This quote was all I could think of reading Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door.  It is an interesting piece which examines the post-war state of mind of the 1950’s.  It tells of a time that was still innocent, in some ways:  “It was a time when even the guilty displayed a rare innocence”—none of the adults in the book who are given clues or told: David’s dad, officer Jennings, and Tony Morino’s mother, are willing or able to grasp what’s going on and pass it off with excuses.  “Lucky for us, the Morinos are real strict Catholics.  His mom said she probably deserved it, she’s probably loose or something.  She said that parents have a right and Ruth’s her mother now.”  This backdrop gave Ruth Chandler, and real life killer Gertrude Baniszewski a lot of room to maneuver as she held a teenage girl captive in the basement and tortured her with the help of neighborhood kids.

The use of David, the boy who lived next door, as a narrator, brings the reader face to face with what’s going on.  In his essay “The Sublime Trials of Jack Ketchum: Teaching  The Girl Next Door in the Era of Torture Porn” Douglas Ford says, “The Girl Next Door works on a much more sophisticated and arguably more disturbing meta-textual level, insisting that the reader constantly evaluate his or her responses to the atrocities being depicted.”  David’s best friends, with their mother at the helm, are perpetuating these atrocities.  More than halfway through the book, David still equates Ruth with supervision, “She was still an adult, wasn’t she? Adults couldn’t let that happen, could they?”  The adult blessing gives David the ability to justify these actions, lets him keep quiet where he might have stood up for her, had the perpetrators been only other children.  This brings to mind the Nazi mentality, of just following orders.  Ford tells us,

“Had Ketchum wanted to tell a ‘true crime’ story, he would have found plenty of details to work from in the original murder case. However, the opening line, with its emphasis on calling upon the reader’s associations with pain, establish his primary purpose: not to relay the ‘facts’ of a murder case, but to force a reader to scrutinize his or her own responses to horror.”

David strikes a balance between curiosity and abhorrence.  For a while, the scale seems about even, then later tips (quickly and with good reason) to the latter.  But for a while, before it gets too bad, even David isn’t wholly opposed:  “Fuck it, I thought, Let it go where it goes.”  This is after Meg makes the drastic mistake of going to the police, back before the abuse was too bad.  The next chapter surmises one sentence:  “Where it went was to the basement.”  The lesson here that Ketchum wants us to pull from Meg’s story (and indeed, Sylvia’s story) is one about complacency, and standing up for what’s right and wrong.  From hindsight, the consequences of interfering were much worse for David by speaking up when he did, as opposed to much earlier.  If he had done the Right Thing, and not been seduced by the pack mentality, everything would have been better for everyone.  It’s hard to make those kinds of choices, especially when we can see, even today, our government taking the easy way out in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, doing what is easy as opposed to what is right.  (I’m reading Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos for some light reading as a break from this class, and it has me thinking about the Middle East).  David’s moral ambiguity is what makes this a fascinating read, and is the most important key to why this book works.

Appearances are everything.  Just ask Norman Bates.  Or Dorian Gray.  You don’t have to ask Annie Wilkes, she’ll come right out and tell you.  What makes Annie more terrifying than the other psychos we have visited is her power.  Paul can’t get out of that bed.  In the beginning, he is powerless by the limits of the car crash.  First Annie controls him through the pills, then, as he’s getting strong, cuts off his foot with an axe.  Being bedridden and trapped adds an element of fear that we haven’t seen before.  Mary in Psycho is vulnerable in the shower, but Norman’s (or mother, whichever name you want to use) attack is swift.  You see Annie coming from a mile away.  Can see her, but can’t stop her.  Like as she’s confronting Paul about leaving the room, she slips in the phrase “pre-op shot.”  He asks, he can’t stop thinking about it, and just like Paul we know something is coming, we don’t know how bad it’s going to be, but we know it isn’t good.  One of my classmates mentioned that Annie is a mother-figure, and that adds to the horror.  All of the psychos we have visited have been men (though just wait until Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door) and the stereotypical view is to see women as less threatening.  Annie was a nurse, a caregiver, and to see that turned on end by her queer views of right and wrong is deeply unsettling.  We spend more time with Annie than with any of the other psychos, get to know her better.  We also see more of her good side, which makes it all so much worse.  The moment when she approaches Paul and tentatively suggests the bees is almost cute, there are times when they have witty banter and you’d think they were friends.  This reminds me of a former boss (also a psycho) and I used to laugh and joke with her in a similar, appeasing fashion.  (I never fantasized about smashing her brains in with a typewriter, but I did wish an awful lot of property damage on her.)

One of the reasons Misery works so well as a novel, I think, is Paul’s reactions to the situation.  There’s no masculine posturing, he doesn’t play the hero, which would get him killed.  He does what he needs to survive, be it drinking the mop water to falsifying the burning of his manuscript.  He’s very realistic about it, not waving down the troopers because he only thinks they have an eight in ten chance of besting her. He’s cautious, and not too proud to beg or scream.

It’s a bit ironic that Paul was something of a womanizer, and he is nearly bested by this solid, domineering woman.  It plays out of a bit of just desserts, revenge for all the times he mistreated women. 

            It’s happened to all of us at one time or another.  We’ve wished for something, maybe didn’t even articulate our wish, because it wasn’t something we could have actively allowed ourselves to have.  And then it happened. 

Uncanny.

In Jane Roger’s “Ped-o-Matique,” this is precisely what happens to Karen.  All she has left of a failed relationship is her son Zac: “Her mother wanted her to meet a man.  But I’ve met the man, Karen said to herself.  I’ve even had his baby.”  Her career is going wonderfully, she’s been selected to travel from Australia to deliver a paper at a conference in Paris.  She spends the entire beginning of the book telling herself this is where she should want to be.  She is weighed down impossibly by the word “should,” she should have had the sense to end her relationship with “P” (she can’t bring herself to use his full name), she should be honored to go to this conference, she should live in the now.  But all she wants is to be at home with her baby.

The uncanny piece in the story is the “Ped-o-matique”, an innocuous free foot massaging machine in the Singapore airport.  With a half hour to get to her gate, she steps in to use it.  Sits down, tells herself she should relax, reminds herself that the massager can prevent deep vein thrombosis in flight.  But it doesn’t stop.  She can’t get her feet out.  She is trapped, and the apprehension she feels builds to terror, as she screams and cries.  It’s easy to say, “why did she panic in a crowded airport?”  She wasn’t maimed, or even really hurt, but the thought of being trapped in a public place, the shame of not being able to operate a machine that hundreds of other people can use just fine, would get to you, I’d think.  I can imagine the frustration she felt.  It’s terrifying.  In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny” Freud tells us that “An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.”  Karen is repressing her desires to get home to her boy, “When she said she didn’t want to go, people had been incredulous.  It was an honor—an accolade!  It showed she was a real high flyer.  Ha ha.  And why would anyone in their right mind not go to Paris?  Lucky her!”  Even in the short excerpt, Rogers allows readers to see that Karen has no interest in Paris, doesn’t want to be there, just wants to be home.  When, after screaming, weeping and wetting herself, Karen is finally freed from the Ped-o-matique bruised and relieved but otherwise no worse for the wear, she is offered the option for a later flight to Paris.  She instead elects to fly home, “almost happy enough to dance.”  Freud tells us “As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to support the old, discarded beliefs, we get a feeling of the uncanny.”  Through these definitions, “Ped-o-matique” succeeds as a work of uncanny literature.

Rogers updates the story by placing it in an airport.  Airports are generally ultra-modern, clean and safe places.  This one had a pool, a cinema, restaurants…and of course the Ped-o-matique.  An airport  is a metaphor for our rushed, busy lives, the need for all this entertainment, all of it at our fingertips lest we sit in idle thought for too long.  A mechanical foot massager is a luxury, Rogers describes the “squashy comfort” of the leatherette seat.  It increases the sense of the uncanny by having the horror come from something that is meant to cause relaxation and pleasure.  It’s so hard for us to relax these days that the thought of this kind of a swindle is deeply unsettling.  This is an extremely urban story, one that capitalizes on our weakness for things that are easy and are handed over to us.  It’s an interesting piece because of how little happens, Karen will probably laugh about this incident in a few months or years, but in the moment, all she could see was being trapped there forever and never seeing her son again.

            Even without the painfully creepy human faced puppet in Matthew Holness’ “Possum”, there’s a lot going on here that’s just plain wrong.  The relationship between Christie and the narrator (did we ever get his name?) was so odd.  There was a sense of coming home, but it seemed like the old man wasn’t quite right, I got a weird Norman Bates sense, that maybe Christie wasn’t even alive and the narrator was putting road kill in his own bed as an oh-so-funny practical joke.  The narrator first throws the dead fox on the stairs, “hoping that Christie might fall when he bent down to remove it.”  Then Christie puts it in his bed, then slaps the thing down on the kitchen table as the narrator is eating breakfast.  And then it shows up for dinner.  There’s a peculiar anecdote in which the narrator tells about a dead fox he found as a child, poked and mutilated, but the fox was playing a joke, and got up and walked away.  This is echoed later, by Christie faking a heart attack in front of school children.  There are a lot of jokes in this little story, and none of them are terribly funny.

            I think the most disquieting part of the story is the narration.  This person is telling us these things in a very matter of fact way.  He is never panicked, never shows much emotion, just reports details to us.  The thing he is telling us aren’t normal, aren’t okay.  This guy seems to be some manner of crazy, even aside from his creepy puppet developing a mind of its own.  Everything in the story is vary familiar to the narrator, which usually is comforting, but here it builds more and more tension as the story goes on.  His old house, his old stomping grounds.  It’s all so…creepy, though.  The descriptions of things are discordant and unsettling, the brown southern winter is a great setting, that cool damp brown weather is unpleasant in the best of circumstances.  It makes a perfect backdrop for this piece.  Everything in the story is dirty, another layer of unpleasantness that sets us on edge as we read.

            As I am reading this story, I wonder what kinds of “plays” this guy was performing, and again I wondered if they were in his head.  His perceptions of acceptable behavior set him up as an extremely unreliable narrator, and he really gnawed at me as a creep.  What kind of audience do you take this puppet to, where it devours the heroes, crashes through walls, and leaves a trail of flies (bluebottles, to be precise) behind it.  (One of the details that most upset me was when he woke up with Possum after tossing it in the water tank and there was a dead wasp in his pocket.  I hate wasps, living or dead, and the thought of someone “tucking” one into my pocket while I slept disgusts me.)  “I heard about your last performance” Christie tells the narrator, “One of my old teaching colleagues wrote to me about it.  An unpredictable affair, by all accounts.”  Christie used to be a teacher?  I wouldn’t have guessed that.  “They’ll have me back, once he’s gone,” says the narrator, more evidence that there is something wrong in his mind.  The story isn’t framed so that I think Possum (who spends this scene sitting at the dinner table with them after being dragged through the mud) is coming alive, I think the narrator is crazy.  Even Christie, saying the puppet is diseased, doesn’t make me think the troubles lie exclusively with Possum.

            It took two readings to come up with the sexual abuse theme, but it is there, quite thickly by the end.  Is this what is wrong with the narrator?  And he uses Possum as a coping mechanism?  I think this may be the most disturbing story I’ve read for this class (or ever?).  Well written, and well executed.

            The evil womb isn’t a dead trope.  In Breaking Dawn, the culmination of the odorous Twilight quadrilogy, Stephanie Meyer invokes the monstrous womb.  At the beginning of book four, the uninteresting, personality-less protagonist of the series, Bella Swan, finally gets to marry the vampire love of her life Edward.  Feminism has much to say about Bella and her actions (and inactions) throughout the books, but in book four, Bella demands sex from her husband.  He, always the voice of reason, knows better, he doesn’t’ know what his rocket powered vampire sperm would do inside her.  But the cunning temptress she is, she seduces him. The sex, of course, is amazing, and the next day, sore and battered from the killer nookie, she realizes she’s pregnant. 

            In Barbara Creed’s essay “Woman as Monstrous Womb” she discusses alien pregnancies, where the woman who has been raped by the other, (because usually these women do not willingly mate with something that is not human) and their gestation period is shorter than usual.  This happens in Breaking Dawn.  I find it hard to believe that Meyer is doing this as an actual nod to the trope, I get the feeling in her case it is a cop out to make the book move faster.  But she must have been exposed to it at some point to let the idea germinate in her mind.

            The baby inside Bella grows rapidly, and she soon becomes bedridden.  The innocent baby kicks and thrashings are more than Bella can handle, breaking her ribs and almost crippling her.  Edward, the father, is more concerned about his lady love and wants her to abort the fetus, she already has connected with and loves her child, and refuses.  It reminded me of the Alien franchise, this inhuman thing growing inside her.  Finally, when it came out, the only way to save the mother was to make her a vampire.   Logistical question…if vampires are dead, how can they impregnate anything?  Once the baby was born, it continued to grow at an alarming fashion.  Meyer portrayed the baby as cute and innocent, but it’s amusing to see how closely she followed these horror tropes.  I suppose the entire series takes horror tropes and fluff-ifies them, perhaps therein lies part of the appeal.  It makes vile, evil things like vampires, werewolves, and mutant half breed babies into charming, likeable good things, and perhaps we like that reassurance. 

            In Bella’s freakish pregnancy, there is some of the horror like that which we saw in the brood.  Her vampire husband is against it, he is horrified by watching what happens to his beloved.  As a reader, I felt more akin to Frank’s reaction in The Brood, watching Nola open her gown (I knew there was something under that white, flowing garment, I just knew it!)…I did not feel Nola/Bella’s love for their freakish mutant offspring.  Perhaps this speaks in some way to motherhood, I am not a mother, don’t have much desire to become one, human babies conceived the normal way sort of freak me out, seeing Nola chew open her placenta and lap afterbirth off her demon baby was extremely unsettling.  In Breaking Dawn Bella was too busy dying to lap her baby clean, but I have no doubt that she would have if she’d needed to.

            Doctor Jekyll created an elixir to purge his base urges.  Dorian Gray wished for his painting to absorb the impact of life, leaving him free to behave without regard for consequences.  Jekyll make a conscious decision to divide himself and so did Dorian, (though he didn’t really think it would work, at first).

            Poor old Norman Bates, however, split himself in a different way.  His split is not supernatural, but medical.  The trauma of jealousy of his mother’s boyfriend led him to murder—a carefully planned murder, that looked like an accident—which jarred him into a mental institution for months.  When he got out, he had created his own version of what happened.  (Unfortunately it was missing Mother’s body…which he went and exhumed and stuffed.  Problem solved.)  While we can’t make potions which split us (though some would argue that drugs and alcohol can change people) and we can’t wish on paintings, any of us could suffer an event which we weren’t strong enough to handle.  We all have our breaking points, it’s just a question of how much of a push it takes to get us over the edge.  I think everyone has a potential horror story inside them, if the stimuli was right.  Most of us, of course, probably will never come close to the horrors it would take to break us in such a way.  But that’s the scary thing about the Norman Bates, the Annie Wilkes, the Hannibal Lecters…they’re people, with mothers and fathers and experiences and traumas.

            Jekyll and Bates have the tact to be appalled by what their alter egos do, it’s not comfortable for them to hear about the horrors that Hyde and Mother commit.  Jekyll loves Hyde, though, and is compelled to protect him because they are the same molecules.  Norman loves Mother because she brought him into this world and has cared for him all these years.  And, I suspect under the surface there is an unconscious degree of self preservation going on, just like Jekyll has.  Dorian, on the other hand, at first delights in what his painting allows him to do.  His conscience seems to not exist, and only manifests itself as a crawling, sick desire to keep the painting hidden.  He starts to fear when Sibyl Vane’s brother comes looking for him, a physical manifestation of a threat to his painting.  Unlike Jekyll and Bates, Dorian never feels bad for what he has done, he feels bad because it is hurting him.  Does this mean that Dorian is evil through and through, while the other two can compartmentalize their evils?  Dorian comes across as far more malicious than Jekyll and Bates, much harder to pity.  He reminds me so much of today’s celeb-u-tantes like Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie, though it seems that they actually physically pay for their vices.  There would be no “early morning, no make-up, hungover pictures” of Dorian, if he existed today.

            I think that we see Jekyll and Bates pay for their sins by worrying and trying to fix what they’ve done (even if it is by making more of the potion, or by hiding the bodies in the swamp) they’re taking action, and doing things that make sense to their crazy brains.  Dorian takes action, too, but it seems more selfish when he stabs the painting.  The others try and protect their alter-egos, Dorian can’t even do that by the end.

            Does Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray belong in the horror genre?  I say, of course it does.  No, nothing jumps out at you, there are no jumpy moments, but the evil that resides in Wilde’s book is much thicker and more delicious than a cheap scare. 

Each and every one of us, without exception, is going to grow old and die.  I think I can comfortably say that each of us will look worse then than we do now.  What if you didn’t?  It’s like the tale of the Monkey’s Paw: one must be careful what one wishes for.  Blindsided by Lord Henry’s incessant, seductive babbling, Dorian is distressed by what he sees in the painting: himself in his prime, looking wonderful due to Basil’s handiwork.  He realizes it’s all downhill from here.  “You have the most marvelous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having,” Lord Henry tells Dorian.  When Dorian disagrees, Lord Henry goes on:  “No, you don’t feel it now.  Some day, when you are old and wrinkles and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with hideous fires, you will feel it.  You will feel it terribly.”  Lord Henry goes on for pages, his words are always easy to listen to, always thought provoking.  Basil can see thorough him, though, identifies that he speaks to hear himself talk, for whatever attention he can get.  Pretty, empty-headed Dorian doesn’t realize this.  The conversation, there in the studio spells out the whole book for us.  Dorian makes his wish: “If it were only the other way!  If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old…I would give my soul for that.” Lord Henry comments:  “You would hardly care for such an arrangement, Basil.  It would be rather hard lines on your work.”  And Dorian says that he will kill himself when he starts to grow old.

So the book begins by cashing in on this deep fear we all have, of wrinkles, incontinence, forgetfulness.  But Dorian’s wish comes true.  He doesn’t realize it until he does the first cruel act of his life:  shunning Sibyl Vane for giving up acting.  He is shallow, he doesn’t love her, he loves the characters she plays. And he drops her like a hot rock when she gives it up for him.  The painting gives him a free pass to being a sociopath.  When he sees there will be no repercussion for being cruel, he sees this as a red flag.  This loss of control—relinquishing control, really—dovetails wonderfully into the horror genre, things we sort of wish we could do, but can’t, because we have a conscience.  Dorian hides his conscience in the attic, and does whatever he pleases.  Only when he is held accountable, eighteen years later by Sibyl Vane’s brother, does he start to sleep poorly at night.  It eats at him a little before that, like anyone hiding a monstrous secret, he is never comfortable too far away from it, but when he is brought face to face with someone who is out to get him, then it all begins to fall apart.  It’s mostly of his own doing, even, Vane is killed in a hunting accident, but the seeds are sewn. 

Dorian destroys himself, and the painting is as good as new.

Showalter points out that Hyde is the only character who doesn’t get his own point of view in the Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  And what a glorious story that would be, free of guilt and shame, describing perverse cavorting through London. 

By awarding Mr. Hyde his own point of view, he would not have been able to stand up as the one dimensional character that he is.  The good doctor has his friends, his career, a raging guilt complex, a sense of humor—he has many human attributes, good and bad, that make him a compelling character.  When we hear Utterson fretting about his friend sliding down some mysterious slope, we are concerned, we too want to know why.

There is nothing of Dr. Jekyll in Mr. Hyde, but there is Hyde in Jekyll.  Perhaps this is because they are both pieces of Jekyll, perhaps because no one wants to read about Hyde running down a child in the city streets then fretting about it.  Jekyll describes his first moments as Hyde as follows:

I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.

This isn’t sustainable in a narrator character.  Going inside this new creature, who is “tenfold more wicked” than Dr. Jekyll, the evil and wickedness would lose its charms.  It would be boring to read of his exploits, and it would cheapen the mystery for Utterson and Lanyon.  The reader will always build the monster more frightening than an author can describe or Hollywood can film, this is why Jaws works so well, you don’t see the shark until almost the very end.  Being inside Jaws’ POV, seeing him gamboling about the ocean looking for people to snack upon, would reduce his lurking, malevolent impact.  Much the same for Mr. Hyde.  As it stands, we don’t know what’s going on inside his mind, we just know that it is bad news.

Modern popular fiction has a tendency to zoom the camera in as deep as it will go, the literary equivalent of HD-TV, where the actors pores are as big as swimming pools.  The Victorian style pulls the reader away from the action, often filtering it.  In this book we are filtered through several narrators, and in a theatrical reveal it is only at the end we are given Jekyll’s story in his own hand.  But it is portrayed in a letter, whereas today it would probably be in the first person.  Even the sentences are formed differently, to hold us at arm’s length.  Today we choose short, choppy sentences, sentence fragments, the least number of words to get the reader there, experiencing along with the characters as much as possible.  Stevenson’s sentences are almost all very long, thick with clauses and punctuation.  I admit that I have trouble wading through the language, I have trained myself to gobble words relentlessly, and language like Stevenson’s, Stoker’s, Shelly’s, forces me to slow down and sip at them, think about them, and appreciate them.

What happens when we lose our minds?  It’s something that can happen to any of us.  After reading through the first three stories (“The Sandman”, by Hoffman, “Dread” by Barker, and Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart”) a classmate of mine pointed out that psychos lose their magic when you switch from horror story to tell all expose.  He cited the examples of Anakin’s transition to Vader demystifying one of the scariest villains of all time, and the treatment of Hannibal Lecter in the most recent installment of that series.

I agree with him.  However, the fact that a sweet little pod-racing lad, and a promising young psychiatrist (or whatever he was, I didn’t see it) can be turned into these monsters through no fault of their own adds to the dread (to borrow Barker’s word.)  Walking down the street, anyone you see could be a closet loony.  Unlike tentacled slime monsters, your mother could be a closet psycho.  The family next door can be more than they seem.  Werewolves and vampires have a clean set of rules: full moons, garlic, silver bullets, stakes…but psychos are human, they are like us, we have the potential to become them.  Makes me think of the character of Hannah from Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why.  I certainly think she was a psycho, fortunately one that was dangerous only to herself.  But it sets me to thinking about how malleable the psyche is, and how human monsters can be created from any number of variables. 

It is this fluidity that sets it apart from other horror subgenres.  That and the knowledge deep in the back of your head that these things can really happen.  Hell, they do happen, all the time.  In Burlington Vermont last week a woman tried to stab her baby because it wouldn’t stop crying.  The news is filled with horrors that are comparable to some of what we’ve read.  The crime in “The Tell Tale Heart”, one guy smothering another guy, is almost tame compared to some of our news stories.  I talked a little bit about voyeurism in my response to Ramsland’s essay, “The Psychology of Horror and Fantasy”.  I think there is a piece of this voyeurism in non-supernatural horror (and also in true crime.  Where does the true crime genre fit into all this?  That’s pretty horrific, but it really happened.).  We slow down to see the car accident on the side of the interstate, and we keep reading about Annie Wilkes torturing Paul Sheldon.  Many of the recent horror movies, the “torture porn” subgenre, embrace this.  Hostel and Wolf Creek feature unlikable characters being shot, raped, stabbed, amputated and more.  We watch this, I think, because it’s in our world, and confronting it through fiction is more comfortable than confronting the real horror.  Do we think that if we read something that “could” happen, we are paying our penance somehow?  That the real thing won’t happen?

It seems that we use these stories as a talisman to ward off being the one who gets pulled over in traffic by the maniac dressed as a cop, or any number of other grisly fates that “could” happen to us in our day to day lives. 

            There are some spoilers up in here, yo. 

I’ll admit it.  I first read Wally Lamb because he had two Oprah endorsed books.  There.  I said it.  I’ve been waiting for years for him to come out with another one, and last year, he did.  His titles are always so monumental, epic and moving, this latest book is The Hour I First Believed.

            Ever since my June residency at SHU, I’ve been trying to train myself to “read as a writer.”  And mostly I’ve been doing pretty well at it.  Looking past the story and deeper into the structure and the composition, the why’s and the how’s.  This book killed that.  Perhaps the writing was too solid to dissect like a bug (he did spend almost a decade on the piece), maybe it was that the subject matter was such a far cry from escapist fantasy.  Lamb tackled it all in this book—and that may be my only complaint…Lamb’s books are like buckshot spraying the people’s lives, he ties all the incidents together, but the books wind up huge, sprawling, epic.  Too big for my taste.  He often has chapters that are letters, stories of the protagonist’s ancestors.  As I talk about the book here I can’t imagine him structuring it in another way. 

            The book focuses on one man finding himself.  In the beginning he takes a pipe wrench to his cheating wife’s lover, but he solidifies through the Columbine shootings which fractured his wife, the loss of the aunt who raised him, the discovery that the woman who raised him wasn’t his biological mother, his wife’s prison sentence and eventual death.  We touch on hurricane Katrina, Iraq, Bush and Cheney’s America, on women’s prisons, abolition—Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla have cameos.  The book is huge in scope and physical length. 

            In a bold move, Lamb uses all factual information for the Columbine section.  The names of the killers and the deceased, the chronology.  He simply added some of his own characters in, blending them with what really happened on April 20^th, 1999.  There seems to be a common theme of forgiveness in Lamb’s books, of letting go of the injustices that life heaps on you.  Lamb’s characters have more than their fair share of injustices.  I questioned my ability to willingly suspend my disbelief.  So much shitty stuff happened to this one guy, did I believe it?  I guess in the end I did.  I certainly did as I was living it with him.  Bad stuff comes to people.

            As always, Lamb has written a masterpiece.  Unfortunately, it is another masterpiece that makes me feel like I’ve been stuck in a sack and beaten against a wall. But I guess that's part of the charm, and a great testament to his writing that I just ache with these characters.  The worst part was seeing the couple's marriage decomposing just before the shit hit the fan.  No one was being malicious, they were just hurting one another, almost inadvertently, but not quite.  It was like they knew what they could do to fix it, but couldn't bring themselves to take the steps to fix it.  It made me think about taking people for granted and how easy it can be.

            Next up?  Some YA horror, Slawter, book three in Darren Shan’s Demonata series.  It will be lighter, fluffier, and probably done before bed tomorrow.  Then lots of reading for school.

Before I fell hopelessly in love with Stephen King, there was Dean Koontz.  I devoured his books like candy back in the middle school days, one after another after another…until I had the epiphany that I’d read this before.  It’s always the same hero and heroine, so pristine and good it leaves a film on your teeth like candy, fighting an adversary who is evil and scary (though often a little bit to be empathized with).  These good guys always win.  

Winter Moon came across my reading list ‘cause it’s a horror novel with an alien in it.  As one who is writing a horror novel with an alien (or even plural aliens!) it in, I approached it looking at the alien, and the interactions with the aliens and the humans.  But first, I am going to complain for a bit. 

Dean, clean up your goddamn writing!  So many passive verbs, some pages had better than ten occurrences of the word “had.”  As I read I switched his wimpy verbs in my head for meatier ones, and came up with a much better book.  I also cut 90% of his adverbs, which were liberally sprinkled throughout the piece (yeah, I used an adverb there to be funny.)  I also could have gone with speedier pacing.  I didn’t care about the family struggling through the aftermath of a shooting in LA, I cared about the parts of the book set in Montana with the terrifying alien.  I felt the insertion of the lovable golden retriever character bordered on gratuitous.   

That said, the terrifying alien was a force to be reckoned with.  The way Koontz builds suspense with some of the forest scenes was brilliant, and I studied the way he crafted them.  (I thought he could have done without some million word long run on sentences.  But when I used my imagination and broke up the sentences, it was all cool.)  The alien was clever and innovative, it dovetailed with some of the ideas I’d had for my own alien.  We learned about their existence along with the unfortunately named Eduardo, and this is what I want my book to be like.  I don’t want to give away what’s going on too soon.  In my book, though, the aliens are characters, in Koontz’s the alien is simply a big bad.  It’s super cool when it’s taking over small fuzzy forest creatures.  I think part of the reason this book scared me a little bit was my fear of the woods.  All those shadows and places to hide—I love the woods and nature, but there are a million places for *something* to lurk.  The plucky little boy and the alien shared a unique mind link (whoops! Spoilers!) and that seemed like a clever way to best it.  The ending, of bringing in police and govt. worked well for the book.  In mine, the aliens are entrenched in our govt, much like in the X-files. 

It got me to do a great deal of thinking, both in the aliens and horror sense, and also structure and word choice.  For the record, Watchers by Dean Koontz in on my favorite books of all time list, and holds a special place in my heart. 

Also on my personal reading list for the semester:

Aliens and Alien Societies by Stanley Schmidt and Ben Bova—I keep plugging away at this, it’s taking me forever ‘cause I keep reading storybooks between chapters.

Nightflyers by George R.R. Martin—I’ve never read him and I sure am excited to.  This is out of print, though not that pricey.

Stinger by Robert McCammon—I don’t like him as a rule, and this book seems to be out of print and rather expensive.  But I keep trying, I want to like him when I don’t feel like he’s trying to be Stephen King Jr

Majestic by Whitley Strieber—Maybe he does fiction better than he does poignant true stories.  This is also out of print and rather expensive.  Humph.

Dreamcatcher and Tommyknockers by Mr. King

If anyone else can think of alien horror, let me know!

Now I am off to read Jailbait Zombie by Mario Acevedo.  The first book wasn’t the best, but I sure am into the character now!

( Well, I quit. )

                The key piece of horror, it seems, is caring about the characters.  I think deep, reasonable characterizations are a huge part of what makes Stephen King so successful.  He writes about the everyman, you believe the characters, and you care when horrible, horrible things start to happen to them.  I just read Jack Ketchum’s Off Season.  According to the back of the book, “five civilized, sophisticated people and one tired old country sheriff will learn just how primitive we all are beneath the surface…and that there are no limits at all to the will to survive.”  This blurb did not sell me.  I read The Girl Next Door and thought it was pretty sick, I liked it all right, but didn’t think the writing was terribly stellar.  This one is set in Maine, which I say I like, but I always scoff when writers “from away” try and do justice to my state.  Ketchum didn’t do Maine justice.  He did toss in some good facts, (Washington country was, at the time of his writing [and maybe still is] poorer than Appalachia) but he didn’t get the feel.  All the Mainers were like stereotypes of locals resenting summer people, and while this does happen, Maine natives DO have other things on their minds.

                Apparently to Jack Ketchum, “sophisticated and civilized” in this context, means “from New York City.”  They are all petulant snots who are self absorbed and absolutely unsympathetic.  The character they spent the most time on, Carla, is absolutely unlikable…and killed off very quickly, leaving the reader in the hands of relative strangers.  We were just sort of starting to get to know her when she was pulled nude from her boyfriend’s penis, dragged outside, strung up from a tree and roasted alive.  Boyfriend didn’t make it, either.  I didn’t care for the characters, I was just annoyed about the chapters I read about her cleaning the house.  I also didn’t care that she was only using the egotistical actor boyfriend for sex, especially when they both died so early on (I guess it’s fitting, she was using him for sex and they died having trashy, dirty sex.)

                These characters, both the villains (who I will address in a moment) and the protagonists (if you can call them that) all spent a lot of time naked and sexed up.  Yes, evil, animalistic hillbillies probably spend a lot of time doing “it”, but you’d think they’d have some sense of self preservation.  It’s never, I mean never, a good idea to force a captive to fellate you.  It came as such a shock when she bit off his junk.  Ketchum’s interest in sex distracted me from the horror at hand.  If the hillbillies had been more practical about their malicious intents, I would have been better sold.  And the character who was so traumatized she forgot to get dressed?  It didn’t work for me, and removed me from the action.

                The hillbillies.  They didn’t seem to have a motive.  They liked human meat, they lived in a filthy cave and impregnated one another, and they were evil.  In one of my classmate’s WIPs about hillbillies, they have a religious motive, and are very clear about their intents and purpose.  These guys have no sense of preservation, the book opens with them making a mistake and letting a woman live to tell about them.  How were they not discovered long ago?  There is no logic and no sense of self preservation (like I said above) and this pulls any interest I have in them.

                The most interesting part of the book is Ketchum’s afterword, where he discusses the publisher wanting to tame the book back in the eighties, how it was too graphic, and the concessions he made thinking “this is my first book, I’d better do what they want.”  In the original draft, the closest thing we have to a hero dies in the end, a la Night of the Living Dead, erroneously shot by the sheriff in the confusion of a shoot out.  Apparently Ballantine said no way to that, and in the original publication, he lives, giving hope to all the readers out there.  The version I read was published in 2006, and Nick dies at the end, the way he was supposed to.  It was one of the only things I did like in that book, a little “ha!” at hope.

                This was worth the $0.66 I paid for it and the few hours I spent reading it.  But man, not by much.  When I see a Stephen King recommendation on a cover (I’m talking to you, The Ruins) I need to start running in the other direction.