What can one say about The Funeral? The delicious short story from Richard Matheson that can be played as late night low-budget horror television fun or be played as a terrifying look into monsters commemorating their earthly demise.
The story gives in a bit to some stereotypes with the pointy-hat wearing witch with the cat and the odd little man repeating “tasty” at poor Morton the mortician and funeral director, but I can forgive these little things as the story is kind of fun and maybe, perhaps, isn’t horror?
Sure, the people who attend the funeral are standard fare at any haunted house. Sure, the story is about a funeral for someone who is clearly undead. But what happens that is horror-esque?
Morton is asked to put on a funeral. Yes, this is morbid stuff, but like it or not we are all going to end up dead one day. Death and taxes baby. Funerals, death as a subject, can’t be relegated to just the horror genre.
Morton puts on that funeral, and does a splendid job. He completes all the requests, including taking down the mirror, and is paid handsomely for his efforts. He is made uneasy by the guests at the funeral, but is that horror? Who hasn’t been annoyed by relatives at an official event? Who hasn’t rolled their eyes at the fanboys talking to the screen during a movie? No, being annoyed by guests is as much a part of social interaction as using turn signals or saying “good morning.”
This story, for me, was touching and a bit funny. All Asper wants is a proper funeral, something he feels he missed out on the first time around. I wonder how many people are truly happy about their funeral? How many of us would do them over or do them differently? Oh wait, we can’t, we’re dead. That’s the funny part. Maybe I am a bit twisted.
But think of all the socially formal events you’ve had to endure: graduations, weddings, funerals, birthdays, retirements, etc. For all but birthdays, you get to do them once. The Funeral almost made me sympathetic to the brides who lose their minds about trivialities like center pieces and the color of ribbon tying balloons down. Almost.
I mean, Asper is dead and a ghoul, and he doesn’t throw a hissy fit about things. In fact, he probably could have killed Morton with ease but he doesn’t. He restrains himself, unlike some of his funeral guests, and some brides to be.
This story reminds me of Hellboy or Joss Whedon’s Angel. Matheson has taken traditional monsters and placed them in a mundane, very human environment. He has fleshed them out to show they have feelings beyond “kill the people” and some of them, Asper anyway, want nice things, no matter the cost. No, Matheson doesn’t take the monster and make it the hero, but he does take the monster and make them … normal.
I mean, when not eating people, what does a monster do with themselves? Even if you give yourself a full hour per meal that leaves 21 hours in the day, what do you do with your time? If Matheson is to be believed, monsters probably do some of the same things.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Thursday, August 26, 2010
What are Vampires Scared Of?
I am Legend is a story that is so strong it is a wonder it hasn’t transcended the genre and other mediums. Yet, here we sit in 2010 and after three movies that completely missed the point and a slew of post-apocalyptic stories that tread more shallow waters, I am Legend still doesn’t get the credit it deserves.
Richard Matheson has done two things in this story. First, he has scientifically explained vampirism and given it historic context. This is impressive and fun to read. The fact in this story that it all comes down to germs and spores is wonderful.
However the second thing he has done with this story is borderline genius. It is what makes I am Legend easily my favorite post-apocalyptic story of all time. I gush, but it is true.
What did Matheson do? He took the reader in and had them pull for a main character we could relate to, that we rooted for, that we hoped beyond the bleak and terrible situation that somehow, someway he, Robert Neville, would find a way to a happy ending. You know he won’t get the happy ending, but you empathize with him.
Then, when we the readers are hooked, we are invested; he pulls back to a wider view of the new world to reveal that we the readers have in fact been pulling for the new world’s boogeyman. Neville is the thing that goes bump in the night. He is the thing that vampires, vampires, fear.
That shift in focus, that revelation is so wonderful, so original, so beyond awesome as a writer that I still find myself reflecting on it. This is at least the third time I’ve read this story and I continue to enjoy that delicious twist. How does Matheson pull this off?
First, his main character is very much the every man. He is a married factory/plant worker with a young child. He carpools with his neighbor, loves his wife, and is just as baffled about the dust storms and rumors of infected people as the reader. He isn’t some superhuman or military dynamo. He isn’t a scientist with a lab and a staff. He’s just a guy. It’s easier to pull for this kind of character.
By the time we meet Robert Neville the world has ended. He’s all alone in a world populated by vampires. As he hunts for supplies to survive he dispatches these creatures with all the passion of someone vacuuming a carpet. It isn’t bad, it just is. The reader, armed with the knowledge of Dracula and other vampire stories knows this is how it has to be. Of course Neville is staking these creatures, it’s what we would do.
Finally, Matheson draws us in with the hauntingly intimate flashbacks of the last days of Virginia Neville, Robert’s wife, and shares with us the horror of her return from the grave. This, for me, is the scariest scene in the book:
“He couldn’t even scream. He just stood there rooted to the spot, staring dumbly at Virginia.
“Rob … ert,” she said” (77).
So the reader has no problem pulling for this poor lonely lost soul. We share his frustration in trying to figure it all out. We feel his loneliness and his isolation. Then Ruth shows up and Matheson turns everything over on the reader.
Ruth appears to be another normal human, another survivor. Neville is barely human when she arrives, so far gone in his patterns and his survival, he’s more robot than human, but he’s still more human than Ruth turns out to be.
The entire exchange between Ruth and Robert is wonderful, especially when read a second time with the knowledge of the ending. As a first read, the reader shares Neville’s confusion over why Ruth is horrified by his matter-of-fact description of his discoveries, experiments, and executions of the vampires. He is doing what anyone would do in this situation.
But after knowing the ending (which I won’t completely reveal here, I truly want all new readers to experience this for themselves), the exchanges between Ruth and Robert take on a completely different tone:
“Her throat moved and a shudder ran down through her.
“It’s horrible,” she said.
He looked at her in surprise. Horrible? Wasn’t that odd? He hadn’t thought that for years. For him the word horror had become obsolete. A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliché. To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact. It had no adjectives.
“And what about the … the ones who are still alive?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, “when you cut their wrists the germ naturally becomes parasitic. But mostly they die from simple hemorrhage.”
“Simple –“
She turned away quickly and her lips were pressed into a tight, thin line.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“N-nothing. Nothing,” she said” (145-146).
For the reader this is a no-nonsense description of a man dispatching monsters. To Ruth, a vampire, this is the butcher of her people describing how easy it is for him to execute her brothers and sisters. From Ruth’s perspective she is hearing a serial killer, a mass murderer explain how he commits murder, and how easy it is for him to do it.
This juxtaposition of motivation and point of view is powerful stuff. Both sides are correct here, both sides have skin in the game, have high stakes to play for, and the reader can see both sides of this conflict. That is excellent writing, excellent plotting, and just excellent story telling.
As was said in the opening of this essay, for some reason movies haven’t been able to capture the power and brilliance and simplicity of this story. The one that comes closest is The Omega Man but even it tries to end happy. The latest version, I am Legend is a fun little popcorn movie I would have enjoyed if they had called it Vampires in New York or Albino End or something else, anything else.
So, my parting thought is this: if you’ve only seen movie versions of this story, you haven’t experienced I am Legend. Books are usually better than their adaptations to screen and stage, but in this case it isn’t even close. The underlying story elements are completely absent.
I can’t recommend this story, in written form, highly enough. If you like your vampires creepy and scary, then this is your story.
Richard Matheson has done two things in this story. First, he has scientifically explained vampirism and given it historic context. This is impressive and fun to read. The fact in this story that it all comes down to germs and spores is wonderful.
However the second thing he has done with this story is borderline genius. It is what makes I am Legend easily my favorite post-apocalyptic story of all time. I gush, but it is true.
What did Matheson do? He took the reader in and had them pull for a main character we could relate to, that we rooted for, that we hoped beyond the bleak and terrible situation that somehow, someway he, Robert Neville, would find a way to a happy ending. You know he won’t get the happy ending, but you empathize with him.
Then, when we the readers are hooked, we are invested; he pulls back to a wider view of the new world to reveal that we the readers have in fact been pulling for the new world’s boogeyman. Neville is the thing that goes bump in the night. He is the thing that vampires, vampires, fear.
That shift in focus, that revelation is so wonderful, so original, so beyond awesome as a writer that I still find myself reflecting on it. This is at least the third time I’ve read this story and I continue to enjoy that delicious twist. How does Matheson pull this off?
First, his main character is very much the every man. He is a married factory/plant worker with a young child. He carpools with his neighbor, loves his wife, and is just as baffled about the dust storms and rumors of infected people as the reader. He isn’t some superhuman or military dynamo. He isn’t a scientist with a lab and a staff. He’s just a guy. It’s easier to pull for this kind of character.
By the time we meet Robert Neville the world has ended. He’s all alone in a world populated by vampires. As he hunts for supplies to survive he dispatches these creatures with all the passion of someone vacuuming a carpet. It isn’t bad, it just is. The reader, armed with the knowledge of Dracula and other vampire stories knows this is how it has to be. Of course Neville is staking these creatures, it’s what we would do.
Finally, Matheson draws us in with the hauntingly intimate flashbacks of the last days of Virginia Neville, Robert’s wife, and shares with us the horror of her return from the grave. This, for me, is the scariest scene in the book:
“He couldn’t even scream. He just stood there rooted to the spot, staring dumbly at Virginia.
“Rob … ert,” she said” (77).
So the reader has no problem pulling for this poor lonely lost soul. We share his frustration in trying to figure it all out. We feel his loneliness and his isolation. Then Ruth shows up and Matheson turns everything over on the reader.
Ruth appears to be another normal human, another survivor. Neville is barely human when she arrives, so far gone in his patterns and his survival, he’s more robot than human, but he’s still more human than Ruth turns out to be.
The entire exchange between Ruth and Robert is wonderful, especially when read a second time with the knowledge of the ending. As a first read, the reader shares Neville’s confusion over why Ruth is horrified by his matter-of-fact description of his discoveries, experiments, and executions of the vampires. He is doing what anyone would do in this situation.
But after knowing the ending (which I won’t completely reveal here, I truly want all new readers to experience this for themselves), the exchanges between Ruth and Robert take on a completely different tone:
“Her throat moved and a shudder ran down through her.
“It’s horrible,” she said.
He looked at her in surprise. Horrible? Wasn’t that odd? He hadn’t thought that for years. For him the word horror had become obsolete. A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliché. To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact. It had no adjectives.
“And what about the … the ones who are still alive?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, “when you cut their wrists the germ naturally becomes parasitic. But mostly they die from simple hemorrhage.”
“Simple –“
She turned away quickly and her lips were pressed into a tight, thin line.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“N-nothing. Nothing,” she said” (145-146).
For the reader this is a no-nonsense description of a man dispatching monsters. To Ruth, a vampire, this is the butcher of her people describing how easy it is for him to execute her brothers and sisters. From Ruth’s perspective she is hearing a serial killer, a mass murderer explain how he commits murder, and how easy it is for him to do it.
This juxtaposition of motivation and point of view is powerful stuff. Both sides are correct here, both sides have skin in the game, have high stakes to play for, and the reader can see both sides of this conflict. That is excellent writing, excellent plotting, and just excellent story telling.
As was said in the opening of this essay, for some reason movies haven’t been able to capture the power and brilliance and simplicity of this story. The one that comes closest is The Omega Man but even it tries to end happy. The latest version, I am Legend is a fun little popcorn movie I would have enjoyed if they had called it Vampires in New York or Albino End or something else, anything else.
So, my parting thought is this: if you’ve only seen movie versions of this story, you haven’t experienced I am Legend. Books are usually better than their adaptations to screen and stage, but in this case it isn’t even close. The underlying story elements are completely absent.
I can’t recommend this story, in written form, highly enough. If you like your vampires creepy and scary, then this is your story.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Twist the Whole Thing
“Cabal” turns nearly everything over. Clive Barker succeeds in making the cops and doctors the bad guys, and the things, the monsters, the Nightbreed under the cemetery, well, not quite the good guys, but the guys the reader roots for anyway.
Boone is at best a confused, guilt-ridden, and weak person. At worst he’s crazy in a dangerous serial killer kind of way. It turns out he’s not a serial killer, but he may not be completely sane either.
The serial killer turns out to be Decker, Boone’s psychiatrist, and for most of this story Decker pulls everyone’s strings in an effort to cover for nearly a dozen murders (more, actually as Decker confesses to Boone) so he can continue his killing spree in a new location. All he has to do is pin his past killings on Boone and slip off to another happy hunting ground. But Boone’s girlfriend Lori won’t buy into the story and Boone won’t stay dead.
Unfortunately the reader is right there with Lori, not believing the story. Decker has found a perfectly willing patsy in Boone, and Boone is happily going along with the idea that he was some kind of mass murderer, but the Nightbreed Peloquin knows Boone is innocent of spilling blood. The exchange between Boone and Decker on pages 47 and 48 is the first twist of the story:
“I killed nobody,” he murmured.
“I know that,” Decker replied.
“That’s why I couldn’t remember any of the rooms. I was never there.”
“But you remember now,” Decker said.
“Only because –” Boone stopped, and stared at the man in the charcoal suit, “because you showed me.”
“Taught you,” Decker corrected him.
This exchange is chilling, and the reader can happily be carried along by this notion. But the pesky details crop up. Eleven separate murders is a lot of forensics, a lot of timelines, a lot of evidence that has to line up and be verified. If Barker had Decker trying to pin one or two murders on Boone, maybe the reader goes with it. But eleven? There is just too much that has to happen perfectly for Boone to fit into eleven separate murder scenes perfectly. Modern forensics and police procedurals kind of ruin this type of plot point.
Once Boone gets to Midian, once the Nightbreed are fully engaged as part of this story then it becomes a near masterpiece. Clive Barker takes the creatures of the night and paints them as just another species of sentient being. Humans call them monsters, and they do prey on humanity when they can, but so do lions and tigers and bears (oh my) and we generally don’t consider them monsters. Barker shows them as misunderstood and the prey of humanity in their own right. Towards the end of this story Barker sums the Breed up very well: “The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity’s sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside” (185).
This is a great description for the Breed. They truly are creatures of the night. As Midian is razed into non-existence by the humans Barker takes the opportunity to show all forms and non-forms for the inhabitants. All manner of creatures are described fleeing the onslaught. This was excellent as it showed the Breed as a diverse group of creatures, not just a bevy of vampires or a cluster of werewolves. The creatures are unique and original and truly monstrous, just like humans.
Another great point for this story is that as awesome and supernatural as the Nightbreed are, they can be fought and destroyed by the humans. So many monster stories feature creatures that humans have no hope against, yet humans are the rulers of the planet. The Breed are in hiding because the balance of power, from a sheer numbers perspective, is in favor of the humans. This adds to their sympathy from the reader and helps them root for these creatures of the night.
The title for this story, “Cabal,” does bug me from a strict definition perspective. Boone is renamed Cabal by the Baptizer Baphomet. A cabal, by definition, is a group. Boone is tasked with being the one who rebuilds Midian somewhere else, somewhere more acceptable. So, the reader tries to give cabal the meaning of bringing the many who are Nightbreed back together in one place, but that doesn’t really fit either. Then the reader tries to say the Cabal is Boone from his human days and now Cabal is the Nightbreed creature he has become, but that is only two entities (and really only one). So, one has to guess that Barker just dug the word cabal and that is fine, if a little distracting.
Overall the genius of this story is that the Christian humans are the bad guys. They attack what they don’t understand and the Nightbreed just want to be left alone. Now, the Breed aren’t completely innocent. Peloquin attacks and nearly kills Boone when he first gets to Midian. He sees Boone as nothing more than meat. But this tale is excellent for giving the Breed their place on the hero side of the good/bad ledger.
Barker has always had a gift for creating supernatural creatures of an epic and memorable quality. The Nightbreed of “Cabal” may be his crowning achievement, even more than the Cenobites.
Boone is at best a confused, guilt-ridden, and weak person. At worst he’s crazy in a dangerous serial killer kind of way. It turns out he’s not a serial killer, but he may not be completely sane either.
The serial killer turns out to be Decker, Boone’s psychiatrist, and for most of this story Decker pulls everyone’s strings in an effort to cover for nearly a dozen murders (more, actually as Decker confesses to Boone) so he can continue his killing spree in a new location. All he has to do is pin his past killings on Boone and slip off to another happy hunting ground. But Boone’s girlfriend Lori won’t buy into the story and Boone won’t stay dead.
Unfortunately the reader is right there with Lori, not believing the story. Decker has found a perfectly willing patsy in Boone, and Boone is happily going along with the idea that he was some kind of mass murderer, but the Nightbreed Peloquin knows Boone is innocent of spilling blood. The exchange between Boone and Decker on pages 47 and 48 is the first twist of the story:
“I killed nobody,” he murmured.
“I know that,” Decker replied.
“That’s why I couldn’t remember any of the rooms. I was never there.”
“But you remember now,” Decker said.
“Only because –” Boone stopped, and stared at the man in the charcoal suit, “because you showed me.”
“Taught you,” Decker corrected him.
This exchange is chilling, and the reader can happily be carried along by this notion. But the pesky details crop up. Eleven separate murders is a lot of forensics, a lot of timelines, a lot of evidence that has to line up and be verified. If Barker had Decker trying to pin one or two murders on Boone, maybe the reader goes with it. But eleven? There is just too much that has to happen perfectly for Boone to fit into eleven separate murder scenes perfectly. Modern forensics and police procedurals kind of ruin this type of plot point.
Once Boone gets to Midian, once the Nightbreed are fully engaged as part of this story then it becomes a near masterpiece. Clive Barker takes the creatures of the night and paints them as just another species of sentient being. Humans call them monsters, and they do prey on humanity when they can, but so do lions and tigers and bears (oh my) and we generally don’t consider them monsters. Barker shows them as misunderstood and the prey of humanity in their own right. Towards the end of this story Barker sums the Breed up very well: “The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity’s sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside” (185).
This is a great description for the Breed. They truly are creatures of the night. As Midian is razed into non-existence by the humans Barker takes the opportunity to show all forms and non-forms for the inhabitants. All manner of creatures are described fleeing the onslaught. This was excellent as it showed the Breed as a diverse group of creatures, not just a bevy of vampires or a cluster of werewolves. The creatures are unique and original and truly monstrous, just like humans.
Another great point for this story is that as awesome and supernatural as the Nightbreed are, they can be fought and destroyed by the humans. So many monster stories feature creatures that humans have no hope against, yet humans are the rulers of the planet. The Breed are in hiding because the balance of power, from a sheer numbers perspective, is in favor of the humans. This adds to their sympathy from the reader and helps them root for these creatures of the night.
The title for this story, “Cabal,” does bug me from a strict definition perspective. Boone is renamed Cabal by the Baptizer Baphomet. A cabal, by definition, is a group. Boone is tasked with being the one who rebuilds Midian somewhere else, somewhere more acceptable. So, the reader tries to give cabal the meaning of bringing the many who are Nightbreed back together in one place, but that doesn’t really fit either. Then the reader tries to say the Cabal is Boone from his human days and now Cabal is the Nightbreed creature he has become, but that is only two entities (and really only one). So, one has to guess that Barker just dug the word cabal and that is fine, if a little distracting.
Overall the genius of this story is that the Christian humans are the bad guys. They attack what they don’t understand and the Nightbreed just want to be left alone. Now, the Breed aren’t completely innocent. Peloquin attacks and nearly kills Boone when he first gets to Midian. He sees Boone as nothing more than meat. But this tale is excellent for giving the Breed their place on the hero side of the good/bad ledger.
Barker has always had a gift for creating supernatural creatures of an epic and memorable quality. The Nightbreed of “Cabal” may be his crowning achievement, even more than the Cenobites.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Shine On You Crazy Writer
Stephen King’s “The Shining” proposes the world has two kinds of people: those who are psychically sensitive and can feel things beyond normal senses, and those who cannot. This extra ability may seem a gift, and those who have that gift surely have fuller lives and know more things about people, relationships, and how the world works. But everybody in King’s story who has this gift, this “shine,” only witnesses horror and death.
Jack Torrance, by nearly every measure, is not a nice guy. He drinks to excess, he has a temper, and he has problems controlling himself. He has problems with the truth (as illustrated by the way he treats a stuttering student trying to make the debate team). When things don’t go Jack’s way he blames others, especially his wife and son. The reader isn’t surprised The Overlook Hotel chooses Jack to manipulate into doing its dark bidding. This is a character teetering between boyhood immaturity and adulthood; only the character is far too old to be having these kinds of issues. This teetering is also reflected in his precarious balancing act between sobriety and alcoholism. He loses both of those balancing acts.
Jack is a writer. King has used the writer/artist as a protagonist on more than one occasion: “The Mist,” “Bag of Bones,” “It,” and others. Write what you know must be true as King has done well with this axiom. Many people accuse writers of being autobiographical when they put a writer in the protagonist role. However, I hope King doesn’t see a lot of himself in Jack.
This story works on about three different levels: as a haunted house/isolation tale, as a descent into madness, and as a domestic/family abuse story. All three of these levels provide the reader with horror as King does excellent work personifying The Overlook and painting the Torrance family as believable characters caught up in supernatural events.
First, The Overlook. King based this setting on an actual hotel in the mountains of Colorado The Stanley (though my copy of the novel denies this). As with most haunted house stories The Overlook is big, empty and foreboding. It dwarfs the Torrances and provides an excellent place for imaginations to run to the horrible. Danny Torrance, he who is the strongest with the shine, draws the malevolence of the hotel like bears to a salmon run.
The Overlook is haunted by many ghosts from a good many eras. King never really lets the reader know whether the hotel draws bad people to it, or if the bad people who own the place fill it with their bad spirits and vibes. Either way, the hotel is brimming with restless spirits, and they want one more: Danny Torrance.
Danny is gifted with the shining, or para-psychological abilities. He can call out to other shine-sensitive folks with just his mind, as he does with Dick Hallorann. He has dreams and visions of the future and warnings from a shadow self (Tony). The Overlook is either scared of Danny and wants him out of the way before he can reveal the power there, or it wants Danny’s power for itself. Either way, The Overlook’s endgame is one dead Danny.
The hotel employs Jack, Danny’s father, to accomplish this. From the scrapbook to the hornets to the topiary animals to actually seeing the ghosts at the masked ball in the bar Jack gets drawn into the hotel’s influence.
Part of what makes the hotel as a setting so effective is its isolation. King uses the impending snow and the absolute cutoff due to the snow to ratchet up the tension. Every one of the Torrances, even Jack, has second thoughts about staying up at the hotel when the snow begins to fly. King has given glimpses of what is to come through Danny’s visions (REDRUM) and the reader just KNOWS they should flee. But once winter comes down the Rockies at them fleeing is no longer an option. They are trapped with the hotel and all its ghostly occupants, and Jack is slowly being seduced into doing terrible things to his family.
Without this isolation “The Shining” would not have been as compelling. If Wendy could have scooped Danny up and just driven away a lot of the tension is lost in this story. King chose his location very well.
The descent into madness is truly frightening. The Overlook convinces a man to turn on his own wife and son and try to murder them. This is unnatural in the extreme. Many parents would rather die than harm their kids. King refers to Wendy in these terms in “The Shining.”
The reader believes this father could harm his son and this husband could harm his wife because Jack starts the story as not the nicest person. He’s broken his son’s arm in a fit of rage. He’s attacked a student who sabotaged his car. He’s had outbursts at his wife, was complicit in a car accident while drunk that destroyed a child’s bicycle (luckily not the child too), and when pushed his response is anger and arrogance. A reader can believe this sort of man, this alcoholic self-centered immature lout could be manipulated to do harm to that which he loves as long as the reward is booze and a book deal.
Is King making fun of writers by showing how obsessed Jack is with being acknowledged as a good writer? He might be. Jack does think the sun rises and sets with his writing. He flaunts his finding of the shady past of The Overlook to Ullman, the hotel manager. On some level he has to know this will cost him this last paying job, knock him off this bottom rung of the ladder he is clinging to for life and sustenance. Yet, for Jack, the potential story imbedded in the past of the hotel is worth the risk. For him the story is king, no matter the cost. Well, the story and the booze.
Finally, the family dynamic is huge in this story. Wendy stays with the abusive Jack because her own father was an abuser. It is her norm. In a very real sense she has married her father, and did it to spite her mother. I’m sure many readers can relate to this metaphorical incestuous relationship suicide.
Danny is a bit of a cheat as a character. Because of his shine he can sense and read his parents much better than a character/child has a right to. King uses this to really carve into the reader’s consciousness. We feel bad for Danny when he can sense his parents’ fighting and sadness. In some ways these passages were too telling. When Danny lies in bed and sees the word “DIVORCE” in his mind’s eye the reader is being hit over the head with that knowledge. After Jack breaks Danny’s arm any good mother, and Wendy fits that bill, would be thinking divorce. We don’t need Danny to spell it out for us.
What King does well with Danny is to show a parental favoritism. Despite Jack breaking Danny’s arm when he was three, despite the hornet stings, despite Jack’s moodiness, anger, and yelling, Danny is a daddy’s boy. Wendy laments this several times in this story.
Now, real parents and real kids will deny the existence of favorites in families, but they are there. We all strive to make equal decisions and to treat our children the same, but the reality is that is impossible. Domestic socialism doesn’t work any better than political socialism does. King was brave to include the tight bond between Danny and Jack. Speaking this level of truth added a lot to the Torrance family dynamic. It also made the breaking of the father/son bond and eventual death of Jack that much more tragic.
Overall, “The Shining” is a modern masterpiece. My only complaint is the unknown factor of what causes The Overlook to be evil. Is it a nesting place for evil people? Is it the location? Which came first: the bad hotel or the bad people making the hotel bad? This can be seen as a strength because the reader can make the distinction for themselves, but a bit more along these lines would have been great.
Also, the “shine” that Danny is so strong with loses a lot of its uniqueness in this story as by the end every major player has displayed a level of “shine.” Danny is strongest with it, followed by Dick Hallorann who rushes from Florida to save Danny and Wendy. Jack obviously has it since he has a nice set of conversations with ghost bartenders and past-guests (long deceased). King says all mothers shine a bit, and Wendy displays that as the book builds to its climax. Even Ulmann the annoying little hotel manager appears to see the remnants of Vittorio “The Chopper” Gienelli lying in the doorway of The Presidential Suite. Heck, even a fellow airplane passenger shines at Hallorann as they exit the plane in Denver. Danny’s ability would have seemed more special had he and Hallorann been the only ones who could access that shine.
Jack Torrance, by nearly every measure, is not a nice guy. He drinks to excess, he has a temper, and he has problems controlling himself. He has problems with the truth (as illustrated by the way he treats a stuttering student trying to make the debate team). When things don’t go Jack’s way he blames others, especially his wife and son. The reader isn’t surprised The Overlook Hotel chooses Jack to manipulate into doing its dark bidding. This is a character teetering between boyhood immaturity and adulthood; only the character is far too old to be having these kinds of issues. This teetering is also reflected in his precarious balancing act between sobriety and alcoholism. He loses both of those balancing acts.
Jack is a writer. King has used the writer/artist as a protagonist on more than one occasion: “The Mist,” “Bag of Bones,” “It,” and others. Write what you know must be true as King has done well with this axiom. Many people accuse writers of being autobiographical when they put a writer in the protagonist role. However, I hope King doesn’t see a lot of himself in Jack.
This story works on about three different levels: as a haunted house/isolation tale, as a descent into madness, and as a domestic/family abuse story. All three of these levels provide the reader with horror as King does excellent work personifying The Overlook and painting the Torrance family as believable characters caught up in supernatural events.
First, The Overlook. King based this setting on an actual hotel in the mountains of Colorado The Stanley (though my copy of the novel denies this). As with most haunted house stories The Overlook is big, empty and foreboding. It dwarfs the Torrances and provides an excellent place for imaginations to run to the horrible. Danny Torrance, he who is the strongest with the shine, draws the malevolence of the hotel like bears to a salmon run.
The Overlook is haunted by many ghosts from a good many eras. King never really lets the reader know whether the hotel draws bad people to it, or if the bad people who own the place fill it with their bad spirits and vibes. Either way, the hotel is brimming with restless spirits, and they want one more: Danny Torrance.
Danny is gifted with the shining, or para-psychological abilities. He can call out to other shine-sensitive folks with just his mind, as he does with Dick Hallorann. He has dreams and visions of the future and warnings from a shadow self (Tony). The Overlook is either scared of Danny and wants him out of the way before he can reveal the power there, or it wants Danny’s power for itself. Either way, The Overlook’s endgame is one dead Danny.
The hotel employs Jack, Danny’s father, to accomplish this. From the scrapbook to the hornets to the topiary animals to actually seeing the ghosts at the masked ball in the bar Jack gets drawn into the hotel’s influence.
Part of what makes the hotel as a setting so effective is its isolation. King uses the impending snow and the absolute cutoff due to the snow to ratchet up the tension. Every one of the Torrances, even Jack, has second thoughts about staying up at the hotel when the snow begins to fly. King has given glimpses of what is to come through Danny’s visions (REDRUM) and the reader just KNOWS they should flee. But once winter comes down the Rockies at them fleeing is no longer an option. They are trapped with the hotel and all its ghostly occupants, and Jack is slowly being seduced into doing terrible things to his family.
Without this isolation “The Shining” would not have been as compelling. If Wendy could have scooped Danny up and just driven away a lot of the tension is lost in this story. King chose his location very well.
The descent into madness is truly frightening. The Overlook convinces a man to turn on his own wife and son and try to murder them. This is unnatural in the extreme. Many parents would rather die than harm their kids. King refers to Wendy in these terms in “The Shining.”
The reader believes this father could harm his son and this husband could harm his wife because Jack starts the story as not the nicest person. He’s broken his son’s arm in a fit of rage. He’s attacked a student who sabotaged his car. He’s had outbursts at his wife, was complicit in a car accident while drunk that destroyed a child’s bicycle (luckily not the child too), and when pushed his response is anger and arrogance. A reader can believe this sort of man, this alcoholic self-centered immature lout could be manipulated to do harm to that which he loves as long as the reward is booze and a book deal.
Is King making fun of writers by showing how obsessed Jack is with being acknowledged as a good writer? He might be. Jack does think the sun rises and sets with his writing. He flaunts his finding of the shady past of The Overlook to Ullman, the hotel manager. On some level he has to know this will cost him this last paying job, knock him off this bottom rung of the ladder he is clinging to for life and sustenance. Yet, for Jack, the potential story imbedded in the past of the hotel is worth the risk. For him the story is king, no matter the cost. Well, the story and the booze.
Finally, the family dynamic is huge in this story. Wendy stays with the abusive Jack because her own father was an abuser. It is her norm. In a very real sense she has married her father, and did it to spite her mother. I’m sure many readers can relate to this metaphorical incestuous relationship suicide.
Danny is a bit of a cheat as a character. Because of his shine he can sense and read his parents much better than a character/child has a right to. King uses this to really carve into the reader’s consciousness. We feel bad for Danny when he can sense his parents’ fighting and sadness. In some ways these passages were too telling. When Danny lies in bed and sees the word “DIVORCE” in his mind’s eye the reader is being hit over the head with that knowledge. After Jack breaks Danny’s arm any good mother, and Wendy fits that bill, would be thinking divorce. We don’t need Danny to spell it out for us.
What King does well with Danny is to show a parental favoritism. Despite Jack breaking Danny’s arm when he was three, despite the hornet stings, despite Jack’s moodiness, anger, and yelling, Danny is a daddy’s boy. Wendy laments this several times in this story.
Now, real parents and real kids will deny the existence of favorites in families, but they are there. We all strive to make equal decisions and to treat our children the same, but the reality is that is impossible. Domestic socialism doesn’t work any better than political socialism does. King was brave to include the tight bond between Danny and Jack. Speaking this level of truth added a lot to the Torrance family dynamic. It also made the breaking of the father/son bond and eventual death of Jack that much more tragic.
Overall, “The Shining” is a modern masterpiece. My only complaint is the unknown factor of what causes The Overlook to be evil. Is it a nesting place for evil people? Is it the location? Which came first: the bad hotel or the bad people making the hotel bad? This can be seen as a strength because the reader can make the distinction for themselves, but a bit more along these lines would have been great.
Also, the “shine” that Danny is so strong with loses a lot of its uniqueness in this story as by the end every major player has displayed a level of “shine.” Danny is strongest with it, followed by Dick Hallorann who rushes from Florida to save Danny and Wendy. Jack obviously has it since he has a nice set of conversations with ghost bartenders and past-guests (long deceased). King says all mothers shine a bit, and Wendy displays that as the book builds to its climax. Even Ulmann the annoying little hotel manager appears to see the remnants of Vittorio “The Chopper” Gienelli lying in the doorway of The Presidential Suite. Heck, even a fellow airplane passenger shines at Hallorann as they exit the plane in Denver. Danny’s ability would have seemed more special had he and Hallorann been the only ones who could access that shine.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
We're Going to Get Bloody on This One
If you’ve read Lovecraft you know the man had tells. I’ve mentioned his worship of the god that is setting. He defines the term “story of the weird” with his eerie backdrops and other-worldly creatures. His other-worldly language and names for these monstrosities is also one of his great strengths. Most of the time encounters with these abominations leaves the people in his stories broken mentally or dead, but rarely bloody, rarely grotesquely maimed.
Not this time.
“The Dreams in the Witch House” gets bloody, and the story is better for it. Poor Walter Gilman is another of Lovecraft’s doomed protagonists who has stumbled into the greater world of other dimensions, witchcraft and death. He is something of a math whiz, and this knowledge coupled with his unfortunate dwelling conspire to pull him into Keziah Mason, the Black Man, and Brown Jenkin’s trans-dimensional world of shadows.
Lovecraft has an excellent concept in this story: that advanced math and old-world folklore combine to unlock the secret knowledge of trans-dimensional travel, immortality and the ability to move through solid objects. A scoop or two more of quasi-scientific knowledge and this story comes dangerously close to science fiction. Some of the details of witches and their dark powers are described by Lovecraft: “The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises, that uselessness of material barriers in halting witch’s motions; and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?”
Gilman has recurring dreams that grow stronger and more vivid containing a bent crone of a woman and the little rat-creature Brown Jenkin. These tour-guides-from-hell drag him through to other dimensions inhabited by horrors only Lovecraft could conjure.
Each morning Gilman awakes with physical evidence of having left his bed, but no evidence that he left his room: “At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side – for it could not stand up alone – was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade.”
I have no evidence that this is the first instance in fiction of physical evidence being retrieved from the dream/subconscious level of existence and being brought into the physical/corporeal world. However, it has to be one of the earlier, if not the first, instance of this sort of plot point. Modern readers will recognize this sort of thing from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in which dream monster Freddy Krueger can kill you in your dreams and your living body dies in its sleep. Later the “Matrix” movies make use of this sort of thing in which a person’s mind is in a “game” and if a person is killed in the game/matrix their body dies in the real world.
This, for us today, is not an original idea. As I read this story I was struck by how original this might have seemed to Lovecraft’s earliest readers.
Gilman gets pulled further and further into this other dimension and is included in hideous blood rituals that kill toddlers. He tries to stop this ceremony to no avail, and eventually is killed for his attempts at stopping these acts. As Elwood, a fellow tenant and student, befriends and tries to help Gilman he witnesses Brown Jenkin dispatch Gilman most gruesomely: “It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body – something had eaten his heart out.”
Earlier in this story as Gilman fought the crone Brown Jenkin also bit and bled to death a two year old gathering the baby’s blood in a rune-covered light metal bowl. As I said in the opening, this is a very grisly and blood-soaked tale by Lovecraft standards. This actually comes as a bit of shock and that is a welcome addition to the narrative.
As with nearly all Lovecraft the exposition-style of storytelling is frustrating and drags things to a crawl. Once a person knows this about Lovecraft you can make your peace with it and read Lovecraft for the other pleasures he provides. However, “The Dreams in the Witch House” has some logical disconnects and plot points that conspire to scuttle the overall narrative.
First, I love the coupling of math, witchcraft, other dimensions, and folk lore. I think this is brilliant, and the promise of Gilman “stumbling” into this knowledge and the other-dimensional witches coming to him through his dreams all works well.
But after the contact is made with Gilman the reader is left asking why? Why did they include him? I thought they would try to kill him to keep their secret and to maintain their other-dimension hiding place. When they didn’t try to kill him I wondered what their purpose was. He didn’t help them do anything. He fought them when they killed the two year old boy, and then they do kill Gilman.
This is a plot point that could be solved with just a couple lines of dialogue:
“Who the heck are you people?” Gilman asked looking around the other-worldly landscape.
“I’m Keziah Mason,” she said.
“The witch? What do you want from me?”
[Insert any reason for their contact with him you’d like.]
However, this conversation never takes place. This is a big deal as it is kind of the heart of the story. Gilman cracking the code of these other dimensions is great. Lovecraft could have had him stumble upon these baby-killers in the walls. He could have had them trying to off Gilman. Instead it’s played as a half-assed middle ground that just doesn’t work very well.
The other major logical disconnect is the lack of options Gilman has. Lovecraft almost alleviates this when he has Gilman move in with Elwood on the second floor. But fresh rat holes and eerie lights descending around this room aren’t enough to motivate Gilman to hit the road. He just goes further and further into these other-dimensional dreams and eventually to his doom.
It’s too passive. He’s too passive. He’s a student, and a math genius. Why can’t he fight? Why can’t he stand and fight The Black Man? Why can’t he step on Brown Jenkin? I cheered when he kicked the little deformed rat, but it just bounces back and eats his heart out.
The story doesn’t need Walter Gilman to win. He’s against some pretty major foes, foes who have defied death for a long time and who know the secrets of the dimensions far better than he does. But he goes too easily into this story. A little more fight in him and this would be one of my favorite Lovecraft stories. But he’s too weak and that weakness saps the story overall.
Not this time.
“The Dreams in the Witch House” gets bloody, and the story is better for it. Poor Walter Gilman is another of Lovecraft’s doomed protagonists who has stumbled into the greater world of other dimensions, witchcraft and death. He is something of a math whiz, and this knowledge coupled with his unfortunate dwelling conspire to pull him into Keziah Mason, the Black Man, and Brown Jenkin’s trans-dimensional world of shadows.
Lovecraft has an excellent concept in this story: that advanced math and old-world folklore combine to unlock the secret knowledge of trans-dimensional travel, immortality and the ability to move through solid objects. A scoop or two more of quasi-scientific knowledge and this story comes dangerously close to science fiction. Some of the details of witches and their dark powers are described by Lovecraft: “The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises, that uselessness of material barriers in halting witch’s motions; and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?”
Gilman has recurring dreams that grow stronger and more vivid containing a bent crone of a woman and the little rat-creature Brown Jenkin. These tour-guides-from-hell drag him through to other dimensions inhabited by horrors only Lovecraft could conjure.
Each morning Gilman awakes with physical evidence of having left his bed, but no evidence that he left his room: “At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side – for it could not stand up alone – was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade.”
I have no evidence that this is the first instance in fiction of physical evidence being retrieved from the dream/subconscious level of existence and being brought into the physical/corporeal world. However, it has to be one of the earlier, if not the first, instance of this sort of plot point. Modern readers will recognize this sort of thing from “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in which dream monster Freddy Krueger can kill you in your dreams and your living body dies in its sleep. Later the “Matrix” movies make use of this sort of thing in which a person’s mind is in a “game” and if a person is killed in the game/matrix their body dies in the real world.
This, for us today, is not an original idea. As I read this story I was struck by how original this might have seemed to Lovecraft’s earliest readers.
Gilman gets pulled further and further into this other dimension and is included in hideous blood rituals that kill toddlers. He tries to stop this ceremony to no avail, and eventually is killed for his attempts at stopping these acts. As Elwood, a fellow tenant and student, befriends and tries to help Gilman he witnesses Brown Jenkin dispatch Gilman most gruesomely: “It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body – something had eaten his heart out.”
Earlier in this story as Gilman fought the crone Brown Jenkin also bit and bled to death a two year old gathering the baby’s blood in a rune-covered light metal bowl. As I said in the opening, this is a very grisly and blood-soaked tale by Lovecraft standards. This actually comes as a bit of shock and that is a welcome addition to the narrative.
As with nearly all Lovecraft the exposition-style of storytelling is frustrating and drags things to a crawl. Once a person knows this about Lovecraft you can make your peace with it and read Lovecraft for the other pleasures he provides. However, “The Dreams in the Witch House” has some logical disconnects and plot points that conspire to scuttle the overall narrative.
First, I love the coupling of math, witchcraft, other dimensions, and folk lore. I think this is brilliant, and the promise of Gilman “stumbling” into this knowledge and the other-dimensional witches coming to him through his dreams all works well.
But after the contact is made with Gilman the reader is left asking why? Why did they include him? I thought they would try to kill him to keep their secret and to maintain their other-dimension hiding place. When they didn’t try to kill him I wondered what their purpose was. He didn’t help them do anything. He fought them when they killed the two year old boy, and then they do kill Gilman.
This is a plot point that could be solved with just a couple lines of dialogue:
“Who the heck are you people?” Gilman asked looking around the other-worldly landscape.
“I’m Keziah Mason,” she said.
“The witch? What do you want from me?”
[Insert any reason for their contact with him you’d like.]
However, this conversation never takes place. This is a big deal as it is kind of the heart of the story. Gilman cracking the code of these other dimensions is great. Lovecraft could have had him stumble upon these baby-killers in the walls. He could have had them trying to off Gilman. Instead it’s played as a half-assed middle ground that just doesn’t work very well.
The other major logical disconnect is the lack of options Gilman has. Lovecraft almost alleviates this when he has Gilman move in with Elwood on the second floor. But fresh rat holes and eerie lights descending around this room aren’t enough to motivate Gilman to hit the road. He just goes further and further into these other-dimensional dreams and eventually to his doom.
It’s too passive. He’s too passive. He’s a student, and a math genius. Why can’t he fight? Why can’t he stand and fight The Black Man? Why can’t he step on Brown Jenkin? I cheered when he kicked the little deformed rat, but it just bounces back and eats his heart out.
The story doesn’t need Walter Gilman to win. He’s against some pretty major foes, foes who have defied death for a long time and who know the secrets of the dimensions far better than he does. But he goes too easily into this story. A little more fight in him and this would be one of my favorite Lovecraft stories. But he’s too weak and that weakness saps the story overall.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
A Mother Will Love the Satan Right Out
It’s all there, right in front of the reader, and in front of Rosemary. Ira Levin wrote such a tight, straightforward novel and at the same time open to all kinds of interpretations when he gave us “Rosemary’s Baby.” The story is simplicity itself: young couple is finding their way in the big city, he wants to climb the ladder of his business, in this case acting, she wants to have kids and start a family. Within that simple family dynamic all the horror in the word resides.
Levin winds this story so tightly that with each quiet little revelation you feel the tension tick up a notch. Yet, even as the story is coming to a close the reader is rooting for Rosemary to be wrong. Each of her worries: the history of the building, Terry’s suicide, the tannis root, Guy’s whereabouts and how he came to have tickets to a show, Hutch’s coma, Donald Baumgart’s blindness, all of it really could be mere coincidence. The reader, for Rosemary’s sake hopes so. But of course she isn’t so lucky.
From the first meeting with the Castevets Levin shows his hand. Sure, it’s just a peek, but the clues are all there. Roman Castevet says: ““No Pope ever visits a city where the newspapers are on strike”” (Levin 55). Later in that same conversation Guy Woodhouse, Rosemary’s husband, responds: “Guy smiled. “Well,” he said, “that’s show biz”” (Levin 56).
The disdain for the Pope and God in general, are right there for the reader to see. But Levin has his story so well written, the reader not only sees the seeds of the Satanists the Castevets turn out to be, but also how Rosemary is an outsider and Guy is fitting right in with them. “Rosemary, in one of the straight-backed chairs, felt oddly out of things, as if the Castevets were old friends of Guy’s to whom she had just been introduced. “Do you think it could have been a plot of some kind?” Mr. Castevet asked her, and she answered awkwardly, aware that a considerate host was drawing a left-out guest into conversation” (Levin 61).
The story continues to isolate Rosemary and to draw Guy into the circle around her. Not long after the dinner party at the Castevets Guy is alone with Roman for a while. Rosemary is visited by Minnie and Laura-Louise and given the necklace Terry was wearing when she committed suicide. It is a charm full of what the Castevets call “tannis root” that Rosemary thinks stinks. She decides not to put it on. Guy responds “Guy, in the doorway, said, “If you took it, you ought to wear it”” (Levin 70).
This kind of tension building continues as Rosemary is further ostracized (or is she just being paranoid?). Levin never plays dirty tricks on the reader; he places it all out there for us to see. We see the moment Guy either joins the Satanists directly, or at least they act on his behalf by striking Donald Baumgart blind. This is offstage; the reader is with Rosemary at a play called The Fantasticks. When she returns the whole house smells of tannis root. Rosemary just assigns the odor to the charm Minnie gave to her. The reader knows there is more to it than that as Guy is scrubbing himself in the shower.
Near the end of the novel Rosemary runs into the person Guy said he got the show tickets from. He never gave them to Guy. This minor piece of information is nothing in the grand scheme of things, maybe just a simple misunderstanding or a lapse in memory on Rosemary’s part. But by the time this information is revealed we’ve seen Hutch, Rosemary’s surrogate father, lapse into a coma, heard odd music and chanting, watched Rosemary have an unusual and painful pregnancy. Even more, we’ve watched Rosemary systematically get cut off from the rest of the world.
All of this tension building, this tight plotting, this excellent set up and building of suspense shows master craft work by Levin. He truly has a masterpiece of suspense here. It’s no wonder it’s stood the test of time.
However, my favorite aspect of this story is that it doesn’t turn out to be some paranoid delusion on the part of Rosemary. Everything she fears comes true. Levin gives the reader, and unfortunately Rosemary, a real supernatural encounter with Satan. This is done in a dreamlike haze as Rosemary has been drugged, but it is real. It did happen, as Rosemary learns when she breaks into the Castevets apartment in the final scenes of the book.
To take a supernatural occurrence like that, and place it within the relatively mundane (but interesting and well written mind you) confines of a New York City apartment? That is the essence of horror. To take a relatively absurd concept (sex with the devil) and give it a concrete real-world adult application is impressive. For me, that is where the great horror lives.
Finally, once the reader gets to the end and realizes that Rosemary isn’t a paranoid basket case (but the reader is never really sure until Rosemary sees the picture of the burning church in the Castevet’s apartment, you really do have to wait that long), Levin isn’t through with the surprises.
You’ve guessed the group has conspired against Rosemary. You’ve guessed that something untoward is happening. When Rosemary finally sees her baby (Andrew, not Adrian) she is horrified by his eyes, Levin could have ended it there. The movie ends it there basically.
Instead her maternal instincts take over. Sure, he’s Satan’s spawn, but he’s also half hers: “He couldn’t be all bad, he just couldn’t. Even if he was half Satan, wasn’t he half her as well, half decent, ordinary, sensible, human being? If she worked against them, exerted a good influence to counteract their bad one …” (Levin 244).
So, instead of Rosemary leaping out the window like Terry did before her. Instead of using the knife to kill her baby, Rosemary becomes his mother. It’s a great twist, and, even better, a believable twist. Rosemary is a bit of a pushover (voted the way Laura-Louise wanted her to, letting the Castevets steamroll her time and again, etc.), but she really is the only good person in the whole book. She trusts, and the reader believes (or really wants to believe) that she can foster that goodness in her baby boy.
Beyond that, it is a blunt and, once again, obvious point by Levin about the power of good and evil. If Rosemary is the only good, and obviously Satan is the focal point of evil, then their child has the potential for both, just like all of us.
Levin winds this story so tightly that with each quiet little revelation you feel the tension tick up a notch. Yet, even as the story is coming to a close the reader is rooting for Rosemary to be wrong. Each of her worries: the history of the building, Terry’s suicide, the tannis root, Guy’s whereabouts and how he came to have tickets to a show, Hutch’s coma, Donald Baumgart’s blindness, all of it really could be mere coincidence. The reader, for Rosemary’s sake hopes so. But of course she isn’t so lucky.
From the first meeting with the Castevets Levin shows his hand. Sure, it’s just a peek, but the clues are all there. Roman Castevet says: ““No Pope ever visits a city where the newspapers are on strike”” (Levin 55). Later in that same conversation Guy Woodhouse, Rosemary’s husband, responds: “Guy smiled. “Well,” he said, “that’s show biz”” (Levin 56).
The disdain for the Pope and God in general, are right there for the reader to see. But Levin has his story so well written, the reader not only sees the seeds of the Satanists the Castevets turn out to be, but also how Rosemary is an outsider and Guy is fitting right in with them. “Rosemary, in one of the straight-backed chairs, felt oddly out of things, as if the Castevets were old friends of Guy’s to whom she had just been introduced. “Do you think it could have been a plot of some kind?” Mr. Castevet asked her, and she answered awkwardly, aware that a considerate host was drawing a left-out guest into conversation” (Levin 61).
The story continues to isolate Rosemary and to draw Guy into the circle around her. Not long after the dinner party at the Castevets Guy is alone with Roman for a while. Rosemary is visited by Minnie and Laura-Louise and given the necklace Terry was wearing when she committed suicide. It is a charm full of what the Castevets call “tannis root” that Rosemary thinks stinks. She decides not to put it on. Guy responds “Guy, in the doorway, said, “If you took it, you ought to wear it”” (Levin 70).
This kind of tension building continues as Rosemary is further ostracized (or is she just being paranoid?). Levin never plays dirty tricks on the reader; he places it all out there for us to see. We see the moment Guy either joins the Satanists directly, or at least they act on his behalf by striking Donald Baumgart blind. This is offstage; the reader is with Rosemary at a play called The Fantasticks. When she returns the whole house smells of tannis root. Rosemary just assigns the odor to the charm Minnie gave to her. The reader knows there is more to it than that as Guy is scrubbing himself in the shower.
Near the end of the novel Rosemary runs into the person Guy said he got the show tickets from. He never gave them to Guy. This minor piece of information is nothing in the grand scheme of things, maybe just a simple misunderstanding or a lapse in memory on Rosemary’s part. But by the time this information is revealed we’ve seen Hutch, Rosemary’s surrogate father, lapse into a coma, heard odd music and chanting, watched Rosemary have an unusual and painful pregnancy. Even more, we’ve watched Rosemary systematically get cut off from the rest of the world.
All of this tension building, this tight plotting, this excellent set up and building of suspense shows master craft work by Levin. He truly has a masterpiece of suspense here. It’s no wonder it’s stood the test of time.
However, my favorite aspect of this story is that it doesn’t turn out to be some paranoid delusion on the part of Rosemary. Everything she fears comes true. Levin gives the reader, and unfortunately Rosemary, a real supernatural encounter with Satan. This is done in a dreamlike haze as Rosemary has been drugged, but it is real. It did happen, as Rosemary learns when she breaks into the Castevets apartment in the final scenes of the book.
To take a supernatural occurrence like that, and place it within the relatively mundane (but interesting and well written mind you) confines of a New York City apartment? That is the essence of horror. To take a relatively absurd concept (sex with the devil) and give it a concrete real-world adult application is impressive. For me, that is where the great horror lives.
Finally, once the reader gets to the end and realizes that Rosemary isn’t a paranoid basket case (but the reader is never really sure until Rosemary sees the picture of the burning church in the Castevet’s apartment, you really do have to wait that long), Levin isn’t through with the surprises.
You’ve guessed the group has conspired against Rosemary. You’ve guessed that something untoward is happening. When Rosemary finally sees her baby (Andrew, not Adrian) she is horrified by his eyes, Levin could have ended it there. The movie ends it there basically.
Instead her maternal instincts take over. Sure, he’s Satan’s spawn, but he’s also half hers: “He couldn’t be all bad, he just couldn’t. Even if he was half Satan, wasn’t he half her as well, half decent, ordinary, sensible, human being? If she worked against them, exerted a good influence to counteract their bad one …” (Levin 244).
So, instead of Rosemary leaping out the window like Terry did before her. Instead of using the knife to kill her baby, Rosemary becomes his mother. It’s a great twist, and, even better, a believable twist. Rosemary is a bit of a pushover (voted the way Laura-Louise wanted her to, letting the Castevets steamroll her time and again, etc.), but she really is the only good person in the whole book. She trusts, and the reader believes (or really wants to believe) that she can foster that goodness in her baby boy.
Beyond that, it is a blunt and, once again, obvious point by Levin about the power of good and evil. If Rosemary is the only good, and obviously Satan is the focal point of evil, then their child has the potential for both, just like all of us.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
We're Going to Innsmouth, Bring the Tartar Sauce
This story has so much potential it is frustrating how it loses narrative momentum three quarters of the way through. Many of Lovecraft’s hallmarks are here: abundant and lush (too lush, I’ll explain later) setting, other-worldly creatures, underground tunnels, a hapless or bystander type narrator, and a twist ending (sort of).
Innsmouth is a dying coastal city in which rumor and legend hide a truly horrible transformation. The slowly decreasing population has a distinct “Innsmouth look” described as such: “His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears.” As the reader continues in this story that “Innsmouth look” strikes fear as you learn that this isn’t just some family trait, this is the outward visual manifestation of a horrible transformation taking place, and it is happening to the entire town.
As always, Lovecraft bows at the altar of setting in this story. The reader is treated to pages and pages of seaside ruin, empty decrepit houses, seafronts and factory buildings, ocean surfaces and architecture. This attention to setting derails the narrative momentum of this story in Chapter IV. For seven pages, a full quarter of the story, the reader is treated to an absolute overkill of details of buildings and train tracks, windows and walls as the narrator escapes the fish-frog hordes searching for him. This section should have been full of suspense and dread. This section should have had the reader on the edge of their seat. Instead the reader is waiting for the whole cat and mouse (or human and fish-frog if you like) affair to end.
Why? On page one Lovecraft ruins the suspense by telling us it was this narrator who called in the government. We know he (or she) is going to live. We know there is no real danger. Chapter IV ends with a parade of fully transformed fish-frogs making their way past the narrator as he hides along the forgotten train tracks. This is good stuff, the “big reveal” if you will, but it comes seven pages after the reader has been lulled to sleep.
The fish-frogs themselves are outstanding. Once again, Lovecraft has dug into the crust of the earth and found an other-worldly evil that universally creeps out the reader. The idea that there are millions upon millions of these things down in the depths is terrifying. The best use of these creatures to strike horror in the reader is this: “For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.”
Hordes of anything are usually scary, hordes of fish-frogs who sacrifice humans and mate with other humans really have the reader freaked out. As the story goes and the reader thinks back to the description of Joe Sargent (the bus driver) the line between human and the “Innsmouth look” and the fish-frogs who come shambling out of the water is made. The idea of not being able to blink, of limbs elongating and becoming webbed, of gills growing out of the soft flesh of your neck truly does horrify a reader.
But then we come back to a plot point I found “fishy” if you’ll allow the Innsmouth pun. Lovecraft tells the reader through the drunken ravings of Zadok Allen that once the transformation is near completion a lot of the newly formed fish-frogs take trial runs down into the depths. This is an excellent plot point and one the narrator desire illustrates well as the story closes. As the transformation nears completion these near fish-frogs are boarded up in homes and shunned from the light of day.
If they seek water, and truly live in water, why wasn’t water more of a plot point for Lovecraft? Why wasn’t the town dotted with ponds or pools? Why didn’t Innsmouth build a canal or dig the harbor into the heart of the city? I kept waiting for the narrator to discover the underground tunnels (a Lovecraft staple, he loved the idea of subterranean connections, he probably loved the subway system) were actually underground canals. If that didn’t happen I was expecting the waterfalls the bus drives over to get into town to come into play as a place budding fish-frogs go to frolic and stretch their gills. I know, personal expectations cannot be blamed on the writer, but if the water and the drive to return to the water were so important to the transformed, then water could have played a bigger role in this story (and could have been used to up the creep factor as well).
Now we come to the narrator. He ends up becoming what he dreads in this tale. That seemed to come out of left field, but wasn’t a deal breaker. After reading the story, though, and knowing of the town’s long history of oddness, disappearances and superstition, the reader does wonder one thing: what is so special about this narrator that his stories and explanations were enough to motivate the government to swarm in record numbers to essentially eradicate the fish-frog threat. From the opening of the story: “The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting - under suitable precautions - of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront.” The narrator goes on to tell of a submarine that torpedoes the Devil Reef as well.
So, what gave this narrator the power to get action that all the rumors, gossip, and disappearances previously did not? It seems a minor question, but one that is pretty important after completing the story.
All in all, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” works on one level (creepy). With a little tweaking, and a more real-time narrative voice, this story could work on every level (creepy, tension filled suspense, vested interest in the narrator, good narrative flow). Fish and/or frogs are not by themselves creepy or horrifying. Humans generally dismiss them as lower creatures. Lovecraft takes that notion of the lower creature and twists it to make them superior to humans. In doing so he takes a rather mundane animal and makes it creepy. That is a great credit to this story. Taking that element (creepy critters) and ratcheting up the other elements of storytelling and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” could have been a masterpiece.
Innsmouth is a dying coastal city in which rumor and legend hide a truly horrible transformation. The slowly decreasing population has a distinct “Innsmouth look” described as such: “His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears.” As the reader continues in this story that “Innsmouth look” strikes fear as you learn that this isn’t just some family trait, this is the outward visual manifestation of a horrible transformation taking place, and it is happening to the entire town.
As always, Lovecraft bows at the altar of setting in this story. The reader is treated to pages and pages of seaside ruin, empty decrepit houses, seafronts and factory buildings, ocean surfaces and architecture. This attention to setting derails the narrative momentum of this story in Chapter IV. For seven pages, a full quarter of the story, the reader is treated to an absolute overkill of details of buildings and train tracks, windows and walls as the narrator escapes the fish-frog hordes searching for him. This section should have been full of suspense and dread. This section should have had the reader on the edge of their seat. Instead the reader is waiting for the whole cat and mouse (or human and fish-frog if you like) affair to end.
Why? On page one Lovecraft ruins the suspense by telling us it was this narrator who called in the government. We know he (or she) is going to live. We know there is no real danger. Chapter IV ends with a parade of fully transformed fish-frogs making their way past the narrator as he hides along the forgotten train tracks. This is good stuff, the “big reveal” if you will, but it comes seven pages after the reader has been lulled to sleep.
The fish-frogs themselves are outstanding. Once again, Lovecraft has dug into the crust of the earth and found an other-worldly evil that universally creeps out the reader. The idea that there are millions upon millions of these things down in the depths is terrifying. The best use of these creatures to strike horror in the reader is this: “For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.”
Hordes of anything are usually scary, hordes of fish-frogs who sacrifice humans and mate with other humans really have the reader freaked out. As the story goes and the reader thinks back to the description of Joe Sargent (the bus driver) the line between human and the “Innsmouth look” and the fish-frogs who come shambling out of the water is made. The idea of not being able to blink, of limbs elongating and becoming webbed, of gills growing out of the soft flesh of your neck truly does horrify a reader.
But then we come back to a plot point I found “fishy” if you’ll allow the Innsmouth pun. Lovecraft tells the reader through the drunken ravings of Zadok Allen that once the transformation is near completion a lot of the newly formed fish-frogs take trial runs down into the depths. This is an excellent plot point and one the narrator desire illustrates well as the story closes. As the transformation nears completion these near fish-frogs are boarded up in homes and shunned from the light of day.
If they seek water, and truly live in water, why wasn’t water more of a plot point for Lovecraft? Why wasn’t the town dotted with ponds or pools? Why didn’t Innsmouth build a canal or dig the harbor into the heart of the city? I kept waiting for the narrator to discover the underground tunnels (a Lovecraft staple, he loved the idea of subterranean connections, he probably loved the subway system) were actually underground canals. If that didn’t happen I was expecting the waterfalls the bus drives over to get into town to come into play as a place budding fish-frogs go to frolic and stretch their gills. I know, personal expectations cannot be blamed on the writer, but if the water and the drive to return to the water were so important to the transformed, then water could have played a bigger role in this story (and could have been used to up the creep factor as well).
Now we come to the narrator. He ends up becoming what he dreads in this tale. That seemed to come out of left field, but wasn’t a deal breaker. After reading the story, though, and knowing of the town’s long history of oddness, disappearances and superstition, the reader does wonder one thing: what is so special about this narrator that his stories and explanations were enough to motivate the government to swarm in record numbers to essentially eradicate the fish-frog threat. From the opening of the story: “The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting - under suitable precautions - of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront.” The narrator goes on to tell of a submarine that torpedoes the Devil Reef as well.
So, what gave this narrator the power to get action that all the rumors, gossip, and disappearances previously did not? It seems a minor question, but one that is pretty important after completing the story.
All in all, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” works on one level (creepy). With a little tweaking, and a more real-time narrative voice, this story could work on every level (creepy, tension filled suspense, vested interest in the narrator, good narrative flow). Fish and/or frogs are not by themselves creepy or horrifying. Humans generally dismiss them as lower creatures. Lovecraft takes that notion of the lower creature and twists it to make them superior to humans. In doing so he takes a rather mundane animal and makes it creepy. That is a great credit to this story. Taking that element (creepy critters) and ratcheting up the other elements of storytelling and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” could have been a masterpiece.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)