What's Horror For?

As I mentioned last week, one of the speakers at this year's ICFA proposed that horror articulates feelings and experiences for which we often can't find the words. It gives concrete embodiment to metaphors for our fears.

In IT, which I still consider one of Stephen King's best novels (even though an older one), he creates a monster that incarnates fear. It appears to people in the form of whatever they're most afraid of. I always get irked when commenters reduce the eldrich cosmic entity in IT to a "monster clown." Pennywise is only one of It's many faces. As the narrator reflects at one point, It prefers to feed on the emotions of children because their fears are more concrete, raw, and primal than those of adults. Grown-ups are afraid of dull, mundane threats such as heart disease, old age, and financial ruin. In the nightmares of children, deeper horrors show up unmasked.

King's nonfiction work DANSE MACABRE suggests that ultimately the work of all horror is to portray our fear of death in shapes we can deal with. In horror fiction, the monster can frequently be destroyed. A boy character in King's vampire novel 'SALEM'S LOT declares, "Death is when the monsters get you."

At ICFA, our panel on changing concepts of monsters in popular culture discussed the phenomenon that classic folklore and literary/film monsters often serve as metaphors. Werewolves and other shapeshifters may represent the beast within, the animalistic or savage side of human nature, as the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde does. Lycanthropy can also suggest the trauma of puberty, an uncontrollable transformation of one's body accompanied by strange new impulses. Body horror in general (for example, a pair of anthologies I recently read that focus on pregnancy and childbirth), too, portrays the experience of one's physical self in an out-of-control state. Characters such as the Phantom of the Opera and Quasimodo illustrate revulsion toward deformity and disability. Vampires serve as metaphors for disease, foreign invaders, forbidden sexuality, transgressing the barrier between life and death, forced transformation, toxic power dynamics, and allegedly threatening Others of countless types. Both vampires and zombies embody the horror of a loved one changing into an unrecognizable Other. Ghosts may awaken guilt about how we treated the dead during their lifetimes and what revenge they may take on the living.

Conversely, nowadays the horror of monsters often comes from the image of an inhuman or no-longer-human creature as the persecuted outsider. In stories of this kind, ordinary humans can become the real monsters while the Other represents the oppressed and abused victim. Frankenstein's creation, of course, is a classic example of body horror and a monstrous violation of the line between life and death as well as a victim of persecution.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: If It Bleeds Collection by Stephen King by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: If It Bleeds Collection

by Stephen King

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

I grew up reading a Stephen King book every few days, sometimes within a single day if I got the enviable time to actually read that much. He was unquestionably my favorite writer when I was a teenager. He was without peer in my mind at conjuring supernatural creatures that I loved to be terrorized by, in large part because they weren't real. He also introduced me to a lot of things I was young and hungry to know, naughty, nasty things, and things that, in truth, I almost wish I'd never found out. As I got older, I got less and less able to handle realistic horror stories--the ones King wasn't intending to tell me. He wrote almost casually about horrible things like secret child molestation, deviations (sometimes sexual) that harmed a person as well as others, and the true crimes of this world, namely, the real ones where people are ritualistically cruel and judgmental, prejudice, and life was so routinely unfair to the underdogs. There's so much suffering that goes on inside battered souls that want nothing more than to hide and escape the attention of the world. He detailed vividly the kind of torment that no one else sees until it comes out and manifests itself almost like a demon out of control. 

I guess the books I was reading as I moved into adulthood made me want to escape, not to have bad situations finitely dissected and served up as a kind of punishment. I found it easier to throw the baby out with the bathwater. More aptly, I threw out the author that forced me to live such painful scenarios. That's undoubtedly a good testimony of King's skill as a writer, but I still find it hard to watch what can only be described sometimes as gruesome train wrecks. 

When I've ventured back into King territory here and there in the long years since then at the urging of a lifelong fan, I found his writing decidedly more mature, at least slightly more sensitive to realistic injustices, and less about supernatural horrors running amok. I miss the dark fantasy aspects, but I appreciate that I'm less traumatized reading his work these days. 

 If It Bleeds is a collection of four previously unpublished novellas by Stephen King published in 2020. I actually watched a wonderful adaptation of "Mr. Harrigan's Phone" on Netflix without having a clue it was based on the Stephen King story of the same name. I looked it up mid-watch and learned of the fact. Not more than a week later, I was at a book sale and saw a hardcover copy of the collection. I bought it and started reading. 

In "Mr. Harrigan's Phone", Craig is initially a refreshingly sweet nine-year-old boy who gets a job reading books to a retired, rich gentleman who lives in a choice spot in a town that's not so nice as to invite flurries of visitors at any given time. Rumor has it that in his younger years Harrigan was "tenacious" in exacting fitting judgment on those who wronged him or those close to him. But that's a side young Craig never actually saw in his kindly mentor of sorts--well, he never saw that side of Harrigan in life, at least. In death, now that's a whole different matter. 

With the movie version of this story, I was pretty surprised to find it dubbed a horror. From start to finish, it didn't frighten me one bit. I imagine it wouldn't have scared even a skittish four-year-old. It's just not what I consider horror. I wondered if they just called it that because of King's crown--he's known as the King of Horror after all. Later, as I thought about the story it told, I realized that the underlying horror of this piece was in adult Craig letting himself believe for even one second that justice can be rectified or gained through injustice and revenge. I loved this story and enjoyed watching Craig grow up. I was moved as he discovered for himself the limits of wrong and right. (The actors in the movie version were fantastic.) "Mr. Harrigan's Phone" was far and away my favorite in this collection. I heartily recommend both the story and the movie version of it. 

The second story in the collection, "The Life of Chuck" details the end of the world and what that looks like for various people but mainly for someone named Chuck. This tale is told backwards, with the end revealed first, working backwards. The three acts didn't make any sense in the order they were presented. Would they have been clearer if they'd been placed in linear order? I'll never know. I enjoyed the first (which was actually the last) of the three disjointed parts. From that point on, I was lost and never found my way back. Afterward, I read about the story online, trying to figure out the point. Not much explained it either. That they made a movie of this story is utterly unfathomable to me. King actually cited a billboard that he'd seen that read, "39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck" as his inspiration and decided to try to figure out what that meant by writing about it. My opinion is that the outcome feels unfinished and fragmented the way it's presented.

"If It Bleeds" is a Holly Gibney story. Originally she appeared as an important secondary character in King's Bill Hodges trilogy (including Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch published from 2014-2016), which I've never read. Suffering from OCD and a form of autism, Holly took the role of main character in the novel The Outsider, released in 2018, as a private investigator. I read this book long ago, also watched the 10-part miniseries version in 2020, intrigued by the idea of a man supposedly committing a murder when he was nowhere near the scene of the crime at the time, though the DNA found there and eyewitness accounts on both sides claim he was in each area simultaneously. His alibi is absolutely solid, as is his guilt in murdering and raping a young boy. So which is right? Or has something much more sinister taken place? 

I have to confess, I remember little of Holly Gibney in the book or the miniseries. What I recall most is that both the novel and the serial were long, so very, very long. Way too long and boring to hold my attention. Hundreds of pages and many hours filmed could easily have been cut to get to the gist of the story--the beginning and the ends were the two parts worth saving. The middle stuff was far too much to carry my interest, though I tried with both the book and the movie. By the time I got to the end of each, where it was actually exciting again, I didn't care. I just wanted it to be over. 

 

I had a similar experience with "If It Bleeds", which continues with a similar theme as The Outsider. I'm sorry to admit I found Holly excruciatingly dull, and I had a lot of trouble making it to the finish line with this story, though the overall idea was of interest to me, as was The Outsider. If anyone else is interested, Holly is also in a 2023 released, self-titled novel. 

The final story in If It Bleeds is "Rat". A writer with only short story success has never been able to finish a full-length novel. Inspired with an idea that has him excited, he rushes to his isolated cabin to write it. Bad weather and sickness set in while he's there. Unsure he'll finish his novel and feverish, he makes a shocking bargain with a sinister rat, but the author is just so desperate to make his career aspirations come true. Gee, what could go wrong? How could this man have not seen the end coming from the off? I can't say I loved this story, though it started out well enough. I couldn't get past the "what kind of a creep would agree to this pact?" aspect. Sigh. Incidentally, Ben Stiller optioned "Rat", intending to produce, star in, and direct the film adaptation at one point, but it's unclear whether that'll ever happen. 

While it's true I only found one offering in this collection really worth reading, I do think that single story is strong enough to warrant putting time and money into procuring it. Whether or not you're a fan of Stephen King, "Mr. Harrigan's Phone"--the novella and the movie--are the very best of the author. I expect you may see more reviews of Stephen King's work here in my Friday column in the future, as I ease back into the works of a favorite writer from my youth. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Quantity Versus Quality?

Are quantity and quality incompatible strategies or goals? Not according to the observations in these and other similar essays:

Quantity Leads to Quality

The Origin of a Parable

The second article concerns a ceramics class whose teacher divided students into two groups. One would be graded on the quality of the work produced, while the other would be graded solely on amount of output. "Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the 'quantity' group was busily churning out piles of work -– and learning from their mistakes — the 'quality' group had sat theorizing about perfection."

Similarly, we've heard of writers who endlessly polish the first paragraph, first page, or first three chapters to perfection, but when an agent or editor requests the full manuscript, the rest of the work doesn't measure up to the meticulously crafted opening.

The "quantity vs. quality" opposition seems to underlie the contemptuous -- and invalid -- dismissal of prolific writers as "hacks," as if high productivity automatically implies mediocrity. Stephen King used to publish two or three books per year and most years still produces at least two. Nora Roberts regularly releases two "J. D. Robb" mysteries per year and at least one "Nora Roberts" romance (probably more, but I don't keep close track of her output in that genre). Those figures may sound "prolific," but consider: A professional, full-time author, living solely on writing income, probably treats that vocation like a "job," writing several hours most days. Even a slow writer can produce at least 1000 words in two hours, and a faster one more like 1000 words per hour. Postulate only three hours per day, possibly a low estimate for a bestselling pro. 3000 words per day add up to 90,000 words in a month, a draft of a typical novel (if weekends aren't included, allow five to six weeks). A producer of "doorstops" like Stephen King, at that rate, might take two months for a first draft. With that time allotment, the writer could generate three novels in six months -- presumably not continuously, but with breaks in between -- with half the year free for revising, editing, polishing, marketing, and business minutiae. This kind of schedule, of course, assumes abundantly flowing story ideas, but from what I've read, the typical professional writer never has a shortage of those.

I'm reminded of Robert Heinlein's famous rules for success as an author: (1) Write. (2) Finish what you write. (3) Send it to an editor who might publish it. (4) Repeat number 3 until somebody buys it. I don't remember whether he addressed the question of when it's time to give up on a story -- maybe when you've exhausted all possible markets? However, I clearly recall the other "rule" he sometimes added: Never rewrite except to editorial order.

His point was that your time is better used in creating new stories than obsessively revising old material. He would probably agree with the "quantity over quality" proponents who maintain that each fresh project gives you a chance to learn something new about your craft. I would allow for one exception, though -- when you're deeply emotionally invested in one piece of work and have your heart set on getting it "right." My first vampire novel, DARK CHANGELING, conceived in embryonic form when I was thirteen or fourteen, went through multiple incarnations before I felt ready to submit it. After that, rejection feedback showed me its remaining flaws. Another extensive revision finally got it published. The protagonist, half-vampire psychiatrist Roger Darvell, continues to hold a special place in my heart. On the other hand, throughout that multi-decade process, I was writing and publishing other stuff, too.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

If We Could Do It Over Again

Recently, I've often pondered the question, "What if you could live your life over?" Many works of science fiction and fantasy explore this provocative idea, such as the 1986 movie PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED. Peggy Sue, disillusioned with her marriage, gets transported back to her senior year in high school. Her second chance, however, ends with her making the same decision as before, becoming engaged to her future husband just as she did on the first go-round. Would I take such a chance if offered? The prospect of avoiding so many past mistakes is attractive. OTOH, there are many things I would dread living through again, such as the hard work of getting through college and grad school And live one's life from what date? If I had to start over as a child (say, at the age of eight when my father remarried) with full memories of my first life, it would sound more like a nightmare than a gift. The idea of reliving childhood with an adult's mind -- and being treated as a child, with no significant power to affect events -- would be frustrating and depressing, I think. If I had to pick a "reset" point, I would probably choose to start over on the day after our wedding. But how could I convince my husband to make the desired changes? He'd think I was joking or crazy.

Anyway, in practice the memories would get fuzzy and confused after a while, so that one would eventually lose most of the advantage of hindsight/foresight (which would it be?). Maybe writing a detailed letter to oneself at an early age would work better; there's a country song about what advice the narrator would include in a message to himself at seventeen. With everything in writing, one couldn't forget the details with the passage of time. (How granular should one get, anyway? "Don't let that salesman in Albuquerque talk you into buying a sewing machine; it will be a waste of money.") But -- as soon as a few significant alterations were made, the past as I remembered it would go off the rails anyway. A shift in a day or two would mean different children would be conceived, rendering a lot of the memories moot. And changes might end up making things worse instead of better. Science fiction provides an abundance of cautionary tales about time travelers who try to "fix" the past and precipitate disasters instead (e.g., the protagonist of Stephen King's 11/22/63, on a mission to prevent President Kennedy's assassination).

On the whole, it may be better we can't do that. There's a TWILIGHT ZONE episode (based on a short story) about a rich man who wants the fun of returning to the prime of life and building his fortune all over again, so he strikes a deal with a demon. It turns out he doesn't enjoy the early 20th century as much as he thought he would on the basis of his rose-colored memories. Also, he keeps waiting to turn young again, which doesn't happen, so he dies of a heart attack (no modern medicine available). The demon appears to him and points out that he wanted to travel back to the time he remembered -- "Can we help it if your memory is lousy?" -- and he never mentioned having his youth restored. I'd probably tell the demon or genie, "No, thanks," and play the hand I've been dealt.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Art Versus Life

A work of art (specifically, literature, including poetry such as song lyrics) does not necessarily reveal the life or personality of the artist. Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers didn't make a habit of committing murders. Stephen King has probably never met a vampire or an extradimensional shapeshifter, and although he incorporated his near-fatal traffic accident into the Dark Tower series, I doubt he actually encountered his gunslinger Roland in person. Robert Bloch, reputed to have said he had the heart of a small boy -- in a jar on his desk -- was one of the nicest people I ever met. As Mercedes Lackey has commented on Quora, she doesn't keep a herd of magical white horses in her yard. Despite the preface to THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, it seems very unlikely that C. S. Lewis actually intercepted a bundle of correspondence between two demons. And, as a vampire specialist, I could go on at length (but I won't) about the literary-critical tendency to analyze DRACULA as a source for secrets about Bram Stoker's alleged psychological hangups.

C. S. Lewis labeled the practice of trying to discover a writer's background, character, or beliefs from his or her work "the personal heresy." Elsewhere, writing about Milton, he cautioned against thinking we can find out how Milton "really" felt about his blindness by reading PARADISE LOST or any of his other poetry.

The Personal Heresy

An article by hip-hop musician Keven Liles cautions against analyzing songs in this way and condemning singers based on the contents of their music, with lyrics "being presented as literal confessions in courtrooms across America":

Art Is Not Evidence

Some musicians and other artists have been convicted of crimes on the basis of words or images in their works. Liles urges passage of a law to protect creators' First Amendment rights in this regard, with narrowly defined "common-sense" exceptions to be applied if there's concrete evidence of a direct, factual connection between a particular work and a specific criminal act.

This kind of confusion between art and life is why I'm deeply suspicious of child pornography laws that would criminalize the broad category of "depicting" children in sexual situations. A description or drawing/painting of an imaginary child in such a situation, however revolting it may be, does no direct real-world harm. Interpreted loosely or capriciously, that kind of law could be read to ban a novel such as LOLITA. Would you really trust a fanatical book-banner or over-zealous prosecutor or judge to discern that the repulsive first-person narrator is thoroughly unreliable and that his self-serving claims about his abusive relationship with a preteen girl are MEANT to be disbelieved?

Many moons ago, in the pre-internet era, a friend of mine who wasn't a regular consumer of speculative fiction read my chapbook of horror-themed verse, DAYMARES FROM THE CRYPT. To my suprise, she expressed sincere worry about me for having such images in my head. Not being a habitual reader of the genre, she didn't recognize that the majority of stuff in the poems consisted of very conventional, widely known horror tropes. Even the more personal pieces had been filtered through the "lens" of creativity (as Liles puts it in his essay) to transmute the raw material into artifacts, not autobiography.

In case you'd like to check out these supposedly disturbing verse effusions, DAYMARES FROM THE CRYPT -- updated with a few later poems -- is available in a Kindle edition for only 99 cents, with a cool cover by Karen Wiesner:

Daymares

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Hooking Without Overwhelming

One of my publishers hosts weekly author chats. I recently read the transcript of a chat that warned against "overwhelming" the reader. Specifically, it discussed the hazard of overwhelming the reader in the opening scene of a book or story.

We know the importance of quickly hooking the agent, editor, or reader. We've heard that an agent or editor has to be reeled in with the first page or sometimes the first paragraph (depending on the giver of the advice) to avoid rejection. What pitfalls loom in that first look? By "overwhelming," the editors in the above-mentioned chat referred to inundating the reader with either unnecessary details or too many characters, especially named characters, right off the bat. The reader needs to know the setting (place and time), important details that "move the story along," and maybe a selection of secondary characters. Above all, the protagonist must be introduced in a way to make the reader care about her.

Another caution mentioned was not to plunge into an "action" scene right away. We need a reason to care what happens to the protagonist before seeing him or her in a crisis or life-threatening situation. A violent fight scene doesn't mean much if we don't know the participants or the stakes involved. The same principle applies to starting with a sex scene, unless writing erotica or erotic romance, and even then the scene will appear pointless if it doesn't reveal character and advance the story.

Before the inciting event, the big change in the protagonist's life, occurs, there should be a glimpse of her normal life, even if very brief. Especially if it's a violent or otherwise shocking event. I have slight reservations about this guideline. We could think of successful novels that deviate from it. One that leaps to mind for me is MISERY.

King's novel starts with the protagonist already injured from a car accident, waking to consciousness in the home of his "number one fan."

A big pitfall to avoid: Starting with backstory. The early pages should always move forward. Frontloading backstory is a besetting authorial sin of my own. I've read books by prominent authors that violate this one, too. A brief opening shows the hero in some dire plight. Then they answer the rhetorical question, "How did I get here?" with several chapters of backstory. Techniques like this probably shouldn't be tried until the author has attained a similar level of expertise and popularity.

One of my favorites of my own works, FROM THE DARK PLACES, originally started with the heroine's gazing at a photo of her late husband and immediately falling into a reverie that leads into a whole chapter about their meeting, their marriage, the birth of their daughter, and the husband's untimely death. Fortunately, I received and followed the advice, "Don't do that!" The book as published begins with present-day action and gradually weaves in, when appropriate, the only parts of the backstory the reader needs to know, the crisis birth and the husband's death.

My husband and I violated the "don't plunge straight into action" guideline in the second volume of our "Wild Sorceress" series by starting in the middle of a battle. In this case, I believe the problem is slightly mitigated by the fact that this is a sequel to a book any reader who buys the sequel has probably read. In the first volume, we transgressed a no-no the chat doesn't mention, starting with a dream sequence. In our defense, it's clearly a dream, not a bait-and-switch, and it has an immediate, clear bearing on what the character is now facing in real life. Still, I would probably resist doing it that way today. It also commits another alleged fault that many editors and readers detest, starting with a character waking up and preparing for her day.

One of my favorite bestselling fantasy authors begins a novel published a few years ago with a life-threatening battle that turns out to be a simulation! I'm astonished that the publisher let her get away with that blatant bait-and-switch!

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt

Mental Illness in Horror

The Horror Writers Association's monthly newsletter has started running a column about the treatment of mental illness in horror fiction -- how it's been done wrong in the past and how to do it realistically, sensitively, and compassionately. Too often in such stories, neurodivergent people or sufferers from mental and emotional disorders have appeared as stereotypically monstrous figures such as deranged serial killers. Yet it's hard to imagine the genre without Poe's neurotic or perhaps delusional narrators, Renfield in DRACULA, Lovecraft's protagonists driven mad by cosmic terrors, Robert Bloch's PSYCHO, and works such as Theodore Sturgeon's brilliant SOME OF YOUR BLOOD (a short epistolary novel featuring a rather pitiable blood-drinking sociopath, who, with only two exceptions, kills only small animals he hunts in the woods). THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS presents the sociopathic genius Dr. Hannibal Lecter, more of a fairy-tale monster with almost magical powers than a realistic criminal, and the serial killer "Buffalo Bill," murdering women to sew a "girl suit" out of their skins. The latter has been criticized for giving the toxic impression that transgender men are inherently unstable and probably dangerous. Lecter explicitly says "Bill" isn't really transgender and has been rejected by more than one sex change clinic (as the procedure was labeled at that time); nevertheless, the impression lingers.

There's little room to doubt that the innumerable fiction and film portrayals of people suffering from psychosis and other mental or emotional disorders as insane killers have negatively affected the public's distorted perception of actual human beings with similar problems. Also, the pulp fiction and horror film trope of the "mad scientist" probably reinforces too many people's distrust of real-life science nowadays, often with potentially disastrous real-world results.

As the panel discussion articles in the HWA newsletter point out, horror writers don't have to stop including mentally ill and neurodivergent characters in their works. Those characters can be drawn as three-dimensional figures with credible virtues and flaws, even if they're sometimes the antagonists in their stories.

I recently read Stephen King's latest novel, HOLLY, which I enjoyed very much. Like King himself, I've been fond of Holly ever since her first appearance in MR. MERCEDES. Through the rest of that trilogy, the spin-off novel THE OUTSIDER, and the novella "If It Bleeds," she has believably evolved as a character. When we first meet her, she's nervous, shy, perpetually anxious, and at least mildly obsessive-compulsive. Even then, her suppressed intelligence shines through. She also seems to be high-functioning autistic, although the texts never explicitly state that diagnosis. As seen in HOLLY, she has grown in confidence, competence, and bonding with people she has come to love, while her core personality remains the same. She still displays the same quirks, including that touch of OC, exacerbated by the need for COVID precautions. She's a well-rounded character whose strengths and weaknesses we can empathize with, yet a true hero when circumstances require. She strikes me as an outstanding example of a non-neurotypical protagonist done well.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

The Purpose of Horror

What is horror fiction (whether in print or on film) good for? My parents certainly took a dim view of my fervent interest in the genre, beginning at the age of twelve with my first reading of DRACULA. A familiar physiological or biochemical hypothesis proposes that reading or viewing horror serves the same purpose as riding a roller coaster. We enjoy the adrenaline rush of danger without having to expose ourselves to any real risk. Personally, I would never get on a roller coaster except at gunpoint, to save someone else's life, or to earn a lavish amount of money. I'm terrified of anything that feels like falling and don't like any kind of physical "thrill" experience. Yet I do enjoy the vicarious fears of the horror genre. Maybe real-life thrill rides or extreme sports feel too much like actual danger for my tolerance level, whereas artistic terror feels controllable.

H. P. Lovecraft famously asserts, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest fear is fear of the unknown." Therefore, horror is a legitimate subject for art, even though he believes its appeal is restricted to a niche audience. We might link Lovecraft's thesis to the physiological model, in that the feared unknown becomes manageable when confined within the boundaries of a story.

In DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King suggests that all horror fiction has roots in our fear of death. Embodying the threat of death in the form of a monster entails the hope that it can be defeated. I think it's in 'SALEM'S LOT that a child character says, "Death is when the monsters get you."

In an interview in the October 2022 LOCUS, author Sarah Gailey maintains that "horror is designed to put the reader in touch with an experience of the body, where that experience is one that they typically would not wish to have." Our culture separates body and mind from each other, while, Gailey says, "Horror serves to remind us that those things aren’t separate. The ‘I’ who I am is absolutely connected to the physical experience of my body and the danger that body could face in the world, and horror does an incredible job of reminding readers that we live in bodies, we live in the world, and we are creatures."

This comment reminds me of C. S. Lewis's remark that the truth of our nature as a union of both the spiritual and the physical could be deduced from the existence of dirty jokes and ghost stories. Bawdy humor implies that our having fleshly bodies is somehow funny, shameful, or incongruous. No other species of animal seems to find it funny just to be the kind of creature it is. Supernatural horror highlights the sense that separation of body and soul, which should form a single, unified entity, is deeply unnatural. Hence we get the extremes of zombies (soulless yet animated bodies) and ghosts (disembodied spirits).

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Current Events: To Write or Not to Write?

The website of WRITER'S DIGEST has an article about whether authors should include references to the COVID-19 pandemic in contemporary fiction:

Should We Write About the Pandemic in Fiction?

The author of the article explores whether it's "too soon" to write about the pandemic or whether readers (and writers) who are worn out after the past three years prefer not to have that weight added to their fictional experiences. "Who would want to read about the pandemic, we wondered, on top of living it? Could we even bear to write about it? Didn’t we all need one long vacation from the subject?" On the other side, she personally felt a need to process the ordeal through stories. "Books make difficulties a shared experience. When we read about something we’ve also lived through, we realize that, thankfully, the story is not just our own." Moreover, in her opinion a present-day novel that didn't mention the pandemic would feel unrealistic; the omission of that element would jarringly stand out.

Most important, for her, failing to mention COVID-19 in a novel with a contemporary setting would violate her duty as an author to write the truth. Leaving it out would falsify present-day reality as we know it.

She makes some good points. On the other hand, one of my publishers decided not to allow references to the pandemic in contemporary fiction, and I believe there are good reasons for their position. First, we hope and trust the pandemic won't last forever. Like the flu pandemic of the early 20th century, it will pass. The disease may (probably will) hang around in some form, but it won't continue to dominate our lives and consciousness. Therefore, including COVID-19 in a story or novel would date the work to a specific period of three or four years. Unless there's a solid plot or character reason to write the piece within that framework, why handicap it that way?

Also, more fundamentally, the pandemic, if mentioned, would overshadow the rest of the story. Any fictional work that includes COVID-19 would have to be in some way ABOUT the pandemic. In that sense, I believe it is "too soon" in the same sense that it's still too soon to mention the September 11 attacks as mere background detail. A novel or story including that event would have to be "about" 9-11, such as Stephen King's novella whose protagonist had escaped dying with his coworkers because he happened not to be at the office that day. I think we can, however, legitimately incorporate such related details as going through an airport security checkpoint, something that's now woven into the fabric of our culture. Likewise, at some point in the future after COVID-19 recedes into the background as an annual nuisance like the flu, if people continue to wear masks in medical settings (for instance) that kind of thing could be casually mentioned in contemporary fiction.

What do you think about referencing contemporary real-life events in fiction set in the present day?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Ranking Dangers

The March-April issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER contains an article titled "The World's Most Deadly Animal," by Harriet Hall. The various candidates for this honor are ranked by the number of human beings they kill annually. A character in Robert Heinlein's TUNNEL IN THE SKY declares humans to be the deadliest animals. The villain in Richard Connell's classic short story "The Most Dangerous Game," who hunts his captives like wild beasts, would agree. Hall's list of the top ten most dangerous animals comes from this source:

Science Focus

Sharks and black widow spiders, which many people might think of when "deadly creatures" come to mind, don't even make it into the top ten. Lions do, barely, at the bottom. Hippos, elephants, and crocodiles beat them. The human animal (counting only homicides) rates second rather than first. The deadliest animal on Earth as quantified by people killed every year? The mosquito.

As Hall points out at the beginning of her article, our tendency to overlook mosquitoes and another high-ranking insect, the assassin bug, highlights the "availability heuristic." Facts and incidents that stick in our minds because of their sensational content tend to be perceived as more common than they actually are. There's a widespread attitude of, "Why is it getting so hot, and how did we get into this handbasket?" when in fact teenage pregnancy, adolescent illicit drug use, violent crime, drunk driving fatalities, and the worldwide number of deaths in battle have all decreased over the past few decades. We sometimes forget that frightening incidents and trends make headlines BECAUSE they're unusual, not commonplace. The occasional shark attack draws much more attention than thousands of malaria-causing mosquito bites.

Steven Pinker, in the section on phobias in his book HOW THE MIND WORKS, postulates that adult phobias are instinctive childhood fears that haven't been outgrown. These universal fears, which fall into certain well-defined categories, reflect the threats most hazardous to our "evolutionary ancestors"—snakes, spiders, heights, storms, large carnivores, darkness, blood, strangers, confinement, social scrutiny, and leaving home alone. In modern cities, the brain's fear circuitry often fails to function for optimal protection. "We ought to be afraid of guns, driving fast, driving without a seatbelt. . . not of snakes and spiders." Children have no innate aversion to playing with matches or chasing balls into traffic; instead, a survey of Chicago school kids revealed their greatest fears to be of lions, tigers, and snakes. Many writers of horror fiction draw upon intuitive awareness of our hard-wired terrors. The cosmic entity in Stephen King's IT targets children because, while adults obsess over mundane hazards such as heart attacks and financial ruin, children's fears run deeper and purer.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Presently Tense

Does anybody really like fiction narrated in the present tense? Apparently, to my bafflement, many people actually do, since that device seems to be a currently popular fad. Not only do authors write it, lots of editors accept it. Of the two most recent Ellen Datlow anthologies I read, each contains multiple present-tense selections. The January-February issue of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, which I just finished reading, includes twelve stories, of which five are told in present tense. To skew the balance further, one of those is the longest piece in the issue. Only one story strikes me as possibly justified in its narrative choice, being framed as a sequence of day-by-day news-as-it-unfolds reports.

Many years ago, I read a horror novella that enthralled me except for one feature: It was written in present tense and second person. "You walk to the top of the barren hill and find the ruins of an ancient stone circle. . . ." kind of thing. (Just an example, not a quote. The bizarre narrative style is the only specific thing I recall.) I've seen second-person-present-tense work very effectively in an occasional short story. At novella length, it was excruciating. An author I follow on Facebook dislikes present-tense fiction so thoroughly that it's an automatic downcheck for her. While I don't go that far, in my opinion present tense has only a limited justifiable use. It works well in the aforementioned rare short stories in second person. And if an author wants to leave open the possibility of a first-person protagonist's death, present tense can discourage the reader from meta-thinking along the lines of, "He can't die, because he's telling what happened in the past." (Only in a short story, though, not inflicted on us for the length of a novel or even a novella.) There are few other circumstances in which present-tense narrative doesn't annoy me. Sometimes it makes sense when used to distinguish current action from flashbacks, as Stephen King does in his recent thriller BILLY SUMMERS. I didn't mind it too much in that book, although I don't think it was necessary.

Why do fiction writers use present tense? I assume the idea is that telling the tale as if it's happening at this moment is supposed to enhance suspense or create a feeling of immediacy. It's probably meant to give the audience a sense of being immersed in the action. In my experience as a reader, that style has the opposite effect. Present-tense narration draws attention to itself and away from the story. It most often generates distance rather than emotional involvement. Conventional past-tense storytelling is "transparent" because it's what we've been conditioned to expect. When reading, we look through it, not at it. My advice, for what it's worth: As a writer, don't mess with what traditionally works unless you have a strong, specific reason for the change.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Human Domestication

Here's a cartoon, funny in a slightly warped way, about the alleged negative consequences of Homo sapiens domesticating ourselves in the course of our evolution:

Yappy Lapdog Phase

Of course, the complainer's argument can be countered by the observation that tall, attractive people skilled at slaying lions aren't best suited to our present-day milieu. Contrary to popular belief, "survival of the fittest" doesn't necessarily (or even frequently) mean the dominance of the individual or group that can win a physical fight. "Fitness" refers to optimal adaptation to one's environment. For a social species such as ours, that environment is composed in large part of other people.

An article on human "domestication," with comparisons to the differences in personality between chimpanzees and bonobos:

How Humans Domesticated Themselves

In short, chimps are the more aggressive of the two species. Bonobos (formerly known as "pygmy chimpanzees") base their social structure more on peaceful interactions, often sexual. Not that regular chimps don't display cooperative, affectionate behavior, of course, but bonobos may be thought of as the more "domesticated" primates. While male bonobos can be aggressive, the females tend to keep them in check, an appealing example of gender balance among our closest animal relatives. The "friendliest male bonobos" are likelier to succeed than those who make enemies through aggressive dominance and have to stay on guard all the time, not to mention facing the disapproval of the females—a primate analogy to the concept of women's role in "civilizing" men, as in the nineteenth-century American West, maybe?

An anthropologist quoted in the article applies this premise to a variety of species (even plants, which cooperate with insects to spread pollen), including our own: "When you look back in nature and see when a species or group of species underwent a major transition or succeeded in a new way, friendliness or an increase in cooperation are typically part of that story." The article doesn't gloss over the dark side of human community-building, however. One method of enhancing cohesion within a group, sadly, is to capitalize on suspicion of other people from different groups. To overcome this inbuilt tendency to prejudice, we need to resist the temptation to "dehumanize" others who differ from ourselves.

Reverting to the cartoon character's complaint about humanity devolving from lion-slayers to accountants, consider Andy Dufresne, a banker, the unjustly condemned protagonist of Stephen King's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" (filmed as SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION): Andy isn't physically suited to fighting off the bullies and sexual predators among his fellow inmates (although he makes a valiant effort and sometimes succeeds). But his intelligence, quick wit, and financial expertise enable him to make himself indispensable to the guards and the warden, thus ensuring his survival and relative safety in the jungle-like environment of the prison.

Even before modern Homo sapiens evolved, evidence shows that some hominids took care of physically disabled members of their tribe, a clear indication that ever since we began to "domesticate" ourselves, attributes other than lion-slaying prowess have been valued.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Book-Love in a Time of Cholera

That's the title of Brian Attebery's introduction to the latest issue of the JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS. He discusses how a reader's experience of literature changes under the influence of real-life circumstances, offering a different angle on the topic of my previous post. Attebery remarks that reading in the shadow of COVID-19 feels "rather like getting messages from an alternate timeline in which people still. . . count on health, employment, and a predictable future." He reminds us that whenever we reread a text, in a sense we're reading a different book, because "works of literature are never merely or entirely themselves" but instead "products of an interaction between text and reader."

The pandemic has inevitably brought Stephen King's THE STAND to the forefront of many readers' minds. Someone on a list I subscribe to recently said of COVID-19, "This isn't Captain Trips." All SF and horror fans would instantly recognize that allusion. Even though King's novel is decades old, current events give it fresh resonance and meaning. Some readers may find a similar relevance in Connie Willis's DOOMSDAY BOOK, in which the heroine time-travels from mid-twenty-first century Oxford to the time of the Black Death in fourteenth-century England. Although she gets stranded in an alien era, surrounded by the ravages of the plague, she and the reader know the hope represented by the distant future from which she comes. Even the worst disasters don't last forever.

Paul Tremblay's SURVIVOR SONG, published in July of this year, seems eerily appropriate to the current crisis. Given the lead times in traditional publishing, however, it must have been written well before the pandemic became known. Here's the first paragraph of the novel's summary on Amazon:

"In a matter of weeks, Massachusetts has been overrun by an insidious rabies-like virus that is spread by saliva. But unlike rabies, the disease has a terrifyingly short incubation period of an hour or less. Those infected quickly lose their minds and are driven to bite and infect as many others as they can before they inevitably succumb. Hospitals are inundated with the sick and dying, and hysteria has taken hold. To try to limit its spread, the commonwealth is under quarantine and curfew. But society is breaking down and the government's emergency protocols are faltering."

The story maintains a tight focus on a small group of characters trying to get one of them, a pregnant woman in labor, to a hospital that has room for her to give birth. Along the way, we witness the near-total breakdown of social norms surrounding islands of refuge, such as hospitals and clinics, where people struggle frantically to provide aid in the midst of chaos. In an odd way, this story offers the comfort—like DOOMSDAY BOOK—that we aren't anywhere nearly so bad off as THAT. Also, the epilogue, set years later, portrays a society that has completely recovered. Tremblay's virus, unlike COVID-19, doesn't produce a "slow catastrophe." Because of the violent symptoms and short incubation time, its epidemic flares up and burns out quickly.

As Attebery's essay points out, events such as the present crisis may also evoke new meanings from fictional works that seem on the surface to have only a tangential resemblance to real-life circumstances (e.g., stories of isolation).

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Horror as a Coping Mechanism

It comes as no surprise to me that a recent psychological study suggests horror fans may be uniquely well prepared to confront scary realities:

Horror Fans Prepared to Cope with Our New Reality

"How does horror teach us?" One authority quoted in the essay says, “What’s special about horror is that the genre lets us chart the dark areas of that landscape [of hypothetical frightening scenarios] — the pits of terror and the caves of despair.” Horror fiction serves as rehearsal for confronting our real-life fears. Its function as "catharsis" is also discussed. Moreover, its monsters and other threats often work as metaphors for societal anxieties. The familiar example of Romero's undead in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is cited as reflecting the "existential" fears of its time.

In his history of horror, DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King argues that all such fiction is ultimately designed to grapple with the fear of death. Death is "when the monsters get you." This essay mentions King's PET SEMATARY as a story that explores the potentially tragic consequences of evading the reality of death.

One of the study's co-authors praises the "prosocial" dimension of horror. “Horror fiction is very often about prosocial, altruistic, self-effacing characters confronting selfish, anti-social evil." Much classic horror focuses on good versus evil, with the heroes working together to defeat the monsters. DRACULA and the majority of vampire fiction inspired by it offer obvious examples. Of course, not all horror follows this pattern. Sometimes it's bleak and hopeless, with no objective "good" or "evil" in the universe, as in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories, in which protagonists who survive usually do so by sheer luck. However, even horror without the religious or spiritual worldview of a vampire tale wherein heroes brandish crosses or King's IT, wherein the heroes know "the Turtle can't help us" yet draw upon a still higher power beyond both It and the Turtle, can showcase the bonds among human beings who fight together against larger-than-life threats.

Therefore, I've always thought it's strange that some people consider reading, watching, or (gasp!) writing horror a symptom of a warped psyche.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Dislikable Characters

What does it take to turn you off fictional characters so thoroughly you don't want to read about them? Even if I dislike some aspects of a protagonist, that's not necessarily a downcheck for the story as a whole if it engages me otherwise. Scarlett O'Hara is far from a nice person, yet I sympathize with her despite her flaws and have reread GONE WITH THE WIND many times. Any character who constantly and indiscriminately peppers his or her conversation with words formerly called "unprintable" (as opposed to using them for emphasis when the situation justifies them) repels me. I detest this habit in Stephen King's early novels, but I find those works so fascinating in general that I put up with the annoyance.

I just finished reading a well-written, emotionally credible ghost story in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. The protagonist, a middle-aged divorced man, sees not only the ghosts of his parents but "wraiths of the living" in the form of apparitions of his ex-wife and their son. The man's unhappiness and his increasing estrangement from the people around him make the story painfully depressing to read, although still effective in its way. The character loses my sympathy, however, when he collects his mother's personal effects from the nursing home and decides to throw away the family photograph.

One of my favorite mystery authors, best known for her dog-themed mysteries, also collaborated on a food-themed detective series. I was so disappointed in the first novel that I never gave the sequels a chance. Two reasons: The protagonist, a young, single woman, inherits money from a relative on condition that she go to graduate school. Instead of rejoicing in the opportunity, she chooses a major, not on the basis of interest—she has no apparent interest in furthering her education in any field—but on the principle of taking the easiest subject she can find in order to get the money. Also, while preparing for a first date with a man she hasn't even met yet, she seriously considers having sex with him. That strikes me as so dumb I couldn't believe in the character, much less like her. Those personal aversions of mine might not even register on the mental radar of a different reader.

Characters who display consistently negative reactions to situations and people turn me off. If the viewpoint character constantly spouts snarky insults, whether aloud or through internal monologue, the writer may intend for the reader to admire her clever wit and sympathize with her grievances. I react, instead, by assuming that if the character dislikes or disdains everybody and everything, there's something wrong with him or her, not with the other people. I once read a horror story about which I recall very little except that it began with the middle-aged, male protagonist lingering over late-night TV to avoid sex with his wife, who had recently developed a renewed zest for it. That glimpse into his mind was enough to make me loathe the character.

I don't mind reading a short story or possibly a novella focused on an unlikable protagonist, if the work has other virtues to hold my attention. I refuse to endure a whole book with such a character, though, unless the story exerts an irresistible fascination for some other reason. For instance, a certain bestselling series about a solitary, embittered man swept into an epic fantasy realm was a very hard sell for me; the protagonist struck me as so unpleasant and depressing that only the strength of the worldbuilding prevented me from giving up on him.

For me to willingly spend an entire novel, trilogy, or series in the mind of a person I would avoid in real life, the work needs to have other enthralling qualities to make up for the unpleasantness. Where do you draw the line with unlikable characters?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Worlds with Depth

The Fall/Winter issue of MYTHLORE includes an article by Katherine Sas on creating the "impression of depth" in a work of fiction (specifically, in this case, in the backstory of the Marauders in the Harry Potter series), a term coined by Tolkien in his classic essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." One of my favorite themes in fiction is the overshadowing of the present by the deep past. That's one reason I find Stephen King's IT enthralling, a feature that the new movie tries to present a bit better than the old miniseries, but still not adequately. So I'm glad to have an official name for this theme. Sas herself paraphrases this effect as "a sense of antiquity and historical reality."

The essence of the "impression of depth" consists of a feeling that the author "knows more than he [or she] is telling." Tolkien refers to the creation of "an illusion of surveying a past...that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity." He mentions the crafting of this effect in BEOWULF by "allusions to old tales." In his own work, Tolkien uses invented languages, frame narratives, references to ancient tales and lost texts, and "hypertextual layering" (i.e., metafictional features that draw attention to the text as an artifact). Such techniques produce the illusion of a world that has existed for a vast expanse of time before the present action and contains places, peoples, and events glimpsed at the edges of the main story.

Within a more limited physical setting, King's IT creates an illusion of deep time by the gradual revelation of how the monster originally introduced as merely a supernatural killer clown has haunted Derry since the town's founding—revealed by Mike's research into the generational cycle of the entity's periodic return and hibernation—and, eons before human settlement, came through interstellar space from an alien dimension. Likewise, the TV series SUPERNATURAL begins on a small-scale, personal level and expands to encompass an entire cosmology. At the beginning of the series, all we know about the background of Sam and Dean Winchester is that their father is a "Hunter" (of demons and other monsters) and that their mother died in a horrific supernatural attack when Sam was a baby. The brothers themselves know little more. We, and they, soon learn that their father made a deal with a demon. Eventually it's revealed that Sam and Dean were destined from infancy, not to save the world, but to serve as "vessels" for divine and diabolical entities. As they strive to assert their free will against this destiny, they uncover secrets of their family's past and the worldwide organization of Hunters (along with its research auxiliary branch, the Men of Letters), they clash (and sometimes ally) with demons, angels, pagan deities, and Death incarnate, and, incidentally, they do save the world and visit Hell and Purgatory several times. They learn the real nature and purposes of Heaven, Hell, and God Himself. The hypertextual (metafictional) aspect of the series is highlighted in episodes such as a visit to an alternate universe where the brothers are characters in a TV show and their discovery that a comic-book artist who turns out to be a prophet (as they believe until he's revealed as the very incarnation of God) has published a series that chronicles their adventures.

Tolkien's colleague and close friend C. S. Lewis reflects on the literary impression of depth in two articles reprinted in his collection SELECTED LITERARY ESSAYS, "Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism" and "The Anthropological Approach." In both pieces, he concludes that the ideas of hidden, half-forgotten, multi-layered dimensions in place or time and disguised remnants preserved from the ancient past are alluring in themselves. We're fascinated by the suggestion of "the far-borne echo, the last surviving trace, the tantalizing glimpse, the veiled presence, of something else. And the something else is always located in a remote region, 'dim-discovered,' hard of access." We're thrilled to enter "a world where everything may, and most things do, have a deeper meaning and a longer history" than expected. Many readers (although admittedly not all) enjoy the idea "that they have surprised a long-kept secret, that there are depths below the surface." Tolkien's exposition of this effect, as well as the creation of it by him and other authors who use similar strategies, offers valuable hints to writers who want to produce that kind of impression.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Deep Time

The September 2019 issue of the SMITHSONIAN magazine contains two articles I found especially interesting.

"The Homecoming": An ancient skeleton of an Australian aborigine is returned to his people for ceremonial reburial. This individual, known as Mungo Man, lived about 40,000 years ago, one of the oldest specimens of Homo sapiens found outside of Africa. Previously, conventional wisdom maintained that the aborigines had migrated to Australia at most 20,000 years ago. Current estimates place the arrival of human inhabitants between 47,000 and 65,000 years ago. By contrast, the earliest known Egyptian pyramid is less than 5000 years old.

"Saturn's Surprise": The water ice that makes up the rings of Saturn is raining down onto the planet, so that the rings will eventually cease to exist. They may disappear in "only" 100 million years—eons compared to the length of time anatomically modern human beings have existed, about 200,000 years, but a minute fraction of the estimated 4.5-billion-year life of the solar system.

Yet another SMITHSONIAN article delving into relative antiquity, "The New Treasures of Pompeii," reports the latest investigations of a Roman city destroyed by a volcanic eruption less than 2000 years ago, in 79 A.D. That's nothing compared to the age of Mungo Man but a long time in the perception of most Americans, for whom the 400-year-old Jamestown settlement seems ancient.

Both the article on Mungo Man and the one on Saturn highlight the vast expanses of time (contrasted with a single human life, anyway) covered by the history of our species and the unimaginably longer history of our solar system, not to mention the universe as a whole.

How would an immortal alien, or even one with a lifespan measured in millions of years, regard us? Would we be able to communicate with such an entity at all? Mark Twain, in a passage included in the posthumous collection LETTERS FROM THE EARTH, sardonically compares the lifespan of the human race in the context of the history of the cosmos to the thin layer of paint atop the Eiffel Tower, with the tower representing the age of the universe. Twain asks how we can believe ourselves to be the pinnacle of creation. That's like believing the entire tower was built for the sake of the skin of paint on the top. Maybe an incredibly long-lived species would see us that way. On the other hand, maybe a million-year-old intellect would view tiny, ephemeral creatures with compassion.

The immortal, cosmic, transdimensional entity in Stephen King's IT (the second half of the film adaptation comes out this week) finds human beings interesting enough to torture and feed on. Let's hope that if similar entities exist and we eventually meet them, they will have matured beyond a sadistic appetite for the fear and pain of lesser beings.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Alternate Timelines

One of my favorite authors, S. M. Stirling, recently launched a new alternate-history series with BLACK CHAMBER, published in July of this year. His website has begun displaying sample chapters from the first sequel, due in spring of 2019. Reading them started me thinking about the effects small or large changes might have on the historical timeline. The POD (point of departure) for the Black Chamber universe—the moment when it diverges from our reality—occurs in 1912, when President Taft dies prematurely and Theodore Roosevelt returns to the White House (instead of Woodrow Wilson becoming President). With no constitutional term limits for the presidency at that time, Roosevelt has free rein to shape the nation according to his principles. Not only the circumstances of U.S. involvement in World War I but the direction of the entire twentieth century will change. The main story line of the novel begins in 1916.

If you could go back in time and alter the twentieth century for the better, what single action would you take? Killing Hitler before he can do any damage immediately springs to mind, of course. However, aside from the ethical problem of murdering a person who hasn't yet committed evil deeds, killing Hitler never works. TV Tropes even has a page on this topic, "Hitler's time-travel exemption." One example: In an episode of the later incarnation of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, a time traveler from the future installs herself as a servant in the household of Hitler's parents. She finally manages to kill baby Adolf along with herself. The nursery maid, however, is so terrified of Herr Hitler's probable reaction to the loss of his son that she substitutes a look-alike infant taken from a beggar woman. So history still plays out with an Adolf Hitler, just not the original one. Nonviolent ways of eliminating Hitler might work, such as preventing his parents from meeting, kidnapping the baby and having him adopted by a nice English couple, or giving young Adolf a scholarship to art school. Would forestalling his political career actually prevent the war, though? Some authors speculate that, given the conditions of post-World-War-I Europe, the Nazi Party would come to power anyway with a different, possibly worse tyrant in charge.

Arguably, the most productive single thing you could do to avert the catastrophic events of the twentieth century would be to go to Sarajevo in 1914 and arrange for Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car to be re-routed so the assassin would never have a chance to shoot him. But would the erasure of the assassination definitely prevent the Great War? The nations of Europe, with their weapons development and entangled alliances, had been building toward that conflict for decades. It's not unlikely that some other spark would have set off the conflagration anyway. Various speculative fiction authors disagree about the ease of altering the timeline. Do we embrace the "Great Man" theory, where the removal of one person makes all the difference? Or do we lean toward Heinlein's position that "when it's time for railroads, people will railroad"? In Stephen King's novel about a time traveler who tries to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy, saving Kennedy creates a major disruption in the flow of history, but not for the better.

Jo Walton's fascinating novel MY REAL CHILDREN takes a unique approach to the theme. The protagonist, as an old woman in a nursing home, remembers two different lives in two worlds (neither of them our own timeline). In one, the more prosperous and peaceful version of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, she suffers through an unhappy marriage. In the other timeline, which verges on dystopia, she has a generally happy life. If she has the power to make one of them definitively "real," which should she choose?

In most of Heinlein's time-travel fiction, he reveals that no change actually occurs, because the traveler's actions simply bring about what was destined to happen anyway. The past as we know it already includes whatever input we contribute—as in, for instance, THE DOOR INTO SUMMER. Some other writers postulate that history inevitably tries to repair itself when "damaged." Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series illustrates the elasticity of the timeline. Claire (a visitor to the eighteenth century from the twentieth) and her husband Jamie can make small changes, but all their attempts to prevent or mitigate Bonnie Prince Charlie's disastrous 1745 campaign fail. The ultimate example of this principle may be "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," by Alfred Bester. The time traveler assassinates a series of successively more important personages without ever managing to make a permanent mark on the past.

The opposite approach postulates that the slightest change will have vast consequences—the "butterfly effect." Appropriately, Ray Bradbury provided the classic example of this theory in "A Sound of Thunder," when a member of a tourist group traveling to the age of the dinosaurs alters his own future by accidentally killing a butterfly. The trouble with this story, alas, is that if a small change that far back could shift the entire direction of history, by the traveler's present day the alterations would have snowballed to such an extent that his native time would become unrecognizable, not just subtly distorted toward a dystopian outcome. On the same principle, consider the many alternate-history stories whose authors introduce famous people from the past in different roles from their real-life ones. Actually, depending on how far back the POD occurs, random alterations in meetings, matings, and conceptions would ensure that most if not all of those people would never be born. But what fun for writers and readers would that be?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Value of Horror

"Horror Is Good for You (and Even Better for Your Kids)," according to Greg Ruth. I wish I'd had this article to show to my parents when I was a thirteen-year-old horror fanatic and aspiring writer, and they disapproved of my reading "that junk" (not that they'd have paid any attention):

Horror Is Good for You

Greg Ruth leads off with a tribute to Ray Bradbury, who was my own idol in my teens—based on his early works collected in such books as THE OCTOBER COUNTRY, full of shivery, deeply stirring, poetic stories. Here is Ruth's list of reasons in defense of horror's value for children. Read the article for his full explanation of each:

(1) Childhood is scary. (2) Power to the powerless. (3) Horror is ancient and real and can teach us much. (4) Horror confirms secret truths. (5) Sharing scary stories brings people together. (6) Hidden inside horror are the facts of life.

The article ends with, "The parents that find this so inappropriate are under the illusion that if they don’t ever let their kids know any of this stuff [the terrors of real life], they won’t have bad dreams or be afraid—not knowing that, tragically, they are just making them more vulnerable to fear. Let the kids follow their interests, but be a good guardian rather than an oppressive guard. Only adults are under the delusion that childhood is a fairy rainbow fantasy land: just let your kids lead on what they love, and you’ll be fine."

Stephen King's fiction often highlights the connection between childhood and the primal, timeless fears haunt the human species. Particularly in IT (which I recently saw the excellent new movie of), King's central theme focuses on the power of childhood's imagination, a wellspring not only of fear but of the strength to overcome it. The boy hero Mark in 'SALEM'S LOT realizes, "Death is when the monsters get you." In his nonfiction book DANSE MACABRE, King offers the opinion that all horror fiction is, at its root, a means of coming to terms with death.

Ruth's defense of horror reminds me of C. S. Lewis's comments, in "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," about the mistaken belief of some adults that fairy tales are too scary for children. Lewis says it's wrongheaded to try to protect children from the fact that they are "born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil." That would indeed be "escapism in the bad sense." He goes on, "Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. . . . And I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable. . . . if he is going to be frightened, I think it better that he should think of giants and dragons than merely of burglars. And I think St. George, or any bright champion in armour, is a better comforter than the idea of the police."

I might add that, in my opinion, the best supernatural horror (which is the type I mainly think of when contemplating the genre) has a numinous quality. In a secular age, human beings still crave something that transcends the mundane and merely physical. It's no accident that the Gothic novel was invented during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and the peak of the classic ghost story occurred during the industrialized, science-minded late Victorian era (along with a craze for seances and psychic research in real life). Ghosts, vampires, etc. feed our yearning for and curiosity about life beyond death, even if they frighten us at the same time.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

IT on FIlm

I watched the theatrical movie of Stephen King's IT this week (more precisely, "IT: Chapter One"). To me, whether a film adapted from a book is "good" or not depends a lot on its fidelity to the source. In preparation for seeing this movie, not long ago I re-watched the TV miniseries and reread parts of the novel. So what did I like about the new movie? And which makes the better adaptation, the movie or the miniseries?

Good points of the film: The bonds among the seven kids in the "Losers' Club." The miniseries did this aspect well, too, IMO. The lovely scenery and contrastingly horrific special effects. The Gothic environment of the decaying, cobweb-infested Well House and the labyrinthine tunnels below, culminating in the lair of It (the only place we get a glimpse of the true extent of Its otherworldly power, as illustrated by the eerie image of the floating children). The chilling moments when adults witness attacks on the children, by either mundane bullies or supernatural forces, and react with blank gazes, then deliberately turn away.

What the miniseries did better: Having more time to work with, it developed all seven of the child characters more thoroughly. The climax showed It in Its spider form, which the movie doesn't, although the TV episode rendered that scene so inadequately that many viewers dismissed the creature as disappointingly "oh, just a giant spider." (The other-dimensional essence of which the spider is only a projection was completely omitted.) The series wove together the past and present, as in the book, so we see the children's experiences as the gradually re-awakened memories of their adult selves. Granted, if the movie had been structured that way, viewers might have found it confusing, especially since "Chapter Two," the adults' return to Derry, is apparently not going to appear until 2019!

Drawbacks of the new film: Again, the cosmic dimension is totally absent. We don't see the vision that reveals Its other-dimensional origin, when it came not "from space" but "through space" in the prehistoric past (a clear homage to Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space"). I've read a hint that this scene may appear in the second movie. I hope so, because without it so much of the story is missing. We do see one glimpse of the "deadlights," but viewers who haven't read the book won't get the allusion. In general, the Derry backstory that gives the novel such depth is covered too briefly in the film for my taste.

As reviewers have noted, the movie doesn't have time to develop all seven of the children as fully as desirable. In particular, I was disappointed that their individual methods of fighting It are almost completely neglected. What happened to Eddie's asthma inhaler shooting "acid," Stan's invocation of the bird names from his birdwatching guide, or Bill's preternaturally fast rides on his bike, Silver? (The miniseries included some of that.) Particularly, the character of Stan as the obdurate rationalist, who regards the supernatural as an unbearable "offense," needs better development. In the film version, he simply keeps repeating, "This isn't real." I was also sorry not to see Beverly's slingshot with the homemade silver bullets.

Beverly is a bit too old. In the book, she's on the verge of puberty, not yet there. One of the novel's major themes is belief. Children are especially vulnerable to It because they're still young enough to believe in the supernatural and suffer the simple, primal fears It feeds upon. That same capacity for belief, however, gives them the ability to destroy It, while adults wouldn't be able to. Therefore, it's important that Beverly remain on the "child" side of the line along with the boys. The central problem of the present-day story is whether they can resurrect not only the bonds that united them in childhood but also the power of belief that they've lost with maturity.

On the whole, I was pleased enough with the movie to plan to buy the DVD when it becomes available and look forward to the second half. But having to wait two years? Really?! Aren't the producers concerned that the prospective audience, at least the majority that aren't hardcore King fans, will lose interest by then? Or at least forget the details of the first half?

In case you'd like to read my essay in STRANGE HORIZONS on Lovecraftian motifs in IT, here it is:

The Turtle Can't Help Us

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt