't even come close. The historical accuracy present in these pages is not only impressive but vital to the deeper levels of the narrative. Plus it's all damned interesting, if at times blackly depressing.
Finishing this novel left me saddened--not because of the final outcome of the story, which is both inevitable and moving and therefore as satisfying as you could hope for, given the subject matter; no, it saddened me because, as McCammon has said, this does not signal his return to writing. In an interview I recently read, McCammon stated that one of the reasons he left the horror field was because it had become a literature that (his exact words following) "...celebrates death," and he no longer wishes to be a part of that.
Speaks the Nightbird is filled with death, but ultimately celebrates life and the possibilities offered to even the most despondent soul by love and faith. Finishing this novel made me wish McCammon would consider the contradiction at the center of his reasoning: yes, maybe horror/dark fantasy/whatever in the hell they're calling it this month...maybe it had been reduced to a literature that celebrated death, but the tide is turning, and now, more than ever, the field needs McCammon's skill and humanity to become what he himself once referred to as "...the supreme mythic literature of our time."
But let's face it; as much as we as readers (and myself as a writer for whom McCammon's craft and skill served as a strong influence) might bemoan the absence of further McCammon books, we are lucky to have this one. And the happiness of no readership--regardless how large or feverishly dedicated that readership may be--is worth any writer's peace of mind and happiness. Maybe McCammon will return to the field one day, and maybe not: I, for one, thank him regardless, for he has given me so many wonderful tales to remember and to which I can return anytime I choose. Like this one.
Speaks the Nightbird, aside from being probably the best novel you'll read this year, proves that, in hands like McCammon's, horror (in all its facets and forms, not just the traditional, boring, pale tropes), could very well fulfill that promise that he himself so eloquently foresaw. It's just a pity that the field let him down and we lost a man who was easily the most passionate and humane dark fantasist of his time. Speaks the Nightbird will leave you hoping, as it did me, that the much-missed Mr. McCammon will someday come back to us--or, rather, allow us to join back with him.
If you enjoy truly disturbing and mind-warping films, check out Robert Altman's 1972 film Images. It's an often horrific study of a children's author (played by Susannah York) and her rapid descent into genuine schizophrenia and paranoia.
The movie is just amazing, beautifully shot and directed to keep you off-balance. It also features a very interesting, pre-Star Wars score by John Williams.
Images is available on MGM DVD for about 10 bucks and should be seen by any and all fans of serious psychological horror.
Movie Information
Running Time: 101 minutes Rating: R Director: Robert Altman Cinematographer: Vilmos Zsigmond (who was later director of photography for Close Encounters of the Third Kind) Writers: Robert Altman, Susannah York
Cast:
Susannah York: Cathryn Rene Auberjonois: Hugh Marcel Bozzuffi: Rene Hugh Millais: Marcel Cathryn Harrison: Susannah John Morley: Old Man
An excerpt from the story "The Sisterhood of Plain-Faced Women" by Gary A. Braunbeck
This is our last dance together, Tonight soon will be long ago. And in our moment of parting, This is all I want you to know...
I remember my mother used to love this one old 1943 Nat King Cole record. It was the only one she owned, as far as I know. She played a song called "There Will Never Be Another You" all the time; it was written by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon. It was one of the sappiest songs I ever heard. I never understood why she liked it so much. But she loved it.
Our house was always immaculately clean when I was growing up. But give my mom even the simplest task--washing a few dishes or something like that--and she'd take about three times longer to get it done than almost anybody else. I used to think it was just her way of avoiding having to listen to my Dad complain about things, but the older I got, the more I began to notice that she didn't really do anything else with her days. She got up, made breakfast, then set about her tasks.
There will be many other nights like this, And I'll be standing here with someone new. There will be other songs to sing, Another fall...another spring... But there will never be another you.
I remember she used to have a few shots of whiskey after my dad went to bed, then she'd play that record over and over, until she got this dreamy look on her face, sitting there in her chair and listening to that song and pretending she wasn't who she was. Sometimes I could see it in her face, that wish. She was someone else and the song wasn't on a record, it was being sung to her by some handsome lover come to court her, to ask for her hand and take her away to a better life than the one she had.
There will be other lips that I may kiss, But they won't thrill me, Like yours used to do. Yes, I may dream a million dreams, But how can they come true, If there will never, ever be another you?
I used to sneak downstairs and watch her do this, and I'd laugh to myself, you know? I'd laugh at her because I knew that my life was going to turn out differently. I'd never be so stupid as to wind up marrying a man who didn't really love me like a husband should but I stayed with him anyway because that's what the Church told me I was supposed to do. I'd never do that.
I'd never spend my days working around the house, doing the dishes and the laundry and the dusting, having no life of my own, no hobbies, no interests. I'd never spend half the afternoon fixing dinner, then half the evening cleaning up afterward, only finding time for myself after everyone went to bed so I could sip my whiskey and play a goddamn record by Nat King Cole about there never being another me.
I mean, I was eight, I was just a kid in grade school, and even though Mom was only thirty-seven she seemed old and used-up and kind of funny at those times.
But now it's twenty-five years later and here I am. I don't know if my husband still loves me; all I've got now is my work. Instead of whiskey and Nat King Cole I have two weak cocktails on Friday night after work and Jane Eyre or well-thumbed collections of poetry or a ton of videotapes, most of them romantic comedies.
She had no real life, except the one she found in her shot of whiskey and listening to that song, and I realized all of this way too late. All she had was this one little dream of some imaginary lover singing a sappy love song to her, and she spent the entire day anticipating it. That's why she took so long to get her work done; looking forward to her fantasy, to this dream she knew in her heart could never be, it was all she really had for herself.
She's gone now, but here I am, just like her.
Yes, I may dream a million dreams, But how can they come true, If there will never, ever be... Another you?
Pride of the Marines is a 1945 war drama starring John Garfield as the tormented marine Al Schmid. It's based on a novel by Roger Butterfield. This was one of the first movies to step away from the unconditional rah-rah nationalism of earlier WWII films and to portray the brutal nature of the conflict and terrible cost paid by the men who fought. In many ways, the movie was ahead of its time.
This movie contains one of the most terrifying and nerve-wracking sequences I've ever seen. Garfield and three of his buddies are trapped in a foxhole in a swamp, and the jungle surrounding them is swarming with Japanese soldiers. You never see the enemy soldiers, though early on you hear them yelling, "Marines, tonight you die!".
The marines can only see five feet in front of them because of the mist and fog, and one by one the guys are picked off by snipers (who take on the feeling of phantoms). Every once in a while you catch the glimpse of a shadow or hear the snapping of a twig...but that's it. As each of them falls to a sniper, the others become even more frightened and paranoid, until, near the end of the sequence (it's a good 10 - 12 minutes long, with no music, just sound effects and silence to build the unbearable tension), Garfield finally snaps and grabs the machine gun and begins firing blindily into the fog...
More would be a spoiler. It remains one of the most nerve-shatteringly suspenseful sequences I've seen.
Overall, the film is beautifully acted and it is one of Garfield's best performances. It's a pity it's not available on DVD, though you can very rarely find it shown on cable TV.
Movie Information
Rating: PG (were it re-released on DVD) Running Time: 119 minutes Director: Delmer Daves Writer: Marvin Borowsky, Roger Butterfield, Delmer Daves Score: Franz Waxman Cinematographer: J. Peverell Marley Cast:
John Garfield: Al Schmid Eleanor Parker: Ruth Hartley Dane Clark: Lee Diamond John Ridgely: Jim Merchant Rosemary DeCamp: Virginia Pfeiffer Ann Doran: Ella Mae Merchant Ann E. Todd: Loretta Merchant Warren Douglas: Kebabian
The first time I was aware of art "happening" to me was when I was a little boy and was watching a first-run Night Gallery episode with my mom on December 15, 1971. The episode was "The Messiah on Mott Street," starring Edward G. Robinson, Tony Roberts, and Yaphet Kotto. The story centers on an old Jewish man named Abe Goldman (played by Robinson) who is sick and dying on Christmas Eve. Abe prays that a Messiah will save him from the Angel of Death, because if he dies, no one will be around to take care of his young grandson.
I realized about two-thirds of the way through that there was this little lump in my throat, and by the time the episode reached its unapologetically sentimental conclusion, I was bawling like a baby. So was my mom. Until the day she died, "The Messiah On Mott Street" remained her favorite Christmas episode of any television show. We had both been moved by Rod Serling's simple tale of redemption and miracles among the tenements, and as Mom was pouring herself and me some hot chocolate afterward, she wiped her eyes and said, "Oh, I swear, that Rod Serling can sure write good stories."
It wasn't until Mom said those words that I came back to reality long enough to realize that Rod Serling (who I knew from The Twilight Zone) had written the words that those people had said, and that his story had made both me and Mom cry (in that good but embarrassing way you never want to tell anyone about later), and that meant that words and stories could affect people.
Not a major unveiling as far as art exhibits go, but it did the trick for me. Watching that episode, knowing my reaction to it, Mom's reaction to it, and then her reaction about her reaction, brought it full-circle and I started crying again (silly, sentimental boy), and when Mom put her arm around my shoulder and told me it was all right, it was okay, it was just a television show, just a story, all I could manage to say was, "No, it wasn't," before I started in with the spluttering again.
I hadn't the experience or the brains to fully realize what was happening to me, so how in hell was I supposed to articulate it? It seemed to me then that, if this were a fair world and just universe, everyone would be able to articulate their thoughts and feelings as well as the people on Night Gallery had, and then maybe people wouldn't find themselves standing around with snot running down their face and tears in their eyes, frustrated because they couldn't find the words to express all they needed to convey.
So I began seeking out Rod Serling everywhere I could. I found collections of his short stories at the local library (Serling was a much-underrated prose writer) and read them all cover to cover, then started in again. Anytime a movie written by Serling came on television, Mom or dad would call me down to watch it. I became a Twilight Zone re-run junkie (still am), and you can bet your ass that mine was there in front of that television set every Wednesday night at 9 p.m. tuned to NBC for the next new episode of Night Gallery.
I once had a daughter. She died when she was very young. She had been sick from the moment she was born and never got better. She never learned to walk, never made a sound, never blew out the candles on a birthday cake. The only home she ever knew were the sterile walls of an ICU.
She was very tiny and she fought very hard. The last seventy-two hours of her life were agonizing, and when she died it was without the benefit of a warm, loving human touch lingering on her skin. Her mother, exhausted and sedated, was asleep on a couch in the hospital's lounge; I'd not eaten for almost a day-and-a-half and so had gone to the vending machines one floor below to get some coffee and a sandwich. The entire trip took four minutes. The coffee was lukewarm and weak, the sandwich stale and tasteless, and by the time I came back to the ICU, my daughter was dead and gone.
Her death was not a surprise, her mother and I had known for a while that it was (as the tired cliché goes) "only a matter of time."
Not a surprise, but still the ice-pick in my throat.
I remember seeing the curtain pulled around her incubator.
I remember the beeps, whirrs, and susurrations made by the various machines hooked up to the other patients in the unit.
I remember wanting to cry but being unable to.
Then it was shuffling, being taken aside, muffled words from weary nurses, uncomfortable-looking orderlies, a gurney with a squeaking front left wheel, and the last sight of my daughter: bumps and curves and patches of pale flesh inside a translucent plastic bag, rolling away, away.
Her mother and I were both young and foolish and not nearly strong enough to handle this. Our relationship crawled along for a few more months, a joyless thing, back-broken and spirit-dead, before ending in infidelity, accusations and poison.
It's been over twenty years since she died. I have since seen my writing career at last get on its feet, and finally gotten -- albeit sporadically -- the upper hand in the battle with my recurring bouts of severe depression.
Still, there are times -- periodic though they may be, usually very late at night or first thing in the morning -- when it all comes back, diminished not one whit by the passage of years, and I crumple. Simply crumple.
Don't believe what the pop-psychologists or self-help books or daytime talk-show hosts tell you about it: You never fully recover from the death of a child. The grief eventually works its way into the shadows, back there someplace, a whisper, an echo, a tendril of smoke perpetually curling in the air over a just-emptied ashtray ... but it never completely goes away.
At the beginning of Peter Straub's wonderful novel In the Night Room there is a quote from philosopher, publisher, and journalist Roger Scruton that reads: "The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation."
Not to downplay Straub's redoubtable achievement with this novel, but Scruton's epigrammatic bit of wisdom knocked my socks off nearly as much as did the novel itself -- and I am not one whose sensibilities are easily affected; it takes a lot to genuinely move me, and Scruton (Bad Attitudes; A Dove Descending and Other Stories) did just that.
To understand why this hit me as hard as it did, we're going to go back to 2002 -- October of 2002, to be precise -- and join Gary during his stay in the nuthouse. (Okay, technically it was not the nuthouse, more of the pre-nuthouse holding facility, but why nitpick at this late date?)
Understand something before we move on: none of what follows is intended to be a ploy for sympathy; it's not a pity party; and it sure as hell isn't romanticized. I did not have then -- nor do I now have -- much sympathy for myself. I was weak, self-centered, and more than a little stupid. I could have turned to others for help, but I didn't; it was far easier to allow myself to implode. In short: I'm not attempting to make you feel sorry for me.
Okay, then:
As some of you know, the 16 months between June of 2001 and December of 2002 were not, to put it mildly, blue-ribbon days for Yours Truly. During that time, I lost, within 9 months, my grandmother (heart failure), my father (cancer), then my mother (emphysema); I'd moved to a new city, gotten divorced (my fault, all my fault), underwent surgery to prevent nerve damage to my right hand, and somewhere in there went off my anti-depression medication -- yes, I know, stupid, Stupid, STUPID.
The result from all of this is that one week before Halloween of 2002, I found myself in possession of a lot of seriously strong and potentially dangerous medications taken from my parents' house. (My sister, Gayle, had enough to deal with, so I went through all the rooms and cabinets shoving Mom and Dad's medications into a box, intending to dispose of everything when I returned to Columbus.)
Bear in mind that though I am far from the brightest bulb in the sign, I am not (under the right circumstances) without a certain cleverness when it comes to finding ways to self-destruct.
I could not go for 5 minutes without thinking of my grandmother's lonely last years, or seeing my father's body, or the look on my mother's face when I told her that I had come to the hospital to take her off life support, or the deep, deep hurt in my soon-to-be ex-wife's eyes the last time we had seen each other.
I couldn't sleep; I wasn't eating, my writing production was down to practically zero because I couldn't concentrate on anything other than the People Who Weren't There Anymore, and my right hand was becoming more and more useless (this was before the surgery). I was now surrounded by a circle of friends who were, on average, 15 years younger than me and with whom I ultimately had very little in common (I knew I was in trouble when I mentioned Harold Russell and not one of them knew who I was talking about), and I allowed my world to become more and more circumscribed by the handful of rooms in my apartment. If I could bring myself to get out of bed at all, I spent a lot of time sitting in front of the television watching re-runs of shows that hadn't been very good the first time, but that didn't matter because I wasn't seeing them, anyway.
So it's October, roughly a week before Halloween, and I'm not really here anymore; some empty, cheerless thing that's wearing my face and using my body to get around has taken the wheel, and I don't feel like fighting with it.
I have enough money to get a motel room for the night. I have more than enough medications in the proper dosages to ensure that the job will be done correctly (I've been researching this for several weeks). And I have recently purchased two packages of pudding cups so that there will be a way to ingest all these medications without causing myself to throw up. (The Shuffling-Off Cocktail Recipe ends here; just know that I had everything necessary to do the deed and knew how and when to take it.)
There's only one glitch: all of the motels within walking distance of my apartment (I don't drive) have no vacancies due to a Quarter Horse convention that's in town. So, much to my disappointment, I'm going to have to do the job at the apartment and hope that my two roommates will still be able to live there afterward.
I'm walking back to the apartment and realize I'm thirsty, so I make a short detour to the neighborhood Giant Eagle to buy a soda. I'm standing in line behind a couple with several children, and the youngest child -- maybe 3 years old -- looks back at me, then turns to her mother and tugs her sleeve and says, "Mommy, that man's crying."
Damned if she wasn't right. I'd had no idea, perceptive fellow that I am.
"Don't stare," says the child's mother, but the little girl looks back at me, still gripping her mother's sleeve, and says, "What's wrong, mister?"
"I'm sorry," I say to her sweet little face.
And then she starts crying.
Now everyone in this line and those on either side of us is looking over and trying to look like they're not looking. Me, I'm standing there shaking like an alcoholic in the grips of the DTs, my face soaked, crying so hard that snot is coming out of my nose in buckets, and a police officer is coming toward me.
Oh, good, I think. Way to be inconspicuous, Einstein. Everyone's staring at you, you've got roughly a thousand dollars' worth of prescription medications in your bag, and now a cop's coming. This is going to screw up the Shuffling-Off schedule something fierce if you don't think fast.
The officer asked what the problem was, and I managed to force a smile to my face and told him that I'd just come from a funeral and I was sorry, this just sort of hit me unexpectedly, and he bought it, and I purchased my soda and walked back to my apartment, still shaking, still in sloppy tears. Pathetic.
I got back inside, walked up to my room, dumped all the medications and pudding on the bed, and just sort of ... imploded.
I honestly don't remember much about the next 12 hours -- I have vague impressions of peoples' voices talking to me, of someone holding my hand, of eating something, of sleeping for a while, of watching a movie -- but when I finally came back to something like lucidity, I was being checked in to an emergency mental health facility here in Columbus. Two psychiatrists had been filled in on my recent history, both had talked to me (which I barely recall), and both had decided I was a danger to myself and to others.
I spent a week there before being deemed stable enough for release. I won't bore you with the details of the intensive day-to-day routine of life in there, save for one thing: the book I had brought with me: Stephen King's From A Buick 8.
Understand that I had given up hope. I had no faith left -- not in myself, not in humankind, not in love, friendship, integrity, this ethereal whoseewhatsit called God, nothing.
And my writing career? -- forget it. I was more than aware that a lot of readers considered my stuff to be too dark, if not outright depressing, I didn't see my fiction becoming any more cheerful anytime soon, and as far as I could tell, the future was in no way bright enough to require my wearing shades.
Submitted for your approval: not a happy camper.
Still, I had already started King's novel, wasn't all that far into it, and God knows I didn't have anything better to do with my extra time, so during those free periods -- few and far between that they were -- I read.
And something odd began to happen.
I started feeling ... if not better, then no worse.
Don't go thinking this is leading up to my describing some thundering, overpowering, Wagnerian epiphany, because it isn't; I had no uplifting moment of realization; no heavenly choir began singing over too-loud, sentimental John Williams music as a beam of moonlight crept through the window and anointed my face and mind with the Silver Light of Truth and Inner Peace; I experienced no visions, no revelations, uttered no exclamations of "My God, the ghosts have done it all in one night!"
No, what happened was, simply, this: I became caught up in the story (which, for the record, may not be the the best-written story King has ever told, but is, I think, the best-told story he's ever written). I wanted to find out what happened next. And because I read slowly, I was able to pace my reading so that I had only enough time to read a chapter or two in the afternoon, and the same later at night. (Sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on what feelings I had "shared" with the group during any one of the five daily sessions that were held -- and those weren't counting the individual sessions.)
But here's the important thing: I had something to look forward to. What was going to come crawling out of the car's trunk next time? What was the deal with the lights and fireworks? Would the dog survive? (Dogs don't fare well in King's books.) Would King be able to pull off this round-robin of first person narrators? Inquiring minds wanted to know.
Okay -- I wanted to know. And that came as something of a surprise to me. Because all of a sudden, I cared about something again.
Admittedly, it wasn't myself, but why nitpick? Something within me still held on to enough wisps of hope that it allowed me to become immersed in a story. And that immersion, that curiosity, that wanting to know what happens next, began to spread over into the way I behaved toward the other patients, the doctors, the nurses, and myself. I started to actually talk to and not at everyone else. What did I have to lose? If nothing else, I had Buick 8 waiting for me at day's end.
Yes, I'm skipping over a lot of things -- those times when I fell back into hopelessness; when something one of the characters said reminded me of something of my mom or dad used to say and I'd hurl the book across the room, only to retrieve it a few minutes later, smoothing out the cover and pages; those times I was too heavily sedated to focus on the words -- because the point here is that as both a reader and human being I had found consolation in imaginary things, and knew it my heart that it was not imaginary consolation.
Looking at my trusty dictionary, I read the following about "consolation":
con-so-la-tionn 1. a source of comfort to somebody who is upset or disappointed 2. comfort to somebody who is distressed or disappointed 3. a game or contest held for people or teams who have lost earlier in a tournament
Arguably, all of these definitions could apply (the third one falling more on the metaphorical side of the coin), but for the sake of this argument, we'll go with the first two.
I remember something comedian Red Skelton used to say at the end of his television show every week:
... if by chance someday you're not feeling well and you should remember some silly little thing I've said or done and it brings back a smile to your face or a chuckle to your heart ... then my purpose as your clown has been fulfilled.
That is the kind of consolation I'm talking about, and it is the kind of consolation that I found in reading King's novel at that time, and in that place. I honestly don't think any other book could have done this for me, under those circumstances.
What I came away with -- aside from three different types of depression medication that I have to take twice a day -- was the knowledge that good storytelling can be a source of great consolation, and that this consolation can give back a glimmer of hope to a weary heart.
How many of you reading this have been lost in depression, or sadness, or lingering grief, or loneliness, or doubt, or any of the thousands of shadowed corners in the human heart where even the blackest darkness would look like a star going nova, and found some moment of comfort in a book or short story that you've read?
And, yes, you bet your ass that this can apply to horror fiction. I'm not talking about that old happy horseshit that says imaginary horrors help us to better deal with the real ones -- we'll get into that at another time -- but, rather, how the very act of reading something that raises anxiety or provides a good chill reaffirms the immediacy and necessity of your own existence.
If some part of you is still willing to choose to be frightened, or disturbed, or repulsed, then this same part is embracing life by embracing fear: if you can still be scared, then you still think life has value and meaning; and if you still think that life has value and meaning, then there is still hope in your heart.
What greater gift could a storyteller hope to pass on to his or her readers?
So, yes, the consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation. Even if those imaginary things live in dark corners and aren't sometimes particularly pleasant or uplifting.
As long as there is fear of the darkness, there will be hope.
Oddly enough, reading Ray Garton's collection of stories kept reminding me of the original Get Carter starring Michael Caine.
Let me explain: throughout Carter, you see how Caine's hardened criminal is complex, strictly moral within the boundaries of his own code, and very, very dangerous and scary. Yet at the end of the film, you walk away with the feeling that, as dangerous as he's shown to be, the character never really even touched upon the depths of the violence of which is capable…and that makes him all the more formidable and frightening when you view the film a second time.
The same can be said of The Girl in the Basement and Other Stories, which now takes its place alongside Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From and Harlan Ellison's Slippage as one of the few collections that I immediately re-read upon finishing it. And, like the original Get Carter, as good as it is initially, it's even better the second time, and a lot of that is due to the remarkable restraint that Garton exercises throughout the title novella and four accompanying stories.
If you've read any of Garton's novels, then you know that he can turn on the gory fireworks with the best of them; in fact, his last 2 novels, Sex and Violence in Hollywood and Scissors, are so gloriously over-the-top that Garton has arguably invented a new sub-genre: that of the Grand Guignol Black Comedy. He remains a master of the horrific set-piece, and some writers (like myself) might consider selling our souls to have half his ability at pacing. But what a lot of readers love about Garton's work are those amazing fireworks.
Potential readers should be warned that The Girl in the Basement contains no such fireworks, yet the collection suffers not a whit from its lack of violence and gore; in fact, it emerges as all the more intense and affecting for its restraint.
All of the stories in The Girl in the Basement are concerned, at their core, with the same thing: corruption; be it moral, physical, spiritual, psychological, or societal, Garton touches upon corruption in all its attendant forms, even those we don't often recognize on the surface as being such.
Take the opening title novella. Ostensibly a story about a possessed child, one begins to prepare oneself for all of the usual trapping associated with this type of story, secure in the knowledge that Garton-an expert hand at injecting new life and energy into the more traditional horror tropes-will not fall victim to cliché.
The story focuses on 15-year old Ryan, a young man who, at the beginning of the story, is living in a foster home with several other teens, having endured a series of abusive foster parents before arriving at the home of Hank and Marie Preston. Ryan has a job bagging groceries at a local market. He has a budding romance with Lyssa, another teen in the Preston's care. He has a troubled (at best) relationship with his mother, a drug addict who is trying to get her life back together. He harbors dreams of becoming a writer, dreams that are encouraged by the Preston's neighbor, Elliot Granger, himself a published horror writer who is currently recovering from painful hip surgery and must rely on Marie Preston and Ryan for help with many of his physical chores.
Already die-hard fans can see several Garton-esque elements in place; the abused kid, the isolated writer, characters struggling with addiction, the internal scars carried by those survivors who've seen the uglier side of life but haven't yet given up. If you hear echoes of other Garton novellas like "Monsters" and "Dr. Krusadian's Method" early on in "The Girl In The Basement", I suspect it's because Garton wants you to; after all, the best way to surprise readers' expectations is to pull a sleight-of-hand by setting them up to expect more of the same and then pulling the rabbit out of your hat.
Which is not to say that "The Girl In The Basement" is an exercise in narrative and structural trickery (even though there is some sly trickery involved on Garton's part, and it's both justified and enviable); this novella is very much its own story, but it's most definitely not the story you're expecting.
There's a 9-year-old, mildly retarded girl named Maddy who's kept in the basement of the Preston house, you see, and sometimes she talks in the deep, gravelly voice of an adult, one who seems able to predict things, one who knows things about you that no one else knows or has ever known…
Think you know what's going to happen and how it's going to happen? Forget it. About the time government agents showed up to "talk" with Maddy in private (something they've been doing for quite a while, as it turns out), I had to shake my head in admiration because I had no idea where he was going with this.
What makes this title novella one of the most accomplished pieces of Garton's career is not just the remarkable restraint he exercises when dealing with the more overtly horrific elements (which at times become almost secondary, and at one point superfluous), but the depth of emotional realism he displays when dealing with the characters. This is hands-down the single most compassionate piece he's ever written; every character is fully fleshed out, both their strengths and weaknesses, their pettiness and kindness, their courage and cowardice, are on display here, and as horrific as this "possession" of the little girl is, it pales in comparison to the portraits Garton paints of how this horror affects the characters. There is a scene near the end of the story where Ryan has a meal of cookies and juice with his drug-addict mother that is one of the most heartbreaking things you're likely to read this year, simmering as it is with a palpable sense of desperation, loneliness, terror, and tragic inevitability.
The horrific elements of the story are for the most part kept on the periphery, and while I think this is going to be a turn-off for readers who look to Garton only for fireworks and fury, those readers like myself who look to Garton to always challenge himself as a storyteller and us as readers are going to come away feeling like we've just left a feast.
And while "The Girl In The Basement" raises many points and answers many questions about the nature of corruption, it leaves just as many unanswered, and rightly so: if one is powerless to fight against corruption, then is it better to simply turn away and ignore it or use it to your own personal advantage? And does that corrupt you, as well?
I don't mean to make this sound philosophically heavy or (God forbid) heavy-handed, because it's a damned entertaining and suspenseful novella, but the depth of emotional maturity and thoughtfulness-as well as the previously-mentioned restraint-elevate this (in my eyes, at least) to the highest form of storytelling that can be found in the horror field; it's suspenseful, horrifying, emotionally rich, perceptive and wise, and-here's the kicker-surprisingly intimate. The "possession" of this little girl (once you read it, you'll understand why I keep putting that term in quotation marks) might be affecting the world and universe at large, but Garton keeps the focus on Ryan and those around him, creating a claustrophobic microcosm that, like all good fiction, mirrors our own everyday lives just enough to make us genuinely uncomfortable enough to question the solidity of the so-called real world surrounding us.
With the exception of the next story, "Cat Lover", all of the stories end with an image of something mudane-a woman crying, a man getting out of his car, someone watching television-that is made darker and more tragic by the context in which it appears; it's Garton taking snapshots of the everyday and like all good writers making us wonder what's going on behind these seemingly inconsequential pictures.
"Cat Lover" is an impressive story, made all the more so when, at the end, you realize that you've just read a story wherein all that physically happens is that a man has a stroke and spends the rest of the story lying paralyzed on the floor of his home worrying that no one is going to feed his cats. While the shock ending can be seen coming from the second page, "Cat Lover" isn't about the nightmarish image that closes the story; it's about loneliness and isolation, and what happens when an individual must suddenly rely on those he/she views as corrupt as their only source of salvation. It's also one of the most sharply-rendered character studies I've read in a long time.
"Reception" is a hard one to talk about without giving away its devastating one-two punch at the end; suffice to say this portrait of a family recovering from the death of one its children manages to achieve in 7 deft pages what I myself strive toward as a writer: to simultaneously chill you to the marrow and hit you square in the heart.
"The Night Clerk" may be my favorite of the shorter pieces contained here-and it's also the one story in the collection that I think most readers are going to finish and go, "Huh?", if not outright dislike. For starters, it's not a horror story in the traditional sense-is, in fact, Garton going mainstream. This seeming vignette about a guy who goes to a an all-night convenience store only to meet up with a laid-back yet oddly pompous night clerk reads like a cross between John Cheever and Raymond Carver. Yeah, there's some violence and tension involved when a masked gunman storms in to rob the place, but this isn't a story about violence; it's a tense meditation on the difference between genuine courage and like cowardice…and bear in mind that the courageous character in this piece is not who you initially think it is. Of all the stories in this collection, "The Night Clerk" is the one that might require you to read it a second time in order to pick up on the myriad subtleties of character and foreshadowing that are sprinkled throughout.
The closing story, "Housesitting", brings the overall theme of corruption full circle, as its central character, housesitting for her best friend while she's on vacation with her husband-uncovers some hidden secrets about her best friend (via some disturbing photographs) that not only forever taint her relationship with her best friend, but corrupt her view of the world around her, as well. The closing scene between the two friends-taking place in a brightly-lighted kitchen on an almost too-ideal suburban afternoon-is Garton writing at the height of his power; as heartbreaking and affecting as this scene is, there is so much more going on beneath the surface, culminating in a single, powerful, beautifully understated final image that will haunt you long after the book is finished-might even, in fact, make you go back to the beginning and start the collection all over again.
The Girl in the Basement and Other Stories is a superb collection, filled with countless surprises, genuine scares, and more than enough emotional depth to satisfy even the most jaded reader.
There's a certain type of story, one that I have come to call the After-the-Fact story. I have not seen many After-the-Fact stories written in the horror genre; mostly, they've stayed in the neighborhood of "literary" fiction. So, why haven't we seen more of this type of story in horror?
After-the-Fact stories are tricky little bastards, because the main action of the story has already happened before the first sentence. After-the-Fact stories do not employ flashback, nor do they resort to the obvious mechanism of having a character offer a quick recap of what happened before the reader came into it; no, in these stories, you're presented with a situation that, nine times out of ten, is in no way connected to what actually happened; you have to piece together the events by what is said and done by the characters. They're a little like walking into a room just after someone's had an argument or gotten a piece of bad news; even though you know something's just happened, no one will tell you what it was, so you have to figure it out for yourself by observing the effect it's had on those around you: you have to pay attention to the detritus, because that's all you've got to go on.
A classic example is John Cheever's story "The Swimmer". On the surface, it's about nothing more than some rich guy in suburbia who's spending a Sunday afternoon running from neighbor's house to neighbor's house to use their swimming pools. "I'm swimming my way home," he tells his friends and neighbors, all of whom laugh and remark on what a card he is as they go about mixing their martinis and discussing events at the country club. Occasionally someone remarks, in passing, " ... he's looking better, don't you think ..." or ... I'm really surprised to see him out like this, after, well ..." Then the main character comes over to them and that line of conversation is dropped. This goes on for a while, each successive neighbor becoming more surprised and anxious at seeing him, offering more whispered comments when he's out of earshot -- " ... didn't realize he was back ..." etc. -- until it becomes obvious that something fairly awful has happened to this guy sometime before the story began, and though Cheever never once directly states what happened, everything you need to know is there.
The first time I read "The Swimmer", its sudden shocker of an ending seemed to come out of left field, so I went back and re-read the story, much more slowly than the first time, and realized that Cheever had, indeed, dropped a ton of clues; unfortunately, the majority of them were hidden in the detritus, given only through subtext.
Raymond Chandler (creator of Philip Marlowe, the hero of such classic novels as The Big Sleep and The Little Sister) once gave the best example of what constitutes subtext that I've ever encountered (and I am liberally paraphrasing here):
A man and woman, both middle-aged, are waiting for an elevator. It arrives, and the man helps the woman get on. For the first several floors they are alone, watching the blinking lights. They do not speak and stand well apart from each other. The woman wears a very nice dress. The man wears a suit, tie, and hat. The elevator stops -- not their floor -- and a young woman gets on; she smiles at both the man and the woman, who smile at her in return. The man removes his hat. The ride continues in silence. The elevator stops, the girls gets off, the man puts his hat back on. A few floors later, the man and woman get off and walk together toward a door at the end of the corridor.
It was usually at this point that Chandler would ask the listener: "What's written on that door?"
So I'll put the question to you: what words are written on that door which our middle-aged couple are heading toward?
How the hell am I supposed to know? some of you may cry. No one in that freakin' elevator said word one to anyone else, and on the basis of all the nothing that happened during that boring, boring, boring ride, I'm supposed to guess what it says on that stupid door?
Yes, you are.Because an awful lot happened during that elevator ride:
The man and woman never spoke to each other, even while they were alone;
They also made it a point to stand well apart from each other even though the man helped her get on;
When the young woman got on, the man, obviously out of respect and courtesy, removed his hat;
Once the young woman disembarked, he put the hat back on; and,
The man and woman got off on the same floor, and are heading toward that door together.
Still say nothing happened and that you have no clues to go on?
Detritus. Subtext. The unspoken information that is conveyed to a reader through a character's behavior, actions, speech, or lack thereof. In acting, it's referred to as "nuance". It's subtle, but its implications are quite direct if you care enough to pay attention. That is, in my opinion, what the horror field has lost over the last few decades: a willingness on the part of both writers and readers to (respectively) employ and appreciate the quieter, more delicate, and less obvious details of character and scene that can make fiction so much richer and rewarding.
Last chance; take a guess what it says on that door.
Try: Marriage Counselor.
That was an After-the-Fact story; tricky little bastard, wasn't it?
There's usually very little action in these stories; nothing much seems to happen at the core -- it's on the periphery that you have to watch out for yourself.
A handful of other After-the-Fact stories you'd do well to search out and read include Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"; Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path"; Raymond Carver's "What Do You Do In San Francisco?", "Popular Mechanics", and "Why, Honey?" (these latter two being arguably horror stories); Carson McCullers's "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud"; Michael Chabon's "House Hunting"; John O'Hara's brilliant "Neighbors" (a horror story if ever there was one); and a personal favorite of mine, Russell Banks's "Captions" -- perhaps in its way the most extreme After-the-Fact story I've yet encountered --wherein Banks details the agonizing disintegration of a married couple's existence through captions taken from newspapers or written underneath pictures in photo albums.
You've undoubtedly noticed that the above list contains no horror writers. There is a reason for this: not many have attempted an After-the-Fact story. Maybe it's because the structure of this type of story seems to self-consciously "literary" to them; maybe it's because horror readers have become far too accustomed to having everything spoon-fed to them and don't think they should have to work a little while reading a story, and so horror writers just automatically assume that All Must Be Revealed as quickly and in as simplistic of terms as possible. I don't know, I'm guessing here. But I've been going through my books searching for at least six examples of a successful After-the-Fact story in the horror field, and here's what I came up with:
"Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly," by Dennis Etchison
"Petey" by T.E.D. Klein
"Red" by Richard Christian Matheson
"Snow Day" by Elizabeth Massie
"Taking Down the Tree" by Steve Rasnic Tem
"Gone" by Jack Ketchum
... and that was it (even with this small a list, Klein's, Matheson's, Ketchum's, and Tem's stories almost offered too many concrete hints to qualify).
I thought perhaps Peter Straub's "Bar Talk", "The Veteran", or "A Short Guide To the City" (all from his magnificent collection Houses Without Doors) could be used to beef up the list, but that would have been stacking the deck (pardon my mixed metaphors); Straub's work is the result of an exceptionally well-read literary background, so of course the sensibilities of his work are informed from countless sources, resulting in fiction that is challenging in its approach to structure and subtext -- no more so than in the "Interlude" fictions sprinkled throughout Houses.
So no Straub; it wouldn't be playing fair on my part. Same goes for Stewart O'Nan, whose wonderful collection In The Walled City contains not one, but two After-the-Fact stories, "Calling" and "Finding Amy". (I exclude O'Nan because, though he does sometimes dabble in the horror field, he is not primarily a horror writer.)
So I came up with six stories, four of which (though superb) just barely made it onto the list. I'm sure there are other After-the-Fact horror stories out there that I missed, but my guess is, not that many.
Horror may be trying to outgrow its popular definition, but it's still suffering from a case of arrested literary adolescence -- and I'm not one who apologizes for using the term "literary" when talking about horror. It can be among our most literary forms of storytelling; emphasis on can be; we still need to take chances, even if we fall flat on our faces in the attempt.
Horror World is hosting a brand-new serialized novella by Gary Braunbeck. The first installment of this estimated 18,000-word tale is up now ... subsequent installments are scheduled to go up on or about the 11th and the 18th of the month.
You can read the first part of "In Seeing: A Story of Cedar Hill" here:
All three parts of the novella will be archived as each new installment is posted, but at the end of the month, the entire story will be taken down. I think the plan is that HW Press will release the novella as a limited-edition chapbook, so be sure to read the story while it's free!
In other Gary Braunbeck news, The Sci Fi Channel recently interviewed him about his latest novel, Coffin County. You can read the interview here:
Here's the book trailer for Gary Braunbeck's new novel Coffin County. The book is a continuation of the Cedar Hill Cycle that was begun with In Silent Graves, Keepers, Mr. Hands, and the stories that have appeared in his story collections Graveyard People and Home Before Dark.
Recent reviews for the novel have been pretty good:
"(Braunbeck) tackles difficult plotting, and writes beautiful, poetic passages. He is also adept at characterization; creating a comprehension of those who may not possess redeeming qualities, and reaffirming, through deft description, the likeability of others. Coffin County has many likeable characters, and many of them die. This is brave of Braunbeck; in the novel, nothing is predictable, anything is possible: Rather like chaos theory." --Hellnotes
"...Gary A. Braunbeck has stepped quite comfortably into the very large shadows left behind by Richard Matheson and Stephen King... COFFIN COUNTY is an intelligent, cogent, powerfully written novel of supernatural horror supported by a solid and thrilling police procedural foundation. I know you will enjoy this truly horrific slice of the dark stuff from a writer whose talents have wowed me for years." -- The Tomb of Dark Delights
"Braunbeck delivers an intensely creepy and truly original tale that's guaranteed to give you chills late at night." -- Bookbitch.com
"Speaking of characters, more articulate reviewers than this one have noted that Braunbeck creates the most human cast in dark fantasy. These are people you might run into at the corner store or at a neighborhood cookout. Even the unsavory people are drawn with a depth that is so defined it qualifies as High Definition Horror. Pick up Coffin County and lose yourself in Cedar Hill, a town so creepy it makes King's Castle Rock look like Disney World." -- Horrorworld
Many dim moons ago, when Reagan had just taken possession of the White House and I'd taken possession of my 20s, I decided on fiction writing as a career, unaware at the time that my decision was due to undiagnosed brain damage, the extent of which is still being determined. I was cranking out bad short stories and even worse novels on a magnificent (and if used as a weapon, potentially deadly) Olympus manual typewriter. Its loud, metallic clickitty-clack-clack became the underscore of my Grand Opera of the Imagination, a march, a rally cry, a battle hymn, always singing out You can do it! You can do it!
Yes, we all recognize the above as being Inspirational Bullshit Designed to Make You Urp on Your Shoes. The truth is, that sound used to drive me crazy, because eventually it began to sound like the Failure Police were mocking me as they danced and sang before my eyes in a Kick-Line of Coming Calamity: You're going nowhere/You're doing nothing/No one will read you/You'll die unread. Boogie-oogie-oogie. Sisyphus had nothing on me.
One of the things that used to keep me going was the thought that, if I kept at it and listened to the advice of pro writers whenever I could corner them, I would start to publish, then be paid, then be able to support myself on writing alone. Well, I did keep at it, I did listen to advice from the pros (especially a marvelously encouraging letter from Harlan Ellison to the 19-year-old moi), and I began to publish. My first short story appeared in a small press magazine when I was 22, and now--almost exactly 25 years later--I have somewhere around 200 published stories to my credit, as well as 10 novels, 10 short story collections, 1 non-fiction book, and 2 anthologies that I have co-edited. And there are nights when that chorus line from the Ninth Circle of Hell still puts on its little show, with a Sunday matinee thrown in for good measure. And I wonder why I'm on anti-depressants.
One thing that often appears to beginning writers much as the vision of the Holy Grail appeared to King Arthur is the concept of the Advance. Ah, so elusive she seems, waiting somewhere Out There in your future, wagging her finger seductively, lips moistened and eyes gleaming with yummy promise: I'm here for you, you'll see. Some day, we'll be together.
Cue soft focus, Writer embraces Seductress, Fade Out as echoing voices sing: You finally got here/Don't need to punch the clock/But you remember/There's still Writer's Block!
Ahem. Yes, the last and deadliest phase of going from part-time to full-time writer, from would-be pro to flat-out slave of the muse: the advance.
As I write this, I have a stack of book contracts within easy reach. All have been signed by the proper parties, and all have been accompanied by advance checks. There's just one little glitch in this portrait of the Writer's dream Come True.
I haven't written any of these books yet.
(Not entirely true; work has begun on all and is nearly finished on two; the point is, I've got until October to deliver all five. Boogie-oogie-oogie, cue the kick-line in the wings.)
That's the part of the Pro Writer Fantasy sequence that never enters the picture when the young You imagines that provocative seductress beckoning to you from your future. Yes, it's great to have someone hand you a stack of cash for something you haven't written yet (it's still one hell of a confidence booster), and when you're younger it's easy to think you'll never, ever, under any circumstances, have trouble producing that book you've already taken money for, but somewhere in the theatrical wings of your subconscious Jung and Freud are rolling on the floor, howling with laughter as the Failure Police don their black fishnet stockings ala Dr. Frankenfurter and wait for their cue.
I once promised myself that I would never, ever accept money up front for something I haven't written. As far as my books go, I've broken that promise every time, and so far I haven't locked up, freaked out, melted down, climbed a tower with a rifle in my hands, or taken to reading John Grisham.
But ....
But there's always the waiting chorus line in my head, kept in place by a stage manager who every so often calls: "Places for the Dance of Doom and Despair! Places, please, he's gonna crack this time, I just know it!"
Taking advances up front for something not yet written is a sure-fire way to keep you on edge, and adds (as I've found so far) a certain, feverish, almost desperate quality to the work itself, which gives definite intensity to the telling of the tale. I've had many people say one of the things they like best about my work is its strong emotional content. I appreciate that, because I do like to engage readers' emotions as deeply as possible (there just isn't story without feeling), but to be completely honest, sometimes that intensity comes not just from my imagination, but from the realization that Dear God, I've already taken money for this thing and I Have to finish it, I Have To, Dear God I HAVE TO! What if I can't? What if I go blank, become blocked, flip out, have to take a one-way ride in the Twinkie Mobile to the House of Good Pudding? What Then? What? WHAT THE #@!* WAS I THINKING?
And one lithium later I remember the why I got into this in the first place.
Recently, I saw a blurb for "The Wicker Man" written by a professional reviewer named Jeff Shannon:
Typically categorized as a horror film, The Wicker Man is actually a serious and literate thriller about modern paganism, written by Anthony Shaffer (Sleuth) with a deft combination of cool subjectivity and escalating dread.
Shannon seems to think that horror by its definition cannot be "serious" or "literate". Unfortunately, he has plenty of company. And I have seen countless instances of others -- readers and reviewers alike -- who dismiss science fiction, mysteries, and fantasy on the same grounds: that genre fiction is somehow not "real" literature.
And so writers and readers of genre fiction get shoved off into their own literary ghetto, where "discerning" readers of lit-rah-chure deign not tread.
Even within the various streets of the literary ghetto, residents dismiss their neighbors: science fiction writers dismiss horror as "trash", and horror writers dismiss romance as "fluff", and on and on without any of the self-styled lit snobs taking the time to actually become familiar with the work they scorn.
(I'm going to talk about horror fiction from here on out, because it's near and dear to my heart.)
Unfortunately these attitudes are something that I see us being stuck with. Horror fiction--regardless of how well-crafted, well-written, thoughtful, literate, and serious-of-intent any number of individual works may be--will always, always be given at-best second-class citizenship treatment in the literary world, and I maintain that a lot of this (especially over the last 30 years) is due in part to horror movies--make that bad horror movies.
People assume that any work labelled "horror" will have something in common with the Freddy/Jason/Pinhead/Candyman/what-have-you ouvre; it's got to have blood, guts, sex, death, torture, sadism, all the visceral elements that are right in your face and up your nose and down your throat.
While it may be true that even many of the more literate and serious works have a smattering of these elements, necessary for advancement of the story, it's those very elements that people tend to focus on and assume that they and they alone constitute horror.
Two quick examples: If I say to you, "Deliverance", 9 out of 10 people will immediately respond with "Squeal like a pig!"
I want to hit these people.
Yes, that rape scene is brutal, but it is not gratuitous, and in the cases of both the film and the novel, if you look beyond the brutality itself to what the act says about the men committing it and those suffering it--not to mention the spiritual, psychological, and thematic ramifications of the act--it adds a depth, a seriousness, if you will, to what follows that otherwise would not be there. In fact, if you watch or read closely (not all that closely, now that I think of it), you'll realize that the main characters would not have been able to survive what happens to them later had the attack not happened.
But most people will say, "Squeal like a pig!" and think they get it.
Same goes for the original The Exorcist; most people remember only the little girl's cussing and spitting up pea soup. Forget that both the movie and novel have a core of emotional pain that has rarely been equaled, and that both ask very serious, very smart questions about the nature of human goodness and decency--nah; let's talk about the vomit and a little girl saying "Your mother sucks cocks in hell!"
Yeah, that's what it's about. Right.
Paul Schrader's version of The Exorcist: The Beginning, gets shelved because it was "...too cerebral and not nearly violent and bloody enough", yet Freddy vs. Jason--an idiotic, sloppy, sadistic, hollow-cored piece of cinematic afterbirth that not only celebrated everything that is wrong with modern horror, but wallowed in it--was a box-office smash.
And the majority of people assume that horror fiction is exactly like horror movies. Or that it's all a regurgitating of Stephen King--because, after all, nothing in the field was done before King did it, right? (Not a slam against King--I'm impatiently awaiting the seventh installment of The Dark Tower just like millions of other readers.)
It's just that King--more than Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, Anne Rice, any of the giants--has been the most visible and the most popular, so naturally he has amassed the largest and most fiercely loyal readership; unfortunately, a part of that readership is a bit tunnel-visioned: everything and everybody is just (in their eyes) copying the master (untrue) and riding on King's coattails.
(Which, in an important way, we all are, like it or not; the man bulldozed and widened the road on which we've all traveled the past 30 years, so you know what? If part of the toll we have to pay for all he's done for modern horror writers is answer questions like, "Oh, so you write stuff like Stephen King?"...ultimately, isn't that a small price for still having the field of modern horror? I digress.)
Take another look at T.M. Wright's Cold House; this was, is, and will always be a f*cking brilliant piece of work; it's moody, eerie, thoughtful, scary, poignant, smart, and challenging--everything good, literate horror fiction should be. Do you honestly think this novel would gain the wider mass-market readership it deserves were it to be picked up by a bigger publishing house?
I don't think so (though I would fervently hope for it).
Why? because it forces the reader to think along the way; it forces them to pay attention; it's not the type of novel that presents everything in clear, graphic, spoon-fed terms so that readers aren't challenged in the least and can easily lay it aside for a game of beach volleyball and be able to pick it right back up where they left off without blowing a single brain cell.
And I maintain that at least part of the reason for this is because people have become too spoiled by a steady diet of bad, stupid, by-the-numbers horror movies. The two things ain't mutually exclusive; one of these things isn't like the other.
What it comes down to is this:
Horror will always be given at-best second-class citizenship in the literary world, and our only defense against this is to continually produce, read, support, and buy work that is of the highest caliber we are capable;
Horror fiction will always be judged--at least, in large (if not total) part--by the quality or lack thereof of the majority of horror films, because it's easier for people to judge a field on the basis of something they can watch than something that they have to take hours (if not days) out of their lives to read;
Writers in the field are going to have to answer the "Stephen King"-type questions for at least another 20 years, so we'd save ourselves a lot of time, energy, and frustration if we quit complaining about it because--face it--most of us who've emerged in the field in the past 2 decades wouldn't have careers if King hadn't widened the road for us to follow;
There are always going to be those who want to distance a work from horror by calling it something like "...a serious, literate thriller" or somesuch happy horseshit, because (and I speak from experience here) whenever you link "horror" with "serious" and "literate", the two words that emerge most often in describing the works in question are "pretentious" and "depressing".
I am not saying that I look down on writers and filmmakers whose work has a more visceral core; I think Jack Ketchum and Martin Scorsese would be a match made in heaven ("Closing Time", anyone?); nor am I disdaining work that succeeds in giving you the out-and-out creeps (like the work of Hugh Cave, great stuff); I like to think I embrace all aspects of the horror field when they are done well. And if that makes me a snob or an elitist--demanding that work be done well--then guilty as charged.
So join me here among the rest of the second-class citizens in the literary cul-de-sac, won't you?
Dave W. says A couple years ago I heard a literary critic describe Connie Willis as "sort of a science fiction writer" because she couldn't imagine SF writers as being able to write. What would she do with Gene Wolfe?
Here are some short reviews of collections I've enjoyed lately.
Four Octobers by Rick Hautala: The flap copy for this quartet of novellas from Hautala (who some of you may know as A.J. Matthews) would have you believe that the four tales are "...loosely connected..." Well, sure, if all you look at are the physical locales and the element of some characters making peripheral appearances from tale to tale, but look closer and you'll see that more connects them than just people and places: there is a palpable sense of overwhelming loss that permeates every story, so that "loosely" thing? Not so much. This beautiful edition from CD Publications boasts a gorgeous cover and interior artwork from the redoubtable Glenn Chadbourne, and collects 2 of Hautala's most accomplished novellas -- "Miss Henry's Bottles" (a personal favorite of mine) and "Cold River" -- as well as 2 brand-new works, "Tin Can Telephone" (reminiscent -- and deserving to be mentioned in the same breath as many works -- of Ray Bradbury) and "Blood Ledge". The result is one of the year's finest single-author collections, and further proof that Hautala is much, much more than just "...that other author from Maine."
Thundershowers at Dusk: Gothic Stories by Christopher Conlon: As with Eyes Everwhere, I have to confess to a certain bias; Chris asked me to read this collection in manuscript form with an eye toward providing a cover blurb. After I finished reading it, I told him, "No, I won't do a blurb -- I want to write the Introduction!" So I did. Conlon is best known as an award-winning poet and anthology editor (the most recent anthology being the excellent Poe's Lighthouse from CD Publications), but he's also a stellar writer of fiction -- he just doesn't write it all that often, which is a real loss for readers. Thundershowers at Dusk is a hands-down brilliant collection from first page to last, every story is a winner, and it contains one of the finest novellas I have ever read in any genre, period, "The Unfinished Music". As rich and rewarding a collection as you'll ever read. (And I will add here, for any publishers who happed to read this, that Conlon is now shopping around a stunning first novel entitled Midnight on Mourn Street that is going to bring a lot of sales and accolades to whichever publisher is smart enough to snatch it up.) I maintain that Conlon is a better writer now than I could ever hope to be, and Thundershowers at Dusk more than proves it. Hence my deep-rooted resentment of him.
American Morons by Glenn Hirshberg: Paul Miller's Earthling Publications gets the Hat-Trick Award this year for having published 3 exceptional books in 2006, the first being this collection, Hirshberg's follow-up to The Two Sams. While I greatly admired the first collection, American Morons surpasses it on several levels, mostly because Hirshberg's writing has become even more focused and polished; he's going to be a major force in the field in the next few years, and while his writing has more in common with that of Steven Millhauser than Stephen King, it is nonetheless some of the most nerve-wracking and unapologetically literary work being produced in the field. All of the stories are winners, but the book is worth its price for "Safety Clowns" and "Devil's Smile".
The Tenant by Roland Topor: A million thanks to Millipede Press for putting this short novel back into print, along with 4 rarely-seen short stories and Topor's own artwork (which reminded me of the surreal work of Heinrich Kley). It's an utterly gorgeous book, boasting an intelligent and articulate Introduction from Thomas Ligotti ... but mostly, there is The Tenant, which remains today just as terrifying, eloquent, and compelling as it was when originally released in 1965. The 4 shorts accompanying it are equally impressive, resulting in a genuine must-have collection.
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel: Hempel, in case you've not read her work, is one of the finest short story writers of the last 25 years, and this omnibus assembles all 4 of her collections, including the hard-to-find At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom. With the exception of the jaw-dropping novella "Tumble Home", most of her stories run less than 10 pages in length, and stand as a testament to what a skilled writer can do in a very limited amount of time. This collection contains one of my all-time favorite short stories, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried". If all so-called "literary" fiction were as exquisite as Hempel's, the world would be a better place.
The Ocean and All Its Devices by William Browning Spencer: It's been 10 years since Spencer's last collection, The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories left readers screaming for more, and Spencer delivers in a big way with this follow-up. For my money, Spencer;s work -- be it in short stories or novel form -- has always read like a head-on collision between John Cheever and Donald Barthelme; which is to say, it's rooted both in the humane and the surreal. The title story is both tragic and nightmarish, containing some of the most chilling imagery you'll encounter. Spencer doesn't write nearly enough, so grab this superb collection and keep it near to bide your time until he releases his next book.
I once had the pleasure of spending fifteen minutes at a bar with the late, great Robert Bloch talking about movies, fiction, and peoples' misconceptions about what they both see and read.
Bloch told me -- as he did many other fans over the decades -- that he still had people come up to him and complain about how bloody and violent they found the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's film version of Bloch's novel Psycho. ("Thank God I didn't have her sitting on the toilet," Bloch always said.)
People complained about Janet Leigh's nudity and complained that seeing her naughty bits so offended their sensibilities; they complained about the excessive amounts of blood; and they complained, consistently, about the violence of seeing the knife plunge into Ms. Leigh's body over and over.
Go back and watch Psycho and pay particular attention to the shower sequence. Hitchcock -- aided greatly by the work of the brilliant film editor George Tomasini -- pulled off a dark magic trick that to my mind has yet to be equaled in American film: they made you believe you were seeing things that weren't actually depicted.
You do not see Janet Leigh's naughty bits. You do not see blood splattering all over everything. And you most definitely do not ever, even once, see the knife plunge into Ms. Leigh's body. But the sequence is so brilliantly filmed and edited that viewers were -- and some still are -- left with the impression that, dammit, they saw all of that.
More on why self-publishing is (probably) a bad idea
My husband was recently interviewed by a reporter from his hometown newspaper. He got a ton of website traffic from the feature they subsequently ran on him, and he was contacted by old friends he hadn't heard from in 20 years, and that's all good.
However, the staffer who interviewed him -- a reporter who is not an intern, and who has written dozens of features for the paper -- asked a truly jaw-dropping question: "So your books are self-published?"
This was the second question she gave him; she asked it in the same tone as the first, which was to ask if he was from Newark. In other words, it wasn't really a question, but more a statement of perceived fact she was double-checking.
This question floored us because:
It showed she hadn't done basic preparation for the interview and taken two minutes to do a Google search and find out that he's professionally published 20 books, etc.
It showed she profoundly misunderstood the process of becoming a professional fiction writer.
Gary, being the nice guy he is, gently told her that pro fiction writers don't self-publish and explained why. And he thought that would be the end of it, until he saw the feature in the paper and read this line:
"The author has never self-published because a lot of book stores will not carry self-published authors and it also can be expensive."
The reporter was likely on a strict word limit, so her including that line struck us as strange and unnecessary. In subsequent discussion on Livejournal, our friend Mehitobel made a comment that I think nailed it on the head:
"See, that's just a weird-ass line. I can see someone ignorant of publishing, or even so jaded with local author profiles that they expect a local author to have self-published, asking about it in an interview. But the line quoted above from the article suggests to me that the reporter may actually view self-published books as the norm, better, or more ambitious. It's like she has it backwards."
It's possible the reporter had been listening starry-eyed to some life coach who told her he'd sold a ton of self-published books and that self-publishing is the right and proper thing for an entrepreneurial spirit to do. If you are a self-help guru, evangelist, TV star or some other celebrity, sure, you can self-publish a book as an adjunct to your public speaking engagements and do very well. And independent comics artists have long been admired for DIY books. But if you're a non-celebrity trying to become a pro fiction writer, self-publishing is more likely to hurt than help.
I don't consider self-publishing to be synonymous with vanity publishing. Vanity presses are scam artists preying on the hopes and dreams of the naive; however there are places like Lulu.com that are straightforward, useful print on demand services.
I don't consider writers who choose to self-publish their work to be "cheating" or lacking in intelligence or moral fiber or anything like that. Want to make a book of love poems as a Christmas gift for your sweetie? Planning to put together a calendar or anthology to support a charity? Have you written an RPG rulebook or other game supplement you want to get into peoples' hands? After you've done your homework, does Lulu.com or a competitor seem to be the most economical way to get your project into print? Go for it.
But if you've got a novel or even a short story collection and you aspire to a larger audience than your circle of friends, you really ought to reconsider.
I know several people who've self-published poetry and fiction books. They're nice people. Most of them did it because they were frustrated by the long, tedious process of submitting their work to and being rejected by traditional publishers. I can certainly sympathize with their frustration.
But 99.99% of the time, if your goal is to establish yourself as a legitimate author and put yourself on a track to a career as a writer, self-publishing is going to be a costly mistake. The only time it's not a mistake is if you're an experienced publishing professional and you know you have the resources to produce, promote, and distribute a good book that can adequately compete with the 400 other books that are published every day.
But people who write pro-quality books almost never have to turn to self-publishing; they generally only do it if they have very specific, well-considered publishing plans in mind and want complete control of their projects. If a pro has a book that the big houses deem unmarketable, he or she can usually find a small press willing to get the manuscript into print.
The average advance for a novel is $5K or thereabouts. It might take you months or even years to finish your first book. It could also take you years to squirrel away that much money if you work an entry-level job. So let's think of finishing a publishable novel as the equivalent of having slaved away to save up $5,000.
If you told me you were taking your $5,000 and going to Las Vegas, I'd probably ask if you were going to splurge on a fun vacation.
If you replied, "No, I need more money; my bank doesn't pay enough interest, and the stock market's too darned complicated. I'm gonna hit the casinos and turn this five grand into fifty grand!", I'd think it was a phenomenally bad idea and try to talk you out of it. Yes, you could get lucky at the slot machines and come home with a fat roll of cash, but the odds are you'd come home hung over and broke.
If on the other hand I knew you were a statistics prodigy with an eidetic memory who'd been consistently winning regional poker games, I'd think you had a real chance. If you then told me how you were sure you could keep the casinos from figuring out you could count cards, but knew you might be wrong and detailed a plan to escape quickly and safely with your winnings, I'd think it was a daring scheme and congratulate you.
The notion of being a rebel writer self-publishing your way to grand authorial success is as bright and shiny as Vegas. But unless you're very talented or very lucky, it's just not going to pay off in a career.
I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir here. But based on the reporter's questions, some people might need to read this.
If you look at a book, usually on the dustcover, paperback cover or somewhere in the first couple of pages you will see something like "'(This author's) writing is a dazzling bravura of wild imagery and nail-biting suspense.' – Reed McReaderson" or "'A wonderful book! I couldn't put it down!' – Gush Auteur".
These little cover raves are known as "blurbs".
I am a firm believer that a handful of strong blurbs can be just as effective as the same number of positive reviews; they're shorter, they're direct, and they reveal nothing spoiler-like about the work in question. This, to my mind, makes them a good alternative for potential readers who don't want to chance having a review give away too much of the story.
Some -- but not all -- blurbs are culled from reviews. Probably half the time (or more) a writer will contact other writers and ask them if they would be willing to read something with an eye toward providing a blurb. I have gotten several wonderful quotes this way, and have also provided them for other writers. (I don't always do this; in the past 4 years I have been asked to read several novels for which, in the end, I couldn't in good conscience provide a blurb because, well...I didn't like them.)
Let me quickly address a few misconceptions about writers providing blurbs for other writers:
Yes, a lot of the time these writers know or are at least acquainted with one another -- but that in no way means that a good blurb will be guaranteed. A writer worth any blurb value has his or her reputation to uphold, and publicly praising a bad book won't help that cause one bit.
I can't speak for others, but I myself do read, from first page to last, each and every book I am asked to blurb. (There seems to be a rather cynical belief that writers don't bother reading their buddies' books before giving them a blurb -- while I don't doubt that this happens every so often, it is most assuredly not the norm.)
Yes, any writer providing a blurb is aware that it's going to be used to entice a reader to buy this particular book, and will slant their blurb to that end -- but bear in mind that is because they like and believe in the book to begin with, so its integrity needn't be called into question.
This is not to say that things can't go wrong here, as well. If a book is saturated with too many blurbs, one gets the feeling that the publisher is overcompensating and perhaps trying to sell you a bill of goods. The first book in Dean Koontz's Frankenstein series has ten pages of blurbs inside.
That's overkill, because the sheer amount of them robs each individual blurb of its effectiveness. You're so numbed by the time you reach the end of the damned things you almost don't feel like reading the book -- which turns out to be quite a lot of good, old-fashioned fun. But because it starts off by pummeling you with page after page of rave blurbs (almost none of which refer to the book itself), you go in with the creeping feeling that someone is trying to convince you a sow's ear is actually a silk purse.
My own personal cutoff point is two pages or a dozen blurbs (whichever comes first); after that, I ignore them. With blurbs, less is definitely more. (The ideal for me, by the way, is a single page containing somewhere between five and ten concise, tantalizing quotes.)
I am very careful to make certain that none of the blurbs used for my books are taken out of context -- I don't want readers to feel that these quotes have been employed to mislead them, and I don't want reviewers to feel that I've misrepresented their theses by "doctoring" their comments.
What it boils down to is that strong blurbs can serve as the middle ground for readers who want some sense of what to expect from a book but don't want to chance having anything "spoiled" for them ... and reviewers can write whatever they damned well please without fear of being accused of "spoiling" anything.
I still think the best solution is to read the first few pages of a book to figure out if you're going to like it or not. But if that's not possible for whatever reason, then seek out a review; read the first two paragraphs and the last two paragraphs if you want to avoid encountering spoilers. If that doesn't appeal or work for you, then turn to the blurbs.
Many of you who read my posts asked for more essays on the business and technical aspects of writing, so I've decided to offer a handful of basic -- what I hope are common sense -- suggestions on how to fine-tune your writing by avoiding certain mistakes that can sink your story in a hurry.
1: "Its" and "It's"
The first one -- and, man, am I getting sick of seeing this one -- has to do with "its" and "it's".
Look at those two words, will you?
I'm going to over-emphasize this, just to get it through your heads:
THOSE TWO WORDS ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE.
They do not mean the same thing.
"Its" is a possessive, as in, "Its components are too complex."
"It's" is a contraction, as in, "It's not my problem if its components are too complex."
This is not something that is up for debate.
If I seem grumpy about this, it's (meaning, "it is") because, in two recent manuscripts sent to me to read for a possible blurb, the friggin' proofreader corrected the author's use of "its" (when it was used correctly) for "it's."
Once more, with feeling:
THOSE TWO WORDS ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE.
"Its" and "It's" are not the same. Stop doing it. It makes you look ignorant.
2: Profanity
First of all, unless you're writing Christian Young Adult (and even that's up for debate), it would be unrealistic to write a novel or short story wherein one of the characters didn't swear at some point; our lives have become much more fast-paced and frustrating, and a result of that frustration is that people swear more now than they did, say, back in the days of Booth Tarkington's Magnificent Ambersons.
However (you knew that was coming, didn't you?), there is a difference between the way people swear in real life and how they should swear in fiction. I know a guy who would have a full one-third -- if not half -- his vocabulary hacked off at the knees if he were unable to say f**k. I've passed strangers' conversations wherein I picked up at least nine different profanities before they were out of earshot.
I remember one instance, while reading Skipp & Spector's The Light At The End, where in a single line of dialogue, one character used eleven profanities -- including all of the Biggies -- in one sentence; it was rather impressive ... but it was also way too much. Yeah, I have no doubt that there are people out there in the real world who do speak like that, but (and here comes the tip), if you over-use profanity in your dialogue, you rob it of its most important function: profanity is simply violence without action; it should be employed in fiction to either foreshadow or replace violence. If you follow this suggested guideline, you'll not only use less of it your writing, but what you do use will be so well-placed that it will have ten times the impact of an endless string of curses.
Example: in my novel In Silent Graves, there is a sequence where the main character (who's just lost his wife and newborn child) enconters two guys on a city bus who are swearing and cursing and spewing the most unbelievable filth (Andrew Dice Clay wouldn't say some of the things these two guys do); their language is upsetting a young woman who's sitting nearby the main character, and as the intensity of the profanity and filth builds, so does the main character's frustration and anger. It's the only time in the book that profanity of this level is used, and that was a deliberate choice on my part: I wanted it to be as shocking to the reader as it is to the main character, and I wanted it to build along with his anger. Everyone who's read the novel has mentioned this sequence as being very effective, and inwardly I cheer; I wanted it to be effective, I wanted their language to be shocking, because the increased intensity of the filth that comes out of their mouths foreshadows the violence that ends this sequence.
So: remember that profanity is simply violence without action, and that it should be employed only to foreshadow or replace violence; you'll find that you use less of it, and that what you do use will be all the more effective.
3: Exclamation Points
Admittedly, this one is a personal quibble. However: The exclamation point belongs in dialogue and only in dialogue.
Whenever I encounter an exclamation point used outside of dialogue, I am suddenly pulled from the spell of the story (assuming that it was cast in the first place) and made painfully aware of the writer's intent. It's the writer telling me, the reader, that this! Is! Supposed! To! Be! Exciting! Or! Shocking! Or! Revelatory! It automatically tells me that the writer doesn't trust my intelligence and instincts as a reader enough to let me figure out for myself that something is supposed to shock or stun or scare me.
Consider the following examples, all of them lifted from recent horror stories I've read:
He realized that he hadn't locked the door behind him! And now they were going to kill her! They weren't alone in the house! He was lost!
You get the idea. To say it's melodramatic would be to succumb to gross understatement. The use of the exclamation point outside of dialogue is, to my mind, a lazy cop-out all too frequently embraced by horror writers (and we've all done it, myself included). Think I'm overstating my point? Then try this simple exercise: Pick any of the above-quoted lines, and when you reach the exclamation point, imagine that it's been replaced by the first four notes of the Dragnet theme. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Makes its use seem absurd, doesn't it?
They weren't alone in the house Dum-Da-Dum-Dum.
Keep that in mind the next time you're tempted to use an exclamation point somewhere other than in dialogue.
4: Italics
Like profanity, italics are most effective when used sparingly. From my point of view, italics should only be used to:
place emphasis on a particular word or phrase;
indicate a foreign word or phrase;
cite the name of a book, film, television or radio program, or musical work (as in the name of a symphony or a specific album, such as Mahler's 1st, The Who's Tommy, Warren Zevon's Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School, etc.);
to insert a brief flashback - be it a sequence of events or a snippet of recalled conversation - within the body of the current narrative; and,
to set apart the contents of a letter, excerpted lines from a poem, or a snippet of song lyrics (which could arguably be accomplished with the use of block quotes instead, making this last "rule" more of a stylistic choice on the part of the writer).
(Parenthetical pause here: when citing the name of a song or a story, quotation marks are what's required, as in: Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" or Stephen King's "Sometimes They Come Back". The title of the album or collection in which the piece is included would be italicized, as in: Simon and Garnfunkel's Greatest Hits and Night Shift. The differences are subtle, but profound, and not necessarily as easy to discern as one might at first think.)
Remember the Dragnet-theme warning I suggested when it came to using exclamation points? Well I've got a similar warning cue to employ when it comes to italics: imagine that whatever is italicized is being either whispered or Shouted Through A Bullhorn (however circumstances dictate); it's a matter of extremes, like it or not.
An italicized letter or quoted poem? A whisper.
A panicked warning (as in: "Look out!")? A shout through a bullhorn. (And bear in mind that when you combine italics with all caps -- "LOOK OUT!" -- it's overkill; the circumstances under which something like the above is italicized give the words or passage an immediacy that presenting them in all capital letters only diminishes; it's hitting the reader over the head with your intent: DEAR GOD, THIS IS REALLY, REALLY IMPORTANT AND I'M GOING TO MAKE DAMN SURE YOU KNOW IT!. Overkill. Don't do that, please. (If you've been paying close attention, you'll know that there's a spot in theis very essay where I overkilled with italics; I did that on purpose, to be annoying, just to help me hammer home the point when you arrived here.)
There is another -- and less directly acknowledged -- reason that it's a good idea to use italics sparingly: like it or not, a prolonged passage of italics quickly tires the eyes while reading. It's that simple.
As a writer, whenever I come to a passage that I know is going to have to be italicized (such as a letter or brief flashback), I apply the same rule to my own work that I do to anything that I might choose to read: no more than 3 pages. That is all that my eyes can take as a reader, so I assume that's my readers' limits, as well. After 3 pages, it just gets annoying; and the last thing you want is for a reader to become more aware of how you're presenting something than of its content.
So: a whisper or shouted through a bullhorn, no more than 3 pages, and you just might find that italics can be a useful ally.
5: Sibilant City
Read this and see if you can spot what's wrong:
"Get out now!" he hissed.
Figured it out yet?
In order for someone to "hiss" something when they speak, there has to be at least one sibilant present.
Too many writers are doing this, and it must stop.
"Stop it!" she hissed. That works because there is a sibilant present. Otherwise, it ain't hissing, folks.
To recap: It's a question of sibilants being present in speech before its hissing can happen. (Subtle, ain't I?)
In Part 1 we discussed an approach to characterization that was based on nuance -- specifically, visual nuance. I used an an example how much you can tell about a character from the way he or she eats a bowl of cereal. This time, as promised, we're going to take a look at how you can get to know a character from the way he or she puts on or takes off a coat.
I know this may seem silly on the surface, but it works for me. Nearly every story I have written has begun with an image of the central character doing something mundane, but it's the manner in which this mundane task in done that instantly tells me a great deal about them.
Just as a mental exercise, try this: the next you go out to a club, movie, party, or restaurant, over the course of the evening choose five people at random and watch how they both remove and put on their coats. Does this person treat their coat with care, removing it slowly, one arm at a time, and then drape it carefully over the back of their chair (making sure that the lower part doesn't touch the floor), or do they just all but let it drop off of them, and then thoughtlessly sling it over the back of a chair without a second glance, even though a full one-third of it is now spread out on the floor?
As far as putting the coat back on, watch this, as well. Do they exercise care when they do this (again, one arm at a time, slowly), taking time to smooth it out a bit once it's on their body, or do they make a bit of a show out of it, swirling it around their shoulders like Zorro's cape and then jamming their arms into the sleeves with such wide flourish there's a good chance they could take out someone's eye should that other person be standing too close?
This can tell you a lot about your character, albeit in broad strokes, but that's where characterizaton starts. The character who takes care of their coat, who is careful to remove it and hang it off the back of the chair so no part of it touches the floor (and who also exercises quiet care when putting it back on) reveals several things by these actions: this coat is something that has some meaning for them -- it may have been a gift from a family member who is no longer alive (it may even have belonged to that family member, it's your call); it may have been something for which they had to save money every month in order to purchase because they don't have a lot of disposable income; it may be that this coat is one of the few things they feel they look good in; or it may be that this is the only coat they own. The possibilities are endless.
But here is the one thing that you'll know immediately: this is, in all probability, a shy person, one who wishes to blend in as much as possible so as not to draw attention to him- or herself. This is a person who will be all to happy to join in the conversation, but will rarely begin one of their own volition.
Whereas the other person -- the one who just tosses the coat down without a second thought and then makes a bit of a show when putting it back on -- this person is not only an extrovert, but also quite probably someone who, though he or she may have a job, has never really known what it's ike to work in order to possess the basics (like said coat). The coat may have been a gift from a parent (who is still probably alive, and thus able to provide them with a new coat when this one becomes trashed by having half of it draped across the floor so many times); it may be just one of several coats they own, so what the hell do they care?; or it may be that -- like our other person -- this is the only coat they own, but because they need to foster this devil-may-care persona among their friends, they treat it with indifference ... until, of coursde, it's time to leave, and putting it back on allows them to be showy, thus making sure they remain the center of attention.
Like I said, these are broad-stroke examples, but it's a way to begin. Other factors must be called into consideration in order to enrich this scenario; the age and sex of the character in question; the kind of coat he or she is wearing (expensive, something off the rack at Target, something tailored specifically for them, etc.); the circumstances under which he or she is wearing the coat. (I imagine that our first character would exercise the same kind of deliberate care with their coat whether he or she were with a group of people or eating alone -- and wouldn't it be interesting if our second character, when alone, treated their coat with the same care and didn't make a show of putting it back on? It's fun how this works, isn't it?)
Now take it a step further: imagine what's in the pockets of each character's coat. Going with the original conceit that our first character is a shy person who, for the sake or argument, was given the coat as a gift by a deceased parent (perhaps the last gift this person ever received from said parent), they're not likely to stick a used candy bar wrapper in one of the pockets because they couldn't immediately find a trash can after polishing off ... what? (Ask yourself that: what kind of a candy bar would this person prefer, or would they like candy at all? Hmmmmm ....) I imagine that our shy perswon would keep a pair of gloves in the pockets (for when the outside tmperature gets cold) and perhaps their car keys, but little else. Simple and uncluttered.
Whereas our second character would have receipts, loose change, car keys, two or three wadded one-dollar bills they've forgotten are even in there, half a dozen phone numbers scribbled on slips of paper, and a half-eaten candy bar from six months ago that has begun to grow a fungus that is starting to breathe and develop a rudimentary language.
I could go on, but I think you probably got the point of this at least three paragraphs ago.
Keeping in mind what I've discussed, allow me to present you with someone:
Female. Mid-30s. Her coat is wool, with a removable lining. It's tan. It's in very good condition and, in fact, might be thought brand-new until you get close enough to see that it's at least ten years out of style. She removes it carefully after entering the restaurant (she's alone) and instead of draping it over the back of her own chair, places it lengthwise across the other chair at the table, so that the collar is just hanging a little over the back of the chair, and the bottom of the coat hangs a little ways past the seat of the chair, nowhere near touching the floor. She's wearing a wedding ring, but it's on the ring finger of her right hand. She takes her cloth napkin and spreads it across her lap, then smoothes it out. She picks up the menu, takes a small sip from her water glass, and begins reading. If you watch closely, you can see that her hands are trembling slightly.
What's her story? Write about her character in a single paragraph.
I've been very lucky in that readers and many of my fellow writers feel I have a certain skill for creating three-dimensional characters. I'm often asked how I manage to do this, so I thought for my next few columns here, I'd go over some of the methods I employ for characterization. Please bear in mind that these methods are those which work best for me and are not being offered as absolutes or -- God forbid -- a template that will guarantee you'll get the same results. There is no such template; creating a multi-layered, believable, sympathetic character is, like everything else one learns about writing, a matter of trial and error.
Before getting any further into this, I need to give you a little personal background so you'll see how I arrived at these particular methods.
For the better part of a decade -- between the ages of 19 and 30 -- I worked as an actor, mostly summer stock and dinner theatre, but I actually got paid to pretend I was someone else. During those years, I worked with an assortment of other actors, all of whom had their own approach to interpreting the particular role in which they were cast.
The late Laurence Olivier was a self-proclaimed "technical" actor -- he worked from the outside in; he would find a walk, a speech pattern, various mannerisms, etc. through which the character would reveal itself to him. While rehearsing a Noel Coward play in which he played a prissy English lord, Olivier was having great difficulty getting a handle on both the character and how to play him. This semi-famous story reached its happy ending when Olivier, passing by an antique store, happened to glance in the window and see a walking stick for sale. He went in to the store, picked up the walking stick, and the moment it was in his hand, he knew the character. (The walking stick, by the way, was described by Olivier as "...one of the ugliest, most ostentatious things..." he'd ever seen, but knew that his character would think it was classy and tasteful.)
I worked with a lot of technical actors. I was one myself.
I also worked with a lot of Method actors. Method actors are an ongoing gift to the world from Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky, an actor, writer, and director from Moscow who created an approach that forefronted the psychological and emotional aspects of acting. The Stanislavsky System, or "the Method."
Without boring you into a coma, I'll try to simplify what "the Method" is. It requires that, if an actor is to portray fear, he must remember something that terrified him and use that remembered fear to instill reality and credibility into his performance. The same with joy, lust, anger, confusion, etc. Stanislavsky's Method also requires that the actor know everything about the his or her character, usually by having the actor write a short "inner history" for their character, past details of their lives that -- while never used on stage -- would nonetheless give the performance even deeper authenticity.
In theory, Stanislavsky's Method is an amazing tool for an actor. It requires the complete submersion of the self into the body, psyche, and thoughts of another person so that an actor's performance rings of the truth.
I use the phrase "in theory" above because, in my opinion, too many actors use Stanislavsky's Method as an excuse for self-indulgence masking itself as research. Don't misunderstand -- when you get a Method actor like Marlon Brando (in his prime), Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Sean Penn, Gregory Peck, Johnny Depp, Lance Henriksen, or Bob Hoskins (to name a small handful) who have the discipline and wherewithal to employ the Method to all its power, and you can have something glorious.
But I didn't get to work with any of them. I got to work with Method actors who would spend weeks researching and writing their "inner history", demand that I address them only as their character (even when off stage), and never, never make light of anything at any time.
The prime example of how Stanislavsky's Method can be turned into rampant silliness happened when I was doing a stage production of Sherlock Holmes and had to do several scenes with the actor playing Dr. Watson. (I played a slimy little safecracker named Sidney Prince.) The actor playing Watson had written a 25-page "inner history" for Watson, researched hand-to-hand combat methods used by British troops during the Boar War, studied medical procedures practiced in London in the 1800s ... and when the curtain rose each night, audiences were treated to his imitation of Nigel Bruce for two-and-a-half hours.
But that's not the silly part. The silly part always happened off stage, right before the third scene of the second act (where Watson confronts Prince). As he and I waited for our cues, the actor playing Watson would drink a cup of vinegar. I asked him why, and this, word for word, was his reply: "Because, Mr. Prince, dealing with you leaves a bad taste in my mouth."
Time to run, not walk, to the nearest exit.
I finally came to the conclusion that for me, as an actor, Stanislavsky's Method was useless. Every Method actor I had worked with wound up giving stiff, overly-mannered, obvious performances (in that it was obvious they were "acting"). I don't know that I'll ever do theatre again, but if I do, I'll use the same "technical" approach that I always used.
But I came to realize that, while Stanislavsky's Method might be useless to me as an actor, it was priceless to me as a writer. I still approach characterization -- especially during the early stages of a story or novel -- from a technical starting point, but almost always fall back on Stanislavsky's Method when it comes time to add emotional depth and authenticity to whichever character is coming to life on the page -- and I won't commit a single word to the page until said character is someone I recognize as an old friend.
I always start with two simple questions, questions that are going to strike you as being a bit silly on the surface, but questions that, for me, reveal so much more than what is simply seen; for the purpose of this column, let's say those two questions are these: How does this character put on his or her coat? and How much milk do they use when having a bowl of cereal?
Since this is already running a bit long, I'll address the second question, and we'll get to the coats next time.
Let's say that this particular character uses just enough milk to barely cover the cereal, thus ensuring that both milk and cereal will be finished at the same time with nothing left in the bowl but the spoon. That's the technical starting point, the outside. Now, let's go in and look a little closer. They do this because they don't believe in waste; they're not the type to dump the last bit of milk down the sink after the cereal is gone. (And if there is any milk remaining, they either lift the bowl and drink it, or set the bowl on the floor so the cat can finish it.)
Why do they not believe in waste? Because they can't afford to be wasteful. They work long hours at a job that manages to pay the bills, the rent, and buy a set amount of groceries each week. But no excesses, no luxuries, ergo, no wasting of the milk. This also suggests that this character may not be the happiest person you've ever met; after all, if they have to be this frugal with milk, then that frugality has to extend to every other aspect of their existence, as well, and with that comes an endless string of commonplace worries that, taken individually, may not seem like much, but cumulatively drain a lot of enjoyment from life.
This character is sitting at a kitchen table that also doubles as the dinner table, because he or she lives in a 3- or 4-room apartment; a nice-enough place that's affordable if not fancy. I'm willing to bet that stashed up in one of the kitchen cupboards is a set of china cups and saucers left to them by a dead relative, cups and saucers that they only use on special occasions, like those rare instances they have company. I'll also bet you that on this character's chest of drawers in the bedroom we'll find a jar filled two-thirds of the way with an assortment of spare change -- mostly pennies, dimes, and some quarters -- that this character is planning on using to buy themselves a nice little something-or-other once the jar is full, maybe a new pair of dress shoes at Target or K-mart.
I could keep going but I think you've got the idea. All of this from simply looking into their cereal bowl to see how much milk they used. And it doesn't matter a damn whether or not any of the information from the above paragraph makes it into the story because I am now well on the road to knowing this person; and the better I know them, the more authentic and believable they will be to the reader, and we will have achieved what Stanislavsky's Method demands: complete, unflinching, undistilled truth when depicting the human condition of the character in question.
Next time, the coats. In the meantime, you might want to think about what we might find in the pockets....
I was talking to Gary last night, and he told me he'd just found out that there are still copies of his limited edition chapbook "We Now Pause For Station Identification" available.
In all my wifely bias, I have to say that this is a kick-ass chapbook. It's not a funny zombie story, but it is a really good one. What's it about? The narrator, a talk-radio DJ, is trapped in his broadcast booth, low on food and water, dangling at the end of his sanity as the dead walk the earth.
"We Now Pause ..." is on the preliminary Stoker ballot, and if it gets on the final ballot, I'm hoping that the publisher will let me put up a movie I shot of Gary reading the story at the Stokers last year. I think that if people can hear even just a bit of the story, they'll know it's worth having.
This is going to bounce around a bit like a paper cup caught in the wind, but will hopefully come together at the end, so bear with me.
One of the things I promised myself when I agreed to take part in this blog was that I would try to avoid offering advice to aspiring writers. This is not arrogance on my part, nor is it my assigned covert role in some labyrinthine conspiracy designed to make certain that basic necessary knowledge for starting one's writing career is kept concealed from you, thus eliminating any potential competition you and your work might pose in the marketplace.
The reason I am uncomfortable offering advice to aspiring writers is simple: I'm still learning how to do this myself (and I hope that I'll never stop learning). Many of the things I discovered through trial and error no longer apply, and I wouldn't dare try to tell someone else how they should go about managing a writing career.
But there is one piece of advice that, when pressed to, I gladly offer to aspiring writers -- and it's one that is often met by blank, confused stares: Forget Genre.
If you sit down and say, "I'm going to write a HORROR story," you might -- consciously or not -- start grafting traditionally horrific elements onto a story where they don't belong, and you can hobble a story by trying to force it to fit within the "traditional" (read: popularly accepted) boundaries of a particular genre, rather than expand those boundaries by not worrying about how it's going to be categorized. View it only in terms of the story you want to tell, not the one you think readers are going to be expecting.
Two things happened recently that prompted me to revisit this subject for myself: 1) Reviews for my novella In the Midnight Museum and my new Leisure novel, Keepers started appearing, and, 2) A member of a local writers' group made a statement so naive as to be almost -- almost -- laughable.
About the former: much to my relief, the reviews for both Museum and Keepers have thus far been overwhelmingly positive, but in almost every case, the reviewers have said something along the lines of "...it's both horror and not", or, "...I guess horror is as good as anything to call it..."
You get the idea. Neither work fits easily into any single category, and it's making some people crazy trying to figure out where to put them. My response is: how about just addressing them as stories and leave it at that?
My guess is that readers and reviewers begin reading a story labeled "horror" (or "cyberpunk", or "fantasy", or "mystery", or what have you) with certain ingrained expectations; they have come to anticipate certain elements to appear to a particular type of story, and are surprised -- sometimes not pleasantly so -- when those expectations are not met and/or indulged.
Only half a dozen times in my career have I sat down and said, "I'm going to write a HORROR story," and then proceeded to do just that, always bearing in mind what readers expect in a horror story, and making damn sure I worked in as many of those expected elements as I could. Six times I've done this, and six times I've produced stories that are just, well...awful. And they're awful because I did not forget genre, genre was the overriding factor in their creation -- and telling a good story was secondary.
Shame on me.
Now to the latter point before I bring all this together.
I belong to a local writers' group that is composed mostly of fantasy and science fiction writers. Many of these folks are unpublished or have just begun publishing; some of the folks have a decent amount of fiction already published; and a small handful of them, including myself and Charles Coleman Finlay, have got a fairly decent body of published work out there.
In a recent discussion, one of the members -- who writes heroic fantasy -- commented that she'd noticed a "...larger than usual number of horror-type stories" being submitted for critique, and could we possibly cut down on that because she and several other members don't 'get' horror. When prompted for further comment, she also admitted that she's read "...some Stephen King" but otherwise tends to read almost exclusively in the field of -- you guessed it -- heroic fantasy.
She is not alone in this; members who write exclusively mystery fiction have quit the group because they didn't 'get' fantasy, and the science fiction folks didn't 'get' mystery.
What's to 'get'? Somebody explain this to me -- on second thought, please don't, it wasn't an actual request.
It doesn't matter a damn if your story is horror, or mainstream, or fantasy, or erotica, or any other genre or sub-genre -- it is, must be, must always be, first and foremost a good story.
Why don't more readers and writers understand that? Have we become so tunnel-visioned in our expectations that we have given up the hope of ever seeing any genre attempt something new and/or different? Or have we been trained through a steady diet of the same old same-old to want nothing more than journeyman-level storytelling, storytelling that challenges neither the mind nor the heart (forget about those "traditional boundaries" I mentioned earlier)?
If you answered "yes" to either of those questions, I think it's quite possible that you're the type of reader or writer who's come to think in terms of "genre" far too much for your own good.
Far too many writers -- both new and established -- think too much in terms of the type of story they're writing -- and what's worse, far too many of them read almost exclusively in the field in which they want to publish. While it is important to be be well-read in your chosen field, it's vital that you read outside that field as much as possible, otherwise you'll eventually be writing nothing more than a hip imitation of a pastiche of a rip-off of something that was original two decades ago but has now fallen far too deep into a well-worn groove to offer a challenge to either writers or readers.
I read all over the place, and do not restrict my influences to those giants in the field from under whose shadows I hope to emerge.
As a result, yes, both of my recent works are and aren't horror; they're both also fantasy and not; each is and isn't a mystery, a romance, a mainstream character study. What they are, are two pieces of which I am very proud because they were the best stories I could make them ... because I followed my own advice and Forgot Genre.
Approach any work as being simply a story, and you'll always "get" it; think only in terms of "genre" and you'll have a hobbled story by the third paragraph.
That is the best piece of advice that I have or will ever have for aspiring writers. I hope you found something useful contained here.
Now go read Theodore Sturgeon's magnificent The Dreaming Jewels and put someone into brainlock when you ask them to tell you what kind of a novel it is.
After a while, regardless of how well-focused, disciplined, and determined you are when writing a book, you just don't, well... see it any more. It happens to all of us at some point on every project. You spend so much time writing, cutting, revising, and polishing, that you risk either not seeing the forest for the trees or become so over-focused on one particular tree that you don't notice the forest fire until it's too late.
Okay, carried that metaphor just a little too far, sorry, but hopefully you've already discerned the point: that there comes a time during a book-length project when you've spent so much time working on it that you lose perspective.
Here's the thing: by the time you, as a reader, pick up a copy of an author's book, the author him- or herself has read it over at least three times -- and this is after the countless hours spent writing, re-writing, and polishing. If you want to include all that, as well, then I think it's safe to say that by the time a book goes to print, its author has read it through, from beginning to end, a minimum of seven times, probably more.
This is a necessary evil. Editorial suggestions and changes must be considered and/or made, the manuscript must then be read through to make certain that these changes mesh with the overall story (tone, narrative arc, continuity, etc.), and if a problem is then discovered, it must be fixed, and the whole process starts over again.
I'm oversimplifying this because to describe the process in painstaking detail would not only rob the reading experience of some of its magic, but bore you to tears.
But when the book is finally out there, and everything looks good, the author and the editor can sit back and smile at having done their job to the best of their abilities. Authors often cite their editors as having been "instrumental" in helping to shape a book that may have encountered some rough spots along the pot-holed road to publication. Editors deserve all the credit that an author cares to cast their way, no arguments here.
But there is a group of unsung heroes in the publishing process, people whose names often don't appear anywhere in the book, but without whose effort, insight, and input, a lot of us would look like illiterate fools.
I am talking about proofreaders, those folks whose thankless job it is to go through your manuscript once you've ceased being able to see it anymore and look for the signs of a possible forest fire (see over-extended metaphor at the beginning). Many people think a proofreader's sole responsibility is to check spelling and punctuation. While that is definitely right up there on their list of duties, many of them go the extra mile -- hell, many of them go several hundred extra miles -- to ensure that the book they're working on is the best it can possibly be.
And they do this by deliberately searching out those elements that you, the writer, ceased to be able to see somewhere around Draft #3.
Two personal examples: a few weeks ago, right before my second Cedar Hill collection, Home Before Dark was being prepped for the printer, one of Earthling's marvelous proofreaders noticed that in my story, "Palimpsest Day", the age of the mother did not add up if one stopped to consider her dates of birth and death. Now, I know that a lot of people tend to read such details with a quick eye and don't stop to do the exact math ... but that's no excuse for sloppiness, and that is exactly what this mistake was -- sloppiness on my part. I had become so over-focused on fine-tuning the story so that it fit into the overall arc of the Cedar Hill cycle that I overlooked a small but significant detail -- making sure the mother's age added up. While a mistake of this sort probably wouldn't have ruined the story, its mere presence would have lessened the story's value. I had read through the manuscript so many times that I simply didn't see this problem any more, and thanks to a sharp proofreader, neither will you.
Second example: up until its fourth round of proofreads, my novella In the Midnight Museum contained a glaring continuity error that, while in and of itself quite small, would have damned near pulled the rug out from underneath the entire story had it not been caught by the proofreader. It was a quick, minor detail that very well might have been overlooked by most readers, but those readers who would not have missed it would have had the entire second half of the story ruined by this nagging inconsistency. (You've noticed, haven't you, that I'm not telling you the exact nature of this mistake? That's because I am so embarrassed by it that I dare not share the specifics, lest you think me, well ... simple. "My God," you'd say. "A sponge would have seen that." And I'd prefer you leave this essay thinking I have an IQ higher than my shoe size.)
But, again, this potentially destructive detail was overlooked by me because I had stopped seeing the whole of the moon and focused only on the crescent (I figured it was time to switch metaphors).
So consider all of the above to be a preamble to this: a song of gratitude to all proofreaders, those unsung heroes who labor over our manuscripts almost as long and intensely as we do, whose unblinking eye often catch the flaws that we can no longer see, and whose objectivity gives us a fresh perspective just as we need it the most.
I'm going to end this by getting even more specific: Paul Miller, Don Koish, Deena Warner, John Everson, Ron Clinton, Robert Mingee, Jack Haringa, and -- my own personal major domo, Mark Lancaster ... thank you. A thousand times, thank you. Thank you for caring about my work enough to go those extra hundred miles and always pointing out even the smallest problem, no matter how testy I get about your nitpicking. You are why I look like a good writer.
My gratitude and admiration knows no bounds.
Now see how many mistakes you can find in this blog entry. Just don't tell me about them or I might throw a hissy fit.
There's a dark side writing that few people have dared address. I'm talking about the single most dangerous foe to the writer's resolve; the thing that can stop even the most dedicated wordsmith dead in his or her tracks; an element of the publishing business that renders all of us absolutely powerless when faced with it.
No, it isn't the dreaded book signing that finds you sitting at a table for 90 minutes, during which time the only person to approach you and the unsold stacks of your new book is someone asking for directions to the bathroom; it isn't having someone discover you're a horror writer and asking (almost as if compelled to do so by a Congressional Decree): "So, do you know Stephen King?"; and, no, it isn't that utterly radiant, mettle-testing moment when you open that first royalty statement to discover that your book has, in the course of one year, sold only one-third of its print run so obtaining that more pricey loaf of bread is going to have to be put on the back burner once again. Yes, all of these can test you, no doubt; they can chip away at your confidence if you let them; and they can make you a real buzz-kill who doesn't get invited to many parties, but I'm not here to discuss my dreadful personality problems.
No; the single biggest foe to the writer's resolve, confidence, and determination is (insert ominous chord here): the Horror of the Used Book Store.
We all shop at them. We're writers, for pity's sake, our major source of income is our writing (see Laura Anne Gilman's previous post to learn more of that particular daily terror), none of us can afford to shell out 30 bucks for each new hardcover or 8 bucks for each new paperback on a consistent basis. We go there to find a bargain, or perhaps to locate a book that's been hard to find or out of print for several years. While we're doing this, we remind ourselves that the First Sale Doctrine, codified in Section 109 of The U.S. Copyright Act, allows the original owner of any book to transfer ownership of the phyisical copy in any way they choose, so, technically, there's nothing legally or morally wrong with our purchasing any books here.
Besides (we tell ourselves), stores like this make books affordable to folks who otherwise wouldn't have the money to buy them. So it's all good ... until we find ourselves face to face with copies of our own books.
Don't shake your head at me; if you've ever published with a mass market house, odds are you've found yourself in this situation. And what is the writer's first reaction? But, my work is eternal, it speaks to the deepest pain of the human condition, my books are things to be treasured , to be passed down from generation to generation, not end up here!
The first time I discovered copies of my novel In Silent Graves on the shelf at a used book store, I felt a slight twinge of disappointment -- who wouldn't? We all hope that our books will be things that readers will want to keep around to read again someday, but here we are, faced with the bald hard truth that not everyone who buys and reads our books is going to want to keep them. I at least had the pleasure of knowing that the 3 copies I found on the shelf had been well-read, as evidenced by the wear on, and cracks in, the spines.
Two weeks ago, I'm in another used book store with a friend of mine who also happens to be a writer, and he points out to me that another copy of Graves is on the shelf. I'm really into this now, I've adopted a helathy attitude, I want to see how well-read the copy was, enjoy the sight of those cracks in the spine, hold it in my hands knowing that whoever had owned it before read the living shit out of it before selling it here.
Well, guess what? (Here's the moment that really tests the mettle.)
It hadn't been read. It hadn't even been opened, as far as I could tell. It still had the Walpurgis-Mart sticker covering the bar code on the back.
"What is it?" asked my writer friend.
"This hasn't even been read," I whispered.
"You don't know that," he replied. "maybe the person who sold this is like you, they take care not to damage the spine when they read a paperback. Maybe they're just very careful with their books."
"And maybe they just didn't read it." (Outwardly, I'm doing the Healthy Attitude Shuffle, I'm very calm and cool and collected; inwardly, I'm jumping up and down and throwing a fit and threatening to hold my breath until my face turns blue.)
"Okay," my writer friend said, "then you gotta tell yourself that there was some earth-shaking emergency that forced them to sell this book. They lost a job. They lost a limb. Their Workman's Comp ran out. They had to do it to put food on the table for their family, man! You know they had to do it to put food on the table! Dear God, why else would they part with one of your books? IT WAS A MATTER OF LIFE OR DEATH!"
"So what you're telling me in your own subtle way is that I'm over-reacting?"
"God, no! You're a hero, Gary, a lifesaver!" He threw his arm around my shoulder and began talking very loudly. "Because of you and your book, somewhere in this city tonight, a man's family is not going to bed hungry. They can afford Grandma's medication for another month. Little Eunice can get that knee surgery so that her dreams of the Joffrey Ballet needn't be forever buried, thus turning her into a bitter, empty shell of a human being before she turns 13! And it's all because of this book on this shelf. I'm sorry, I'm ... I'm getting emotional, tearing up. So moving, it is. I so rarely get to witness acts of decency and heroism. It reaffirms my faith in humanity. We must all hold hands," he cried out to the terror-stricken customers. "Indeed, we must all hold hands and sing out our joy at being here to mark this resplendent moment in human history. Come, sing with me, all of you: 'WHEN YOU WALK THROUGH A STORM, KEEP YOU HEAD HELD HIGH, AND DON'T BE AFRAID OF --'"
"So I'm over-reacting, is this what you're telling me?"
"Nah. They probably got through the first 20 pages and decided it was too much of a downer. You gotta admit, this thing ain't gonna make anybody's list of My Top Ten Favorite Chuckle-fests."
"I feel so much better now, thanks."
"Hey, take your pick: They did it to put food on the table, or they did it because they thought your book sucked the dimples off a golf ball through 40 feet of clogged garden hose."
We're writers, we exist because of fantasy and delusion and our ability to convey them on the page. And when you have to rely on your writing as your major source of income, any delusion helps, especially if you know it's a delusion.
So I helped a stranger put food on the table for his family. I feel good about myself.
Bubba Ho-Tep is one of my favorite 2003 movies. It's an extremely adept adaptation of Joe Lansdale's novella of the same name by director Don Coscarelli. Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis are wonderful in their respective roles as elderly men who may or may not be Elvis and JFK stuck in a nursing home in Mud Creek, Texas* who must do battle with an Egyptian mummy who is brought to unlife after his museum box is dumped in a creek near the home.
The low-budget movie circulated the U.S. in extremely limited release last year. My wife and I took my nephew to see while it played in Columbus for a week -- to sold-out showings, no less -- at our local art house theater, the Drexel. Afterward, many people my nephew talked about the movie to in his home town wouldn't believe it was an actual movie.
However, now that Bubba Ho-Tep has been released on DVD, everyone who missed it in theaters can get themselves a copy. And in my book, it's an excellent purchase for any movie fan's library. I bought my nephew one just so he could prove to all his friends he didn't just make the whole thing up.
The movie is wonderful all the way around, with great performances from everyone, right down to the smallest supporting character. It's got all of Lansdale's trademark humor and off-center poignancy.
The transfer is gorgeous, and seeing it again (this time on the small screen) made me appreciate the director's use of comic-book angles more than I did inb the theater. There's a surprising amount of extras, but the single biggest reason to own this (aside from having the movie itself) is for the secondary audio track where Bruce Campbell as Elvis comments on the film as if he's seeing it for the first time. It's basically a 90-minute performance piece, and it's utterly hysterical.
What surprised me upon my second (and third) viewing (yes, I watched it twice -- c'mon, you know I have no life) was that there are countless little throwaway character bits that I didn't catch the first (or even second) time. A lot of love went into the making of this movie, a lot of care was taken, and the result -- even if you have some quibbles about it -- is undeniably a unique (in the dictionary sense of the word) movie: you ain't ever seen nothin' like this before.
The other surprise was the level of poignancy in the movie; this thing would have been a disaster if the filmmakers had decided to make fun of the elderly, or to play its two lead characters for laughs; they don't. The characters -- outrageous as they are -- are treated with respect and given dignity, and I was shocked that during the "salute" moment near the end, I actually got a little choked up.
Helluva good movie, a new cult classic (as it deserves to be -- the masses aren't ready for something like this).
I'd most definitely give this movie ***1/2, hands-down -- and it's ***1/2 instead of **** because I have a quibble: I think it takes just a tad too long to set up its premise, but that in no way diminishes the enjoyment.
* They shot the movie on-location in an actual nursing home in the actual town of Mud Creek, Texas. When you watch the movie, you'll notice that aside from JFK's room, the home looks pretty run-down. The home had been closed down temporarily for badly-needed repairs.
Unless you're writing in the Christian Young Adult genre (and even that's up for debate), it would be unrealistic to write a novel or short story wherein one of the characters didn't swear at some point. Our lives have become much more fast-paced and frustrating, and a result of that frustration is that people swear more now than they did, say, back in the days of Booth Tarkington's Magnificent Ambersons.
However (you knew that was coming, didn't you?), there is a difference between the way people swear in real life and how they should swear in fiction.
I know a guy who would have a full one-third -- if not half -- his vocabulary hacked off at the knees if he were unable to say "f***". My wife talks in her sleep; though she strives to be polite in her speech, her most common nocturnal utterances are some combination of "christ", "sh**", "f***", and "what?" I've passed strangers' conversations wherein I picked up at least nine different profanities before they were out of earshot.
I remember one instance, while reading Skipp & Spector's The Light At The End, where in a single line of dialog, one character used eleven profanities -- including all of the Biggies -- in one sentence; it was rather impressive ... but it was also way too much.
Yeah, I have no doubt that there are people out there in the real world who do speak like that, but if you overuse profanity in your dialog you rob it of its most important function.
Profanity, at its core, is best used as violence without action.
It should be employed in fiction to either foreshadow or replace violence. If you follow this suggested guideline, you'll not only use less of it your writing, but what you do use will be so well-placed that it will have ten times the impact of an endless string of curses.
For example, in my novel In Silent Graves, there is a sequence in which the main character (who's just lost his wife and newborn child) encounters two guys on a city bus who are swearing and cursing and spewing the most unbelievable filth (Andrew Dice Clay wouldn't say some of the things these two guys do). Their language is upsetting a young woman who's sitting near the main character, and as the intensity of the profanity and filth builds, so does the main character's frustration and anger.
It's the only time in the book that profanity of this level is used, and that was deliberate: it's supposed to be as shocking to the reader as it is to the main character, because the increased intensity of the filth that comes out of their mouths foreshadows the violence that ends the scene.
Lost Boy, Lost Girl features characters those who have read Peter Straub's best-sellers Koko (1988), Mystery (1989), and The Throat (1993) will quickly recognize. In this book, horror novelist/Vietnam vet Timothy Underhill must travel home to Millhaven, IL and seek the aid of P.I. Tom Pasmore to solve the mystery of why Underhill's nephew disappeared after witnessing his mother's suicide.
While they track a pedophilic serial killer, they realize the lost boy had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he may have fallen under the spell of a ghostly girl.
This is without a doubt the best thing Straub's written in a decade. I for one thinks it takes a lot of guts and integrity for a writer of his stature to go off in a new direction under the guidance of a new editor and--gulp!--actually grow before our very eyes.
My respect for Straub has tripled since reading this book, and I use every chance I can to tell any dark fantasy fans I meet that they must read Lost Boy, Lost Girl -- I think it's every bit as important a novel in the field now as Ghost Story was when it was released.
One of the goals Straub and his new editor had in mind with this novel is for Straub to reach a wider audience--which is why it's so short. If you've had trouble with his stuff being far too dense in the past, then this is definitely the book for you. It's the most accessible novel he's ever written in the genre. It's beautifully crafted, surprisingly moving, and creepy as hell. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
The film The Sweet Hereafter is based on the novel of the same name written by Russell Banks. If you enjoyed the film, I encourage you to seek out the book, because it's wonderful. If you want to be a writer, or if you simply enjoy a good story, the novel has a great deal to offer you.
The book's central event is a school bus crash that kills many children in the small town of Sam Dent in upstate New York; the rest of the book explores the effect the tragedy has on the town and the novel's central characters.
The Sweet Hereafter provides the best example I've ever encountered of an author alternating between several first person narrators. It's told from four viewpoints: Dolores Driscoll, the bus driver; Billy Ansel, a grieving, alcoholic father of one of the dead children; Mitchell Stephens, a New York City lawyer who is trying to cope with grief over his own drug-addicted daughter; and Nichole Burnell, a teenager who was crippled in the accident.
Banks establishes such distinct cadences for each character that when all four of them are talking to one another, he goes sometimes for pages without a single "he said," "she said."
The book is 257 pages long and was first published in 1991, though parts of it appeared before that date in North American Review and Ontario Review.
God is Alone is a 2004 indie film written and directed by Jason Torrey. It's about a young man named William who, along with his deaf sister Amy, endures a great deal of abuse from their father. After William loses his job, he sees a girl abandoning a baby in a dumpster; he tries to help the baby, and the film chronicles the disaster that follows. On a symbolic level, the film is basically an update of the story of the birth of Christ.
I thought that Monique Farrar, the actress who played Amy, was superb--I don't recall the last time I saw a face so naturally and deeply, deeply sad; of all the actors in the film, she was the only one who I felt wasn't "acting"--she was natural and effortless and heartbreaking as hell.
Other reviewers have criticized the movie for having far too many scenes of William walking around. I agree (though I can undertand, to an extent, why Torrey chose to do this), but even if I hadn't liked it overall, I would still recommend that people watch it for the extraordinary "coffee-making" scene that comes about 2/3 of the way through.
The coffee scene accomplishes everything that good film storytelling should accomplish; it adds depth to the character, it has real poignancy, it's nerve-wracking as hell in context, and ultimately incredibly sad.
The entire sequence, from the time her father pours the coffee on the table right up until Amy falls asleep in her bedroom is--in my opinion--perfect. No flashy camera work, nothing terribly symbolic, just one person in a great deal of quiet pain and fear trying to keep herself from being further abused, then retreating into memories of the past in order to make coping with the present more endurable.
There's a lot of subtle pain and terror in that sequence, and though the rest of the film doesn't measure up to these 8 or 9 extraordinary minutes, that they exist at all is proof enough of the director's talent for me.
If you can get past some of the over-long strolls, a handful of visual self-indulgences, and some of the heavy-handed religious symbolism (that Amy was dressed in white, white, white all the time got on my nerves in short order) this is very worthwhile--though flawed--piece of filmmaking. It's a movie that isn't afraid to be exactly what it wants to be: it's the work of a single vision, so it's understandable that that vision might have gotten a little tunnel-visioned at times.
There is a scene in the movie that--as far as I can tell--serves no other purpose (speaking here from a narrative point) than for the director and his wife to put their baby daughter on-screen. But you know what? I'm a sucker for babies. The little girl is adorable, a natural for the screen if I ever saw one. Unfortunately--for the scene in question--you can't look at anyone or anything else once the baby comes on. It's not that she makes noise or draws attention to herself, it's just that she's so darned cute you don't really care about anything else.
But I want to re-emphasize something: despite my reservations about it, this is a very worthwhile film, one that shows its director as having serious intent and a talent to watch.
God is Alone is 104 minutes long and is intended for mature teens and adults.
M. Night Shyamalan's The Village is about the people of Covington, an isolated late-1800s era village somewhere in the wilds of Pennsylvania. The villagers have an uneasy truce between themselves and monstrous creatures who live in the woods surrounding their village. Travel is prohibited; as the movie opens, one of the village's elders has just lost his only son to a disease that could have been cured had they been able to travel to nearby towns to get medicines.
The plot thickens as the creatures invade the village at night and leave red slashes on doors and mutilated animals. After her beloved is gravely wounded, a blind girl decides she must brave the woods to get medical supplies.
Signs was an allegory about faith; this movie is about fear. The villagers wear the color of caution and cowardice.
The good things about this movie are that it is beautifully photographed and wonderfully acted, and the micro-writing of the script is very good. There are a number of great scenes, but I think the best is between Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) and Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard) on a porch.
The problem -- and it's a big one, folks -- is that The Village should have never been approached as a horror/suspense movie in the first place. It is not a scary movie because it never should have been a scary movie. Shyamalan has bought into his own PR as the "New Master Of Suspense". This movie -- and bear in mind I've liked all his other films -- was hamstrung by bad storytelling. As a result, it's the weakest of the films he's written and directed so far.
I've seen the central idea of The Village done in at least two old Twilight Zone< episodes, and I can't help but think that a writer like Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson would have done The Village right and told it as a sociological drama.
Another film similar to this was done many years ago; it's a wonderful Alan Bates film entitled King of Hearts. If you enjoyed The Village but left the theater feeling dissatisfied with the story as I did, you might try to find King of Hearts as a rental.
Furthermore, several people have mentioned to me that the plot of The Village is quite similar to a children's novel entitled Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix. Haddix's novel includes not only the basic idea of the village, but the village elders also have black boxes in their homes.
Derivative or not, The Village has a good story at its core -- but it took the movie over an hour to finally get around to telling it. The "twist" should have been revealed in the first thirty minutes -- as it is, it's broadcast enough that my wife and I guessed it pretty early on, and I know of at least one person who guessed it from simply watching the trailer. It could have been a really chilling and poignant drama had it been written and directed by someone who wasn't bent on making a suspense movie with a twist at the end.
And unfortunately although the story looks and sounds great, Shyamalan blew every chance he had to tell this story the way it should have been told.
Discussion (Spoilers Follow)
The movie does have an interesting political subtext, and many viewers (including myself) are interpreting it as a critique of the Bush Administration's handling of the war on terror: "If you won't fear the outside world so that we can control you with fear, we will create monsters to frighten you into meek submission."
Political allegories aside, the story was actually told backwards: this would have been a much more compelling movie had it begun with all of these broken people in the counselling center deciding they'd had enough of society's violence, and then following them as they took steps to make the life in the village and raise their children to be fearful of the outside world, and ending with the creation of "the monsters."
There was an outright plot hole in this one, too (aside from the literal plot hole in the woods). Why was the monster suit hidden in the floorboards of the quiet room where Noah would have access to it? The scene before had led us viewers to believe all the suits were in the forbidden shed. And how would Ivy know what the claw of one of the monsters would feel like, since she's never seen one? Sloppy.
And I found Noah's character to be a bit aggravating; I'm faulting the script rather than Adrien Brody's acting, which was fine as usual. Noah giggles at the sounds from the forest at the beginning because he know's what's going on -- it seems like he's the embodiment of the director laughing at us because we don't know what's going on yet. I gathered that Noah was responsible for all the animal mutilations as well, but it seems impossible he could do so many of the animals later on, and it's never really clarified. Another plot hole.
This movie's horror trappings were ultimately unnecessary. The tale was told with the emphasis on the wrong elements.
The lesson: never buy into your own PR, lest you take a good story and purposefully mangle it so that it better suits your "reputation."
Movie Information
Rating: PG-13 Running Time: 108 minutes Director: M. Night Shyamalan Writer: M. Night Shyamalan Score: James Newton Howard Cinematographer: Roger Deakins (who also shot O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Sid and Nancy) Cast:
Bryce Dallas Howard: Ivy Walker Joaquin Phoenix: Lucius Hunt Adrien Brody: Noah Percy William Hurt: Edward Walker Sigourney Weaver: Alice Hunt Brendan Gleeson: August Nicholson Cherry Jones: Mrs. Clack
I watched this 2004 movie last night and much to my surprise, I liked it. I'm not sure that this was really a good movie (though I can say without hesitation that the camera work -- done by the talented Conrad W. Hall -- and pacing of the action sequences are excellent) but I sure had a good time watching it.
It put me in mind of a Bogart movie from 1953 called Beat the Devil -- a movie that bombed and was panned by critics upon its initial release because everyone thought it was being serious; the ensuing decades have revealed that the movie is, in fact, a subtly tongue-in-cheek comedy whose wit and cleverness was a bit ahead of its time.
I think that's why The Punisher tanked; it's not a serious movie, despite the way it was advertised (and one wince-inducing torture sequence). I found this to be a wild entertaining, tongue-in-cheek comic book/action movie satire with a couple of very sly performances from Tom Jane and John Travolta.
And if you think I'm off-base about the tongue-in-cheek aspect, go back and watch the dinner-with-the-neighbors sequence again; Jane does some hysterically subtle stuff. And consider the diner sequence when guitar-strumming Johnny-Cash-as-psychopathic-assassin Harry Heck confronts Castle. And review the time the Russian assassin shows up--looking like Gorgeous George, complete with the Popeye red-striped shirt--you'll have no choice but to realize that this thing was not meant to be taken seriously; it's all tongue-in-cheek, and just overdone enough to be winkingly funny; it's meant to be a joke, and one that the viewer is in on.
Seriously; if one were to view this as a movie with serious intentions, it would be a disaster; watch it as a sly action dark comedy, and it's a whole new experience.
The basic plot is pretty simple: after his family is murdered by gangsters, Frank Castle goes on a one-man mission to kill the killers. "This is not revenge," Castle says. "This is punishment." He sets up his base of operations in a seedy apartment building where his oddball neighbors take an interest in him.
Comic book purists may of course be dismayed by the liberties the movie takes with the Frank Castle canon. Jane's Castle is a Federal undercover agent whose entire extended family is murdered by Howard Saint's hitmen at a reunion in Puerto Rico. Whereas in the original comic Castle had nothing to do with the drug lords prior to his immediate family's murder, in this movie Saint decrees the mass slaughter in revenge for his son's death during a drug sting orchestrated by Castle. And the subsequent action takes place in Florida instead of New York City. Furthermore, instead of being a loner, Castle becomes involved with his neighbors despite his own intentions.
Movie Information
Rating: R Release Year: 2004 Running Time: 124 minutes Director: Jonathan Hensleigh Writer: Jonathan Hensleigh and Michael France, based on the works of the various writers for the Marvel comic Cinematographer: Conrad W. Hall (who also shot Fight Club and American Beauty) Cast:
Russell Andrews -- Jimmy Weeks Omar Avila -- Joe Toro James Carpinello -- Bobby Saint/John Saint Mark Collie -- Harry Heck Ben Foster -- Spacker Dave Laura Harring -- Livia Saint Thomas Jane -- Frank Castle (as Tom Jane) Kevin Nash -- The Russian Will Patton -- Quentin Glass John Pinette -- Bumpo Rebecca Romijn-Stamos -- Joan Roy Scheider -- Frank Castle, Sr. Hank Stone -- Cutter John Travolta -- Howard Saint
I was asked to be one of the three judges for this year's Chiaroscuro Magazine/Leisure Books short story contest. We got quite a number of submissions, and on a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the highest), the stories came in at a solid 6.5 to 7, which, I have to admit, surprised me -- if for no other reason than a handful of past judges from other contests (not just this one) had led me to expect otherwise.
To be honest, I wasn't prepared for there to be such originality among the submissions; for every mad slasher, ghost, vampire, and (insert tired horror cliché here) story I read, I found there to be at least one story whose content, writing, or central idea outshone the more predictable tales (and even the predictable stories displayed a level of technical craftsmanship that was refreshing).
But even in a majority of these original stories, certain disquieting similarities began to pop up, the most predominant one being that, somewhere past the mid-point of the story, it seemed that the writers suddenly thought: "Whoa, wait a minute -- this is supposed to be a horror story!" ... and subsequently grafted obviously horrific elements onto the narrative so it more resembled the popular concept of horror.
Example: one story dealt with a young boy's imaginary friend whose physical form and behavior changed to suit the young boy's mood; if the boy had been mistreated by his friends, the imaginary friend appeared to him as beaten-up and angry; if the boy's mother had scolded him for something he did wrong, the imaginary friend appeared to him as smaller and sadder.
You get the idea.
Now this was -- for the first 6 pages -- an absolutely wonderful piece, reminiscent of the best Twilight Zone episodes, but then--
-- Whoa, wait a minute -- this is supposed to be a horror story! --
-- the imaginary friend shows up, unbidden, in the shape of a deformed monster wielding an axe, tells the boy that he's "...sick and tired of pretending to be something I'm not", and chops the little boy up into bloody chunks (the death of the boy takes almost 2 pages, and is unnecessarily graphic).
Now, had this turnabout been set up anywhere beforehand (which it wasn't), I might have accepted it; it might have been a terrifically vindictive morality play about allowing reality to intrude too far into one's fantasy life (which it is, at least for the first 6 pages, and beautifully done); the ending might have been interpreted as the death of one's fantasy life equaling the spiritual and physical death of the Self; in other words, it might have resulted in something deeper and infinitely more disturbing than the cheap, bloody shock that the writer chose to end it with because, gosh-golly-gee, it's a horror story and you expect this sort of thing, right?
What made this doubly alarming is that, in almost every case, the writers who grafted these ham-fisted horrific elements onto their stories had demonstrated a level of skill that led me, as a reader, to believe they were going to stay true to their voice and vision (and no, I won't apologize for using that last word); until these grafted elements intruded, each story had suggested that its writer was not only well-read and intelligent, but trusted their own instincts enough to know that it's okay to do Something Different in horror; yet near the end, some mass-market, don't-challenge-the-expected-norm, lowest-common-denominator gene kicked in, and something SPOOOOOOKY or Shocking!!!! (read: recognizably horrific) arrived to bust up the party and send everyone home way too early.
And I keep wondering: Why?
Flash back to a month ago, on the Shocklines discussion board. The subject of happy endings came up, and it appears that many readers have come to expect a certain formula from horror: meet the main character, get to know/like him or her, follow him or her through the horrific darkness that ensues, and emerge alive and triumphant with him or her into the light at the end.
Mind you, I've got nothing against happy endings - providing that they emerge naturally, are consistent with the overall tone of the piece, and (this is the important point) are justified. Otherwise, it's just bad plastic surgery.
Happy endings only work when they're justified from within the natural progression (both tonal and narrative) of a story, and in my fictional universe, that rarely happens; horrific elements only work when they're justified, and in the case of many of the submissions to the contest, this just wasn't the case; too much grafting, not enough 2nd or 3rd-drafting: the writers didn't trust their own instincts enough to not take the obvious way out.
Consider if you will Stephen King's remarkable novel, Pet Sematary; here you have a story that is incredibly dark, with only the briefest flashes of light and hope sprinkled throughout. The dark (and, at best, melancholy) tone of the novel is set early on, as are the ground rules of its microcosmic universe, and King never once betrays those rules or the novel's tone: because of the expert way he sets up everything, he can't betray them and remain justified in the world-view he presents.
Many readers were shocked that King ended the novel as he did, and the reason behind this shock? As a friend of mine put it: "After all the horrible things that had happened, I was expecting a happier ending."
Not if you read it correctly, you weren't.
From almost the very beginning, you know there's no way in hell that this is going to turn out for the best. So how would you have felt if King had betrayed his story to give readers an "expected" happy ending? And even if he had found a way to cop-out with touching warm fuzzies at the end, do you think the novel would have had the effect on readers that it did? That it still has, over 20 years later?
King never flinched here, never pulled back, never hoodwinked for the sake of making things more palatable or comfortable for the reader; the result is a novel that is not only one of the most emotionally rich he's ever written, but arguably the single most horrific of his career.
And for you "...light at the end" folks, ask yourselves this - and be honest: how many of his novels and stories have had "happy" endings? I can think of maybe four - and even those aren't "happy" endings in the traditional sense. So why does his work endure? Because it's honest unto itself. From A Buick 8 may not be the best-written story he's ever told, but it's arguably the best-told story he's ever written, simply because he remains true to the tale. And sometimes that means not ending things with a gaudy display of horrific fireworks; and sometimes it means not ending things on a happy note, lest the story and the reader be betrayed.
Old William Shakespeare|Willy S. said it best, folks: "To thine own self be true."
That is, in reverse, the answer to my question about the contest submissions: these horrific elements were grafted onto the stories because their writers (for whatever reasons) have been conditioned -- be it through uninspired films, television programs, or from reading work by writers whose only influence has been said films or television shows -- to believe that readers will only accept a story as being "horror" if it has certain readily-identifiable elements -- i.e. gore/violence/zombies/ vampires/what-have-you -- that are popularly mistaken as being the only elements that horror is concerned with.
There is a new generation of upcoming writers who are being conditioned for mediocrity; they will not -- or cannot -- trust their own instincts because the popular misconceptions about horror are threatening to become the accepted rules. If that happens, if the tired, formulaic, tried-and-true become the norm once again, then I'll be more than content to make do with being a writer whose work is only read when people are in "...a certain mood."
But I will not be content to sit idly by and let the upcoming generation of horror writers betray themselves, their stories, their craft, and their chosen field by giving them the impression that it's all right to shove a bloody shock down a reader's throat because this is supposed to be a horror story.
The solution is simple: Don't do that.
If you get to a point in a story where you say to yourself, Damn, I'd better have something horrific happen pretty soon, do yourself and the rest of us a favor and walk away; come back to it in a day or two when you can approach the story fresh, on its own terms, and not those you have been programmed to think are applicable; yeah, you might not end up with a wide readership, but odds are the readership you will have will be a fiercely loyal one.
Okay, in case you haven't already heard (which means my scream of shock didn't reach all the way across the East Coast), this past Saturday night, June 5th, the Horror Writers Association honored my short story "Duty" with the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction.
That's right: I won a Stoker. I'm still reeling from it, still incredibly happy, and still half-expecting someone to come tap, tap, tapping at my chamber door, saying, ahem, there was a terrible misunderstanding and could they please have it back because Stephen King is waiting for it.
I will confirm that it's one hell of a humbling experience to receive one of these, and I am more grateful than I can put into words; but like I said in my acceptance speech: for those who claim the Stokers don't mean anything, try standing up on that stage with one of them in your hand and saying that.
After having visited NYC, I can say to all of you New Yorkers that you've got every reason to be damned proud of your city; everyone I met -- from the shuttle driver to the people who manned the hotel desk to the bleary-eyed guy who sold me a cup of coffee at 5 a.m. -- was friendly and (get this) courteous.
That's right, you read it correctly, courteous. Even though it was obvious to all of them (sometimes painfully so) that I was a visitor from Ohio, I was never spoken down to, never made to feel like a hick, never dismissed out of hand, and not once was I ever made to feel like they were doing me a favor by putting up with my presence in their city. The song is right: it's a helluva town, and I can't wait to visit again.
And for the record: the coffee I had in NYC was the most delicious coffee I've had in my life; and I want to move to Tower Records -- not near Tower Records, to Tower Records, as in: I wish to live in the building, preferably somewhere on or near the escalator that links the CD section to the DVDs one floor below. Yes, I have problems, but you already knew that.
Every year since 1988, the Horror Writers Association hands out their Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement during their annual conference in New York City or Los Angeles. The Stokers, which are named in honor of influential horror author Bram Stoker, are analagous to the Nebula Award, Hugo Award, or World Fantasy Awards. The award itself is a hefty little ceramic replica of a haunted house.
The Stokers are awarded based on voting by the HWA's active membership, which is composed of writers who have made at least three professional sales.
Currently, Stokers are awarded in the following categories:
Novel
First Novel
Short Fiction
Long Fiction
Fiction Collection
Poetry Collection
Anthology
Nonfiction
Lifetime Achievement
The Stokers are arguably the lynchpin in earning and expanding the reading public's knowledge and appreciation of what the horror field has to offer.
Unfortunately, the Stokers have been jokingly referred to as "The Strokers" both within the horror field and without, and continue to be criticized (and in some cases, outright mocked) by many people. (But mock the Hugos, Nebulas, or World Fantasy Awards, and many of these same folks go apoplectic).
The term "Strokers" first appeared in a parody article in the second issue of Midnight Graffiti, (Fall 1988). It was not slamming anybody in particular. It was an alternate universe joke piece that suggested "Stroker" awards (a sculpture of one hand washing another) for categories like:
Most Typos
Novel Most Worthy of Novelization
Best Stephen King Ripoff
This Year's 'New Stephen King'
Best Work by a Dead Writer
Best Never-Published Story
Best Horror Story or Book that Isn't Horror
... and so on.
However, the "Stroker" moniker came about as a result -- in my opinion -- of the 1997 awards, after which rumors and accusations of "vote swapping" ran rampant. ("I'll vote for your work if you'll vote for mine.")
In '97, the recipient of that year's award for Superior Achievement in Novel was Children of the Dusk by Janet Berliner and George Guthridge. When that novel was announced as that year's recipient, a lot of people were very surprised; until the recipient was read aloud, everyone (myself included) assumed that Tananarive Due's My Soul To Keep had a lock on the award.
What made this one of -- if not the -- single most controversial award in the history of the Stokers until that time was this: in 1997, Janet Berliner was an officer of HWA (I believe she was president). George Guthridge, however, was not. The reason Children of the Dusk was permitted on the ballot -- one that I agreed with, by the way -- was because Guthridge, not being an HWA officer, should not have been penalized because he co-wrote a novel with someone who held office; ineligibility by association could not be permitted. So Children got on tha ballot, everyone assumed that My Soul To Keep would win, anyway, and all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds -- -- until the moment the award was announced.
God, the accusations and rumors that started flying; Berliner had used her office to coerce people into voting for the novel; there had been vote swapping; there had been "political favors" promised in exchange for votes...it got really ugly really quickly. People whose work hadn't even been on the ballot started attacking one another about things completely unrelated to the awards (though the subject of the awards was, in most cases, what had prompted the initial disagreements); the younger members started accusing the older, more seasoned pros of forming an impenetrable clique, thus guaranteeing no new writers ever had a chance at winning a Stoker; a large amount of known pros left HWA as a result of the ugliness, and the Young Turks who took over in their place proved almost instantaneously that they were just as capable of keeping things as effed up as the old guard had supposedly been...it was bad.
And HWA was viewed as an organization composed of bloody-minded, mean-spirited, socially-inept weirdos whose members all suffered from a perpetual case of arrested literary adolescence and gathered in NYC every year to engage in a well-dressed tunnel-visioned circle-jerk called the Stroker -- uh, Stoker Awards.
(Keep in mind that HWA has repaired a lot of the damage since then, a majority of it due to the efforts of the current administration. If you're thinking about joining HWA, do it now. It's got a lot to offer if you have the sense to seek out and/or ask for it. Any writers' organization is only as strong and useful as its membership ... and HWA's membership boasts a lot of power and integrity.)
Not only was the value of the Stokers tainted by the ensuing ugliness in '97, but -- much worse -- the integrity and stability of HWA itself was called into question -- and, in my opinion, still hasn't fully recovered in the eyes of many, which doesn't surprise me; after all, horror has always been the bastard child Lit-ra-chure keeps chained up in the basement whenever respectable folks come to visit and talk about Ulysses or other works that deserve serious consideration (No, I'm not bitter; why do you ask?).
What got buried under the detritus of all the in-fighting, accusations, rumors, and exoduses resulting from the '97 awards was one simple fact: Berliner and Guthridge had agressively campaigned for the award: e-mails to members politely asking for their consideration, actual honest-to-God paper letters to the voting members and, finally, copies of the novel itself were sent to all qualified voters. (And we're talking something like 200 Actives at that time; a 6-dollar cover price, with a couple bucks in postage to send each copy, and you're looking at a couple of thousand dollars in materials and postage -- not to mention the twelve hundred or so dollars' worth of sales that Berlinger, Guthridge, and their publisher wouldn't make because of sending out all these freebies.) As far as I can tell, they won it, fair and square.
I'm Lucy Snyder. I'm a Worthington, Ohio author and former magazine editor; on this site you'll find my writing as well as features from my husband, novelist Gary A. Braunbeck.
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by Rick Hautala: The flap copy for this quartet of novellas from Hautala (who some of you may know as A.J. Matthews) would have you believe that the four tales are "...loosely connected..." Well, sure, if all you look at are the physical locales and the element of some characters making peripheral appearances from tale to tale, but look closer and you'll see that more connects them than just people and places: there is a palpable sense of overwhelming loss that permeates every story, so that "loosely" thing? Not so much. This beautiful edition from CD Publications boasts a gorgeous cover and interior artwork from the redoubtable Glenn Chadbourne, and collects 2 of Hautala's most accomplished novellas -- "Miss Henry's Bottles" (a personal favorite of mine) and "Cold River" -- as well as 2 brand-new works, "Tin Can Telephone" (reminiscent -- and deserving to be mentioned in the same breath as many works -- of Ray Bradbury) and "Blood Ledge". The result is one of the year's finest single-author collections, and further proof that Hautala is much, much more than just "...that other author from Maine."
by Christopher Conlon: As with Eyes Everwhere, I have to confess to a certain bias; Chris asked me to read this collection in manuscript form with an eye toward providing a cover blurb. After I finished reading it, I told him, "No, I won't do a blurb -- I want to write the Introduction!" So I did. Conlon is best known as an award-winning poet and anthology editor (the most recent anthology being the excellent Poe's Lighthouse from CD Publications), but he's also a stellar writer of fiction -- he just doesn't write it all that often, which is a real loss for readers. Thundershowers at Dusk is a hands-down brilliant collection from first page to last, every story is a winner, and it contains one of the finest novellas I have ever read in any genre, period, "The Unfinished Music". As rich and rewarding a collection as you'll ever read. (And I will add here, for any publishers who happed to read this, that Conlon is now shopping around a stunning first novel entitled Midnight on Mourn Street that is going to bring a lot of sales and accolades to whichever publisher is smart enough to snatch it up.) I maintain that Conlon is a better writer now than I could ever hope to be, and Thundershowers at Dusk more than proves it. Hence my deep-rooted resentment of him.
by Glenn Hirshberg: Paul Miller's Earthling Publications gets the Hat-Trick Award this year for having published 3 exceptional books in 2006, the first being this collection, Hirshberg's follow-up to The Two Sams. While I greatly admired the first collection, American Morons surpasses it on several levels, mostly because Hirshberg's writing has become even more focused and polished; he's going to be a major force in the field in the next few years, and while his writing has more in common with that of Steven Millhauser than Stephen King, it is nonetheless some of the most nerve-wracking and unapologetically literary work being produced in the field. All of the stories are winners, but the book is worth its price for "Safety Clowns" and "Devil's Smile".
by Roland Topor: A million thanks to Millipede Press for putting this short novel back into print, along with 4 rarely-seen short stories and Topor's own artwork (which reminded me of the surreal work of Heinrich Kley). It's an utterly gorgeous book, boasting an intelligent and articulate Introduction from Thomas Ligotti ... but mostly, there is The Tenant, which remains today just as terrifying, eloquent, and compelling as it was when originally released in 1965. The 4 shorts accompanying it are equally impressive, resulting in a genuine must-have collection.
: Hempel, in case you've not read her work, is one of the finest short story writers of the last 25 years, and this omnibus assembles all 4 of her collections, including the hard-to-find At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom. With the exception of the jaw-dropping novella "Tumble Home", most of her stories run less than 10 pages in length, and stand as a testament to what a skilled writer can do in a very limited amount of time. This collection contains one of my all-time favorite short stories, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried". If all so-called "literary" fiction were as exquisite as Hempel's, the world would be a better place.
by William Browning Spencer: It's been 10 years since Spencer's last collection, The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories left readers screaming for more, and Spencer delivers in a big way with this follow-up. For my money, Spencer;s work -- be it in short stories or novel form -- has always read like a head-on collision between John Cheever and Donald Barthelme; which is to say, it's rooted both in the humane and the surreal. The title story is both tragic and nightmarish, containing some of the most chilling imagery you'll encounter. Spencer doesn't write nearly enough, so grab this superb collection and keep it near to bide your time until he releases his next book.
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