To Each Their Darkness
by
Gary A. Braunbeck
Apex Publications
Visit us at http://www.apexbookcompany.com
Copyright © 2010 by Apex Publications
All Rights Reserved
Cover art by Steven Gilberts
Cover design by Justin Stewart
Book design by Aaron Leis
Apex Publications, llc
www.apexbookcompany.com
Po Box 24323 Lexington, KY 40524
Published by Smashwords
Table of Contents
Part One: A View from the Aisle Seat
1. Small (and Not-so) Beginnings; Second Chances;
and Lots of Things Which Dance
2. For an Eye and a Tooth; Chowing Down;
and The Emporer's New Clothes
Part Two: Proud Words on Dusty Shelves
Statistics; Subtext; and Why Horror Will Never Be Considered Serious Lit-rah-chure, No Matter How Much We Stamp Our Feet and Threaten to Hold Our Breath Until Our Faces Turn Blue and We Pass Out From Lack of Oxygen, Which, If We’d Been Using it Properly in the First Place, Would Have Gone to Our Brains and Made Us Realize that We Need to Make Our Writing More Than Merely Competent, Only Now We’re All Passed Out on the Floor and Have Wet Ourselves and Little Kids Are Sticking Uncomfortable Things Up Our Noses and Who’s Going to Take Us Seriously After That?
2. Brought to You by the Law Firm of Beguile, Intrigue, and Assault
3. Opinions, and the One who Offers Them
Part Three: To Each Their Darkness
Forty-Five Minutes at the Bar with Bill; Getting It Right; “This Is Where I Came In”; and
A Prayer for the Coming Revolution
“Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle; a man may show as reckless
courage in entering into the abyss of himself.”
— W. B. Yeats
“There are lonely cemeteries,
graves full of bones without sound,
the heart passing through a tunnel,
dark, dark, dark
as in a shipwreck we die from within
as we drown in the heart,
as we fall out of the skin into the soul...”
— Pablo Neruda, “Death Alone”
“... Her body is gone, only this
flat, crackling image remains,
but even now, still she trembles
deep in the paper, where particles
that form her likeness waltz
in quick, subatomic union ...”
— Lucy A. Snyder, “Photograph of a Lady, Circa 1890”
DYSART: You won’t gallop anymore, Alan. Horses will be quite safe for you.... You will, however, be without pain. More or less completely without pain.
[Pause. He speaks now directly to the theatre, standing by the motionless body of ALAN STRANG, under the blanket.]
And now for me it never stops: that voice of Equus out of the cave—“Why Me?...Why Me?...Account for Me!”...All right—I say it!...In an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place—yet I do ultimate things. Irreversible, terminal things. I stand in the dark with a pick in my hand, striking at heads!
[He moves away from ALAN, back to the downstage bench, and finally sits.]
I need—more desperately than my children need me—a way of seeing in the dark. What way is this?...What dark is this?...I cannot call it ordained of God: I cannot go so far. I will, however, pay it so much homage. There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.
[A long pause
DYSART sits staring]
BLACKOUT
— Peter Shaffer, Equus
“I live fearfully within myself.”
— T. M. Wright, “Fog Boy”
Preamble: Welcome to My Abyss
Explanation the First
Eight years ago I wrote a non-fiction book titled Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror As a Way of Life. It was, at the time, the best I could make it. Upon its release it received a lot of very kind reviews and was later honored with a Bram Stoker Award nomination from the Horror Writers Association. Since then, it has gone out of print, the rights have reverted back to me, and if you want a copy you can easily find one at any number of online booksellers (used and otherwise)—but be careful: some of them are charging outrageous amounts. Believe me when I tell you, do not pay more than the original cover price of $40.00. Never say I offered no help during these uncertain economic times.
Ahem.
I was not then, nor am I now, completely happy with the way Fear... turned out. It’s not just the formatting mistakes and typos that were in that edition (though rest assured I did not do the Happy Dance about those), but I always felt as if the book had come this close to its goal and my intention, only to run out of steam in the home stretch. There are few worse feelings in a writer’s professional career than to realize that you’ve loosed a piece on the world that was either not yet ready to be written, or was ready to be written...just not by you, not as you were then, with your limited emotional inner vocabulary.
Don’t misunderstand; I remain proud of Fear... and will happily sign it for those who have in the years since gone to the trouble to track down a copy because they’ve heard such good things about it. In many ways (which I briefly touched upon in the original edition) the writing of Fear... saved my sanity and my life. It reinvigorated my creative drive (which had been all but nonexistent) and my determination to live the rest of my life as well as I could and bring no further pain, anxiety, sadness, disappointment, fear, or the infliction of loneliness into the world than I already had—and believe me, I’d done more than my share of spreading around the misery as fairly as I could, especially in my younger days.
In the introduction to the first collection of Cedar Hill stories, Graveyard People, I wrote, with tongue firmly in cheek, the following words:
“What you now hold in your hands is the first collection...of my Cedar Hill stories (in) the order in which they appear in the Cedar Hill Cycle, an ongoing work that will see completion only when I die.”
Somehow I don’t find that quite as funny now as I did then (more on that later).
It occurs to me that this explanation has taken on a far-too-somber quality far too soon, so instead of carrying on in this borderline-melancholic tone, I’ll take a breath and continue slouching toward the point.
Explanation the Second
If you’re like me, you always feel a little apprehension when an author releases the “preferred version” of a previous book. There are numerous reasons for this, not the least being that this is the version of the book that existed before an editor got his or her red pencil on it. It could be that the previous version of the book was the better version, thanks to a keen editorial eye that caught not only typos and continuity problems, but was also able to find the excess fat when the writer became self-indulgent and mercilessly trimmed away elements that might very well have bored readers to despair. It could also be that the book was gutted in order to meet an absurd word or page count by a mass-market publisher or, in some cases (this really happened to a writer friend of mine), because the fucking font used by said mass-market publisher was set in stone and the length of the manuscript exceeded the previously-mentioned acceptable page count because of the required use of said font.
So here you are, looking at an author’s “preferred” version of a book you purchased, read, and enjoyed years ago (if you hadn’t enjoyed the original, you wouldn’t be standing there with the new edition in your hand, wondering should I or shouldn’t I). It really is a crap-shoot, because sometimes the “preferred” editions add depth to the characters and storyline, fill in little plotholes that you noticed on the way but decided didn’t really matter, and give the overall narrative a stronger and more confident cohesiveness that you didn’t even realize had been missing until now. And sometimes all a “preferred” edition does is dump in the fertilizer that the original editor worked for months to shovel out, a heavy-duty filter mask covering the nose and mouth at all times.
Examples of “preferred” versions that fit in the former category: The Totem, by David Morrell; The Throat, by Peter Straub; Robert Dunbar’s The Pines; and F. Paul Wilson’s Rakoshi (originally published as The Tomb, the novel that marked the debut of Repairman Jack). For the latter category (and here’s where I’m going to piss off a lot of folks), I have one grand example: The Stand: Complete and Uncut by Stephen King. For me, the new material added zilch to that epic, except for some really grotesque background details about certain characters that neither humanized them more, nor enriched relationships, nor did anything to move the story forward; in fact, sequences in the original version that I’d found terrifying and exhilarating became bloated and mind-numbingly repetitive. I had to force myself to finish it. And King is a writer whose work I usually greatly respect and admire (I think Pet Sematary will coexist alongside the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and Matthew Lewis' The Monk until the multiverse implodes and we’re all reduced to the final vibrations on the unseen strings running through the three sheets of space and one sheet of time, and don’t even get me started on The Dead Zone, a novel I re-read every year...but already I digress).
It is a few months away from the middle of 2010 as I write this, which means it is also a few months from my fiftieth birthday (this said by the guy who didn’t have a game plan past 40 because he really didn’t expect to still be here). The person I am now, like the narrator of The Indifference of Heaven (a.k.a. In Silent Graves), is coming to grips with the truth of his mortality; it’s no longer some abstract concept happily pushed back into the fog of youthful denial, but an actual figure closing in from the distance, with recognizable features and questionable breath. So here I am, re-examining the horror field and the validity of my place in it, and whether or not my overall body of work has any real worth or purpose. (Hey, I’m almost fifty, fer chrissakes! Allow ten lines of middle-aged crisis morbid musings. Your turn is coming. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.)
Ahem.
I look back on the person I was nine years ago and find that he embarrasses me. His impatience, his anger, his almost complete disregard for his own health, his naïveté, and his selfishness; Christ, his selfishness. Yeah, he’d managed to survive some nastiness (okay, okay, a lot of nastiness) from his childhood, his teenage years, his early adult life, blah-blah-blah, and he was trying to believe that the worst was over and he was now firmly walking down the road of health, happiness, and success. He had no idea that all of the shit that had happened to him up to that point—or that he’d walked into or caused himself—was just a warm-up, the comic in baggy pants with a spritzer bottle and banana cream pie, the opening act to the final third of his life, where more than a few surprises were waiting up the multiverse’s sleeve, some of which were going to land on his head like a curse from Heaven.
But I do have at least one thing to thank him for; he had a hand in helping to get me to the point where I am, at last, ready to write the book that Fear in a Handful of Dust should have been.
And so ...
Explanation the Third
That does not mean that what you’re reading at this moment is the “preferred” version of Fear. No; had that been the case, I would have kept the original title and simply added a “Revised and Expanded” beneath it in smaller letters. Consider this book the equivalent of a variation on a theme. It’s a bit more orderly, a bit more directly honest, a little less stream-of-consciousness (but not much), more focused on the writing process (and the pitfalls that process often presents if one is not careful), and if you’re expecting to find the entire text of the original between these covers...sorry, not happening. It has nothing to do with any esoteric or “artful” (gaaah! —that word!) pretense on my part, but it does have everything to do with those of you who purchased the original edition, and those of you who have purchased this variation on a theme.
As a reader and lover of limited edition books, nothing makes me want to grab a rifle and climb a water tower more than shelling out forty bucks plus shipping for a limited edition, only to see the exact same book, word for word, come out a few years later in a much less expensive trade paperback edition. (Yes, I still tend to overreact from time to time). It completely negates the collectability of the original edition and makes the reader feel like a rube, like he or she has fallen for the old bait-and-switch.
If you are one who purchased the original edition and may be thinking that you’ve been had, know this: probably a little more than 40 percent of the original text is contained within these pages. What reprinted text there is has not been altered in any way (with the exception of correcting typos and errors in grammar and syntax). I think you’re going to appreciate the new material and having this as a companion piece to the book you purchased eight years ago.
If you are one who didn’t purchase the original because the forty bucks plus shipping for the limited edition was way the hell out of your financial comfort zone, you should find the cover price of this Apex edition much more agreeable, and you’ll be getting the book that I’d always intended the original to be. I want to make certain that no one comes away feeling as if they got the bad end of the deal. I spent a lot of time worrying over this, and I hope you find my solution a fair and equitable one. The book was simply too important for me to give up on.
Which, finally, leads me to the new title and ...
Explanation Next to the Last
As mentioned earlier, the original edition was subtitled Horror as a Way of Life, and it actually came close—this close—to conveying what I wanted to get across to those folks—readers, writers, editors, book reviewers—who, in one form or another, seemed to frequently and loudly bemoan the stale state of the horror field, yet most, when asked what might be done about it, just cast downward glances and shook their heads in bemused resignation. Horror fell into a sickening rut in the late 80s and early 90s, and that’s what lead to its demise; everybody was writing the same kind of book that was being written by everybody else, and if someone, through sheer cosmic accident, happened to produce a piece of work that was original, that dealt with the terrors within as well as without, that offered unique situations and fully-developed three-dimensional characters reacting as real human beings would react when faced with such a dark challenge, well...there was no dearth of evil-clown artwork that could be slapped on the cover to make it look like everything else. (Ask the wonderful, overlooked and underrated writer Joseph Citro about this, whose handful of excellent novels during this period were all but treated as afterthoughts—evil clown covers included—and which are now being reprinted by a first-rate regional publisher, Hardscrabble Books, in New England, and treated as the works of literary merit they always were...and the publisher never shies away from mentioning the more horrific elements to be found between the covers—not one of which has an evil clown in sight.)
Well, here it is, nine years past the 2001 so daringly envisioned by the remarkable Arthur C. Clarke, and horror has been enjoying something of a renaissance since entering the new century. Oh, man, it really looked good when the books first started shipping out of the warehouses around 2002 to 2003. Mass-market publishers were taking chances with some risky, emotional, challenging, even experimental and surrealistic material. The subject matter grappled with in these books—not to mention the skill and manner with which it was tackled—was, for a while, awfully exciting. It seemed like this stuff was gloriously all over the road, something new and different every month, nothing predictable or pedestrian—hell, even some of the covers weren’t what you expected. It was time to see what the horror-hungry public was ready to flock to, a public that had been surviving on expensive limited and numbered editions from a small handful of specialty presses that had somehow managed to not lose their shirts in the interim. For a few years—say, up until 2005 or 2006—it looked as if horror was truly going to pull itself up by its bootstraps and start climbing toward a new and higher creative precipice where it could evolve into what Robert R. McCammon once called “the supreme mythic literature of our time.” Whoo-hoo! Groovy, even! I’ll just grab my wallet and then—let me at ‘em! Would we see the resurrection of the traditional ghost story, I wondered. Would the countless purveyors of so-called psychological horror grow enough of a spine to move out of the niche created by Thomas Harris and Hannibal Lector? Would the plethora of second- and third-rate Stephen King wannabes finally feel that second testicle drop and dare to step out of his (justifiably) massive shadow? Might this next generation of writers bring with them an aesthetic and intelligence honed by the reading of past masters? Would there at long last be that oh-so-longed-for daring move into cross-genre work? The editors were swearing that horror wouldn’t fall into the same old rut of the late 80s and early 90s. And, much to my surprise, it didn’t.
It created a completely new rut to fall into.
The rut of the 80s and early 90s was guarded by vampires and psycho killers.
The new rut—and what a roomy, bottomless rut it seems—is guarded by...vampires, psycho killers ...
... and zombies.
Lots and lots and lots of zombies, some of which carry the shredded flesh of Jane Austen in what’s left of their teeth; others are still chewing on H.G. Welles, or Jules Verne, or .. I’ve lost track. After the publication of Brian Keene’s Stoker Award-winning The Rising, the renewed interest in the undead was fast and furious (and I am not blaming Brian for this, so no nasty e-mails, please). Yeah, fast and furious, and a lot of Keene’s imitators produced work that was, at best, of journeyman quality. Most of it was just awful—no sense of character, no original plots or plot elements, just fast-paced blood and guts and zombies.
Lots and lots and lots of zombies.
(This is all leading up to my explaining the new title, so stay with me.)
I have grown to hate zombies. For the record, I have written only three zombie stories in my career, and one of them—“We Now Pause for Station Identification”—won the third of my five Bram Stoker Awards.
I love a good zombie story when it’s done well, when it’s in the hands of someone with skill, wit, intelligence, and the ability to instill it with more than one level. Anthologies like those edited by Christopher Golden, Kim Paffenroth, John Joseph Adams, and the Prime Books anthology, Zombies: The Recent Dead, edited by Paula Guran (which should see release shortly after this book) are excellent examples. But don’t kid yourselves: the quality of the stories you’ll find in these collections are the exception, not the norm.
The recent and near-ubiquitous trend of “reimagining” classic works of literature by adding zombies or vampires or sea monsters or IRS agents—okay, that last one hasn’t happened yet, but it’s probably coming soon: Wise Blood-Sucking Vampire IRS Agents—got on my nerves in a hurry. I read Seth Graham-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and liked it; it was funny enough to hold my interest and showed a lot of imagination on the author’s part; there were a couple of times where I could not differentiate his prose from that of the author on whose dead spine he was doing cartwheels. It was a fun read, but that was all. Now we’re seeing—from both the major mass-market house as well as the specialty press—a plethora of “revisionist” classics wherein characters such as Mr. Darcy or Huck Finn (with Zombie Jim), as well as others mentioned previously, are being picked over like the last remains of meat on a turkey drumstick. At least Graham-Smith demonstrated some craft in his novel, but the imitators that have followed in its wake are the equivalent of online fan fiction. The writers don’t even bother with craft, they simply find sections of the original text that can be excised so that they can insert their beastie of choice. In olden days, this would have been called hackwork.
I know an excellent writer currently enjoying a rise in his popularity who can string together some of the loveliest sentences that work on both the micro and macro writing levels. His prose is confident, his sense of pacing a wonder to behold, and his characterization solid. Problem is, nearly all of his books have been inspired almost completely by Stephen King’s books. And it shows. Most of the time, said writer is just employing King-like concepts and tropes as a jumping-off point; the King-like familiarity grabs readers’ attention, pulls them into the novel, and keeps their attention as he smoothly moves into his own original storylines and fresh ideas. There is another up-and-coming writer I know who cites horror movies and their directors as being her major influence. And it shows. She couldn’t write a good sentence if guns were being held on her family and one of them killed each time she over-used adjectives. Like the writer mentioned earlier in this paragraph, you can correctly infer that there is something missing from her work for me—the same thing I find that is missing from a majority of new horror being published by newcomers: the authenticity of an individual literary vision. In short, too much of it reads like what’s come before, and what’s going to come after will be just like what came before and what comes after it, ad nauseam.
I have a theory about this, about why it’s happened before and why it’s happening now.
Too many horror writers are afraid to bring their own personal darkness to the surface and use it to instill their work with that authenticity; it’s just easier to use what’s come before—or elements of what’s come before—because it’s immediately recognizable by readers. Vampires. Ghouls. Serial killers. Science experiments gone awry. And zombies. Lots and lots and lots of zombies.
Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Joyce Carol Oates, Poe, Kelly Link, Caitlin Kiernan, Jonathan Carroll. Names you know, and whose books you have read. You know what sets them apart? They know their own darknesses, have come to grips with them, and are now in control. They also like to mix it up as often as possible; with the exception of Poe, all of them write or have written some impressive cross-genre works, works that terrify, frighten, disturb, move, and chill you because they know the big secret: terror is an extremely intimate thing, and if that terror feels mass-manufactured, then all is lost. So they instill their own personal darknesses into their work—carefully, subtly, quietly, often imperceptibly—so that when the set pieces come, when all hell breaks loose, they have drawn the reader so deeply into the narrative that there’s no escape; story and reader have become one because the readers feel that the writer has written this book or story exclusively for them, and they accept the writer’s individual darkness because it has come through so well on the page—because the writer, as Yeats so succinctly put it, had the “reckless courage” to enter into the abyss of him- or herself, submerged in that abyss and gathered the darkness needed for the work, and then made it back to the surface and to the keyboard, for the most part unharmed.
Each has gone to their darkness and shared it brilliantly on the page.
If only the next generation of horror writers could learn from this. But most of them don't; most of them have no influences that existed before 1982, and much of their work doesn’t read so much as a horror novels as they do film or miniseries treatments. They walk nowhere near the abyss of the self, where their personal darkness awaits them at the bottom, so they cannot bring that element of authenticity to their work. But their darkness is still there, waiting.
Explanation the Last
I decided to re-title this book To Each Their Darkness as a reminder that until you have explored your abyss and brought back the materials you need to enrich your work, that missing authenticity will always be AWOL. And it’s not only your loss, but your readers’ loss, as well.
Not to mention that of your story or novel.
All of them deserve better. They deserve to be steps the horror field can climb to reach that new precipice upon which it comes ever closer to being the supreme mythic literature of our time.
To Each Their Darkness, then. I’d like to share some of mine with you.
Welcome to my abyss.
FADE IN: CRAMPED APARTMENT OFFICE—NIGHT
Sitting at the desk is a HORROR WRITER. Once 40-ish, he is now 50-ish with way too much grey hair in his beard. He is hunched over his computer keyboard in a position that health guides insist in no uncertain terms is uncomfortable, even dangerous, but he doesn’t seem to notice. CAMERA TRACKS IN slowly, and we see his hands madly typing away in a self-taught two-finger method that you can just tell has served him well over the years. CAMERA PAUSES on his face, which is wearing a PERPETUAL BEMUSED SCOWL that we will come to know and dread and in the end find incessantly irritating.
HORROR WRITER stops his typing, runs a hand through his hair (which also has too much grey, but what the hell, he figures he’s earned it so screw those “Just For Men” hair coloring ads). He looks around the office as if the word he’s searching for has skulked off to hide in a corner just to annoy the living shit out of him.
WRITER
(in VOICE-OVER)
I should have done something noble with my life, like becoming a cesspool cleaner or a CPA...but, no, I have to be a goddamn writer. If this was the opening scene to a movie I was writing, half the effing audience would have run for the exits and been home by now. I dunno, maybe it’s like everyone says—I’m too hard on myself. Still...how in the hell do you make yourself seem interesting to readers who’ve seen this type of thing a hundred times before? Stephen King nailed it with Danse Macabre, but I’m not trying to write another book like that. That would be silly. Stupid. Suicidal. Very hard. Difficult, even. And, besides, King’s got that whole “I’m big enough to tie knots in your spine” thing going for him.
He looks around a bit more, can’t find where the word is hiding, then sighs loudly, reaches for his smokes, remembers that he can’t smoke inside, and stares at the screen.
WRITER
I’ll bet Stephen King can smoke in his office. Lucky bastard.
He looks over to his bookshelves, which contain several books by Stephen King, as well as William Goldman, Carson McCullers, John O’Hara, Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Harlan Ellison, M.R. James, Kobo Abe, Ed Gorman, John Cheever, T.C. Boyle, Russell Banks, and about a hundred other writers. He STARES at the King books. His upper lip twitches on the left side.
WRITER
How come we all have to walk in your shadow?
STEPHEN KING BOOKS
Oh, no you don’t, not this horseshit again! Speaking from the heart—a heart filled with nothing but love for ya—we are sick and tired of always being shat upon and pointed at and blamed for every little thing that goes wrong in other writers’ careers. “Oh, if only they didn’t pay so much money to Stephen King for his books! If only they would recognize that some of us are deserving of hefty advances! If only they would recognize that some of us are just as brilliant as Stephen King and his offspring!” Jesus! What a bunch of whiny, self-pitying, self-indulgent, self-delusional, greedy little resentful warthogs you are sometimes!
WRITER
(composing himself after the initial shock)
I was unaware that you could talk.
BOOKS
Oooh, listen to him, why don’t you? “I was unaware...” What a surprise that is to us! See how we tremble at this revelation? And yet you seem to be taking it so well.
WRITER
It’s late and I’m stuck for a good opening; nothing would unnerve me right now.
BOOKS
We could do an interpretive dance number. We’ve been rehearsing.
WRITER
That’s all right.
BOOKS
No, seriously, we’ve been rehearsing like nobody’s business. We can do other things besides take up space on the bestseller lists and raze entire forests. We have an identity outside of the guy who wrote us. Make some room over there and we’ll show you a Bob Fosse routine that’ll have you—
WRITER
—no, really, you don’t need to do this—
BOOKS
—but we insist! We do. You’ll never regret this, we swear it! On your deathbed, when your grandchildren ask you what was the high point of your life, you’ll say it was without a doubt the night Firestarter did the forbidden dance with Hearts In Atlantis while On Writing got all jiggy with Misery and Under the Dome did a pole-dance that—
HORROR WRITER grabs a GODZILLA ACTION FIGURE WITH KUNG-FU GRIP and THROWS it at Different Seasons, deeply hurting that book’s feelings and causing it to whimper quietly, but with great dignity.
GODZILLA ACTION FIGURE WITH KUNG-FU GRIP lands on its head, firmly wedged between two bookcases. It is not a pretty sight, but no one notices.
HORROR WRITER mutters an apology to the books, then turns back toward his computer.
WRITER
(V.O. cont'd)
I wonder if King ever has his books offer to dance for him. Nah...for him they probably mount a full-scale production of La Traviata...or the Broadway version of Carrie.
He shakes his head.
BOOKS
Excuse us, not to be a bother—
WRITER
—that ship kinda sailed—
BOOKS
—but we have what we think is a fairly solid, if arguably uninspired, idea for your opening.
WRITER
This makes me despair. Sincerely. Regardless of what I do, this will be thought of as just another rip-off of Danse Macabre.
DANSE MACABRE
(from bookshelf)
Did I ask to be dragged into the middle of this? No, I did not. I was up here, minding my own business, and was bothering whom? No one. And yet now, suddenly, here I am at the heart of the controversy, and I have to say, in all earnestness, it is tiresome. Leave me out of this, I’m begging you.
(pauses)
Besides, I’ve seen their dance routine and, trust me, they’re better off up here on the shelf.
BOOKS
You always did have a superiority complex.
DANSE MACABRE
Not listening. See? This is me, not listening.
WRITER
(to himself)
I have got to start taking my medication again.
BOOKS
Look, this is a book about horror films and horror literature, right?
WRITER
Sort of...
BOOKS
“Sort of”? One tingles in the presence of such crystalline decisiveness. It is so very important to have a definite goal in mind. No wonder you have two-way conversations with inanimate objects.
GODZILLA ACTION FIGURE WITH KUNG-FU GRIP
(Shouting from between the bookshelves)
A little help, please? It’s not bad enough that Toho decided to put me in cold storage and that in some prints I still share screen time with Raymond Burr—no, now I discover that they’ve whored me out to some outfit called “Legendary...something-or-other,” who, with my lucky streak lately, will probably be run by some guy named Guido the Fist. And they’re talking 3-D. So I ask myself, “’Zilla-man, how can this get any worse?” Answer: I get used as a projectile and wind up with my ass in the air. There is no dignity in this for the King of All Monsters, do you understand? So—if you don’t mind my asking, if it’s not too much trouble, if you wouldn’t mind, not to be a pest, but—will one of you schmucks do something before my neck snaps?
WRITER and BOOKS
Shut up!
GODZILLA ACTION FIGURE WITH KUNG-FU GRIP
If I could reach your ankle, I would do such serious damage. Believe me when I tell you this.
WRITER
(to BOOKS)
You were saying?
BOOKS
Since it’s a book—okay, okay, a sort-of book—about horror movies and horror literature, why not start with something that combines the two?
WRITER
Gimme a ‘frinstance.
BOOKS
Start things off like a really pedestrian, self-conscious screenplay. You can open with a shot of the office and this pathetic middle-aged dweeb banging away at his keyboard, then have something truly ridiculous happen to show just how pedestrian it all is, then work your way back around to the dweeb at the computer and move into the book that way. See? Both film and the printed word combine to save your sorry tuchus.
WRITER
I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but that’s a good idea. I think I’ll go with that. Yeah—that’s a really good idea.
BOOKS
That’s why we’re bestsellers and you’re...well...not.
WRITER
I can’t describe for you how comforting that is.
GODZILLA ACTION FIGURE WITH KUNG-FU GRIP
Okay, I can feel the blood rushing to my head, there are these dark shadows creeping in from the corners of my eyes, and I can’t seem to breathe, not that anyone cares ....
HORROR WRITER leans in toward his computer screen, aware that Danse Macabre will always be looking over his shoulder. He is oblivious to the hideous death-roar of GODZILLA ACTION FIGURE WITH KUNG-FU GRIP (which is more of a snivel at this point) and the self-satisfied smirk of the BOOKS, who really do seem quite pleased with themselves.
DISSOLVE THROUGH TO: THE COMPUTER SCREEN, which reads:
Establishing Shot: It Was Already Broke When I Got Here
I’ve eked out what I euphemistically refer to as my living writing fiction for the last twenty-seven years. I’ve published somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred short stories, ten novels, ten short-story collections, a handful of not-bad poetry, dozens of film columns and book reviews, and have seen my work nominated for (and winning) some lovely awards and translated into seven languages. I’m forty-three, divorced, on anti-depressants, and am on my third attempt in as many months to quit smoking. I like to watch movies, listen to music, read everything I can lay my hands on...and write stories. God, how I love to write stories. I have no hobbies of which to speak because a full 85 percent of my time is spent on work, making me one of the most single-minded, hyper-focused, evangelically monomaniacal little writin’ pricks you’d never want to meet. I have a terrific agent, more grey hair than I’d like, twenty pounds I need to lose, and a cat named Monte who will eat anything that doesn’t run away from him in time. A lot of my work has been classified as horror, and I’m good with that because I think horror is—or, rather, can be—a noble field in which to toil. But there remain a number of dilemmas (not as many as it had back in the 80s, thank the Fates) still facing the field as we begin a new but you-bet-your-ass-cautious resurgence of the you-should-pardon-the-word genre.
What you hold in your hands both is and isn’t a book of film and fiction writing commentaries; yes, you’ll find several reviews and (hopefully intelligent) analyses in here, but a format like that can quickly grow wearisome and repetitive—any schmuck with desktop-publishing capabilities can churn out a book of reviews and opinion pieces about the same books and movies we’ve all seen discussed a thousand times before—so I’ve decided to take it a couple of steps...well, let’s say sideways. One’s reaction to horror movies and literature is a highly subjective and personal thing, with emphasis on the latter. Consider this a thinly-disguised autobiography by means of reflections about movies, books, and writing. It’s not enough for someone to simply say, “I liked it” or “I really hated it”; those are not opinions in and of themselves—they are prefaces to opinions. To qualify as actual opinions, they must be followed by reasons why, and in order for you to understand the reasons why, you have to understand something about the person giving the opinion.
Like it or not (and there are times when I fall more on the “not” side), horror in all its written, recorded, and visual forms is the core of my life. I have loved the darkness ever since I was a little boy of five watching Zontar: Thing From Venus, The Lodger, Tarantula, The Creature From The Black Lagoon, and other movies on Channel 10’s Chiller Theater on Friday nights, along with my dad, who always smelled of machine grease, Old Spice, and factory foulness from his day’s labor at a manufacturing plant that would eventually screw him up one side and down the other and toss him away like a rusty machine part.
My parents—though not great readers themselves—always bought books for me, encouraged me to read, and always watched scary movies with me. You’ll hear more about them as we go on.
But we need to begin where this will all end: in the darkness, in a seat on the aisle, watching phantom images flicker across the screen as the observers gathered there become an audience and metamorphose temporarily into what the late Jim Morrison dubbed “quiet vampires”: film spectators.
Now, from among these quiet vampires, let’s pick someone...
...ah, there, middle row, right-hand section; we can all guess as to his story, but I think I might have a little inside information; so let me tell it:
There’s this guy sitting in a second-run movie theater, where he’s come with a minivan full of friends to see Rob Zombie’s House Of A Thousand Corpses. It’s about sixty minutes into the thing, and he’s suddenly asking the following question to a God he’s not sure pays any attention to humankind, assuming that He/She/It/Them is even there: Why in the hell am I liking this movie?
Make no mistakes about it: Corpses is an exercise in sadistic, inhuman, grotesque brutality. It hates all of its characters, and a good argument can be made that it has nothing but contempt for its target audience (who stayed away in droves during its initial run in theaters)—but, unlike, say, the Scream films, it doesn’t attempt to disguise its contempt for its audience with a lot of overly clever visual gimmicks, trendy film-geek references, and smartass asides. Corpses is up-front about it, as if Zombie is saying, “Okay, you sick, twisted things, this is what you want, so here it is, right in your face and up your nose and down your throat. Gag on it.” It fails as an out-and-out horror film, it fails as a black comedy, and it fails in its core intent to be an affectionate homage to the psycho-horror films of the 1970s such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House On The Left.
But for all the levels on which it fails—and they are legion—there is a raw, primal, kinetic energy to the movie that gets under your skin, no matter how much you don’t want that to happen.
All while giving you the finger from first shot to last.
In an odd sort of way, you have to respect a movie this arrogant and condescending. Yeah, it’s garbage, but it’s ingenious garbage that, for about one minute halfway through the movie, actually achieves a moment of genuine nerve-wracking brilliance: one of the family of psychos that our unlucky quartet of boys and girls has encountered forces a sheriff’s deputy to kneel at gunpoint, then holds the gun in front of the deputy’s face while the camera does this slow, slow, slow pull-back to a distant overhead shot; it takes the camera almost fifty seconds to pull back and then remain still, and while this is happening there’s nothing going on—no movement, no dialogue, no music, no sound, nothing. Absolute silence. And then, once the camera has stopped moving, this silence and stillness continues for almost another ten seconds before the psycho pulls the trigger and kills the deputy.
John Woo or Kurosawa it ain’t, but here’s the thing: we know the second that deputy drops his gun and kneels down that he’s toast, burnt on both sides. We know this, we’ve seen too many horror movies not to know this, and so this unbearable, nerve-wracking, agitating silence is nothing but Zombie’s way of drawing out the dread of the moment; he knows that we know what’s coming, but he also knows that suspense and dread are not created by hyperactive editing (which he’s utilized to alarming effect thus far) but by that most precious and misunderstood element available to storytellers and filmmakers both: hesitation. There is more outright terror in a held breath than in a million deafening screams, and with this single shot, Zombie shows the audience that he knows this—and since Zombie possesses this understanding and skill as a director, you can’t help but wonder why he decided to squander it for most of Corpses' ninety-three-minute running time (which feels more like two and a half hours by the time the credits roll).
As far as this guy watching from his seat in the middle row is concerned, Rob Zombie—for all the lambasting he’s taken from critics and audiences alike—knows precisely what’s he’s doing every step of the way.
House Of A Thousand Corpses contains almost everything this guy in the audience despises about the modern horror genre—the only element missing from it is that of a heterosexual couple being snuffed immediately following sex.
In short, there was—and remains—no sensible reason for him to like this movie.
But he does. (He also liked Zombie’s second film, The Devil’s Rejects, a grindhouse film if ever there was one, and a film that could be considered a companion piece to Sam Peckinpah’s masterpiece, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.)
The guy has counted thirteen people who have walked out on the movie so far—something he himself should have done a while back.
He’s sitting there, and all around him people are leaving, yet he watches the screen, fascinated, and suddenly finds himself thinking about, of all things, the A-word: art.
Here’s some background on this guy: over the last eighteen months he has buried one of his favorite uncles, his father, his grandmother, and his mother—who he had to order taken off life-support and then spend three terrible hours watching her life grind to its end in a series of sputtering little agonies (he still has nightmares filled with her heartbroken, angry, accusing eyes); he has recently moved to a new city; he has gone through an emotionally devastating divorce that was completely his fault; he has undergone a fairly serious surgery to repair nerve damage in his right hand; and he has had a suicidal meltdown that landed him in The Bin for a while, where they kept him doped to the gills and under constant observation.
It’s not exactly been a banner time for him up, and he knows that the last thing he needs is to be sitting here watching a vicious, mean-spirited, gleefully sadistic, inhumanly brutal so-called movie that is the most crystalline encapsulation he’s ever seen of everything he hates about the horror field.
Yet he’s not moving.
People are running for the exits all around him, and this silently pleases him, even makes him feel some hope for the human race—
—yet he remains. A movie that would offend his mother, that would make his father’s often-pessimistic view of the world darken thirty shades of onyx, a movie that he knows has absolutely nothing to recommend giving it any more of the time that he’ll never, ever, ever get back (I’m going to be dead soon enough, he keeps thinking)...and his ass stays glued to the seat.
There is a contradiction here that needs exploring, and that’s something else we’re going to do along the way; after all, how many of you have continued reading a horror novel or story that you know is sub-par, or stayed in your seat during a horror movie that even the medically brain-dead could recognize as being awful?
For this guy—and guess who it is?—that number is easily more than he cares to count.
But he knows he’s not alone in this; thousands of you share his interest in, fascination with, and love of the darkness.
Admit it; you’re right there with me in that movie theater; you’ve been with me there before, and you’ll be there with me again. And again. And again.
Don’t point fingers and accuse me of being elitist, biased, unpleasant, acerbic, grim, arrogant, depressing, untoward, discourteous, and generally no fun at parties; I already know I’m all of these, thanks so much. And you’d better damn well not accuse me of being part of the problems that I intend to discuss here. Horror movies and horror fiction existed long before I first put pen to paper, as did their problems, so if anything said herein and onward strikes a nerve with you, don’t try to put the blame on me, folks: it was already broke when I got here.
HORROR WRITER leans back, looks at the screen, and nods.
BOOKS
See there? What’d we tell you?
WRITER
Okay, you were right. Thank you.
BOOKS
Always listen to us, pal, we’re never wrong.
WRITER
I have two words for you ...
DANSE MACABRE
(to itself)
This oughtta be good.
WRITER
... Maximum Overdrive.
THE BOOKS are silent for a moment, but we can HEAR Danse Macabre chuckling uncontrollably.
BOOKS
That was a cheap shot. You should be nicer to us.
WRITER
It’s late and I’m tired. Sue me.
BOOKS
You really shouldn’t criticize a movie until you’ve tried making one yourself.
WRITER
Easy for you to say.
BOOKS
(pouting)
Yeah, well, still...that was pretty low, even for a horror writer.
WRITER
(to himself)
Is it just me, or has Godzilla been awfully quiet?
BOOKS
What now, oh follower-in-our-creator’s-shadow?
WRITER
Well, I think we’ve taken this opening bit about as far as we can without trying readers’ patience, so ...
He places his hands on the keyboard. The legs of the GODZILLA ACTION FIGURE WITH KUNG-FU GRIP twitch for a moment, then are still. CAMERA MOVES to the screen and we SEE:
CUT SHARP TO:
Part One: A View From The Aisle Seat
“Film spectators are quiet vampires.”
—Jim Morrison, The Lords
1
Small (and Not-So) Beginnings; Second Chances; and Lots Of Things Which Dance
“Life is material—you just have to live long enough to see how to use it.”
—William Goldman, The Color Of Light
This is how the majority of this book is going to unfold: things are going to jump and skitter and bounce around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle caught in the wind, but, believe me, it’ll all come together in the end. Or, as Jim Morrison once wrote, “The subjects says, ‘I see first lots of thing which dance...then everything becomes gradually connected.’”
Structure and reading experience dictate that this is the place to start with some appropriate anecdote about the first time I was ever really scared by a horror movie or nearly jumped out of my shorts when a sudden sound startled me from the story I was reading, some humorous moment of epiphany where All Was Revealed, but the truth is my “revelation” (a word I find more than a bit overly-dramatic, so we’ll use “discovery” from here on; thanks for enduring this parenthetical pause) did not come about from reading a book or seeing a movie, but rather, because of two incidents in my life that occurred five years apart. The first was solitary, while the second ...wasn’t.
The first came about because of music. Specifically the music of The Who. Even more specifically the album Quadrophenia; and even more specifically, the second song on side four (this was, after all, back in the glory days of holy vinyl).
By its musical structure alone, Quadrophenia opened my eyes and my intellect to the endless possibilities offered by the metaphor; add to that its compelling and challenging narrative structure, and you've got something that, to my mind, qualifies as a masterpiece.
Quadrophenia centers on a young kid in 1960s England named Jimmy. Jimmy comes from a hard-luck, working class family. He wants to be popular among his friends. He also wants to be a good son, a good worker, and a great lover. In the midst of trying to be all things to everyone, he realizes that he presents four very distinctive personalities to the world over the course of his days: the tough guy, the romantic, the crazy fun friend, and the troubled son. Each of these separate personalities is represented by a distinct musical theme, and each personality encompasses only one aspect of the real Jimmy; none of them represent who he is in his heart. On top of all this, he’s saddled with having a deeper insight into the human spirit than most people think a person of his station is capable. He admits that even he doesn't know who he really is. Being a confused, angry young man with rampaging hormones, it doesn’t take long before certain aspects of his other personalities start bleeding over into the parts of his life where they don’t belong.
There's much, much more to Quadrophenia's story, but that's the spine of it.
Okay, Christmas Eve, 1972. I was twelve years old. I had been in the hospital for
over a week with pneumonia and had been released the previous morning. My dad was at work and his shift didn't end until 8:00 p.m., and my mom and my little sister (age four) were doing the visiting rounds with friends and relatives but had promised me they’d be back before seven. I was lying there in bed, feeling like I was gonna bite the big one any second, and there was nothing to do—a phrase not used in the existentialist, Vladamir and Estragon, Waiting for Godot sense. No; what I mean is: I was bored out of my skull. I was also so weak I couldn’t draw a conclusion, let alone move.
It was a tradition at the Braunbeck home that everyone got to open one present on Christmas Eve, and I knew which one I was going to unwrap. However, I was convinced that I wasn't going to live to see the morning (I was having trouble breathing and every inch of my body, inside and out, felt like it was boiling away), but I somehow rallied and stumbled downstairs in a medicated haze and stole one of my presents from under the tree. I knew it was the Quadrophenia album, and I was damned if I was going to die without listening to it. I took it back up to my room, put it on my record player, lay down (collapsed, actually), and listened to it all the way through, sides one through four.
This sounds like a ham-fisted cliché, but the thing changed my life. On side four, there’s an instrumental piece called “The Rock,” which remains for me one of the most amazing and moving pieces of music—and that's music, period, not just rock music—that I’ve ever heard.
In Tommy, the central character’s epiphany is conveyed through words and music, but in Quadrophenia, it is conveyed solely through music. “The Rock” starts off by repeating each of the four themes separately, then, one by one, begins overlapping them until the four themes blend seamlessly into one, creating a fifth unique, defining theme as Jimmy finally realizes who he really is.
That was a revelation—ahem...uh, er...discovery—for the twelve-year-old me. Pete Townshend and The Who had pulled an incredible musical sleight-of-hand, created a musical Rubik’s Cube that I hadn't even realized existed until the puzzle was completed.
I knew then that I wanted to someday create a piece or body of work that did what Townshend had done with Quadrophenia’s music: present you with a group of seemingly disparate pieces/themes that in the end converged into a unified whole that was not only rewarding in and of itself (as “The Rock” most definitely is), but also enriched the sum of its parts.
“The Rock” is a perfect metaphor for what we as human beings strive toward during every moment between that first slap on the ass and the last handful of soil tossed on the lid of the coffin. Call it the psychological equivalent of string theory or whatever you will: we strive to bring the various selves together to form the whole that is uniquely "me" or "you," all the while treasuring the journey that has led to this time, this breath, this moment.
That's why I admire “The Rock,” and that’s why Quadrophenia—both in its musical and narrative structure—was, is, and ever shall be the prime example of the standard I compare—get this—my storytelling abilities to. I don't know if I'll ever create something as structurally and aesthetically overpowering as it is—and God knows it’s not something that is always in the forefront of my mind—but, damn, it’s been a helluva trip toward my own “Rock” so far.
And part of that trip has always led to either the bookshelf, the movie theater, or the typewriter (then electronic typewriter, then word processor, then computer). For me, all of these things—books, stories, movies, music, etc.—have always been connected in one form or another. I balk at many (but not all) writers who claim that the use of modern technologies and cultural icons in fiction is proof of lazy writing by sloppy, unorganized minds who don’t want to bother with the work of refining their descriptive skills. “What of Dickens?” they say. “Dickens did not rely on the use of easily-accessible catch-phrases or film, television, and pop-culture references in order to enrich his work.” Yeah, no arguments there...but are you trying to tell me that if computers, television, radio, and blockbuster films had existed in Dickens’ day, he wouldn’t have employed them in his stories? Are you saying that if television news cameras had existed when Sydney Carton walked to his heroic and noble death at the end of A Tale Of Two Cities, he wouldn’t have delivered his famous “‘Tis a far, far better thing I do...” speech right into the lens so the whole world might hear his final words? Or that if Ye Olde videotape and VCRs had existed during Great Expectations, the tragic Miss Havisham wouldn’t have sat before a television in her wedding dress, watching transferred home movies of herself with the man who jilted her, or even played the song they first danced to on her record or CD player? Okay, you could try, but I wouldn’t be convinced.
In his book of essays Who Killed Hollywood? the redoubtable novelist and screenwriter William Goldman makes a compelling—if somewhat insular—argument about the importance of movies: American culture (Goldman argues) is at the center of world culture, and it is movies—not books, not symphonies, not poetry or sculpture or dance or any other art form—that lies at the heart of American culture.
This is an argument I neither fully agree nor fully disagree with, but like the majority of Goldman’s arguments about movies and culture, it has tremendous merit and so should not be ignored. For the sake of that argument, let’s say that Goldman’s conclusion is correct, and that movies are what lie at the heart of American culture. As writers, we have one of two choices as to what we can do about this: we can ignore the importance movies play in the day-to-day lives of many people, never referencing them in our fiction, or we can accept that it will always be movies that are at the heart of American culture and proceed accordingly. No, I’m not saying that we should write our novels and stories with an eye toward the eventual movie adaptation, nor am I advocating that our prose should be of the clipped, shorthand, eighth-grade comprehension level that we are told is as difficult as most readers will tolerate; what I am saying is that movies, music, television, DVDs, cell phones, and all the other accouterments that decorate the world have uses beyond those for which they were designed. If, as storytellers, we fail to employ them (when and if needed, of course), then we have no one but ourselves to blame if our work is thought to be out of touch. In the end, these things are just props, and as any good performer can tell you, if a prop can be employed to enrich your performance, you’re a fool not to use it.
If fictional stories in all their forms are supposed to be, as often purported, reflections and reinterpretations of reality, then that reality has to include those things that give structure and recognition to the world around its characters. It doesn’t matter a damn whether Havisham pines for her lover while trundling around in her wedding dress during the 1800s or while sitting glued to the Internet searching for some nugget of information about him in 2070; universal human conditions never change, only the props surrounding them. Any writer worth their carbon knows that in order to make a story’s characters and circumstances immediate and accessible to readers, there must be points of reference to establish in which reality this tale is set. In the case of horror fiction, it becomes not only necessary, but vital that reality be firmly established as soon as possible because it’s going to be chewed to shreds soon enough, especially when the promise of the second chance is dangled in front of a character.