Ahh, Memories

Well, it's that time of year again: the week when one can flip to nearly any channel (besides Lifetime and QVC) and find a horror-related documentary or classic slasher film playing. The week when every house is crawling with little face-painted vampires, and the very air seems to have drifted straight out of a Ray Bradbury story.

What could I hope to add to this wonderful time? I could spout platitudes about how this is my favorite time of year, but I've just done that. I could theorize about the alluring nature of this holiday, and the power it holds for even the non-horror masses, but I doubt I'd have much in the way of original ideas there.

So I'm going to go the simple route. Halloween, at its core, is all about being scared out of one's wits in order to brag about it later, so I'm going to dig into my psyche and pull out my own scariest memories. Almost anyone can run off a list of the top 10 scariest films they've seen, but in my opinion, when you want to remember how it feels to be scared, you need a talented author. In lieu of one of those, I'll be MC-ing tonight.

And now, a few of my scariest memories. They're a bit jumbled and interconnected, but then, memories always are.

The house in which I grew up rose for two thin-walled stories from the arid plains of West Texas. Every night, winds in excess of thirty miles per hour would tear across the dead grass, battering the windowpanes with dust. Alone in my room, surrounded by nothing but hissing winds and empty space, I used to stare out my windows at night, listening to the creaking of my walls, and imagine I saw a pair of yellow eyes staring back at me. Eventually, I convinced my mom to hang thick towels over my windows, and I kept them drawn shut most nights. Even after that, I tended to avert my eyes when I walked past those areas of my room.

My room opened on a large walk-in closet, which in turn opened on a "studio," where my dad kept his computer and books. To reach the studio, one had to crawl through a small door that Lewis Carroll might've imagined. At night, the studio was filled with shadows and the chirp of insects, and the light switches were on the far side of the room. I used to dread being sent to find something in there; I'd creep across the room, wincing with each step, watching the darkness shift around me and hearing rough breathing in each night-sound.

I was convinced the studio was haunted, and when I asked one of my friends, he said "of course it is." This matter-of-fact reply did little to allay my fears. I also used to fear a space at the top of the stairs, where I swore I could feel the chill of an evil presence. Whenever I was alone in the house, I'd run past that pot as quickly as I could; if I paused too long, I began to feel cold and jittery, and sometimes I'd be sure I was hearing a malicious voice whispering at the back of my mind.

One night, I read Lovecraft's "The Curse of Yig" just before bed. The story--especially the end--sent me into an ecstasy of fright, and I lay there in the dark trying to banish it from my mind. The longer I tried to sleep, the more I became convinced that snakes were crawling through my room, leading the twisted form of a certain serpentine woman-thing to my bed. In the buzz of insects I heard her voice hissing to me, and no amount of logic could banish her from my mind. I think I stayed awake the entire night, dreading the moment when I would feel her cold scales scraping against my skin.

As you can tell, I was always gifted with an overactive imagination. If someone asks me where I get my ideas, I often think that I've got an enormous library of intense emotions, just waiting to be mined. Even when I lack for ideas or plots, I'm never short on feelings, and it's those that are really at the root of horror.

If you remember any childhood experiences of your own, feel free to post them. Otherwise, enjoy this special night, and regulate your consumption--candy and otherwise.

Weird Tales

I've just sold a story to Weird Tales. Yes, that Weird Tales.

More information as it becomes available. I'm going to go lie down.

And, as it's conveniently Friday, I'm going to drink a sizable amount of pricey Scotch tonight.

Brevity Is the Soul of Wit

Hemingway's famous six-word story, "For sale: baby shoes, never used." is supposedly the piece he considered to be his greatest work. It's attracted a bit of buzz in recent months; Utne and BlackBook magazines asked a series of writers to attempt their own six-word masterpieces, and Wired tapped some of my personal favorite authors, such as the following:

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon

Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore

With bloody hands, I say good-bye.
- Frank Miller

I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss … ?
- Neil Gaiman

Kirby had never eaten toes before.
- Kevin Smith

Aside from the complaints anyone might expect me to make (Where the hell are Warren Ellis and Guillermo del Toro?!) the majority of these are quite amusing, if not exactly Hemingway-level material. They offer a glimpse into the minds of some respected writers, which is quite interesting, as far as it goes. Would I be horrendously amiss to guess what some other writers might make of this exercise?

In case of possible fact-distortion: these next few are poorly-composed pastiches.

Haunted? This backseat? Baby, trust me.
- Stephen King (circa 1985)

You'd look lovelier without skin, darling.
- Clive Barker (circa 1985)

Anyone remember adults? No? Me neither.
- Ray Bradbury

Aliens landed? Meh. What's on TV?
- Kurt Vonnegut

Wait...then where'd my scrotum go?
- Warren Ellis

These formulaic writing assignments can be useful for "inside the box" thinking, which can benefit productivity if you find yourself in a slump. However, like NaNoWriMo, they don't often generate the most high-quality work; it's a trade-off. Nevertheless, I'll fire off a few of my own, and hope to start a meme. In case of possible fact-distortion: this next set are mine.

Little beasts live inside my eyelids.

You'd taste better braised, with capers.

Let's play doctor. I call dermatome!

My best friends are all incorporeal.

Omit needless words. Omit needless people.

All right, dear readers, I'm a-lookin' at you. Let's see what you're made of, either in the comments or on your own sites.

My Writing Married Its Cousin

I was chatting with Orrin yesterday, and he brought this anthology to my attention. It's an assemblage of short stories, mostly by authors who aren't known for horror, such as David Mitchell and Margaret Atwood, and some who definitely are, such as Stephen King and Peter Straub. It's edited by Michael Chabon. Yes, the Michael Chabon.

According to Orrin (and the reviews), some of the tales miss their mark. That's to be expected, I suppose. I don't expect authors who have little interest in horror (and what is horrifying) to crank out top-notch genre work.

UPDATE! Here's a much more in-depth review by Orrin.

But that, dear readers, is just the problem. I try to avoid basing my posts here on emotional reactions, but I can't help it this time. The very concept of such a book as this, and the literary culture that enables its existence to be a novelty, pisses me off.

Let me explain. Horror wasn't always a curiosity. It wasn't even always a genre. Monikers like "horror writer" and "horror film" only came into existence in the 1930s, when horror films bolstered public interest in monster-filled tales as their own niche form of entertainment. The chain-dragging ghost was a motif in plenty of Gothic fiction, of course; specters and boggarts crept across the work of every Victorian author from Dickens to Melville to London to Stevenson. There was a time when the genre wasn't a nasty little puddle in which the literary intelligentsia could dip their toes and laugh about how odd the water is.

Now, I am not making any such accusations about Mitchel or Atwood, or any other contributors to Chabon's anthology. But the state of the genre has declined to the level of a backwoods swamp village. Horror films inbreed Robert Englund and Kane Hodder into any roles where they'll be recognized. Tom Savini's effects reference and even mock his own work from years ago. "Mythos" writers, too shy, or perhaps unimaginative, to leave Lovecraft's universe, construct endless parodies of it. A truly iconic monster hasn't been invented in decades.

Horror has been excised from respectable fiction, just like sci-fi and fantasy were. We sit in the corner, chewing the cud of our own conventions, and every other genre--including high fantasy, which is hardly innocent of that same crime--stands around and laughs at us. And, in ever-so-subtle ways, of which this book is one, the literary establishment reminds us of the fact that we're oddities; a playground of the grim and nauseating that offers a few transient thrills, but no real fulfilling meat.

This is no one's fault but our own. If you brand yourself as a "horror writer," you are reinforcing the trend. Please, as I've said so many times before, don't write horror! Just write good stories! If one is particularly horrific, fine: label it horror, because it'll probably sell better that way. Good writing is good writing. If readers are going to respect the creaky old manors and rattling chains, they'll be expecting solid prose, a clever plot, and well-crafted characters.

In years to come, I hope we see more writers in the vein of Diane Setterfield and Tom Picirilli, who can survive their branding and achieve success as unique voices, not "shockmeisters" or "scream queens." No one's mind consists solely of a "horror imagination."

Suspending Barriers

Suspension of disbelief. We've all heard the phrase, and few of us really understand its mechanics. Coleridge invented it, but even he never defined it in any scientific sense.

If you think you have a solid grasp of its mechanics, try this thought experiment: imagine yourself watching a film. Do you literally believe that you are in the story, interacting with the actors? Do you believe the monster is real, and in the theater? What disbelief, exactly, have you suspended? Stop and really think about this for a moment. Try to answer it.

Noël Carroll has his own theory: he believes we suspend nothing, and instead react to the idea of what's happening on the screen or the page. What we speak of "stretching believability," we really mean that the director or author has strayed too far outside the internal rules of the universe he or she has created, and the vision is losing its cohesiveness.

And now, a few more tangents, which I promise I'll gather up in the end. According to this article, an artist who depicts planets in other solar systems is often asked how the "photos" are so realistic. The public cannot separate the depiction of the planet from the planet itself.

This morning, I was reading an essay by Harlan Ellison; he described a talk he gave at a university, where he mentioned having written Mr. Spock's lines for a particular episode of Star Trek. One student leaped up, in tears, denouncing Ellison's "lie." The poor fellow honestly believed in the existence of Mr. Spock.

I'm sure you can see where I'm headed with all this. Suspension of disbelief may be a flawed theory, but somewhere along the line, people are just becoming credulous. Ellison describes another instance, related to him by a high school teacher: a student who had watched a TV movie was incapable, even throughout the course of a discussion, of comprehending how the events depicted weren't "real." In his mind, he witnessed them; ergo, they were as real as could be. Call these isolated anecdotes, but tell me you've never fallen in love with a movie character.

This article isn't to point out flaws in your psyche--I'm not entirely sure they're always flaws at all, and at any rate, if they're innate human flaws, that means they're mine as well. Perhaps there's no evolutionary advantage to not reacting to a performance as though it's real life, or, more likely, we haven't had theater long enough for any evolutionary adaptations to take place around it.

Either way, I have no desire to address the cultural and moral implications of a generation deadened by television and movies; no doubt every generation has had a similar opinion of its own youth. And that is as far as I'll go with that.

The question I'd like to raise is, as always, how can the author apply this to his work? Somewhere along the line, the audience/reader reaches a point where reality and fiction blur; in some sense or another, he or she becomes a part of the story. I would argue that this takes place through character-identification, which is really just a longer word for empathy. In that respect, at least, Carroll is on the mark: the reader must feel more than sympathy for the characters--he or she must feel empathy.

Horror simply does not work if empathy for the characters is not established early-on. This is,I believe, the main reason why so few slashers are scary: we find ourselves rooting for the killer instead of the victims! Think of the most frightening films and books you've ever experienced. I'd wager that almost all of them spend extensive time acclimating the reader or viewer to the characters, getting you involved in their everyday desires, efforts, and struggles.

The best horror, I would argue, treats the horrific as an intrusion into a normal world. Watching a film like Jeepers Creepers, one gets the sensation that the director is just waiting for the dialogue to end so the monster scenes can commence. In Poltergeist, on the other hand, the family already has enough (believable) problems, and the supernatural invasion feels truly invasive.

I know I've rambled quite a bit, but I've meandered around to my point. Empathy can go too far; it can even create serious delusions. But it can also be used well, and wisely. By absorbing the reader into the characters' lives, the writer can break down those barriers between self and story. The utterly disarmed reader is the easiest reader to scare.

I'd love to hear what you think about this cultural meltdown between reality and entertainment, and some of your own favorite empathy-building techniques.

The Last Agnostic

My short story "The Last Agnostic" has taken the top spot at The Horror Library's Slushpile Smackdown for October. Head on over and take a look!

What Are Your Strengths?

Memes are fickle. Sometimes I'll stumble across one that I particularly like, only to watch it vanish from neglect after a few days. My answer is to participate in memes that interest me, and internet immortality be damned.

At any rate, I've been tagged for one. This meme asks that the writer describe his or her top five strengths; after pondering this awhile, I began to see the reasoning behind it. We writers are taught to be hyper-sensitive to flaws in our work and the work of others, and to take criticism without flinching. Somewhere along the way, we forget why we like our own work.

In the end, I had to ask for suggestions. As I pondered them, I remembered why I wrote the sorts of things I do, and what I enjoy about my own work when I read it. Oh, and please, if you haven't read this blog much, don't think I'm an egomaniac for talking about myself this way. I'm really quite self-deprecating. Off we go, then.

1. I have a strong sense of how many words are needed to tell a story, and what narrative form should express it. Depending on the scale of the concept and the number of characters, I can often tell early-on if my tale should be a novel, novella, short story, or screenplay.

2. I avoid rehashing common themes. As soon as I get a story idea, I think of a way to make it bigger, or flip it on its head. When people read my stories, they often tell me they had no idea I'd take the plot in the direction I did.

3. I write violence so real, it's painful. I take time to flesh out my characters beforehand, and I describe each sensation they feel with precision. After reading certain paragraphs I've written, some people have claimed they've felt empathetic agony that bordered on real physical pain.

4. I'm not afraid to "kill my darlings." If an element from an early draft of a story doesn't fit the plot or themes, I delete it and don't look back. This leaves most of my stories fast-paced and coherent.

5. I blend the beatific and the horrific. This is my personal favorite trait of my own writing. My protagonists are often awestruck even as they're frightened out of their wits, and I try to bring a sense of childlike wonder to even the most gruesome proceedings. On the flipside, even the most innocent of my protagonists have a brush with grave danger of some sort.

Well, there we are. Orrin, I hope you'll pick this up. Otherwise, it's back to writing articles for me.