Rawhead Rex, much has been made of the male/female interplay in this story. It is there, it is pretty overt (some might say overwhelming), but I’m going to focus on something else.
The moon. Clive Barker’s Rawhead Rex is obviously a monster. He has monstrous proportions with hands three times the size of a man, a nine-foot height, incredible strength, and that monster classic: a taste for human flesh, kids especially.
If we remove ourselves from the violence and gore (blood and semen and piss, all hard to ignore, but bear with me) Barker has personified the prehistoric. Rawhead stands in for pre-Christian society. He is uncivilized, untamable, comes from the wilds, and is most comfortable under the moon.
I am by no means an expert on Pagans or any of the pre-Christian societies. I know there was a big disconnect between a mono-deity religion and one that worshipped multiple gods (and goddesses). I know many of the Druid and Celt worship sites and temples were converted to Christian worship sites, and that many churches share ground with temples that came before them.
But that moon. I don’t know if this is my pop-culture tinged education, or what I’m supposed to believe, but if pressed I would say that Pagan’s were more enamored of the moon than are Christians. I don’t believe they worshipped it, but they had outdoor temples and ceremonies held at night. These have been demonized by modern culture and religion and made into something scary and dark and evil.
Enter Barker with Rawhead Rex on his leash. He comes out of the earth to wreak havoc. He’s a monster, but a thinking one. Sure, he doesn’t think well, but he’s more than just a beast. He has a plan, another monster classic (cue cartoon mouse Brain’s voice): to take over the world. I never was sure, but I think maybe Rawhead’s idea of taking over the world might have just been his little patch of wild woods now known as Zeal. I didn’t think he meant the entirety of the world. He just wanted to go back to the being the Alpha Monster in his neck of the woods.
Alright, I can’t ignore it completely. Rawhead can also very easily be a monstrous manifestation of male appetites. He eats what he wants, he sees women in very derogatory terms and deems them unclean when they are menstruating and has fond memories of raping humans so they can spawn his mutant hybrid offspring (killing the women in the process of course).
More than anything else Barker’s references to women from Rawhead’s point of view was the most monstrous of his traits. I thought it a huge copout that an angry mob led by a grieving father was the wrong ending. Rawhead needed to be taken down by a woman, not just the Venus statue, but a modern human woman acting like a momma-bear when her child is threatened. Instead Barker allows a male to take down the monstrous pre-historic all-male he’s created in Rawhead.
Finally, the descriptions of Rawhead were good. The idea of a moon face splitting wide to reveal a giant tooth-filled maw was excellent. Again, giving away my age and era here, but I couldn’t help but see the Rancor from under Jabba the Hutt’s palace in Return of the Jedi. That was probably just me, but the image of the all-mouth towering creature kept coming up Rancor for me.
All in all, not Barker’s best story. But Rawhead Rex is a great monster who has leapt from short-story pages to have a bit of a following and notoriety.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
I've Heard of Hairy Legs, but This is Ridiculous
Breeding Ground reaches right into my head and pulled out one of the great fears. Sure, the specific fear for me is giant trap-door spiders that pop up to snatch people as they walk through the woods.
But Sarah Pinborough’s giant pale telepathic spiders born of the human women strike close enough to home to really freak me out. Add to that the way they come about and this is truly a gruesome tale of apocalyptic proportions.
Matthew Edge is our first person narrator and main protagonist. He fills the every-man role quite well. He’s youngish, a generally good person, just moving from his misspent youth into some level of domestic maturity when his girlfriend Chloe comes up pregnant. Since Matthew is a stand up fellow who genuinely loves his girlfriend this unexpected pregnancy just solidifies their relationship (in his eyes) and he gets busy getting ready to be a dad.
The problem is the pregnancy between Matthew and Chloe isn’t the only pregnancy they experience. It turns out those meddlesome scientists have once again doomed humanity to an apocalypse of their own making, quite by accident (again) of course, but the results are the same: a quick devolution from civilization to a few humans clinging to survival.
As I said before, spiders are one of my “things.” A buddy and I were once caught with a can of hairspray filched from his sister’s room and a lighter. We were removing books one by one from a bookshelf and preparing with our homemade blow torch to roast an eight legged abomination. His mom caught us and we ceased and desisted. She pointed out we might have burned the whole apartment building down trying to kill one little spider. Then, as now, as long as nobody got hurt, burning a building down to nail a single spider sounds like a fair exchange to me. Eight legged pieces of evil these things are.
So, Pinborough had me hooked with the spider angle. Another of my “things” is the post-apocalyptic tale. The Road, Terminator (the future parts), The Road Warrior, Dawn of the Dead (the original) all have a dark place in my little heart. How humans respond to a threat big enough to not just kill, but to rend society asunder is fascinating stuff. Breeding Ground measures up to this lofty company.
Our narrator and hero loses his girlfriend and joins a band of humans who are all traumatized by recent events. They make their way to a military base and there they learn some of the truths of what is happening. I don’t want to reveal too much here, but suffice it to say that we humans did it to ourselves. Pinborough gives us a vivid and nasty monster in her spiders. At one point she describes that the y still have some semblance of a face on their torsos and this image is burned into my brain. Vivid and horrifying. Nice.
I would be remiss if I didn’t broach the subject of gender when it comes to the characters and to the monster spiders. Initially the spiders birth from the women of society, and all the new spiders are female. At one point Chloe, well along into the “there’s something really wrong here” territory is communicating telepathically with a friend of hers. She is sitting, bloated and monstrous in her living room but her mind is riding brain waves the spider creatures can use.
It is hinted at that the spiders maintain a level of telepathy after they are born and mature, and this is truly a terrifying thought. A giant spider is bad enough. A giant spider with intelligence and the ability to communicate with other giant spiders makes them a formidable foe, one that maybe can use strategy and try to outwit you.
Pinborough may be implying that women communicate better than men, or that they communicate on different levels than men. I think that is pretty obvious. Men and women operate and communicate very differently. It is what drives much of the humor and frustration in our society. If the human women had lived and worked with the spiders to round up the men I would rail against this whole theme. However, the women in this book are slain in the act of giving birth. Regardless of the community of females, the new breed that has taken over the planet could care less. Women or men, we’re nothing but food to the spiders.
I only had two minor issues with this book. First, Matthew must be some kind of Lothario or Casanova. He has a beautiful girl to start the story, and before it is over he has had sex with essentially the last two women on earth. I mean, bravo Matthew, but this seemed amazingly convenient.
The other issue was a bit bigger. Why did Matthew, Rebecca, George, and Chester leave the military compound? The base wasn’t overrun; they didn’t run out of food or supplies. Sure, the other men were one by one succumbing to the lumps on their bodies that led to the men of the new world sharing the fate of the women. Pinborough led us to believe that there were literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of these spiders running around. At night they could see rows of glowing red eyes in the trees (freak me out).
I know there were rumors of a kid colony and Matthew babbled on about Rebecca having a baby, but none of that passed the sniff test. As brutal as it sounds, you let the other men birth their shiny black spiders, you kill the spiders, and you hole up in the compound. In post-apocalyptic stories there is no “happily ever after” and these characters were leaving survival for the great unknown.
Survival is the only option. I read Breeding Ground not knowing it has a sequel (Feeding Ground), but my last thoughts as I finished this book were: too bad these guys made it this far and now they’re going to their deaths.
I guess dying on your own terms has a certain level of control to it, but living for as long as possible, and taking care of those you love, protecting them from monsters and death, Matthew should have staked out his piece of the earth inside the military base and tried to make it his new home.
But Sarah Pinborough’s giant pale telepathic spiders born of the human women strike close enough to home to really freak me out. Add to that the way they come about and this is truly a gruesome tale of apocalyptic proportions.
Matthew Edge is our first person narrator and main protagonist. He fills the every-man role quite well. He’s youngish, a generally good person, just moving from his misspent youth into some level of domestic maturity when his girlfriend Chloe comes up pregnant. Since Matthew is a stand up fellow who genuinely loves his girlfriend this unexpected pregnancy just solidifies their relationship (in his eyes) and he gets busy getting ready to be a dad.
The problem is the pregnancy between Matthew and Chloe isn’t the only pregnancy they experience. It turns out those meddlesome scientists have once again doomed humanity to an apocalypse of their own making, quite by accident (again) of course, but the results are the same: a quick devolution from civilization to a few humans clinging to survival.
As I said before, spiders are one of my “things.” A buddy and I were once caught with a can of hairspray filched from his sister’s room and a lighter. We were removing books one by one from a bookshelf and preparing with our homemade blow torch to roast an eight legged abomination. His mom caught us and we ceased and desisted. She pointed out we might have burned the whole apartment building down trying to kill one little spider. Then, as now, as long as nobody got hurt, burning a building down to nail a single spider sounds like a fair exchange to me. Eight legged pieces of evil these things are.
So, Pinborough had me hooked with the spider angle. Another of my “things” is the post-apocalyptic tale. The Road, Terminator (the future parts), The Road Warrior, Dawn of the Dead (the original) all have a dark place in my little heart. How humans respond to a threat big enough to not just kill, but to rend society asunder is fascinating stuff. Breeding Ground measures up to this lofty company.
Our narrator and hero loses his girlfriend and joins a band of humans who are all traumatized by recent events. They make their way to a military base and there they learn some of the truths of what is happening. I don’t want to reveal too much here, but suffice it to say that we humans did it to ourselves. Pinborough gives us a vivid and nasty monster in her spiders. At one point she describes that the y still have some semblance of a face on their torsos and this image is burned into my brain. Vivid and horrifying. Nice.
I would be remiss if I didn’t broach the subject of gender when it comes to the characters and to the monster spiders. Initially the spiders birth from the women of society, and all the new spiders are female. At one point Chloe, well along into the “there’s something really wrong here” territory is communicating telepathically with a friend of hers. She is sitting, bloated and monstrous in her living room but her mind is riding brain waves the spider creatures can use.
It is hinted at that the spiders maintain a level of telepathy after they are born and mature, and this is truly a terrifying thought. A giant spider is bad enough. A giant spider with intelligence and the ability to communicate with other giant spiders makes them a formidable foe, one that maybe can use strategy and try to outwit you.
Pinborough may be implying that women communicate better than men, or that they communicate on different levels than men. I think that is pretty obvious. Men and women operate and communicate very differently. It is what drives much of the humor and frustration in our society. If the human women had lived and worked with the spiders to round up the men I would rail against this whole theme. However, the women in this book are slain in the act of giving birth. Regardless of the community of females, the new breed that has taken over the planet could care less. Women or men, we’re nothing but food to the spiders.
I only had two minor issues with this book. First, Matthew must be some kind of Lothario or Casanova. He has a beautiful girl to start the story, and before it is over he has had sex with essentially the last two women on earth. I mean, bravo Matthew, but this seemed amazingly convenient.
The other issue was a bit bigger. Why did Matthew, Rebecca, George, and Chester leave the military compound? The base wasn’t overrun; they didn’t run out of food or supplies. Sure, the other men were one by one succumbing to the lumps on their bodies that led to the men of the new world sharing the fate of the women. Pinborough led us to believe that there were literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of these spiders running around. At night they could see rows of glowing red eyes in the trees (freak me out).
I know there were rumors of a kid colony and Matthew babbled on about Rebecca having a baby, but none of that passed the sniff test. As brutal as it sounds, you let the other men birth their shiny black spiders, you kill the spiders, and you hole up in the compound. In post-apocalyptic stories there is no “happily ever after” and these characters were leaving survival for the great unknown.
Survival is the only option. I read Breeding Ground not knowing it has a sequel (Feeding Ground), but my last thoughts as I finished this book were: too bad these guys made it this far and now they’re going to their deaths.
I guess dying on your own terms has a certain level of control to it, but living for as long as possible, and taking care of those you love, protecting them from monsters and death, Matthew should have staked out his piece of the earth inside the military base and tried to make it his new home.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Monsters Want to Say Goodbye Too
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)