The Return of the Ghost: Hauntology, Hontology & the Art of Growing Good Horror From Dead Things Today

It has long been surmised by the Literary Establishment as well as much of our genre establishment that the best of the ghost story is behind us.

“Authority” after “authority” has said so. Yet since the 1980s, there has been a growing American fascination with ghosts in general that is eerily reminiscent of that early twentieth century fixation on seances and spiritualism. From talk shows featuring modern-day mediums to Hollywood offerings that range from comedy to romance to outright Horror, right down to ghost hunters and fascination with demonology and witchcraft… we have become obsessed with ghosts.

Isn’t it ironic that we seem unable to capitalize on this successfully in the genre? And why is it that so many other academic researchers outside of Literature have seen the obvious and are actually studying the phenomenon?

Maybe it is time to wake up – to see with open eyes what these other academics are seeing:

That our obsession and preoccupation with ghosts is all about our national heritage and the subtext of our reinvented history.

That ghosts are Literary business. And it is no wonder a great ghost story is so hard to write even when we are bursting with personal demons.

Hauntology and Hontology: the Future is Cancelled

One of the most interesting discoveries to make about the Horror genre is that Horror is complex in its primordial roots. Horror is not just about urban legends and folklore and paperback terrors – indeed Horror is all about philosophy, biology, brain science, social science, chemistry, physics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history and religion. And in every one of these academic subjects lies a research angle or two that draws inference from Horror and our invention, use of, and reaction to it.

We don’t have to flirt with haunted houses or seances or EMF meters chasing rumors of spirits to be drawn to the subject matter – to ask apart from religious association if ghosts are “real” and if so what their presence means. We don’t have to dissect and catalog the types of ghosts and hauntings to be captivated and disturbed by the idea of their presence. Yet we have been doing this in increasingly commercial ways since the 1980s, rationalizing that we are not at all incorporating “deep” religious questions into our own investigations which we proclaim are objectively scientific or cloaked in simple “curiosity”… We have been operating under the pretense that we ourselves have no secrets, and that our “interest” in the subject matter is exploited purely for the sake of entertainment.

Whether we are talking about paperback plots or haunted asylums, we posit a curious divestment from the subject matter of ghosts and the bigger questions they represent.

But that is not how historians and philosophers in particular are seeing this fascination with the paranormal.

Forget psychology and religion. These folks are associating a concurrent rise in ghost-busting with an international rise in political populism and  Black Lives Matter… In the cultural global phenomenon of cancelling the future in the effort to glorify and reclaim a reinvented past rife with – not ghost stories – but the real thing: Horror.

So how is this connected – this seemingly unrelated pursuit of proving or disproving ghosts and who we elect as President of the United States or Prime Minister of the UK, or ruler of a China or Russia?

The answer – as Mark Payne put it – is our collective “shame of life.” Payne, a professor in the Department of Classics and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, explains: that “shame is the route by which we access the capabilities for living that are abrogated in modernity. This is the hontology of my [book] title, as opposed to the hauntology that Fisher took up… that it is the loss of the New World as a horizon in which these abrogated capabilities were still in play, and the inhabitants of the New World as presenting forms of life before which Europeans felt shame in comparison with their own…” (Payne 1)

In other words, all of that American Exceptionalism that we have pushed at each other nationally and internationally, has led to all of us feeling not only inadequate in these times of global economic and historic and social challenge, but has led us to rely on historic narratives of shady origin to begin with. We find ourselves competing with a mythology even as we attempt to reconstruct it in its own image. We are desperate for a semblance of stability we believe past generations have had, when in fact past generations were simply too (willingly or intentionally) socially isolated to compare notes about reality.

And as any ghost story lover can tell you, what we believe about reality means everything.

“Shame – la honte” is a term derived from French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s 1993 lectures on Marx and Marxism, in which the title of the collection (The Spectres of Marx) refers to a statement by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto that a “spectre [is] haunting Europe.” Payne then asks, “What is this specter-ridden Europe?” And his argument is that shame lies somewhere in between the hegemony (leadership and dominance) of the United States with its own foundation resting on a repurposing of its indigenous peoples and an original (and borrowed) history from Europe that has resulted in a simple reinvention of the same Europe its founders had left…repeating the same sins from European pasts while proclaiming… well… alternative facts. And furthermore that the consequence of this reinvention has led (over time) to the realization that the lives we are living “is not really life.”  (2)

We have then a great need to keep our mythologies about – for instance – cowboys and Indians alive in our imaginations. We Americans need the fantasy of true freedom, true democracy, of feeling what it is to truly live every moment “to its fullest” by selectively remembering only the adrenaline of success of the hunt, or in war, in overcoming death. We romanticize a history that is neither true nor viable in order to live vicariously through those images.

This is why we have to keep Native Americans culturally “dead.” If they are “alive,” they challenge the carefully crafted myth of freedom… from Chief Wahoo to Thanksgiving.

We have, in our fictionalized American lives, repurposed Native ones for our own use – supplanting indigenous peoples and making our real indigenous people superfluous, redundant, and strangely disingenuous. Says Joshua T. Anderson in an essay from Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre: “Carol Clover suggests there is a ‘special connection between the country folk of the urbanoia [or city-revenge] films,’ such as The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, ‘and the Indians of the settler-versus-Indian western.’ As Clover elaborates, ‘In these stories both redneck and redskin are figured as indigenous peoples on the verge of being deprived of their native lands,’ suggesting that ‘the rednecks of modern horror even look and act like movie Indians…” (Weird  132)

Here not only have we eviscerated that freedom, but we have devoured the dead and become one with the delusion. We have absorbed democracy – not practiced it. The American cowboy represents that ‘rugged’ individualism we value in our cookie-cutter understanding of our indigenous populations, that sense of imagined democracy in which we allegedly ‘do nothing we do not believe in personally,’ and abscond with the belief that we can in fact do anything and be anything we want…that the West (if not the Western U.S.) is a big enough place in which to act out our dreams.

Yet go West and the land is full. The Indians are “disappeared” onto out-of-sight/out-of-mind reservations, and the cowboy is a caricature for commercial use and selling cigarettes. We have no place left in which to realize our manifest destiny of machismo and individualism…

Go West and we are deflated. Our hopes are crushed. There is nowhere to go, no world to conquer, no challenge against which to prove ourselves… in which to live… We have killed ourselves. And we are haunted by that which we can no longer have.

Hauntology is described by James Ashford in an article from The Week, as “the idea that the present is haunted by the metaphorical “ghosts” of lost futures.

The concept asks people to consider how “spectres” of alternative futures influence current and historical discourse, and acknowledges that this “haunting” – or the study of the non-existent – has real effects.”  https://www.theweek.co.uk/104076/what-is-hauntology

Is it starting to come together – this quirky marriage between philosophy and history and Horror?

We keep telling ourselves that other people or peoples live more “real” lives. And we compound these imaginings with the knowledge that they are living these presumed lives despite our most vigorous efforts to eradicate them. And the more we entertain this inner dialog, the more personally angry we become at those people while believing ourselves even more disenfranchised of our own dreams. There is a term for this…

Hauntological melancholia…We become terrified that we – as a nation or even as a species – have already lived our best lives, done our greatest things, that we are a civilization and species in decline.

Says Mark Fisher, there are “two kinds” of such melancholia that the hauntological kind springs from: the first is “Wendy Brown’s ‘left melancholia’ [which] is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness, but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward-looking and punishing.” (Fisher 23) Herein the loss of the future we assumed to be ours has led to that weird pride of failure we see enacted by those ‘proud to be poor/I am what I am’ folks – a pushback to an immobile and stagnant future bereft of all imaginable forward momentum by being proud of how we got here because we can’t be proud of where we are going. We look backward and say it has all already been done.

We have to ask: is this why we have woken up – because the car stopped and the driver is gone?

Fisher states that his interpretation of hauntological melancholia means that instead of “giving up on desire” we instead “[refuse] to yield. It consists, that is to say, in a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call ‘reality’ – even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time.” (24) And here we are left with those who are aware of the loss of momentum, and the awareness demands an accounting of our own selves. Is this all there is to life? we ask, isn’t there something MORE? Why don’t I FEEL anything?

So we look backward for comfort. And encounter a new wall – one Fisher identifies as “post-colonial melancholia” which dirties the myth of how we got here…and is the second type of hauntological melancholia influencing his research.

Says Fisher, “Paul Gilroy defines this melancholia in terms of an avoidance: it is about evading ‘the painful obligations to work through the grim details of imperial and colonial history and to transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness…”(24) It is about justifying why our own failure to thrive has happened; it is blaming the Other and the immigrant…Fisher is instead linking his understanding of  hauntological melancholia to the loss of the narrative of promise as compromised by the framing of our decisions of the past – in other words, nostalgia for what we think our past promised us…the evaporation of what we thought was the process, the guarantee, the formula for success if not happiness.

We have been unable to process the concept of a shelf life for “the good old days.” We lost them — therefore we must claw them back.

And here we are, living with all four forms of hauntological melancholia peeking out behind a pandemic.

And as Fisher points out, it has led to the feeling that “the 21^st century hasn’t started yet. We remain trapped in the 20^th century…[where] the slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.” We no longer hope for a new innovations in music or technology or the arts…We do not, for example, expect to ever see another band like The Beatles, or an artist like DaVinci. “The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed.” (Fisher 8)

And don’t we know all about this in our genre? Stephen King (unless we change our own philosophy) will be the last great Horror writer, and H.P. Lovecraft will be what Horror was really aspiring to, and therefore will indeed come to represent the end of the genre’s evolution. Yet this is everywhere…

Look at fashion. At music. At cars. There is no innovation…no sign of diversification or development, no evolution…We just keep making more of the same…of everything.

And this is directly linked to the past — our past and our narrative of it – as surely as it is linked to the way we feel right now, in this historical moment.

Are we not seeking ways to tell our Horror stories in the midst of this pandemic, surrounded by the ghosts of our carefully constructed, self-immolating history?

We have been high-centered as writers in the genre because we know this is BIG. And we have been looking for an angle. We have been hoping for word from on genre high – from a knowledgeable and eager Establishment.

And we have been left to figure it out on our own.

Back to Ghosts

So here we are at this precarious moment in history (yes, history is something that is made by the present) and we have no clear understanding of either our future or the past.

Yet what if this is indicative of one of those truly integral moments we have seen in the past? The kind of moment that leads to a lurching explosion of discovery and invention?

We may indeed be on the brink of another “Golden Age” in our genre – one that will break more than a few norms because it is time for them to be broken and replaced with our next growth spurt, and as a consequence then build if not rebuild our fanbase.

Clearly our ability to fantasize about the past and the people in it is without boundaries – moral or factual. And we need to imagine those things so we can fit that narrative into our own. However we need to come to terms with the likely reality that the future for our ancestors was no more clear for them than it is for ourselves; and that all of that romanticized living of those  “real” lives meant they had precious little time or energy to do much more than plod onward on their own best guesses…just as worrying about bills, and Covid, and growing up to being whatever we wanted to be as children and raising children sucks up all of the oxygen in the room and saps our psychic and physical energy.

That those in the past were in the business of making the ghosts we are now obsessed with is of more than passing interest to historians and philosophers seeking to unravel the mystery of why we seem to be imploding in our national identity, politics, and personal lives. Ghosts are back – and back in a big way. And we are making more of them daily.

Is seeing them, pursuing them, or denying them a sign of our cultural stability?

Perhaps. Because it means that something is bothering us… a narrative we thought we controlled is proving to have a life of its own… a different version of the truth. The subtext is rising out of the ground we buried it in and following us home from the graveyard. It haunts us. And it threatens to possess us.

“Who are you?” we ask of the dark. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

And when it answers, we turn off the recorder. We run screaming back out to the light from the place we intentionally went into in order to find a ghost. We laugh nervously. We scared ourselves. The ghost was real, but we didn’t really want to know it: we didn’t stick around for the answers we didn’t want.

Says Jeffrey Weinstock in his introduction to Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, “The idea of the ghost, of that which disrupts oppositional thinking and the linearity of historical chronology, has substantial affinities with post-structural thought in general. The ghost is that which interrupts the presentness of the present, and its haunting indicates that, beneath the surface of received history, there lurks another narrative, an untold story that calls into question the veracity of the authorized version of events. As such, the contemporary fascination with ghosts is a reflection of an awareness of the narrativity of history.” (5)

There is precious little that is more interesting than the dead who don’t stay dead; ghosts defy being confined to narrative, to discerned facts, enacting their own versions of truth. Ghosts are also liminal things – not only existing between living and afterlife/oblivion, but also between past and present, operating outside of time and space. They represent both justice denied and justice sought. They represent the would-be of US.

We need ghosts. We need them to be real… Continues Weinstock: “They speak to our desire to be remembered and to our longing for a coherent and ‘correct’ narrative of history. We value our ghosts particularly during periods of cultural transition [my emphasis], because the alternative to their presence is even more frightening: if ghosts do not return to correct history, then privileged narratives of history are not open to contestation. If ghosts do not return to reveal crimes that have gone unpunished, then evil acts may in fact go unaddressed. If ghosts do not appear to validate faith, then faith remains just that – faith rather than fact; and without ghosts to point to things that have been lost and overlooked, things may disappear forever…That ghosts are particularly prominent in our cultural moment indicates that we are particularly vexed by these questions.” (6)

Are we not at this time in a particularly profound moment of cultural crisis? Are there not voices crying out for justice and governments in turmoil? Are there not endless horrors spilling from the pages of carefully penned history? And are we not all screaming at each other, waving flags and beliefs like amulets against a history we are afraid to acknowledge when the future is no longer anticipated or viable?

And is that crisis of culture not directly related to history and the narrative that can no longer be contained by simple racism?

When the truth wants out, ghosts walk.

Back To Horror

What we are seeing here makes for a very interesting time and future for the Horror genre. In the attempt to suppress creativity and “control” the direction of the genre’s new writings and writers by rejecting Horror that is not in keeping with the Weird tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and additionally disparages our rediscovery of and struggles to reinvent the Literary ghost story, we have been on the wrong side of our own history. And we have stifled our own growth.

Other academic theorists have been doing our work – seeing in our genre what we have refused to see and to nourish. Our newer Critics are both too few and too typical – meaning it is the nature of Literary Critics to choose a writer and their catalog of works in which to build their own body of work in Criticism. So with too few Literary Critics and too much work waiting to be Criticized, we simply need more voices pointing out the obvious and sending our writers off in new directions.

Hauntology and Hontology – ghosts of the past that devour our future and shame that devours our present – are the fertile Literary ground we have been seeking. Neither excludes traditional monsters or folklore, yet both can open the door to better and more relevant Horror as we come to grips Nationally with the errant narrative of our own history, This is the chance for us as writers to tell our own stories – whether you are a white writer in the genre enduring the shock of realization and the guilt of institutionalized behavior you never meant to be a part of, or if you are in that oppressed class of “Other” enduring a very public and painful birth – these two theories are going to reinvigorate the ghost story subgenre. We simply need to be taking our cues from other genres, other academic studies from other academic theorists – including Film Critics – and our own lives.

We need to tell our tales. Dead men (and women) most certainly do tell secrets for which there are always two sides, because injustice haunts every living thing on this planet. It is our job as writers in the genre to speak those evils no matter what genre editors say or prefer, no matter what Critics want to see more of. We are the intermediaries, the documentarians, the liaisons between those who study and publish and judge the genre, and those who live and read it.

Don’t be afraid to turn out the lights…Call it forth, summon its forbidden truths with your eyes wide open.

Use what is happening today.

Call it by its name and it will come.

Tell us a ghost story…

References

Anderson, Joshua T. “The Werewolf and the Were/Wear/Where-West in Stephen Graham Jones’s Mongrels.” Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre. Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon, eds. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, c2020.

James Ashford. “What is Hauntology? The Idea Asks if People Can Be Haunted By Ghosts of Lost Futures.” The Week U.K., (31 October 2019). Retrieved 12/15/202 from https//www.theweek.co.uk/104076/what-is-hauntology

Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014.

Kleinberg, Ethan. Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, c2017.

Payne, Mark. Hontonology: Depressive Anthropology and the Shame of Life. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2018.

Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination. Andrew Weinstock, ed. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press/Poplar Press, c2004.

Modern American Horror and the Incredible Whiteness of Being: Where Do We Go From Here in the Age of Social Awakening?

Horror changes when you stop just being a reader of Horror and instead choose to write it.  

Not only do questions arise about who you choose for characters and how they are depicted, but questions take shape around the relevance of plots and the potential for constructing a Literary message that might emerge from your once-invigorating first draft. We often aren’t yet thinking too seriously about the Bigger Picture – the one that suggests we might be writing Horror in a bubble. We don’t notice we are picturing an editor who looks like us, and instead we occupy ourselves with the worries of most novice writers – worries about craft and relevance, about choosing just the “right” marketing venue. We are just writers writing. Or so we think.

We never really worry that we might be judged by too many assumptions, although if you are a woman in Horror you are always aware that both you and your work are being measured against a predominantly white male history, specially conjured and mindfully tended for the last several decades of American Horror. But something is happening here, now, in this country. And it would appear that we are starting to really wake up to a lot of truths we never really saw as coexisting with us… the real Monster under the bed.

Now in this age of Covid 19 and Black Lives Matter, the Horror genre finds itself forced to gaze at its reflection in the mirror and ask a seminal question: where do we go from here?

Where do we go from all of those Lovecraft anthologies? How do we pierce the thin skin of that bubble we have been suffocating in? And who, exactly, will we take with us? How do we stop being so darned white, and what do we do if as a writer we just…are?

The Princess Epiphany (Fix Yourself a Drink. Don’t Lose Your Shoes.)

Being white and a writer of Horror, these past seven months of Covid 19 and Black Lives Matter has been a rude awakening. Sadly, I thought I was awake before, but just like a scene out of Nightmare on Elm Street, I discovered I had only dreamed I was awake…

Darn it.

We all wake up in different ways. For me it has been about searching for minority voices in Horror, and learning that most of my youthful favorites are no longer “recognized” as being Horror writers (as though re-categorizing their writings would preserve some “purity” of the genre). It came as a disappointment to realize that what so many of them had in common was simply not being part of an homogenous set – they were often from another race or culture, or gay, bisexual, or transgender writers… and it did not matter how good they were. They were simply made gone, cast into other genres for a “better Literary fit.”

Then I began really thinking about what I was hearing drip from the essays of genre Establishment and even from Critics, asking what they are always asking for, how do we push the genre out of the rut it is in…and then I began wondering why can’t we seem to talk about anything other than Lovecraft tributes?

But then all of …this… happened. And it was my Freddy moment. Say what you will, but I have never been so ashamed of being White, as if being made to be ashamed of being American wasn’t bad enough these last four years.

Watching endless hours of Real-Life horror on the television screen, all of that news coverage of inexcusable and seemingly shameless killings of so many African Americans right now when the world is watching… it all got me thinking about the prolific tenacity of racism in all of its forms – the most insidious of which for me is institutionalized racism – a racism slipped in your drink at the bar, when you are having a good time and not thinking about who is around you or their motivations.

It is everywhere. Lie to yourself all you want, you know it is true. It has been in Horror a for decades. And foolishly, I have let myself believe that it was only in the choices of who we allowed in the genre… I had never considered it from the standpoint that it also was about what we have the audacity to actually SAY we want in the genre, or what we SAY is in the factual HISTORY of the genre. Then there had to be yet another Lovecraft anthology…

(Surprise! I was feeling like the only one who was guessing up til now…)

The following is my epiphany of how institutionalized racism moves in Horror. This is how we as writers outside of the Sacred Realm of traditional publishing and its editors have been complicit.

The First Rule: Edify the Writers Who Reinforce the Narrative

New or under-published writers (often referred to as novice or amateur writers) often stand wide-eyed before the high priests of the Establishment and offer their prose souls in eager anticipation of discovery or helpful advice. They read editorial essays and devour the critical comments about staying in-genre and writing original traditional Horror all without a single word or reference as to how to do so. “Write what you know” we are told, “be original,” “Lovecraft is the height of perfection…”

It does not occur to us that we might be just one more obedient and compliant white writer in the herd of the unpublished masses. It never occurs to us that there is anything but a loose history written of the genre because no one in the Establishment endorses any writer of (or writes themselves) said history. We just accept the kool-aid in its enticing cups of promise. We fall all over ourselves hoping to ingratiate our way into print. 

So we feel unanchored, unmoored… and we flail about. We are white, so we do as we are told and write what we know – whiteness. But it echoes in empty chambers because we do not live in a white-only world. And it seems our writing bears only slightly more than a passing resemblance to older white writers – writers from decades ago, in styles that are antiquated. And we are again rejected. We are rejected until all we hear is phrases that include “Lovecraft anthology” and “Legacy Collection…” and how we are STILL not writing original work…  

Confession: writers write for an audience.  The audience inevitably looks like ourselves. Writers – Horror or otherwise – don’t get out much.

The Second Rule: Don’t Get Caught…

We have all heard the mantra “write what you know”… it is kissing cousins with the one that says “don’t write about people and cultures you don’t know.“

What becomes the startling discovery is how hard it is to follow that advice – especially as a modern person living in contemporary American society. We are surrounded by people and cultures, by color… vibrancy… unknown differences. The temptation to use those differences in our worst imaginings is only reinforced by what is held out to us in the genre as all but “perfect” Horror – Lovecraft.

We are rejected again and again until we learn the hidden lesson: it’s not the cosmos, the monsters, the syntax. It’s the subtext. And it’s so obviously the subtext, I now wonder if the editors and the Critics even hear themselves, because thinking that they do is just plain….scary.

In Horror – especially the kind inspired by H.P. Lovecraft – differences and unease around the unknown masses surrounding us feeds the atmosphere we have been groomed to believe belongs in Horror. The exotic unknown provides the magic, the mystery, the sinister imaginings that stalk us…it is so easy to ascribe a monster to some unknown culture, some obscure religion or cult, to create an imaginary group of monster-worshippers with secret powers and ancient, unknowable deities. Worse, we feel endorsed if not pressured to create these mystery stand-in peoples, to flirt with Fantasy and Science Fiction world-building by making up a whole culture in the pretense we are not referencing the very ones living around us. This way, we can have our cake and eat it, too…

Who could possibly be offended? How could this be wrong?

It takes some doing to hear the dog whistles…  

The Third Rule: Don’t Spook the Herd…

But it also leaves white writers in the genre with a conundrum: try to include our growing racial diversity and or risk getting it way wrong and being accused of “entitled profiteering,” or sticking to writing exclusively about other white people and being called racist or tone deaf.

And this is why we really need to learn and study the history of the Horror genre itself: the history of American Horror is a mirror of American history, and as long as we are pressured to ignore that, there will be a lot less Literature happening in the genre.

In his book Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession With the Hideous and the Haunting, W. Scott Poole states: “Something wicked this way comes when we look into the historical narrative…Belief and ideology, the social realities produced and reproduced by the images of the monster, turn into historical actions and events. It is not enough to call these beliefs metaphors when they shape actual historical behavior or act as anxious reminders of inhuman historical acts, a cultural memory of slaughter. How limp and pallid to use the term ‘metaphor’ for cultural structures than can burn the innocent to death, lynch them, imprison them, or bomb them. The monster has helped make all of these things possible in American history.” (25)

Yet, this isn’t really discussed –not in class, not in genre. We are directed to metaphors. And there we languish on the beach, seashells whispering sweet nothings in our ears…

Yet we cannot separate ourselves or our writing from our history as we live it — at least not honestly. And neither can the writers who have gone before. And as we edify certain writers over others, as we hold them out as near-perfect, we lean in… we study with hungry eyes and untold ignorance…and then we mimic. We do not see a difference because the difference is not there. We are still living in Lovecraft’s world of fearing the Other.

The Fourth Rule: Mindless Recitation Becomes Truth

There is systemic and institutionalized racism in our modern version of the Horror genre. We do not admit many writers of color, we do not admit writing that does not conform to an accepted narrative that most of us have not been taught to SEE in its sub-textual proliferation. We are convinced because it is the preferential truth that we are done with all of that. We just “innocently” repeat it because we see it as a requirement, a harmless convention of the genre. We don’t question its presence or its function. We don’t question the success of our own publication, because it doesn’t occur to us that we don’t deserve it, or that someone might deserve it more. That is the very definition of systemic racism…

We have ALL been snowed. We have all been lied to. And worse, we have all been groomed to continue the tradition, with the punishment of manuscript rejection or banishment from the genre to keep it “traditional.” But who defines what is “traditional”? Who IS this Horror cabal in charge of our genre’s narrative?

Do you not find it interesting (if not coincidental) that at the exact time in our history that the Black Lives Matter movement arises in response to a rise in white supremacy and nationalism, that a movie like Get Out! gnaws at the fringe of the Horror universe currently packed with finger-wagging editors seeking more Lovecraft?

And while minorities might think it must be easy-peasy for white writers in the genre to get published, do they know that only white writers ghostly imitating the white patriarchal style of the 1940’s are rewarded, along with “Other” (including female) writers only if they very mindfully write un-offensive stories that do not overtly threaten the status quo?

The Fifth Rule: Rewrite the History to Support the Narrative

You want to know why there is so little Literature happening in American Horror? We aren’t allowed to talk about things that Establishment editors don’t want to hear… not child abuse, not child sexual abuse, not sexual harassment, not rape, not health issues, not homelessness, not job loss, not disenfranchisement or disillusion… and sure as heck not politics or race.

Instead the cry for allegedly “traditional” Horror is deafening…  Yet the truth is that “traditional” Horror addressed exactly those issues.  We have reinvented the term “traditional” and hijacked it to reflect the monsters as white males designed them. Period.

Is that where the ghost story (the vehicle of discontent for women and minority writers historically in the genre) went? Is it a coincidence that it has been “determined” by some that between Sheridan Le Fanu and M.R. James (two white males) all of the worthwhile and legitimate ghost stories have been told? One wonders… Because isn’t that a little too convenient?

Is also it an attempt to rewrite our history to the exclusion of what is known about Horror in order to favor a very white, very male patriarchal “success story””? And doesn’t that remove the “teeth” from monsters in general?

It is that history of interacting with ourselves and Others that we bring with us and hide under our beds, importing select suspicions when not directly transplanting whole belief systems onto new soil. Says W. Scott Poole: “Our monsters…are not simply delusions, whether they slither toward us as folklore, urban legend, or popular entertainment. Nor are they simply mirrors of social fears or expressions of social anxiety, the catharsis interpretation of the horror tale. They are so embedded in the way Americans talk about class, race, gender, and social structure that they offer a way for people to mark, comprehend, and just as frequently, misunderstand their world.” (xix)

Yet we continue to pretend that monsters don’t exist, all while they frolic in the shadows and dance naked in the sunlight in full view.

Again Lovecraft is the example. Is it any coincidence that perhaps the single most racist writer in the genre – H.P. Lovecraft – is now the genre’s premier Golden Child? Or that the demand for “original” Horror comes with… tentacles?

“Original” is a code word.

“Original” does not mean “different” or “other”… It sure as heck does not mean “new” … It means “differently told, modern” Lovecraft stories.

Can you say censorship and “traditional” in the same sentence?

Lovecraft is often given a “pass” because he is so clearly an institutional racist. Like ourselves, he believed what he was raised to believe and what society reinforced. And when he tells his stories it is not with a conscious purpose to “convert” but is an example of that simple-yet-horrendous assumption that his readers will “get” the terror in ways we may not today interpret it. And this means that modern readers may not pick up on the racism alluded to, but that being presumably, eternally white, we would simply gather in the general atmosphere of imminent dread and make of it what we will. The problem is, we are internalizing that narrative in order to mimic it. How often do we say it, and read it, and edify it before it starts to make some kind of weird sense?

Literary Criticism digs deeper than that first reading, that fan-driven desire for frisson… Criticism looks at subtext. And this is yet another reason why Literary Criticism needs to be introduced to readers in high school – right when Horror becomes a rite of passage.

Look, Lovecraft can be enjoyed, and reading or liking his work does not make you a racist. But I am saying that the longer we emulate and praise the narrative, the more likely we are to become numb if not deaf to the subtext that says Others are scary and are out to end us all.

If a Horror reader is and prefers to remain a “surface dweller” then Lovecraft is fun and kitschy and an awesome representation of British Horror done American style. Nothing has to “change” as long as we clearly identify subtext for what it is: a marker of a moment in time… But isn’t it interesting that we don’t quite know what to do with things when the truth comes out, when we look beyond the surface? The experience is jarring, because when you first fall in love with Horror, the surface is what you fall in love with – the idea of being scared. We do not start out in Horror looking for hidden messages…

So what do we do when we find them? It is a certainty that there will always be subtext – consciously or unconsciously inundating our writing – because we are human and we cannot always stop ourselves. And as time passes and history moves past the moment, we Freudian-slip onto the stage naked. But there is a difference in discussing subtext and how it found its way into our subconscious and conscious behaviors, how it dictates social currency and acts.. and endorses or excuses it.

The fact is, there is indeed an unsavory if unconscious subtext in Lovecraft. And if we are asking for more of that in the Horror genre, what are we really trying to say?

Yes, We Are Waking Up: And We Were Promised a Handsome Prince…

If we are going to fix the problems we have in the genre, then we have to stop trying to avoid responsibility for where we are. This doesn’t mean we must go through and purge offensive writers or racist ones. It doesn’t mean we should write with future Literary Critics in our heads, either.

However it does mean we have to acknowledge as white gatekeepers of the genre, we have let the genre be pixie-led down a dead-end path where a racist and sexist narrative has been used to limit our growth and originality. White writers have also been victimized by this narrative. And no, it is not our duty to apologize to all Other writers, to hang our heads in shame for being somehow complicit.

We have ALL been manipulated and lied to, some of us being more willing to buy into the fairy tale than others. But we must also consider the cost to the genre… Horror is not meant to be spoon-fed to the masses, but to leech into their comfort zones through the skin. And now that we have been roughly awakened, it is time to acknowledge the total absence of the prince.  

We simply need to acknowledge that this love affair with the carefully constructed and insulated world that Lovecraft wrote from within is not a sustainable or defensible (let alone healthy) relationship to have with our genre history or its future. To do so is creatively limiting.

And to demand more of the same is a love song to fan fiction – not genre writing.

What we do going forward in the Horror genre is going to matter, and it is going to hinge on how we treat subtext in writing, how we identify monsters.  But it also means demanding that history remain in its context, and that we in fact and practice live and write in the time we are in. That means hearing all voices, fearing none, welcoming the envelope-pushers, and redefining what Horror is by providing agreed-upon criteria.

Horror in America is still white, because we choose to do little more than briefly mention (and then ignore) the fact that at the precise time in American Literary history that Horror flowered on our shores, we were in the cold embrace of white male elitism, of racism, of misogyny. And then we insisted on telling ourselves a beautiful mythology full of shiny objects to distract from intolerable truths. People do that when they need to believe their own delusions…when the truth is so terrible that the guilt alone would melt us like a Martian ray gun… when the night terrors torment our American Dreams.

How do we get out of this? Be careful how we wake up… and don’t expect a prince.

Says Natalie Wilson in her book, Willful Monstrosity: Gender and Race in 21^st Century Horror, “…monsterizing the Other was – and continues to be – one of the primary ways to maintain power and shore up existing hierarchies. One such endearing hierarchy, that of East/West, lies at the heart of colonialism and conquest. While denigrating the Other has spanned history, the Western world, as Partha Mitter puts it, ‘forged a monopoly on this’ (339).  Importantly this monopoly is linked to the emergence of race as a concept…thus laying the groundwork for the concept of monstrous races.” (6)

We cannot hope to change things if we refuse to change our trajectory of accepting what institutionalized racism continues to do in its currently unchallenged, understated state of being.

It means that we have to start seeing Horror where Horror is… and that means right here in the ordinary lives of ordinary peoples. It means we have to start talking about all of those things editors have said they want to hear no more about, because out here in the Real World, people are living those things, THOSE Horrors. And they  — we – deserve the acknowledgment of the struggle it is to be a decent human being in this world of subtext. We all have a story to tell.

Horror is not Fantasy, it is Horror.

And we have had enough of the Fairy Glamour.

Take your spells and be gone.

References

Poole, W. Scott. Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. Second ed. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, c2018.

Wilson, Natalie. Willful Monstrosity: Gender and Race in 21^st Century Horror. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., c2020.

Daniel Is Traveling Tonight On A Plane: Covid Takes a Life

I am standing at the foot of his ICU bed, huddled with weeping family members and his soon-to-be widow, who has already lost her fourteen-year-old son just years ago to a drunk hit-and-run driver… The nurses have silenced the alarms and turned off the ventilator.

I look at his face, the one with a smile that we will never see again in this life, and see the reflection of his deceased father, and that of my own husband…And I know now the family will look to him to see the both of them, for he is what is left to remind them in this country. It terrifies me to know this could have been my husband, that it could be in some nightmarish future… And I know and dread the horror that Yolanda must be feeling… there is nothing we can say to ease her agony… or that of their two daughters…

I am standing there… and all I hear is an Elton John song replaying over and over in my head….

Daniel is traveling tonight on a plane
I can see the red tail lights heading for Spain
Oh and I can see Daniel waving goodbye
God it looks like Daniel, must be the clouds in my eyes

Daniel is 57 years old…two years younger than me, and I cannot help but see how much more he has lived life. Watching his family gathered near him, each by turn saying goodbye in a language I have not mastered, but understand enough of to realize that this is how you say farewell to someone you love, that this is how you live a life that will be remembered and cherished. It is hot in the room, and I feel faint.

They say Spain is pretty, though I’ve never been
Well Daniel says it’s the best place that he’s ever seen
Oh and he should know, he’s been there enough
Lord I miss Daniel, oh I miss him so much

Daniel is the oldest of eleven children; and like all eldest, has earned the respect of his siblings by being the first to do a lot of things, and keeping himself in charge of shepherding a large family that often seeks his advice.

Touching his hand, I feel the rough callouses that a life of hard work has made, a gentle hand that held his grandchildren as tenderly as his own.

He was the one I knew I had to impress when my then-future husband brought me home to meet the family. I liked him instantly. And because I no longer have relatives, I considered asking him to walk me down the aisle – but then I knew I couldn’t, because his place was next to my husband as best man…His son Rickie – the one killed just years later –  was our ring-bearer….

Oh oh, Daniel my brother you are older than me, 
Do you still feel the pain of the scars that won’t heal
Your eyes have died, but you see more than I
Daniel you’re a star in the face of the sky

We wait with dread for the moment we know he will leave us. We know he no longer has a choice; but we also know he defied everyone’s doubts he could fight Covid long enough to test negative so we could all be with him. It is a testament to his character, to his spirit, and to his love for his family that he put up with months of the ventilator and a trach tube until we could all be there, until he could give Yolanda and his daughters one last gift of his presence… We all crumbled when his breathing slowed, and then with a slight rasp…stopped.

Oh oh, Daniel my brother you are older than me
Do you still feel the pain of the scars that won’t heal
Your eyes have died, but you see more than I
Daniel you’re a star in the face of the sky

When we drove home in the dusk of the day, barely visible in the dissipating storm clouds, we could see a rainbow. I have never seen one under such dim light before. And it occurred to me that it looked like it was over Daniel’s house, not far from the intersection where Rickie died, not far from where Yolanda will have to figure out how she will make a new life for herself when it is the old one she wants…the old one she needs….

I keep hearing Elton John in my head. I keep seeing all of the things that could have been were it not for this horrible disease.

I feel so ruined and weary, so fearful for everyone in this family of immigrants I have come to love so much…And I see Daniel waving goodbye.

Daniel is traveling tonight on a plane
I can see the red tail lights heading for Spain
Oh and I can see Daniel waving goodbye
God it looks like Daniel, must be the clouds in my eyes
Oh God it looks like Daniel, must be the clouds in my eyes

Songwriters: Vladimir Cort, Elton John, Bernie Taupin
© Universal Music Publishing Group

About 7,550,000 results (0.64 seconds)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA78e27R_J4

Death, Disease & Pandemic: How Horror Writers of the Past Translated Illness (Part 2: Stephen King, Richard Matheson & Dean Koontz)

Another way writers wrangle the concept of a pandemic is to imagine one.

Only a few months ago, the very idea of a worldwide pandemic – one that could stop and rearrange everything we thought we knew about the world and ourselves was, well – an idea, an event that happened a long time ago or very far away.

Now that we are faced with a reality that itself reinvents the world, that does not stop hand-delivering difficult truths to us, it seems even harder to credit Horror writers with their earlier efforts to imagine the worst and carry it off with any accuracy. We can look at fiction and see it as superfluous – perhaps even “pointless.” Because in the face of reality, fiction always pales…

But Horror is never pointless – not at its true heart. Horror is the handmaid of horrible truths. And there is nothing like pandemics gone global that deliver our failings on a golden platter.

Here we will look at three Horror versions of the pandemic – Stephen King’s The Stand (a work that rings true in both the delivery of this disease and how we are handling this pandemic); Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (a work dedicated to the personal meaning of social distancing in the book version, and in the most modern film version an echo of the fears we have had and now entertain broadly at China’s expense of science escaping the lab); and Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness (for its now-viral reputation for eerie prediction of this pandemic within a single passage. Note: it is not a book about pandemic, but it is a lesson in naivete, fact-checking, and our modern tendency to believe anything we see on the internet).

Stephen King and The Stand: When Reality Meets Criticism

When we think of modern pandemic Horror, many of us often think first of Stephen King’s The Stand. How could we not? It was one of the first King blockbusters, and is likely one of the first novels that come to mind when we think of pandemics in fiction… a tale about what a Super-flu might be like as a tool of Apocalypse – innocuous, yet savage in a world-order-changing kind of way.

Published in 1978, it happened upon the reading public just at the moment common folk were globally becoming aware of the way diseases spread and decimate… it happened when air travel proved it could deliver all manner of disease in record time and without detection… And when we had begun to realize that all governments (including our own) just might be thinking of disease again (and as we once did before) as a handy way to wage wars…if not to purge undesirable populations.

In that way, The Stand was not prophetic, but it was timely.

In the 1980’s, we first started to understand that disease could be the undoing of us all, and that fact kept The Stand in circulation for some time. All that globe-trotting and the rise of AIDS made us realize that weaponized disease could be a real and scary future for us. Coincidentally, the first step in dealing with a problem is to imagine it. And thanks to the dominance of the paperback (especially in places like supermarkets and – yep – airports), The Stand was one of our first popular modern fictional imaginings. It came at a time when we precisely needed to consider what an event like a Plague could do to a modern and mobile society.

So while some might be tempted to call it a prediction or an interesting stretch in the fictional imagination, it was already a popular discussed topic most preferred not to imagine. It was (frighteningly enough) already an expectation in the scientific community that simple influenzas were on their way to not being so simple. We were already starting to overprescribe antibiotics and see farmed animals moved to packed, unpastured communes that demanded even more frequent antibiotic use in animals.

We were calling this new, looming fear the Super Flu – “known to public health experts as pandemic influenza…which would cause substantial disruption of society and commerce” https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/news/20040826/us-super-flu-plan-reveals-gaps-in-readiness#1 . The last one by King’s novel’s time was the 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic, “which killed some 34,000 Americans” but was nothing compared to the title holder – the 1918 Spanish flu, which “was responsible for 675,000 U.S. deaths…” History aside, however, it was the newer discussions held by the scientific community that kept the fears alive and fanned the concerns over a repeat of that history. None of us wanted to go there, but by the late 1970’s it was clear that we were pointed in that direction.

Stephen King did what many of us didn’t want to do – to imagine it and what it would be like to live through a pandemic. And rather than weigh the Literary Craft questions so many are wont to do, what I find most interesting in this King mega-novel is the Literary World View questions King raised but is so often attacked for not (or not thoroughly enough) exhibiting: what does the role of cultural society play in our reaction to an apocalyptic pandemic, and what is the role of religion in our interpretation of pandemic?

Keep in mind that I am not saying King did enough with those questions considering the size of the book, but he did provide quite the interesting national portrait of our country – one which rings true with today’s pandemic as mirrored in The Stand right down to the overinflated sense of patriotism as a backdrop and the ready belief in an underlying battle of good versus evil with the United States as the only relevant battle ground… keeping in mind that today’s coronavirus is not as thorough an executioner as King’s flu.

Long Criticized for not really including The Rest of the World (except in an honorable-mention sort of way), King nailed our now fully-realized selfish, myopic view of ourselves. Maybe Critics did not want to believe that such a reaction would be true – especially given our cultural mythology as the “conscience and savior of the world.” But as the coronavirus has proven, King was indeed correct about our lack of interest in virtually anyone else. And what an ugly theory to be proven true…

In the novel, a Super-flu overtakes the world rather suddenly, leaving small pools of survivors, who soon realize that the pandemic is being used as the stage for the Ultimate Battle between Good and Evil. Once again — even with the religious overtone – the entire book never really concerns itself with the rest of the world. For our own egotistical reasons, the U.S. is the center of the religious universe as well as the human one. Nothing is ever mentioned about why the United States is where Heaven and Hell would choose to argue their differences, but those of us who live here – especially now with such a loud media presence of evangelicals promoting radical views that we are the envy and target of the world because we are religiously right – well, we can see this was all brewing as part of our national self-image as far back as 1978…

(Never mind what stark truths that might bring to our international relations through those same years, or what picture that might paint about a certain set of towers in New York…)

For all of the Criticisms King has taken for The Stand – and indeed there are some Craft/logic issues – what I find significant is that in the book his American characters act as isolationist, evangelical, and self-centered as we really are, and today as we are proving ourselves to be.

Have we not pushed away the World Health Organization (and their coronavirus tests, by the way) as well as any official international collaborations? Has our President not attempted to corner the patent on any vaccine discovered in the U.S. with plans to ransom it to the rest of the world if not our own lower classes?

Do we not toss religious judgment out there when large segments of our population are dying of Covid 19? Is that not the argument certain vocal pockets of the national population are arguing in the subtext of demanding the reopening of churches as “essential” businesses, as though the righteousness of being in a pew guarantees Divine Intervention and lack of virus exposure?

Are we not smirking at the sins of New York and winking at the Purity of the Midwest? Have our political parties not called each other Evil? Are we not  flag-waving, belligerent, and determined at rifle-point to re-establish the government in our own image selves while pandemic chaos rules?

King called it. Just because Critics don’t want to say so, doesn’t make that any less accurate.

The fact that King reframes the pandemic as religious is an important World View statement. Perhaps we don’t have the rise of a Randall Flagg (so far as we could prove it, anyway), but all of the arguments in play today are caricatured to some degree (accidentally or on purpose) in King’s novel – right down to the common Literary Critical criticism that his characters speak in pedestrian language with lots of cursing (Joshi 79-81). Have the Critics been WATCHING the news? Have they been OUT in American cities and towns? THAT IS how we speak and act. Albeit sadly.

And clearly, a real pandemic isn’t going to change that.

Include the interesting point that King used a main character to focus on what would happen in prisons to prisoners in a pandemic and THERE is an interesting prediction. Are we not seeing a slightly scaled down version today in King’s prisoners sealed in and left to die in cells with dead guards and few in charge who care?

And are we not seeing the rise of militant groups that think we need to re-take our own government, re-make our own government, reinvent the government we have convinced ourselves once ruled gloriously in this land…

While we do have to look Critically at our genre works and admit that there might just be some Craft failings here and there, I do think that we are not giving King credit for at least hitting on World View cylinders in this one. Was it too long, too circuitous? Yes, I believe that to be true. Could editing have been better? Yes, I believe that also.

But if we are going to attack contemporary writers for mimicking older styles, then how about at least a nod toward a modern take on the genre – even if and may especially if it is told in our modern vernacular. I think it is quite relevant sitting here in quarantine at the moment.

The Stand offers an old theme of pandemic apocalypse with a modern twist, modern setting, modern characters (though lightly developed)… he employs the Good versus Evil trope, and in the course of the book shows us King’s take on how we might react to it. If we criticize it as being not deep enough, too shallow to compete with Literature, then one has to ask is not King’s audience the perfect accomplice in the book’s popularity – not because we are incapable of appreciating or expecting Literature, but because we are no longer taught how to appreciate or expect it? Is that not also evocative of World View?

This book is all about imagining that which had not yet fully gripped us yet – the threat of pandemic on an ill-prepared nation, the religious reckoning that still functions as subtext in this country, and the “pedestrian” way we are likely to handle it… pandemic drives the plot (although it feels sometimes like a tortured drive and not a well-paced one). King has, after all, described it as his personal Vietnam… and at times it does read that way. But I still find it interesting – especially in light of our current pandemic times.

Is this a groundbreaker in Literature? Probably not. King has always been the writer for the masses, the author of Adult Horror fiction for the Young Adult in all of us… If he inspires others to go longer or deeper or to just keep writing and reading Horror, I am thinking he is doing his job. And with The Stand, he has returned the pandemic to Horror as a plot driver…something not done well since Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend…

So if you haven’t read this tome, now might be the time. And if you wind up having Criticisms, start drafting a work showing how you think it could have been done differently… We’re going to need all of the examples we can get…

Richard Matheson: I Am Legend & the Rise of the Vampire-Zombie Apocalypse

Zombies. Can we not think of the beginning of the Zombie craze without assuming Richard Matheson’s first novel might be to blame? Well if you do blame him, rethink it. Hollywood changed Matheson’s Vampires into Zombies – all likely to the way we look at monsters in the modern world – Zombies being so much more like us than Vampires (or so we think), and Matheson’s pandemic so much more suitable to the Zombie mythology (since we don’t see Vampires as roaming in packs). Since its publication in 1954, the book has been made into three movies – The Omega Man, The Last Man on Earth, and the more modern I Am Legend with popular actor Will Smith. So what has been the creative seed about this novel that we cannot cease to pick at it? Perhaps it is the long shadow that a pandemic threat casts.

Yet why aren’t we bigger fans of it today? We could blame the date it was written… thinking it would be like reading older prophetic Science Fiction – a bit of a let down for some things, amusing for others. Or maybe it is because Hollywood re-shaped it as Science Fiction… Or we could just smirk at the use of Horror monsters to define a real threat of apocalypse-by-disease.

Yet what Matheson gets right is at the very least – interesting. Because the book is often considered to be one of the best in the Literary handling of the topic of human loneliness… something a little social distancing has made perfectly clear to most of us.

I Am Legend is yet another modern take on the pandemic in modern times, a mutation of a virus that leads to the end of the world. Ironically, according to a Literary Analysis from DePauw University’s website https://sites.google.com/a/depauw.edu/i-am-legend/critiques-of-the-novel “the most common theme of this novel is an emphasis on human emotion and how we interact with others”… making it timely, if not in some ways just plain accurate.

Matheson (in the eyes of modern Critics) handles the Literary concept of apocalyptic pandemic in a much more competent fashion than most other Horror writers, but was not so well-received Critically in his day. But does it really catch fire with modern masses in the same way as King? It doesn’t seem to. And maybe that is because none of us like to admit we have a problem with loneliness in particular…let alone the idea of dying a non-glorious death by disease. Worse, we are not sure what we want out of Horror today as readers. And that indecisiveness makes us…fickle.

Interestingly, he sets the novel in 1976 – The Year of the Pandemic – if what plays on protagonist Robert Neville’s turntable in the opening scene is to be believed. He incorporates the then-modern world, he weaves in the necessary Horror accoutrement – including crosses, mirrors, stakes and mallets and garlic – all to serve as Horror placeholders as he unveils the real threat behind the monsters – uncontrolled disease and the Horror of isolation. Yet the book did better once it was re-cast as almost-Science Fiction and film.

Perhaps Matheson wrote genre Horror too literally, anchoring it to genre formula inadequately rather than clearly to the Literary point. Perhaps even he did not see it… Perhaps the general population – as yet un-Kinged by blockbuster Horror – would have received it better as a scientific thriller (like Coma by Robin Cook, for example)… It just seems Matheson had a tale to tell that was bigger than the Horror used to frame it. So perhaps he chose the wrong genre to tell the story in.

Ironically, I think that the reason it appears lackluster is because Matheson uses actual Horror tropes the way they are expected to be used – to the point that they seem trite. According to one Critic (Damon Knight, 1956), “The book is full of good ideas, every other one of which is kicked out of sight…if only the author, or somebody, had not insisted on encumbering it with the year’s most childish set of ‘scientific’ rationalizations….” Yet isn’t that what one would expect when introducing a science-based story concept to a Horror audience? Are we not told to anchor our plot, to provide explanation for how a Horror comes to be?

Matheson chooses Vampires, which Hollywood replaced with Zombies – and that allows a reader to minimize the reality of a pandemic’s effect by almost mocking it with monsters. This book (after all) provided the origin (if not the inspiration) of the concept of The Zombie Apocalypse. But the most amazing thing is that it was all written in 1954 – talk about dancing with the prophetic… (and we could mean pandemic, or even water-cooler expectations of a Zombie Apocalypse…)

Matheson does with pandemic what a good Horror writer should – using the monster to define a Literary World View – that we need each other… Yet unfortunately it can also be said that because his Vampires were “not traditional enough” – not of the Polidori style and more akin to Zombies – that maybe alienation of the Vampire fan was the undoing of it in our genre… We simply fell into the two traditional camps of Horror: those who love pulp roots and demand strict adherence to established handling of tropes, and those who want innovation and Literary elements. It seems to be the undoing of many great writers in our genre… But what he did with I Am Legend is an important example for Horror writers looking for an angle on how to tell a pandemic story in Literary terms.

Clearly it involves flirting with other genres if not Literature itself. But it also means walking that tightrope between Critics and fan expectations. We have to choose. And it would appear Matheson ultimately chose right.

Pandemic and poorly loved Vampires aside, Matheson is the author of titles like Stir of Echoes, Cell, The Legend of Hell House, What Dreams May Come, and stories that went on to become television short story episodes as in TV series Kolchak: the Night Stalker, and several more episodes in Twilight Zone, Night Gallery and The Outer Limits. He was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (1984), Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime achievement (1991) and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010. All in all, not half-bad for a Horror writer whose work often crossed into other genres…and clearly when we are talking pandemic, it pays to think outside the box.

Richard Matheson died June 23, 2013.

Dean Koontz: When Precognition Just…Isn’t

There is a rumor spinning around the internet today about a Dean Koontz thriller written in 1981. There is a passage in the thriller (about a grieving mother who believes she has seen her deceased child in a passing car and begins a grief-driven roller-coaster ride in trying to find him) which eerily predicts a pandemic – this current pandemic – right down to the year, the country and city of origin, and its origin as a respiratory affliction. Or so it would seem.

Have we entered the oft-chartered territory of Science Fiction writers in precognitive fiction?

Try not to get too excited. Even author Dean Koontz insists this is no uncanny prediction – but rather a marketing strategy that panned out.

First, a little about Horror author Dean Koontz, who we have now roundly lost to the Suspense/Thriller genre.

Dean Koontz (born July 9, 1945 in Everett, PA) is another writer who found other work in parallel genres when the Horror Boom dried up. Fourteen hardcovers and sixteen paperbacks reached Number One on the bestseller charts over the years, and most of his earlier work was part of that once-giant Horror section we once commanded as a genre. His work can also be found under pseudonyms David Axton, Leigh Nichols, Brian Coffey, and Deanna Dwyer. Awards include the World Horror Grand Master Award (1996) and the Ross Macdonald Literary Award (2003), with nominations for the Prometheus Award, the Hugo Award, and three Locus Award nominations.

For those of us who grew up Horror fans in the 1970s and 80s, Dean Koontz was a staple. I remember many of his titles being the dog-eared paperbacks we traded in high school – iconic – teen fodder – devoured. Titles like Hell’s Gate, Demon Child, Children of the Storm, Whispers, Phantoms, Strangers, and Watchers… These were the books that fed the Boom, that supplemented books by King, by Bentley Little, Peter Straub, Dan Simmons, Anne Rice, V.C. Andrews, John Saul, and Tanith Lee. These were the books so often picked up in airports and supermarkets, read to pass the time and stoke our love of scary things. For the paperback masses, his name was constant and familiar… and now –prolific as he has been – his section in a bookstore is almost as big as King’s…

But it was none of these books that bring him to my attention now. Koontz did not write a pandemic-specific novel. However, this little rumor of prognostication needs to be cleared up…

Recently, a rediscovery of his book The Eyes of Darkness has found new life on the internet – being touted by some as having an eerie set of passages about what looks like a prediction of today’s coronavirus. And while I freely admit I have not read this title by Koontz, a little research online is important to mention.

Here are the larger-than-life “coincidences” being showcased:

 

Yeah. Wow. Woooo.

But really, what is this all about? Are we really having a Science Fiction moment?

Dean Koontz himself says not. But even if we were and never having read this title, what I CAN tell you about living as a young adult during the 1980’s is this: the idea of pandemic used as a biological weapon by one of our rivals/enemies was an increasingly popular topic of national conversation (because the scientific threat was increasing). The rise of the medical thriller at the time only fanned the flames, and a little consciousness was all that was required to consider the plot or plot device of such a thing, and besides China and Russia, who else would be a likely cold war foil? A little research for one’s novel could easily land one in a place like Wujan, and imagine a Chinese Communist plot to overthrow democracy.

That said, is even this information in the book correct?

Actually, it isn’t, according to website https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dean-koontz-predicted-coronavirus/ which reveals that the original printing claimed the virus was called – not Wujan 400, but Gorki 400… and that some future editions were re-edited to list Wujan as the city of origin.

Well. Does that mean it is any less…eerily coincidental? Yes, if we want to claim it as a 1981 prediction. I mean let’s face it: as world concerns about pandemics and hostile governments with evil intentions have grown, China has played a greater, more prominent part in our fears and national security concerns. Likewise, I am certain we play starring roles in their nightmares as well, and we have only a bunch of gifted smallpox blankets to Native Americans to thank for that. With a virus research lab located there, Wujan was probably on the map for any thriller writer looking for a pandemic source.

In addition, keep in mind that during the late 1980’s the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union returned to being Russia, and for a brief time there was even hope that we would finally make peace with our former world rivals as Russia struggled to redefine itself. Russia, in the 1980’s, was not the Big Scary Enemy of the past… in fact it was just not as much a part of the national subtext as the Cold War cooled. And a book like The Eyes of Darkness would possibly benefit from a modern rewrite with a new Big Scary Enemy to keep it relevant and less-dated – and China was rising to fit the bill. Keep in mind the rewrite of this passage was meant to reorient the book, to update it so the dated parts would not turn off readers – no other reason.

While the fact-checking site does not mention when the rewrite occurred, the copyright page on a book on Amazon does show a second copyright of 1996 – and I suspect that was to include the revision.

And yes, that kind of sucks the life out of the “prediction” (which is now more like a scientific guess with lottery characteristics).

The fact remains, however, that whether this is an editorial decision to make the old novel more modernly relevant, or some spooky coincidence… anyone who does research on epidemics, pandemics, and viral spillover will smash into China, Africa, and any country that participates by necessity in “wet markets” to survive. The choice of China is convenient and somewhat inevitable as the likely antagonist if we want a political thriller element in our novel or to modernize one; that is the price of having one of the world’s largest populations and being a rising economic and military power.

So was it a strange coincidence? Possibly. Weird? You betcha. But an uncanny prediction from 1981? Nope. Just good old marketing savvy mixed with…luck.

 

REFERENCES

DePauw University, “Critiques and Literary Analysis: I Am Legend/Richard Matheson” retrieved 5-9-2020 from https://sites.google.com/a/depauw.edu/i-am-legend/critiques-of-the-novel

Evon, Dan. “Was Coronavirus Predicted in a1981 Dean Koontz Novel? A Speculative Anticipation of a Possibility is Very Different Than a Prediction” www.snopes.com, 18 February 2020, retrieved 5-15-2020 from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dean-koontz-predicted-coronavirus/

Joshi, S.T. McFarland & Company, Inc.: North Carolina, c2001

Knight, Damon (1967). In Search of Wonder. Chicago: Advent

 

Death, Disease & Pandemic: How Horror Writers of the Past Translated Illness (Part 1- Bram Stoker & the Rise of the Vampire)

It should seem obvious: death is that “thing” behind the “fear” that Lovecraft used to define our genre. Yet for the most part, Horror writers seem to prefer the more visceral kinds of death – the vainglorious, the heroic, the tragic – death that glorifies the person or the plot. Therefore, Horror writers also tend to avoid the obviousness of rampant disease as their story-behind-the-story. When it comes to death-by-disease, our genre prefers to utilize the mystery of illness and disease (if not life and death) as a way to explore human nature, leaving the horrific details of unfolding pandemics to the Science Fiction genre.

But we have had writers who embraced the horrors consequential to pandemics – specifically Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Matheson, Bram Stoker, Stephen King and even Anne Rice.

So perhaps now is the time to discuss what those writers did to translate disease and death into top-rate reading experiences, and to add a few titles to your pandemic self-isolating reading lists.

As fans and readers, we might learn something about ourselves and our often-forgotten national and international histories when whole peoples are faced with the overwhelming, unthinkable effects of uncontrolled contagions of the past. But if you are a writer, you may also see a way to bend your current sense of personal trauma, your own fears and grief into something that might propel your next piece of fiction well past the inevitable crush of future publications about pandemics.

Vampires: the Undead for a Reason

I have a confession to make: I am absolutely weary of Vampire stories.

But there is something inevitable about them in our genre, and perhaps we should be glad to have them stirring things up now and again. However I admit I draw a heavy sigh of resignation to think that, well, here we go again…Because sure enough, Vampires have their origins not merely in folklore, but in premature death as dealt by disease and pandemic. In his book The Vampire: a New History, author Nick Groom states that despite those more remote folk origins:

“Many accounts of vampires associate outbreaks of vampirism with contagion, making them vectors and consequently part of the history of infectious diseases. Although the means by which illness and infection spread was not fully understood until the middle of the nineteenth century, William Harvey had, in 1628, published his theory of the circulation of the blood…Circulatory networks are the very media of vampirism: they roam, feed and infect through the circulation of blood.” (15-16)

We are indeed doomed, if only because we as humans will never completely control the versatility and lethal beauty of the biology of viruses. That fact has left many a creative door open, many plots and superstitions circulating…with Vampires to carry them into our imaginations. They nest there, never fully staying buried.

Yet if we as writers of the genre really look at what the genre did well for Critics or well for readers (often not exactly the same thing), we might perchance envision how to turn our own, more recent personal experiences into both original and unforgettable Horror. How do we turn this pandemic into something we can write about (if not within)? How do we stay the course in Horror writing?

When we think back on earlier times when science was new or nonexistent (or merely outdated and outclassed by modern medicine), what we see are the Horrors of our own making – grisly deaths marred by our own inability to understand how people pass viruses on to each other. We see theories about transmission and consequence that dumbfound and horrify us reading about them today – theories that transmission occurs by the mere glance of an ill person (resulting in blindfolded patients), by simple breath of or conversation with a sick person (resulting in a whole other kind of isolation), “venomous and infected air,” complicated “fear of standing water in ditches or sloughs or other corrupt places,” dread of decay and physical corruption, all mixed with the even more terrifying fear of it all being the instrument of Divine Judgment on a person or a people…. (Groom 16-17)

Mix all of that fear with the rush to get dead and decaying bodies off the street and underground, and the Horror of bizarre medical practices, untold suffering and the possibility of premature burial begins to surface…

From the Black Death to cholera – another disease that could be carried by infected persons up to two weeks before the exhibition of symptoms – our international history of pandemic is carried on the backs of war, travel, and commerce. (Groom 164) Yet our core fears of not only dying, but of contracting disease and being judged for it if not exiled because of it has never left us.

We have not really changed all that much from our ancestors. For example, by the nineteenth century multiple pandemics of cholera were no longer legitimately associated “with meteors or divine visitation but with barges and ships, railways, markets and fairs, and mass movements and assemblies of people – be they marching troops, escaping refugees, or crowds gathered at political rallies and popular demonstrations. In tune with the modernity of the disease, traditional scapegoats such as witches and Jews escaped blame: instead it was the medical profession who were first held responsible…” (Groom 165).

We can see today how easily we all slip into the blame-game just like those ancestors, even if we have to embrace a little superstition or magical thinking now and then to carry it off: isn’t it true even today that we cast suspicious eyes on those we presume to “know more” than we do ourselves? Are we not blaming a lab in China right now for a virus that originated in nature –no matter how it jumped species?

We are not so different than we were in those times. But indeed those times had significant differences because medicine was evolving in plain sight – not in laboratories with top secret clearances and nondisclosure agreements.

Enter the age of early medicine and body snatchers and those characters today we might find unsavory – yet whose relentless pursuit of knowledge while sometimes marred by tales of gruesome scenarios where live patients thought dead were buried or vivisected by misadventure – led us to understand the nature of disease and the frailty of human flesh. As we struggled to understand pandemics and control the outbreaks, we sacrificed some of the things that allowed us false senses of control. Our lack of control became bold-faced truths.

That we were in those times surrounded by blood – from animal husbandry to hunting to daily life and death – did not alleviate our terrors. That science was getting involved in mystical, magical, paradoxical and experimental thinking did little to help human imagination. Even now, we have trouble separating pandemics from Divine Judgment. (It just seems easier to control our own religious devotion or to game God than it does to outsmart a virus.) But then a lot more of us had no clue what medicine was ultimately about. In fact, most of us still don’t.

But that certainly has never stopped Horror writers from “going there”….

When it comes to pandemics, however, it is true that most fiction works surface in Science Fiction. Perhaps this is because we (as a general reading public) don’t really want to explore the raw, methodical, Horror of death-by-disease — let alone the dull scientific details; it can be far more entertaining and mentally engaging to dive right into the what-if scenario of apocalypse if we are looking at things as probable survivors instead of likely victims.

But that is often where Horror diverges from the rest of the genres. We do describe the ugly stuff. We do imagine or document the gritty details of death and describe them liberally. But the best of Horror doesn’t stay there… Pandemics, disease and death-by-illness are often consequences of humanity’s conscious choices and consequential collateral damage. It is our job as Horror writers to point that out – especially in the subtext.

Dracula, Disease, and Bram Stoker

Fear of disease and its evil cousin pandemic was often associated with fears of blood and decay and bodily fluids. This would be because medicine took a while to catch up to understanding cause and effect, and the rest of the world was left to care for and dispose of disintegrating flesh. Many illnesses cause the body to bleed, spew, leak and smell…not a pleasant thing to experience or suffer, but definitely a thing to fear if the word “contagion” is added or bandied about.

Says author Nick Groom, “Early theories of plague considered it to be an instrument of holy displeasure…” (16), something we ourselves do even now on a regular basis (we have only to look at the AIDS crisis to see how quickly we are willing to accept the superstitious rationale if doing so can possibly save the rest of us from contagion). Continues Groom, “Early vampires need to be understood within this sacred context. These mystical plagues were manifested through invisible forces – qualities that would come to characterize vampires – and the more radical conjectures on contagion speculated that it could be spread by immaterial means, by the words, or simply the breath of an infected person.” (16)

Toss in humanity’s groomed fears of new medicine at the time, the mysteries of death and illness, a little awkward knowledge of human biology, and a certain fever pitch of panic could be generated. This is how Dracula was born – straight out of the fears of preternatural contagion, a rich history of vampire folklore, and one Bram Stoker. States biographer David J. Skal in his book Something in the Blood: the Untold Story of Bram Stoker:

“Bram Stoker came into the world midway through a century of scientific and technological change more rapid and destabilizing than human beings had previously experienced. The tension between religious and scientific world views was especially pronounced, and Stoker’s own intellectual development and literary output would amount to a lifelong juggling act of materialism versus faith, and reason against superstition.” (Skal 7)

Does it not feel like we are experiencing similar times right now? We should then keep in mind that this was (and still is) the perfect breeding ground for vampire novels, as Nick Groom states: “Dracula is the climax to over 70 years of vampire tales…But the vampire clearly existed before Dracula as a species of Enlightenment thinking in the contexts of medical science, theology, empiricism and politics, and it was this figure that both thrived in the nineteenth century and was adapted by Stoker.” (170)

Combine that understanding with the devastation of what was happening at the time of his birth in November of 1847 – the Irish potato famine, wherein “starving and evicted tenants flooded into the city slums and workhouses, and with them dysentery, famine, fever, and typhus. Terrifying accounts reached Dublin from County Mayo, where workhouses had begun the inexorable transition into death houses.” (9-10), and the stage is set. Life in grim times has a way of feeding a writer’s imagination and Literature of the time. And while we think of popular Gothic Romances of the same period as islands of Literature, what they really were is fictionalized documentation of what was happening during the period. So would become Dracula…a Gothic Horror story reeking of its historical time.

Continues Skal, “The years of Bram Stoker’s childhood were filled with oral accounts of horrors attending the famine. Most poignant and tragic were the now-legendary tales of the “coffin ships” which carried typhus and cholera along with desperate immigrants to North America. Many never arrived alive; as many as a hundred thousand refugees were interred in one mass grave at a St Lawrence River quarantine station in Quebec. Bram undoubtedly heard these stories, told and embellished like folktales, and later could have read published first-person accounts of doomed passengers…” (22)

Thinking about that should get our attention; as of today the U.S. alone has attributed more than 74,595 deaths to the coronavirus pandemic. And just as what was obvious and part of daily life served as the backdrop for the story of Dracula, we are painting our own backdrop right now.

The fact of pandemic today is likely to influence coming new fiction for our century. Now is the time to take in the details – perhaps to journal if not to write the story needing to be born. Little details may fade if we ever get back to “normal”…But even if we don’t, this moment of transition is not unlike the birthday of Dracula. We should never forget the feel of a mask worn across the face, the suppression of breath, the inability to read faces, the heat of exhalation against layers of linen, the burn of the ears from hours of loops affixed there…the freedom of pulling it off in a car with the windows rolled up, the endless long lines and the types of things limited and the times they are limited for (including the order in which they go missing from stores). Details need to define a character and a character’s actions and available options. Don’t count on your memory. Write it down.

Then let it bake in the imagination.

Bram and the Rest of Us

When we want to understand how an author takes the external raw facts of happenings, configures them with his or her own experiences and reshapes them into fiction, it pays to have Horror authors as examples of how it was done. Bram Stoker is just such an author, battling with something arguably more powerful and intrusive than the internet: surviving Victorian Society as an Irishman during pandemic and famine…

Here we have an example of how a writer living through times of immense change (such as now) dealt with oppressive religious mores and social constrictions. There were other peculiarities affecting the period of his youth, including being one of many photographed male children dressed as little girls and living through an ever rising tide of disease and illness accompanied by folk and fairy lore and abuse of opium and laudanum for controlling disease and the vivacity of children… Stoker himself suffered a mysterious paralysis, leaving him bedridden during his childhood (and which may or may not have been connected to period parental use of opium or laudanum), and tying him to so much post-mortem speculation about his sexuality and internal struggles with the changes in play around him – all of which consort with an imagination that could have drafted a monster like Dracula.

Says Skal, “How many nineteenth century writers, especially writers of horror and fantasy, had their early imaginings or mature productions colored and intensified by childhood perceptions of death and the experience of opium? Early death was everywhere, and laudanum use was so accepted and widespread that it may not have registered as a particularly remarkable reminiscence. But it is almost impossible to imagine Poe’s claustrophobic tales not being informed by his famous abuse of alcohol…” (40).

What are you experiencing? Are you writing it down?

When we are given such details in historically framed prose that has a distant and clinical feel, it is not then so difficult to see how earlier Horror writers have been influenced by their times. Yet it often remains a mystery to us as to how to turn the fears and dread we experience today into actual working fiction. For example, we hear fellow contemporary writers talk of the struggle to concentrate, to imagine, to construct stories; we hear about disorientation and distraction. No doubt, writers like Stoker had similar competing distractions, although not on the exact level of the loud and intrusive internet.

In those earlier times, one could shut the door to turn off the stimulus. But that doesn’t mean the imagination didn’t work, or that mass burials and the accoutrement of mass death wasn’t lurking right outside.

We should not underestimate the complexity of those earlier times with their own challenges. Rather, we should accept every generation has its own burdens to carry, that all great things take time, and all writers – even the old greats – are often riddled with the self-doubt we may feel even today as we are overwhelmed by the modern flotsam of facts and rumors. We should take heart, as even Stoker struggled to get it all down in those gritty times of his.

Says Skal, “The reason Dracula took seven years to write was that Stoker had great difficulty writing it, especially through the overload of his own imaginative clutter. The process was twisted, arduous, and constantly interrupted. He stopped to write other books. He questioned himself. He censored himself. He had second, even third thoughts about almost everything.” (306)

We have to remember that even as we are affected by and then separate from times of historic change, the way to arm our Muses is to take in the experience with all of our senses: the details will convey the Horrors more profoundly than trying to explain them. Show, don’t tell…and always, always dig deeper.

Today, when students of the Vampire look at Dracula-the-written-work, it is the details that impress. Says Nick Groom in his foreward for his book The Vampire: a New History:

“I had originally intended to downplay Dracula simply as a representative example of late-Victorian vampire fiction; but the novel is so profoundly informed by the myriad deliberations of its time on vampires, blood, science, technology and literature that all the paths of the (un)dead lead to Dracula, just as they lead away from it”(xv)

Stoker then proves that knowing the vehicle of destruction is as important as knowing the path of destruction.

And whether we like him (or her) or not, the Vampire fits the Literary bill to frame such a period of history as any ravaged by pandemic. In the Vampire we have a fear of contagion; fear of the night when death often descends to spirit away beloved souls; we have a stirring of confusion about sexuality and the role of blood in both sex and disease; we have the debate about what life and death and immortality mean; we have the rich fabric of folklore and superstition juxtaposed against new science and the efficacy of religion; we have fear of what nature can do and might have done to us, combined with dread of what mistakes in society and even nurture might have caused… Stoker’s times were loaded with internal and external battles that we can identify with if we only choose to look at them.

We can see where his inspiration came from – especially when we consider the prominence of Varney the Vampire and theatric pantomimes in Stoker’s life. But this tells us little about where the focus comes from to sit down and write a Dracula…

Instead, it tells us that we have to see a novel not as a playful hobby, a hope for a surprise bestseller, but an act of sheer will. Writing an artful work of fiction, an original, a Literary statement, a genre-changer… that is an act of work. It is childbirth – agonizing and bloody labor…

It takes conceptualizing and research, it takes feedback and beta reading, it takes revision and pause. It even takes doubt.

We have to be willing to see the Horrors for what they are. That means seeing the details of this modern pandemic for what they are… raw, unadorned and paralyzing with perspectives akin to war… We have to be willing to ride the tides of PTSD, of nightmares rooted in truth, of the dead and dying coming in endless waves without repose.

Some of us will succeed in doing this. Some of us will create Draculas. But we cannot think of Bram Stoker sitting blithely at his writing desk, wringing his hands in glee, already spending his author’s profits. He would have done no such thing. There would have been no such promise in writing a work of Horror. We must stop imagining that the greatest writers of Horror had no troubles like our own, and did not suffer as we suffer; each had his or her own demons to battle. And in truth, translating the horrors of death and illness into something like Dracula is more about the ability to take our internalized fears and marry them with the mythology and society of our day.

Do you dare look? More importantly, will you dare remember and remind the rest of us? Will you speak for the dead?

 

References

Groom, Nick. The Vampire: a New History. Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, c2018.

Skal, David J. Something in the Blood: the Man Who Wrote Dracula. Liveright Publishing Corporation: New York, c2016.

Nameless Horror: Monsters, Metaphor & the Coronavirus in Modern Life (Are You Writing or Are You Blocked?)

Social unrest, political distrust, unbreachable financial divides, and now a global pandemic… Has there ever been a more fertile time for writing Literature?

Yet here so many of us are, so incredibly overwhelmed by the high, swift tides of information overload, emotional distress, and outright confusion about where our place actually IS in this historical mess that we are like so many deer in the headlights: frozen in stunned silence. If you are suffering from a new and frustrating writer’s block right now, you are not alone…

Is the constant inundation of data that we accept as the price of admission for living in the modern world creating circumstances that are any different than the times writers have lived and written through before?

And does it contribute to how we interpret a pandemic as a kind of “nameless monster” that runs rampant through our emotions, devouring our creativity?

And if that is what Horror is all about, why can’t we harness the chaos?

Nature as Monster

As Horror lovers in times like these, we are forced to confront the real truth about our genre: that the best of Horror is homegrown in the soil of Real Life Horror. Every monster in our genre was spawned from the very scary realities of actually living in the world. And we should not be surprised that as a genre that revels in the macabre accoutrement of death, Horror has been influenced a great deal by plagues and pandemics, disease and human vulnerabilities.

So here we are again… starting to understand how villages of old came to fear strangers, how peculiar or selfish habits carry very real threats, how peasants were once wont to queue up outside castles with pitchforks, and how throughout the ages the threat of death remains so very personal and terrifying.

Small wonder that some of us might flinch under the weight of it all…

Disease emphasizes very powerful fears: will there be anyone left to help or bury us respectfully? Is there a God and life after death, or is this really “all there is” and “have I wasted my life”? Why me, or why not me? What will we do without the ones we love most? How will we survive so much change alone?

Horror responds to these queries with Vampires, Ghosts, Zombies, and even Mummies. To make ourselves feel powerful, to mock what we cannot control, Horror offers up Witches and Sorcerers, Priests and Angels, Amulets and Ancient Texts… And to keep the battle accessible to even the most timid of our readers, Horror provides formulas to defeat monsters like Werewolves, Poltergeists, Demons, and Maniacs with hooks and hockey masks.

By injecting the supernatural into Real Life, Horror has always mitigated and satirized Real Life Horror.

So what is stopping us now?

Why is the coronavirus the game-changer for many writers?

The answer is: because this just got personal.

Viruses go anywhere…striking in what seem like random patterns like tornadoes. They are invisible, seemingly arbitrary yet horribly specific, and potentially lethal – if not to us, then to those we love and things we need to make our lives routine and familiar enough to be safe. Worse, viruses invade those “safe” places…

Viruses as an extension of what we thought of as “domesticated” Mother Nature are exactly as Philip Athans says about Stephen King’s The Mist in his book, Writing Monsters: How to Craft Believably Terrifying Creatures to Enhance Your Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction: [it] “is as much a monster in the story as the Lovecraftian horrors it hides. It’s something that you can’t stop, can’t predict, and can’t fight – and in a very real sense it acts in collusion with a panoply of dangerous outsider predators.” (Athans 104)

Perhaps our mistake has been in miscasting Nature altogether (which is really not all that surprising or unlikely if we consider how easily we tend to miscast members of our own species, for which we have oodles of proof of unpredicability).

Native Peoples have said from the beginning that the earth is a living, breathing entity; that it demands to be treated respectfully, or it will defend itself in quite lethal ways. They weren’t being “cute,” “quaint,” or “naïve” when they said this; they meant it. And now here we are… watching a naturally born virus erupt among humanity — the biggest most harmful infestation the earth has had to endure.

As writers, we are observers. And thinkers. It is so very easy right now to wonder if we have done this to ourselves in so many ways. And guilt is yet another suffocating emotion in the Arts.

Yet is this any different that the plagues writers like Shakespeare composed through?

I say it is. And it is because Shakespeare may have had to deal with the closures of theaters, the layoffs of himself and actors, the fear and devastation of those dying around him… But he did not have media 24/7 blasting the devastation at him every waking moment. He wasn’t told to isolate in place, to scrub his doorknobs and food items like a neurotic raccoon, to love and fear his grocer, to keep seven-figure body counts in his head, to be shown on a map that there is no escape, to hear a litany of symptoms that mirror so many other less deadly diseases, to be designated “essential personnel” enough to wait on his fellow Elizabethans wholeheartedly but without the panicked, demanded-for protections of other essential personnel… Shakespeare could retreat if he was able, to write if he was able, to take the time to assimilate what the plague meant to him and his audience…to turn it into poetry…

I am not saying he had it easier. But there is a profound difference in helping your village dig a mass grave and filling with known folk to watching a military as large and “great” as our own being ordered to use heavy machinery to dig trenches in preparation… To see technology used via refrigerated semi trucks to store bodies (still keeping it distant and less real for those of us hunkered down in front of our television sets and not being able to realize the magnitude because we are blessedly protected from the reality…)

Reality is needed…even ugly reality, and there is something profoundly important about burying one’s own dead, about witnessing death.

Our country’s leaders (like so many) wonder why we don’t “get” the danger…. It is because we are being sheltered from the truth… that people are DYING. And it is not a pleasant death. It is not an attended death. And death is not at all like cleaned-up-grandpa-in-a-fancy-box-with-flowers. It is not take the beloved dog to the vet and tell the kids he’s gone to live on a farm. Death is a battlefield. Death is watching the body fight for life with a person trapped inside. It is a twisted shell left gaping, ravaged by the wounds of that battle…And it is gritty and horrible, eviscerating, emotionally devastating, and will torment the dreams of those forced to live through it.

If such a witness to this kind of devastation is a writer, much of what is witnessed is not written on the battlefield. It is written after the nightmares wake the soul and spill their truths out onto the page. Such writing is another kind of death – one with rebirth. But it very often takes time… Reality comes rife with ghosts.

Some of us as writers have already been there at one time or another…in my case, watching my mother die of cancer. It devastated my ability to write. I couldn’t abide Horror, which suddenly seemed so incredibly trite. And that drove the stake deeper into my heart and twisted it. Because writing has always been my way to cope.

Reporters can tell me a thousand times the “GOT author is writing” and all it does is make things worse. Like many Horror writers, I know I should be writing. But I can’t right now. It just doesn’t feel decent somehow.

The thing is… that’s okay.

What I learned from last time – from that ten year writer’s block – is that we have to sort through our emotions. We have to experience what we are feeling. It’s the only way to come out the other side.

Because when nature is the monster, the overwhelming properties of that monster means we are often robbed of words.

Indescribable, Unutterable Horror

Says Athans, “Every story is about something.” (75) Monsters are often used in our genre to represent the real something… Monsters are metaphors… and “some of the scariest monsters are the ones that attack our psychological well-being.” (74)

Are we not there with the coronavirus? Are we not asking ourselves if we have been the agent of cause behind the rise of this disease? Do we not question everything from morals and politics to global warming and tinkering with Mother Nature? Are we not freaked out?

Yet we are unable to really envision this monster as it ravages continent after continent. All the slides in the world, all the explanations…. Most of us just cannot envision it… So we default to the imagery we all understand because it is not specific. We call it a Monster…

Says Athans: “You can’t see a virus, let alone slash it with your trusty broadsword, shoot it with a blaster, or drive a stake through its heart. It gets inside you and starts eating, and the only reason you know its there at all is the horrific effect it’s having on your body.” (123)

How can we really look into that horrible maw of disease we have named the coronavirus then, and not be made insane?

We have to realize that as writers, really seeing and on some level experiencing this Horror is also the way out of the block. It is our job and our nature to observe, to record the details, and regurgitate it all in some semblance of acceptable order…

We have to realize that this is what Critics mean when they talk about Literature… and why Horror should include more of it. Literature is about how humanity functions in the crisis of Life…

Soldiering through this incredulous time of pandemic is providing you as a writer with information that while overwhelming now, will inform every piece of writing you do from this day forward.

And if you are a Horror writer, it will also be colored by the indescribable moments, by the awful silence that fills the mind when the world as you know it stops.

Wordlessness for a writer sounds like death. But it is truly the sound of rebirth in the making. From that unutterable mass of emotion will come the monster you need to tell the story.

One theory of why Lovecraft is so successful in Horror and monster-making attributes his choice of words in descriptions – words like abnormal, accursed, amorphous, antediluvian, blasphemous, cyclopean, daemonic, eldritch, fetid, gibbering, indescribable, iridescent, loathsome, squamous, unmentionable, unnamable, unutterable…. (Athans 214)

Do we not talk about the coronavirus using similar vocabulary?

The deliberate rendering of the monster’s description as indescribable and defiant of all sane envisioning opens the door to our worst imaginings. It personalizes every monster, tailor-making each one into a very precise creature in our very different heads. All versions can be true at the same time. And such monsters are not only unforgettable, but immortal in our memories – fear first.

How we are seeing the coronavirus is doing the same thing to our mental processing. It has become a Lovecraftian monster whose terrible imagery has merged with our own vision of it.

When we deconstruct fictional monsters into their basic and indistinct parts, we can either deduce their weaknesses, or become disoriented by the Horror – losing ourselves in the very type of  insanity Lovecraft loved to dangle over his protagonists. This makes Lovecraft a writer whose astute observation of his own personal fears allowed him to create a most effective emotional maze to draw his readers into. It is why we remember Lovecraft stories for all of the right reasons – for the Horror of them (and not for the almost-dull prose created to stall the sense of urgency we have come to expect in contemporary American Horror).

There is just something particularly terrifying about the slow, steady advance of a lethal monster with no known weaknesses…

Says Philip Atkins, “Many of Lovecraft’s stories lack immediacy; the threat is always subtle, implied, still developing, rarely seen in its entirety, or shown doing horrible things.” (201)

Is this not how we frame the news of today?

The pandemic is not expected to crest until July or August… although most states have a stay-at-home order, you can go for a walk, go to the grocery…

No one wants to alarm the public, to start a stampede or a panic. Today we have grown accustomed to the fact that everything is administered in measured, acceptable doses. Wars and massacres and even pandemics are interrupted by commercials for better pillows and soothing medications, and ways to waste hard-earned money. We are provided the necessary distractions to pacify and anesthetize our reactions.

Yet when the monster is big enough, bad enough, universal enough… then the parts we do not see cast long, scary shadows. The horrible things come closer, seem more personally possible – even if there is denial. And when the monster takes someone we know, when it stands drooling outside our front door, and worse – when it is invisible – we feel real terror.

How can we defend against the seeming indefensible? A Zombie Apocalypse is preferable — or a rise of Vampires, the stirring of Mummies and the howling of Werewolves… we know each of us can figure out how to fight those.

Viruses take special knowledge. Wars take special luck.

So when the monster – the metaphor for all we dread, hate, or fear – materializes ever so briefly, ever so fatally from the darkness… we need a modicum of control.

And when our fingers cannot find purchase as we dangle from the cliff we never saw coming, we have mere seconds to save ourselves or be lost to irrational terror.

We may see the coronavirus – but we only see it in glimpses of statistics, in the sudden, inconceivable loss of someone we love who was just fine so short a time ago. We never quite see the monster, even when we are shown images of it on a slide… it remains indescribable.

The monster-virus is as much a mystery as the code behind the internet. We see proof it is there, but we cannot truly see IT. So we imagine it. And it wreaks its Horror from our emotions outward… it remains unthinkable, shapeless…amorphous…unreal….

And for many of us, the writing stalls. We cannot muster the muses from those gloriously fertile adjectives.

When we compare ourselves as writers to those who invoked novels from battlefields, from prisons, from oppressive governments and bestial thugs…even those who write in famines and even older plagues (yes, even Shakespeare wrote through two), we start to wonder what is wrong with us.

Yet unlike those wondrous writers, our own modern world seems to move through two very different realities simultaneously. Our world is “crafted” for us…filtered…. We don’t see the wars coming; we don’t comprehend the epidemic, let alone the pandemic. We are subject to numerous layers of “spin”… and the shock of the truth hits us in relentless waves when the storm finally approaches.

We are willingly lulled into numbness, into stasis…a bespelled slumber…

For countries like the U.S… this has been a rude awakening… a reminder that where monsters are concerned, we are all meat.

So not being able to write right now is more than understandable; this is unfamiliar to our senses. We don’t know how to process the flood of data pouring into and all over our Art. For too many of us, this is like listening to The War of the Worlds on radio…real only by its reporting…by images we cannot recognize of places made into Hollywood sets. We are waiting to hear someone announce April Fools…

Writer’s block is a natural reaction.

It is okay.

Not-writing might even be the righteous thing to be doing at this moment in our history. Writing will come back. Some people will not.

So if you are blocked, and not writing like that GOT author, or Shakespeare… Rest assured you are not alone. And you are no less a writer for it. You are doing research, willingly or not.

Live in the moment.

Be human.

The words will come later… When the rest of the world needs a little reminding of what Real Horror is all about.

 

Trick, No Treat: An Urgent Warning for Cat-Lovers, Writers, and…Everyone Else

Horror writers and cats… There seems to be a connection. But then, many writers are cat people.

Perhaps we find a lot in common with those awesome feline wiles and independent characters; perhaps we fancy ourselves as equally above the fray and conflicts of more social creatures. But they frequently end up our steadfast companions, our de facto muses, our deepest of confidants.

We take their presence for granted, depending on their ghostly travels in and out of our writing space, counting on their quiet judgment and unrelenting expectations. We love them. We confide in them. And they matter.

So when their lives spin into mysterious health problems, we are left feeling betrayed by the gods. And because cats so rarely confess (like ourselves) that they have become vulnerable to disease, they (also like ourselves) tend to hide the truth of disorder until things have gotten serious.

Such is what happened to my own writing companions. And what I learned about cats, this newest of feline disorders, and what is happening to our animals universally is important and timely… because our tinkering with the environment has hit home in a whole new way: it has invaded the sanctity of our delusion that we can abstain from what our species has done to this planet. It is now affecting not only our pets, but ourselves. This is a warning. This is about all of us and chickens coming home to roost. And if you love Horror, then surely you will appreciate the irony…

We have caused this one. I am talking about plastics in our environment. And I am talking about their insidious effect on the thyroid – HUMAN and animal.

This post is about an emerging health crisis facing cats in particular and everything and everyone else in addition, and we have caused it. So if you have a cat or many cats, if they are your better halves, if you yourself have mysterious health problems, you need to read this. There is evil afoot. There are tricks in our bags of Halloween goodies.

Hyperthyroidism: A Feline Epidemic

Let me be clear. Cats are not the only ones. I have personally worked with and met so many people experiencing thyroid problems, that when my cats were diagnosed, it got my attention in a big way. A little research showed that dogs and other animals are also affected. But cats are where I learned the harder lesson.

The animals we share our living space with, our food, our water, our environments with, are all being affected… But because this is suddenly new in cats, it has begun to hog the attention of veterinarians.

Our cat specialist advised us that prior to 1979, cats simply did not get hyperthyroidism, like sharks didn’t get cancer… and all vets were essentially taught to not bother looking for it in felines. But thankfully, one young vet did… and he discovered that all of a sudden, cats were developing the disease.

He also discovered that it was because of the growing presence of chemicals we have placed in our living environments – plastics in particular, but also chemicals related to firefighting and fire suppression and fire retardants – things in furniture, paint, construction, clothing, textiles, WATER… EVERYTHING we are surrounded by and now cannot escape…

Cats are developing hyperthyroidism as a direct result of environmental contamination. It is an epidemic. Almost every cat over ten years of age will develop hyperthyroidism. And now, it is even seen in kittens.

Your cat is now a canary…

And if you think I am kidding, you need to read the article just released recently about plastic in tea bags (https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/09/27/these-tea-bags-release-billions-plastic-particles-into-your-brew-study-shows/) … The article states “Earlier this year, a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature estimated that on average, a person might ingest 5 grams of plastic a week, the equivalent size of a credit card. Researchers at the University of Newcastle in Australia compiled dozens of studies on the presence of plastic in water, as well as in food such as shellfish and even beer.”

I found out one of my cats, Max, had hyperthyroidism when he went to the vet for an emergency tooth extraction. He had been throwing up constantly (unusual for him), suddenly stopped eating normally, losing a lot of his body weight despite a ravenous appetite, drank like a fish, and became scary-lethargic between fits of feline mania. It turned out that he had broken a canine horsing around with his sister, and the urgency of that matter got us roused from our cycle of excuses and theories and to the vet. He had begun to get thinner prior to the broken tooth, had begun to become obnoxious and over-interested in his sister, also chasing around his brother (a skittish shelter rescue cat), becoming…”mean” when he had been a loving, affectionate cat that snuggled with everyone. We noticed the slight change in his personality, an increase in caterwauling, and a rasping change to his voice. And like all pet owners, we assumed that changes came with age.

Max, now 13, was likely to be entering a possible period of geriatric crankiness. Or so we rationalized.

And we had rationalized it all. We do that as humans, especially when we don’t want to think something bad is possibly lurking… when we contemplate the rising costs of veterinary care. But thanks to that broken tooth and the required bloodwork prior to dental surgery, we found out that Max had a disease: hyperthyroidism.

Hyperthyroidism is an endocrine disease. And like human hyperthyroidism, feline hyperthyroidism wreaks havoc in the body. According to the website for our specialist, “Feline hyperthyroidism is the most common endocrine disease in cats. Early treatment is key! Left untreated, hyperthyroidism will ultimately kill the cat. The disease creates a hypermetabolic state which has a devastating effect on all the body’s systems, especially the heart and the kidneys.”

Cats with the disease show profound changes that creep up on our observation skills, so we tend to not-see them for a while until all of a sudden we notice:

• Significant weight loss despite a sometimes insatiable appetite (sometimes to the extent that they devour everything in sight yet their ribs or hip bones are poking out)
• Possible pot belly (despite weight loss everywhere else)
• Increased thirst and heavy urination (two to three times what is normal in the litter box)
• Increase or a start in massive and sometimes violent vomiting
• Diarrhea (so constant you start looking at their food for the reason)
• Hyperactivity, hyper-attention, hypersensitivity (this includes pacing, racing, fight-picking, girl chasing, atypical or sudden waking up at night, an increase in nocturnal vocalization, excessive sensitivity to touch or sound)
• Clingy-ness (like you start wondering if they know you are about to die or something)
• Voice changes (like you start wondering if they got into a household chemical or ate nonfood items, because that is all you can come up with as an excuse)
• Coat changes (often appearing unkept, matted, greasy…just plain wrong) and including a “blanching” of their coat color, especially in the face.
• Consistently dilated pupils.
• Personality changes – often aggression, and often mistaken for premature dementia.

After I really looked at the symptoms I found myself ashamed that they did not compile in my list-making mind and sound instant alarms. Never mind that it seemed to happen quickly, like over six months or so.

In fact, while I was busy not-noticing what was happening to Max, I was busier not-noticing that it had begun to happen to his sister, Lola. Lola had (at her dental surgery) been found to have a malignant, cancerous tumor between her shoulder blades. Her vet warned that this was probably in the process of metastasizing, and did we wish to be referred to an oncologist. So I was rationalizing her health changes to an assumption that cancer was now at work.

I was wrong. At least as far as we currently know.

Because when we took her in with Max for his annual exam and bloodwork for hyperthyroid medication, we found out Lola also had hyperthyroidism.

And suddenly, it all made sense.

So what were we looking at with this disease?

Here’s the scoop, and it is not pretty:

Untreated, hyperthyroidism will kill your cat. It eventually affects major organs – kidneys, heart… the over-active metabolism drives blindness, and even sudden death, torturing your cat, changing his or her personality, plaguing them with violent vomiting and endless bouts of diarrhea…

Treated, hyperthyroidism will kill your cat slower.

To treat your cat, you will have to see your vet twice yearly (or more if your cat has high numbers), have expensive bloodwork done, and you will have to medicate them daily. Often twice daily. The medication is not too expensive, but it adds up. And there is more…Again, from our specialist’s website:

“Hyperthyroidism is a multi-systemic disease that affects all organs of the body – from the brain to the tip of the tail and everything in between. It severely damages the heart, kidneys and liver by making these organs work harder and work overtime. The body can’t rest, and a negative metabolic state becomes normal. The end result can be total heart failure, kidney failure, liver failure, and the collapse of all systems. It is a common misconception that methimazole will stop this. Its effect is partial at best. Methimazole masks the symptoms of hyperthyroidism, while the tumor continues to grow and the disease continues to advance. Dosage of methimazole needs to be continually monitored. It must be increased or in some cases decreased or stopped as the disease continues to advance until many cats cannot be controlled with medication. When the cats become intolerant to methimazole, these patients are sick and can only be saved with radio-iodine. These are very high risk patients with questionable outcomes. Treat early for a cure!” https://catspecialist.com/radioactive-iodine-faq/

Here’s an interesting fact: methimazole was designed for human use. And it was never intended for long –term use because over time it becomes ineffective…

And this medication (along with its alternate name felimazole), is scary. You are not supposed to handle it with bare hands. Your other animals are not supposed to eat it. You are not supposed to allow waste to accumulate in the litter box especially if you have other cats or nosy dogs or toddlers. Or are pregnant. And, you are supposed to wear gloves when medicating the cat and cleaning the box. To not-do so is a direct and dangerous health risk to humans.

Surprise.

Knowing all that, what do you think this disease will do – when either left untreated in a cat, or undertreated, because an owner either does not know, does not care, or cannot afford treatment? What do you think is going to happen to all of the cats whose disease is not diagnosed and treated in some way, but whose owners are frustrated and tired of cleaning up feces and vomitus and dealing with agitated, sometimes hostile cats? I’ll tell you: they will be dumped, thrown out, abandoned, or euthanized because people do not understand or do not want to understand that cats are no longer low-maintenance pets…that we have sabotaged their lives and a wondrous God-given animal design.

Worse, what does this mean is happening even to people? About what is now invasively and unavoidably in our environment?

According to the Kresser Institute, “The prevalence of thyroid disease [in humans] has skyrocketed within the past few decades. According to the American Thyroid Association, an estimated 20 million Americans have some form of thyroid disease.This alarming trend begs the question—what is responsible for the epidemic of thyroid dysfunction? A growing body of research indicates that exposure to environmental toxins is a key piece of the thyroid disease puzzle.” https://kresserinstitute.com/environmental-toxins-harm-thyroid/

And the alarm bell should be that environmentally-driven hyperthyroidism has gone epidemic in cats…

While job-hunting, I inadvertently found out something that my vet at the time failed to mention – whether because she did not know (a real possibility for non-cat-specific vets as, just as with human medicine, advances in specialties are rapid and radical and hard to keep up with), or if she assumed I did not care or could not afford alternatives, or because like anything else, corporate pressures (a real threat to vet care) translate cat diseases like this into an endless cycle of veterinary charges necessary to keep your cat alive and distort the best intentions of otherwise caring veterinarians, I will not speculate…However…

THERE IS A CURE FOR CATS: radioactive iodine therapy, or I-131 treatment… (It is available for dogs as well as 131-I treatment, but there are many more complications involved for them…see your vet.)

Be aware that it is every bit as scary as the disease and its treatment. But at least it is available, and quick.

Unfortunately, it is also labor intensive and it is expensive.

I-131 Treatment: Radioactive Iodine

Now you’re getting the picture…

This is serious stuff. And if you have a cat, you are probably going to face this enemy. So here is the truth of it:

We treated Max for over a year with medication. We were not warned to not-handle the drug or the litter directly, so I have no idea what that means for us health-wise. It may be a future surprise… yet another not-so-goody in the Trick or Treat bag of Life…

Nonetheless, the treatment was not really “working”… it was more like a Band-Aid for a bullet hole, and I began to worry we were going to lose Max sooner than we were supposed to. It is also the opinion of some vets that medication is just not effective enough, because it cannot stop the disease or peripheral health conditions that it masks and/or enables….but many of them may not know or know much about the options. And when pet owners shrink away from annual visits to the doctor because they consider $50 too much to spend on a cat, they rightly assume that same owner is not going to want to do necessary diagnostics tests that can run hundreds of dollars, and subsequent lifelong medication with its stress and charges, let alone a costly cure that typically runs to the thousands of dollars.

But then I found out about I-131 treatment, and that it has a 96% cure rate.

96%… odds we can literally live with….

Price was going to be an object, but it was also going to be no object, because I would have sold everything I own… And price is in fact up there. As the treatment grows in popularity, there will be probable and increasing ranges in cost, and some variance is already out there. But keep in mind that this is radiation.

There is just no way to get past that fact.

Again our specialist’s website states it well:

“Radio-iodine therapy is the gold standard in human and in veterinary medicine, and is very cost effective. Compare the costs and continued costs of medically treated hyperthyroidism, thyroid surgery, twice daily insulin treatments for diabetes, fractured limb repairs, treating congestive heart failure, treating chronic liver and kidney disease and then compare the curing of hyperthyroidism. The cost to value ratio is amazing. When was the last time you heard the word “cure” used with any major, chronic medical condition?” https://catspecialist.com/radioactive-iodine-faq/

The “medicine” needed is nuclear and government regulated. That means it is not cheap for you OR the vet. Your cat is also made radioactive. In fact, for four days following the treatment, even the vet cannot touch your cat without radioactive protection, keeping your cat in a specially regulated, tightly controlled environment where everything they touch and excrete must be handled like the nuclear waste it is…

Once your cat is discharged, you cannot snuggle or sleep with him or her for two weeks, then you must limit time for two more weeks. Waste must be kept in a special container for up to six weeks after the last elimination at four weeks… months of poo will sit in your garage or on your balcony. (Thank God it is no longer summer…)

And, after four to six weeks, you must have the cat retested for bloodwork to see if the treatment worked, because there are some cases where the treatment might bear repeating. Again, early diagnosis and treatment is key.

Some veterinarians say you should do a second follow-up with a full exam and bloodwork in three more months. If the numbers are in normal range, then the cat is considered “cured.” If not, you may face that second treatment. OR, you may find that hyperthyroidism caused or masked other life-threatening issues… like cancer. Or kidney disease. Or diabetes. Or cardiac issues…

And if all of this suggests an urgency here in diagnosis and treatment to you, you would be right.

The cost of I-131 treatment is higher than most people who own cats can easily afford – especially because cat owners usually own more than one cat and as mentioned, this is now a universal disease for all cats to endure (and if you can only afford one, which do cat you treat? It’s like choosing one child over another…). But over time, the cost of having to go to the vet for bloodwork, the cost of drugs, the cost of drugs not working completely, the insidious progression of the disease and its wear on you, your family, and the cat does add up…it all makes I-131 treatment the very best option.

As I said, it varies…clinic to clinic, state to state… But here in Colorado, at the clinic we went to (Cat Specialist, Castle Rock) it ran $1500 per cat.

It cleaned us out, but we sent Max and Lola together for treatment. They are now working through their post treatment, radioactive afterlife. Their coats feel burnt and dry, they still exhibit hyperthyroid symptoms now and again (which they will as the disease purges from their bodies). But overall, they seem more their old selves – Max, more loving…Lola, less living under the bed… So far, Lola shows the most improvement. We are not sure with Max, who is still thinner and not plumping up like Lola seems to be doing.

I have not yet had our third cat tested, but he has an appointment around the time Max and Lola will have their follow-up bloodwork. And hopefully by then, we will have enough to treat any cat needing a first or second treatment if necessary.

I want to be clear. Most cat owners have more than one cat. Most cat owners have cats because they have been traditionally low-cost, low-maintenance pets.

We have ruined that. We have ruined the environment and promise of a life-long home and health for cats, and who knows what that really means for us or our children.

Guess what? Native peoples were right. And now the chickens have come home to roost in your cats and dogs and even you…Just look at all of the plastic in our lives… and we are eating a credit card’s worth a week!

Wake up!

I guarantee you watching your beloved pet succumb to hyperthyroidism is devastating, as well as emotionally and physically exhausting. What will it be when it is you, your spouse, or your kid?

It is already probably why a new group of cats and even dogs are being abandoned and abused more often: their symptoms are being misunderstood as behavioral issues… as dementia… old age… or

Cattitude…

It’s why people open the door and hope a cat does not come back—that misunderstanding of the call of biology and nature. And now it will be because the cat keeps throwing up all over, or having ungodly diarrhea, or manic moods and caterwauling (which may indicate pain)…

But cattitude is also why writers like me love them. And why and how we come to rationalize changes that are really indicators of the emergence of a serious disease.

And we are talking about a disease here. We are talking about environmental pollution.

And we are talking about love.

Hyperthyroidism is now a condition of cat-owning.

Let me say this again: cat-ownership is no longer a low maintenance thing. You need to be proactive, take the cat to the vet as often as the dog. Cats need to be seen annually; PERIOD. In fact, many vets are now pressuring owners to bring in both cats and dogs twice a year for a complete work-up because advances in veterinary medicine mean earlier, more accurate diagnosis and better treatment options. And these can be very expensive, but this is not about money-grubbing: this is about monitoring your animal for problems which left untreated will rapidly accelerate into more expensive problems if not a death sentence. Because veterinarians are seeing more sick animals than ever before…

The fact that veterinary care is getting as expensive as human medical care is not helping, but it does mean that veterinary care is getting better… And we simply cannot afford to tell ourselves “it is just a cat” or “just a dog”… we have made them dependent upon us. And now we are making them sick. We owe them.

Take your cat to the vet annually…be sure to have bloodwork, a fecal test, and urine test done annually. After age eight in a cat, do it twice a year. Have them look for hyperthyroidism specifically. Tell them. Don’t wait for your vet to wonder about it: tell them to test for it.

And if your cat suddenly starts showing changes… take them to the vet immediately, express your concerns, and do not let anyone pooh-pooh your worries. Be adamant. Watch for hyperthyroidism to emerge. Because the statistics say it probably will, and the sooner you treat your diagnosed cat or radiate your diagnosed cat, the better his or her chances.

This is not going to go away. And if you have ever loved a cat, you know how emotionally charged this issue is about to become.

I highly recommend the I-131 treatment, because it is a chance at a cure, and because I have already seen the aggravation, cost and seeming pointlessness in “treating” the disease with medication.

And I know personally how much I don’t want to lose my cats to this disease. I have also been that poor where options just weren’t on the table, and may be that poor again one day… Do your best to plan ahead when you get a kitten. Set aside monies like a college fund…Make no mistake; I am fully aware that I could do this for my cats because I am married and we have two incomes right now… Others are not so lucky. One day, I might not be again either. But I will never be without a cat in my life any more than I will be without pen and paper.

Ever. And I know there are other cat lovers out there just like me, and cats just like Max. And Lola… And they…mean… everything.

Trick or treat.

 

For detailed information about feline hyperthyroid disease, what to expect, and the process of I-131 treatment… I encourage you to visit the Cat Specialist Castle Rock website https://catspecialist.com/ . Then find a clinic in your area, and be prepared to travel… we travelled 40 miles to get to our provider. And I highly recommend them for Colorado residents.

Sredni Vashtar: the Beautiful Terror of My Childhood (Why You Should Know the Writings of Saki/H.H. Munro)

One of the biggest detriments to not-having your genre acknowledged as its own Literary genre early enough is the probability of certain authors and certain stories being simply…forgotten… in the rush to recognition.

In today’s world of out-of-sight, out-of-mind thinking, we are at perhaps an even greater risk of losing track of what has gone before (and especially for American Horror readers, if those writers and stories are not American). Those authors and those stories hide in plain sight, often labeled as “kid’s stories” or Young Readers stories…Young Adult… They are categorized within the anonymity of broad genre labels, all too often not narrowed down to the familiar genres like Fantasy or Horror.

Instead, they are tucked into anonymous collections of other stories – those peculiar selections of odd works by established, Literary names whose proximity-by-binding is designed to “hook” young readers into the discovery process of reading and creating an undefined, unshaped hunger for Literature. Yet many of these stories – while so relevant to youth – are also so keenly relevant to their individual genres that even adults are susceptible to their magic… which means something — especially when such tales are remembered decades after the reading of them.

It is a difficult and miraculous thing for an author to create such a story – so immediately ordinary by its concept and yet so hauntingly extraordinary by its telling that its mere existence bears mention and demands acknowledgement. So why don’t we know those author’s names and their stories?

For the last five decades one such tale has haunted me, reminding me of what we all as Horror writers aspire to – that one significant story that no one ever forgets... And re-reading it as an adult changes nothing. Indeed, tucked neatly in between those half-remembered reading lists and Literature textbooks with short story collections are stories I now never hear mentioned, and I wonder if we have misplaced these authors accidentally or on purpose—because just such a one provided a story whose name and details stayed with me for over fifty years after one reading…

Sredni Vashtar, by H.H. Munro, also known as Saki.

Understanding How Horror is Discovered in an Unused Toolshed

What is it about reading a great story for the first time, about being seven years old and having a story crouch in your imagination decades later? How exactly does the mind become the tool shed, repository of forbidden feelings and childhood resentments – shaping the imagination like moonlight shapes silhouettes in a dark room?

Surely it is because it is already there…a makeshift box for all of the sins we endure, all of the sins we imagine…

It occurs to me I had some wickedly awesome English teachers in my youth.

And I am not saying it is their fault I became a writer of Horror fiction, but it certainly helped.

It was the story that seemed to have changed everything – “Sredni Vashtar,” the first Horror story I remember reading — and having it rock my world. I also remember how it made me feel – guilty and satiated all at the same time, dissociated from my own bullied life, and vividly aware of how inadequate the class discussion afterward seemed. Did they not “get” it? I wondered. Am I the only one who sees?

I know now that every child feels that way…alone, isolated…vulnerable because we are taking the whole world into the damaged vessel of ourselves trying to make sense of who we are while so many are trying to force us into shapes we do not recognize. Listening to that class discussion, I checked out. I missed the first real opportunity to understand how to read critically because I was already obsessed. I was already a Horror fan, and simply did not know it…

Because in my mind Sredni Vashtar lived…where there are bullies, such things happen.

Horror today has been neatly packed into a restrictive set of monsters and tropes. It is as though we are afraid that if we venture too far out of genre conventions, we lose ourselves. We avoid gray areas, and sneer at labeling certain tales as childish things. Yet that is exactly how the genre grows – by invading other gardens, casting spores among the resident flowers, and riding strange blooms as parasites until the new buds open blood red and spill out a new species of life…

We seem bound and determined to narrow definitions instead of expanding them, locking out certain families of Horror. Some of this comes as we prepare to establish our genre within the field Literary Criticism. But some of it also seems to rise from nefarious fears that we are losing…something…perhaps identity…perhaps control.

In the mad dash to the finish line, we have grabbed our tomes of Lovecraft and Poe and tossed Stephen King into our box of must-saves-from-the-purging-fire of the Tech Revolution. But we don’t even know the names of those who came in between, let alone that they simply have to be saved.

Hector Hugh Munro is one such author… One whose work reaches beyond childish things and right into adulthood, because with stories like “Sredni Vashtar” he has reminded us that Horror starts early – that it is those very emotions we learn to control and subvert as children that make us who we are, and feeds the monsters of our genre.

H.H. Munro is also another potential foundational author of the Horror genre, writing under the pseudonym Saki. “He adopted the name in 1900, and it’s believed to have been taken from a character from the works of the Persian poet, Omar Khayyam.” (Reimann)

Another British author (what a surprise!) Munro has been described as a “Scottish writer and journalist whose stories depict the Edwardian social scene with a flippant wit and power of fantastic invention used both to satirize social pretension, unkindness, and stupidity and to create an atmosphere of horror…” (Encyclopedia Britannica)

The son of an officer in the Burmese police, Munro was born in Burma (what is now Myanmar) in 1870. He and his sister were returned to England and the care of a “strict, puritanical” grandmother and aunts after the untimely death of their mother when he was two years old; “He later took revenge on their strictness and lack of understanding by portraying tyrannical aunts in many of his stories about children.” (Encyclopedia Britannica)

As an adult he served as a police officer in India, and was posted to Burma before contracting malaria which forced his return to England in 1895, and which is alleged to have led him to become a writer. Munro “never married and may have been gay, but homosexuality was a crime in Britain during Munro’s lifetime and the decorum of the times would have required him to keep that part of his life secreted away… ” During World War I, he was killed in action at the Battle of Ancre (November 14, 1916) by a German sniper. (Summary; Raimann)

Other sources seem to confirm Munro’s “secret.” And they also reveal a very familiar “theme” for white male writers of the time: racism and a touch of misogyny. “Munro was certainly wary of the growing Jewish presence in England, and he ridiculed the mounting women’s suffrage movement. Still, however chauvinistic his politics were, Munro knew something about marginalization. As a homosexual in Edwardian England, in which one risked being tried for gross indecency, Munro chose to be secretive to the point of repression for his entire life.” (Reimann)

So why is a man so much a cookie-cutter of our genre’s representation of his period — one where Horror had begun to seriously flower — no longer worthy of mention?

The mind boggles. But it also begins to have suspicions…And Sredni Vashtar howls from the shed — because Munro’s works have indeed held their own against so many bigger names of his time (Wilde, Kipling, Wodehouse)… Why don’t we know him?

“As Christopher Hitchens wrote, Munro ‘is among those few writers, inspirational when read at an early age, who definitely retain their magic when revisited decades later.’” (Reimann) Yet those in this country who read him as children are growing older…and young people don’t seem to speak his name…

And all the while, those of us who read him cannot forget him. Perhaps that has to do with the relevance of his writing, with the collective memory of every childhood.

“Sredni Vashtar” is iconic. He is archetype made manifest, made justice…

From the outset of “Sredni Vashtar” we are faced with the problem of an unfortunate child becoming a horrible child. ..an evil child who delights in the vanquishing of his perceived enemies with an unbridled relish that resonates within every child who has endured the bullying of adults or peers.

Yet we cannot stop there because Munro did not. In fact, “Sredni Vashtar’ might also be considered a darker version of the familiar trope found in children’s fiction: the idea of the child having a wish granted. It might also be viewed as a satirical take on religious practice and observance…” (Summary)

Truth can be a very scary thing – especially truths about how we really, bluntly feel – especially when we are children…and believe in magical thinking.

Yet growing up, we cannot escape the raw conjuring of that original thought of revenge; we remember it vividly – the need for it, the primal hunger for it, the knowledge of how it should taste.

We are confronted with the possibility that we ourselves will have to admit we have also had these fantasies – at least once as children, and now even as adults.

Of course it is unsettling; this is what psychology is all about.

But it is also what Horror is all about.

We discover the most terrifying of Horrors in the most unobtrusive of places…the “normal” places… those we would never suspect of having rich and lethal depths teeming with cries for justice that become twisted and mutilated by our own desperation…

Horror is also about the discovery of unsavory truths.

What does bullying do to us—always that perpetual child eternally wounded by words and actions that bombarded us in our most vulnerable moments, when no one came to our rescue and our souls cried out for vengeance.

Do we not carry those images and fantasies into adulthood? Who among us has not fed a coworker to a monster in the quiet depths of a lonely cubicle? Who among us has not cried out its name?

When we look for the value of Literary elements, we are confronted with them in Munro’s works. But we are also confronted with Horror. And when that Horror transcends childish things, we know it is no longer “just” Young Adult or Young Reader material.

In fact, I have had a hard time considering Munro a children’s author at all. I suppose it depends on how deep one really wants to go… But when we talk about children’s Literature – about the purpose of it – should we not also be talking about the importance and relevance of genre?

The Importance of Spine-Tingling Tales

We often worry about what our children might see or read – forgetting that they do in fact see everything…

But what we also tend to forget is what scary stories did for us as kids. Scary stories brought out into the open the things that knifed us in the dark. They gave our fears images and resolution – even if such solutions were unsavory or socially unacceptable. With scary stories, we had permission to not only be afraid, but to fight back…to defeat our monsters…to win despite our insecurities and flaws.

In fiction, we get to weigh the consequences of our actions. And sometimes, our thoughts.

Fear is what I remember most about my childhood. Fear of displeasing authority, fear of divorce (since every other kid seemed to be going through it), fear of other kids, fear of math and math teachers, fear of getting lost, fears of being left, fears of being disliked by my own family (reinforced by a sister who clearly wished I had never come along), and fear of never being good enough. Life in the military made it better; where my sister dreaded every new school and every new post, I loved it. I loved the chance to start over where no one knew my embarrassing flaws which I blithely hoped each time we moved I had left in our last quarters.

Of course they came with me, messing up potential new friendships, leaving me perpetually shy and easily humiliated. Bullies found me quickly, my own sister often among them, leaving me feeling so often pummeled by adult criticisms and children’s insulting nicknames.

Until I found reading, I felt alone – horribly, vulnerably alone. But when I discovered the kind of stories that spoke to my fears, everything changed. The bullying continued, the shyness grew and the humiliations continued to roll in – but then I had a secret: I knew something of who I was. I knew that I had a shed, and Sredni Vashtar was in it.

The stories I remember most were Horror stories, ghost stories, tales of terror…strange tales of the unexpected… And they felt like they were written especially for me… It was like having a cozy grandpa reading me each one…It was like my feelings were more than okay to have.

So I devoured them. Each time a reading assignment happened, I was looking for the Horror, dismissing the ones that weren’t scary, embracing the ones that were…It’s how I became a fan of Greek Mythology (thank you, Mrs. Allison) and fairy tales (thank you, Mrs. Miller) … It’s how I tripped into history and found myself reading about the 1914 Russian Revolution, about Wounded Knee, about the Civil War…about Lizzie Borden…

Despite my immersion into art at that point in my life, books spoke to me. And I hunted them down with fervor. Stories – mostly short stories in that time before too much Young Adult – that were written by long-dead folks with wicked imaginations. Each time I read a good one, I wondered if the adults knew what they were promoting… I feared them being taken away…

But the one that dominated my passion was “Sredni Vashtar”… and I had to have it. I ordered it from my Weekly Reader book club in 1967. I believe it was 35 cents, and I got a whole book of Saki’s stories for the hefty price…

(This was the one…exactly the one….yep…35 cents….)

Why might such a story be such an epiphany for a seven year old?

Perhaps because the only control a seven year old has is in their own minds. Perhaps because when you are seven, everyone else has power over you.

Conradin horrified me…that left to his own devices, he would devise a means of revenge that only a child could appreciate.Yet in my own way I knew Conradin; as does every child. We utilize and wield wishes then, as though they hold their own magical power…and then we are shaken when it appears that they do…even as we make new wishes…

The reading of spine-tinglers are an important rite of passage for most children. For some reason it is those maligned tales which open the vein to Literature for many of us. Perhaps reading them feels covert – like we suspect the teacher doesn’t really “get” it – not like we do as children (because it is not that we forget, but that we never really know for certain that our teachers were ever children…there always remains something shallow and possibly untrue when they say “when I was your age…”)

Spine-tinglers open so many doors…sometimes doors that lead to toolsheds…

When a writer transforms the ordinary, the real emotions which roil about shaping fantasies in our heads makes them come alive, turns them into marionettes that dance on desires that rise from the bully’s oppressive acts and exact the justice we so desperately need, that writer is a salvation…the work an epiphany. We can take the story at face value, sensing and riding the undercurrent that rises like an ocean swell to carry the imagination through decades of other Horrors…or we can learn to see what Literature is all about; we can talk in terms of evil, and child psychology, and the effects of bullying…

We can even dive into the details of  a writer’s life… measure the effects of secrets on souls, explore and theorize about the true personal cost of speculation and rumor and innuendo of an author’s possible sexual orientation in oppressive times.

But we cannot do so without wondering if that speculation has anything to do with Munro’s absence in the light of our new day – at least in the educating of American Horror audiences. Has Munro – like Tanith Lee – been censored out of our canon-elect? And has he been buried for the same bigoted reason: the fear that reading his work will alter our children’s minds and morals?

It seems a very real and very dark possibility.

And if so, it is one that is cheating us out of important works – the kind that drive creativity in the genre.

“Sredni Vashtar” is about bullying, plain and simple. It is about childish, passionate revenge. It is about the wishes of childhood and the corruption of innocence as created by the bully, not the victim.

If we are looking at the work of censors, isn’t it time we stopped the stupidity? If we are going to elevate writers who strongly disliked women (Bram Stoker and Lovecraft) or those whose lives are marred by substance abuse (Poe and even King), why is author gender and sexual orientation such a source of ostracism? Are we really so moral a genre, so perfect a species?

I am saying we can’t afford to lose writers like H.H. Munro – especially because of any possibility of some misplaced moral judgment. We need to read him. We need to claim him. We need our future Horror Literary Critics to add his name to their lists for canon consideration because in Horror we all have Things living in our tool sheds…

As a genre built on the primal fears we all face as children, how can we ignore a writer so in tune with the social terrors of childhood? And aren’t we all of us damaged in some way by the world we live in?

Perhaps it’s time we embraced Saki because of the scars.

Sredni Vashtar demands it.

 

The Works Of Saki (H.H. Munro)

Novels

The Chronicles of Clovis

When William Came

 Short Stories

A Bread and Butter Miss
A Defensive Diamond

Adrian
A Holiday Task
A Matter of Sentiment
A Touch of Realism
A Young Turkish Catastrophe
Bertie’s Christmas Eve
Canossa
Clovis on Parental Responsibilities

Cousin Teresa
Cross Currents
Down Pens
Dusk
Esme
Expecting Mrs. Pentherby
Fate
Filboid Studge
Forewarned
For the Duration of the War
Fur
Gabriel-Ernest
Hermann The Irascible
Hyacinth
Judkin of the Parcels
Laura

Louis
Louise
Mark
Ministers of Grace
Morlvera
Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger
On Approval
Quail Seed
Reginald
Reginald at the Carlton
Reginald at the Theatre
Reginald in Russia
Reginald on Besetting Sins
Reginald on Christmas Presents
Reginald on House-Parties
Reginald on Tariffs
Reginald on the Academy
Reginald on Worries
Reginald’s Choir Treat
Reginald’s Christmas Revel

Reginald’s Drama
Reginald’s Peace Poem
Reginald’s Rubaiyat
Shock Tactics
Sredni Vashtar
Tea
The Background
The Bag
The Baker’s Dozen
The Blind Spot
The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water
The Boar-Pig
The Brogue
The Bull
The Byzantine Omelette
The Chaplet
The Cobweb
The Cupboard of the Yesterdays
The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh

The Dreamer
The Easter Egg
The Elk
The Feast of Nemesis
The Forbidden Buzzards
The Guests
The Hedgehog
The Hen
The Hounds of Fate
The Image of the Lost Sole
The Innocence of Reginald
The Interlopers
The Jesting of Arlington Stringham
The Lost Sanjak
The Lull
The Lumber Room
The Mappined Life
The Match-Maker
The Mouse
The Music on the Hill
The Name-Day

The Occasional Garden
The Open Window
The Oversight
The Peace Offering
The Peace of Mowsle Barton
The Pennance
The Phantom Luncheon
The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat
The Purple of the Balkan Kings
The Quest
The Quince Tree
The Recessional
The Remoulding of Groby Lington
The Reticence of Lady Anne
The Romancers
The Saint and the Goblin
The Schartz-Metterklume Method
The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope
The Seven Cream Jugs
The Seventh Pullet

The Sex That Doesn’t Shop
The Sheep
The She-Wolf
The Soul of Laploshka
The Stake
The Stalled Ox
The Stampeding of Lady Bastable
The Story of St. Vespaluus
The Storyteller
The Strategist
The Talking-Out of Tarrington
The Threat
The Toys of Peace
The Treasure-Ship
The Unkindest Blow
The Unrest-Cure
The Way to the Dairy
The Wolves of Cernogatz
The Yarkand Manner
Tobermory
Wratislav

 

 References

Reimann Matt. “Hector Hugo Munro: The Strange Ideology of Saki.” Dec. 18, 2015. Books Tell You Why.com. Retrieved 5/29/19 from https://blog.bookstellyouwhy.com/hector-hugh-munro-the-strange-ideology-of-saki

American Literature. Retrieved 5/30/19 from https://americanliterature.com/author/hh-munro-saki

Encyclopedia Brittanica. Retreived 5/31/19 from from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saki-Scottish-writer

“A Summary and Analysis of Saki’s ‘Sredni Vashtar.” Interesting Literature. Retrieved 5/26/19 from https://interestingliterature.com/2017/04/20/a-summary-and-analysis-of-sakis-sredni-vashtar/

Horror as a Second Language (Fresh New Horror From Other Places & Cultures)

When we look at the tradition of Horror, we tend to embrace its ethnocentrism as a characteristic of the genre – a living trope, if you will.

We think that the construction of the genre happened in a Western vacuum and that there exists some kind of “proof” that no one else shares in the tradition of true scary tale telling. It is as though it is not legitimate if it is not published in an English-speaking country and contains predictable Western characters living out a familiar plot. We point at the acknowledged (and therefore “official”) history of Horror without recognizing that those who have judged our stories and uplifted the genre’s profile to (at times) cult status have also been “traditionally” white and male and Western – the same ones who historically controlled the presses and the public’s choice of content and access to the written word. Are we right, then, to assume that no one else is (or has ever been) writing Horror of value?

The answer is a resounding no; Horror is neither exclusive nor rare – not in experience nor the storytelling. And perhaps the key as to why we seem at a creative and Literary stalemate in our modern writings is ensconced in the significance of “how” – in having fashioned this odd, culturally exclusive bubble – all of our best efforts have resulted in a kind of genetically compromised inbreeding of ideas. In our hand-over-fist attempts to understand what we think Horror formula is or should be, perhaps it is we who have become the victims of our own intent to discredit others.

This means our contemporary problems (especially in American Horror) may well have grown in its isolated and lonesome Petrie dish to be not only about who is telling what stories, but about the future of the American side of the genre. We are unquestionably at a Literary and creative impasse.

And we had better start asking what happens when all of the 1970s-1980s bestselling authors stop writing. What exactly will we do then?

Robbing Horror From Other Cradles

At a time when we are unwilling or unable to create the kind of Horror that excites our readers and grows our constituency, we need an infusion of original DNA – the kind of DNA that descends from folklore and fairy tales – the gritty stuff of childhood fears. And we need to do this shamelessly – borrowing from those older traditions tucked neatly into vague heritages because while we were being all puffy and proud about our modern sophistication and electronic gadgets, what we call The Old World was still telling scary tales of things that go bump in the night. And people who grow up with those storytelling traditions clearly have a thing or two to teach us about where we all (and our monsters) come from.

For those of us on this side of the pond, it’s time to climb out of the creative box we have put ourselves in – from what we call our genre to who writes in it. We have no proprietary rights here; just because some smarty-pants marketing department decided to print the word “Horror” on the spines of countless Western paperbacks in the 1970’s does not mean it is the correct name to call our genre, or the one with which the rest of the world concurs. Nor does it mean that the rest of the world interprets “Horror” in the same way as we do in the West.

Why has our Horror all become one-dimensional? Homogenous and flat? Because “we” have decided what formulas constitute Horror, all to the denigration of other traditions of storytelling.

Yet isn’t that where we got our ideas about Horror in the first place? It’s time we confessed the truth: the West did not invent Horror. We may have perfected a branch of the tree, but we are not the whole of it. Our roots go much, much deeper and come from afar…

And every person who came here brought a little piece of that with them.

We cannot claim to not-know this entirely. Our genre’s historic use of Orientalism and racism to further heighten a presumed white reader’s fears or to elevate the exotic mystery and exploit the willing ignorance of a class of readers groomed to see themselves perfected in an ethnocentric mirror is no different in Horror than in any other genre. But in Horror, it has fast become this almost-necessary ingredient we are directed to mimic. Because we have not been able to “move the Literary needle” in American Horror since Lovecraft, that is where we are directed to learn about how to write the good stuff.

But what if we don’t want to because no one does Lovecraft better than Lovecraft, and most importantly, because the rest of us are no longer as threatened by different peoples or cultures? What happens when dread and fear turn away from dimly lit rural areas with secret histories to vibrancy, exploration and inclusion? What happens to Lovecraft mimicry?

What happens when we have outgrown that narrow Worldview?

Today most of us are able to acknowledge the pinch of this and dash of that from other cultures and folkways that have driven the more muted successes that line the cages of our genre and we are increasingly curious about it. From Japanese filmmakers to Russian folklore, we are intrigued by the monsters some part of us always suspected were watching us from the shadows. More importantly, we are starting to ask what happens when in following the Lovecraft-enamored lead of the Western Horror Establishment we continue to drown out international and “minority”- voiced Horror, displacing it as an anomaly or christening it Other-relevant “Literature” to keep it at a safe distance.

Horror should never be “safe.” And trying to hold onto Lovecraft and the singular whiteness of Horror is contributing to the lack of historical awareness so necessary in our genre.

It so reminds me of that unfortunate music fan who suggested that Paul McCartney was lucky to receive a “break” from Kanye West and might someday make something of himself “Cuz Kanye just handed this guy a career”… (not a shining moment.)

 

Why don’t we KNOW where we come from? And isn’t it possible that this very tone deafness is one of the contributing causes to the endless cookie cutter “plateauing” of scary in the genre as we know it?

If we really dare to look at the Horror genre’s origins, we will find the richest veins in folk and fairy tales from our Old Countries – the very things an “advanced” and “civilized” culture likes to mock. But in the dark of the night, isn’t that where Horror gets under our skin uninvited, rummaging about and prickling our skins? Does it really matter where the scary images come from if they are coming after us?

It’s time we started researching the rest of the world’s stories – rediscovering some, and hearing others for the first time. Because these are the stories and the traditions we carry with us as we move through the world, colliding with each other. Of course this means learning about other people, how they live and think. It means letting ourselves sink into other life ways in order to find the Horror we crave.

And it means allowing ourselves to be corrected… To acknowledge real history, real traditions, and the real Peoples who live them intimately. It also means admitting to ourselves that we live in bastardized, cannibalized times. We bring fragments of Horrors from our lineages, and those halflings collide unceremoniously with Things That Were Already Here. Isn’t it time we exploited our own ignorance? Paid the price of our own desire to minimize our once hidden roots? Our personal roots?

We don’t need sacred Indian Burial Grounds or gypsy curses to amp up our Horrors… we have our own sins making monsters in urban factories right now.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read those first-hand accounts and value them for themselves…to inspire and remind us that we have our own stories if we will just stop and look. It helps us to see how other people tell these tales, to “spin” our vocabulary, to look askew at what we cannot see directly. We need to, not only for ourselves, but because of the obvious: we no longer live in a vacuum no matter how many walls we endeavor to build. We need to see that even Lovecraft would have a hard time being Lovecraft today.

And is it really such a bad thing – really – to stop “using” other peoples whose customs we don’t know to scare our readers with? Because in a global economy, there are no secrets – not really. If a writer makes something up for the benefit of plot, he or she will ultimately be exposed for the careless or arrogantly conceived error and deservedly so. But there are wondrous stories to be had, to savor just as they are – cultural accents and all.

Of course, this means getting out of our comfort zone. But that is the nature of Horror, isn’t it? And haven’t we learned that wondrous things await if only by way of Japan and its gift of Godzilla, and its ghost traditions pushing into our own culture by way of films like Ringu (The Ring)and The Grudge and the world of Manga?

 It’s All About Language and Culture and Horror Underfoot

While it’s hard to believe that modern music fans don’t always know the names of the bands and musicians that shaped the genre they are in, we of the Horror genre should not throw stones. We are doing the same thing right now, oblivious to our own genre history, crashing about like the proverbial bull in the china shop looking for a new mythos when we don’t even know the last one. We don’t learn our genre history, which squares so nicely with no one teaching it to us. We just keep clinging to the Lovecraft life raft, even if it happens to be the Titanic.

How long before we have a Paul McCartney-Kanye West moment of our own? You realize it is more likely to happen the smaller we make our universe, right?

We like to think that the Horror galaxy revolves around a white, Christian, English-speaking sun – because the little of “everything” we know tells us this…

Yet we could not be more wrong. All of our best tales descend from our Old World roots…and that must mean that out there somewhere is the motherlode of scary… It’s not, after all, like we haven’t drank from that well before – Horror was seeded in our early days of human history, and we have carried remnants of it out into our new and ever changing world with countless diasporas. Yet we tend to not use this personal version of Horror DNA. Instead we look askew at stories presented by “other” countries, often in “other” languages.

Up to this moment, we have hidden behind our world dominance. We have blatantly bragged that those who want to be heard need to speak the way we want to hear language. We don’t read foreign authors, we don’t like names or place names we cannot pronounce, cities we cannot picture, weather that does not mirror our own. We also don’t like the pools of secrecy we ourselves create when we push groups of humanity into the shadows of our entitlement and the people there speak words we don’t know the full meaning of. This is true whether such people on the margins speak Spanish or Black English or something from the Middle East.

Let’s just admit it: we are control freaks. We have a driving need to understand the nuance of every word we read, every meaning implied. And even though in the Horror genre, that can be an absolute necessity to “getting” it, there is still more to our aversion to works that come from “Other” places…

From International writers writing in other languages, to works written that speak of other traditions and cultural importances… we dislike the feeling that there are secrets being coded for certain readers. We feel that way about slang and inner city lingo as surely as we stink eye the immigrants speaking Spanish in the lunch room. Yet we need to get beyond our own Lovecraftian self-importance… we are missing out on some great storytelling – the kind that sends you to your own keyboard and pokes the Muse.

And alas, we are going to have to work for it…because language has its own cultural complications— the most obvious being when dealing with those which are “not-English.”

One of the biggest problems for international writers is being read by English Speakers. We are less likely to be bilingual than most other cultures, assured as we are that it is English that will continue to dominate everything that matters on the world stage.

And what this means is that we take our arrogances into the Literature we read… We not only fully expect to read things in our language, but we judge it differently even when it is delivered thusly. We underestimate what it means for a work to be translated.

In fact, we all too often misinterpret a writer’s talent by the fluency of the translator. However sometimes translators are “functional” but not “artistic.” Where all writers need translators with the eyes and ears and imaginations of poets, all too often we get novels that instead of reading like Dostoevsky, read like Google. This is due to cost, availability of a good translator, and having someone who can judge the finished product properly. Once one leaves their native language, this can be a real challenge – for writers and editors.

This is a real problem. The author needs a fluent translator to make their work accessible in other languages – languages they likely do not speak. And because they do not speak it, they cannot easily judge when a translator is fluent in both languages – fluent enough to tap into nuance and vocabulary yet still capture both those necessary interpretations as well as the voice of the author.

Translation matters, whether we are talking editing an inner city/urban work or a foreign one. And just as we ascribe proofreading errors to writers and their talent, we associate a translation with the quality of the original work if not the literal intelligence of the author. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth: nuance of the native tongue once lost results in a confusion of original intent, of the poetry of the prose and disagreement about what the original text meant.

 

Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s I Remember You: a Ghost Story – an example of how translation should work FOR the work…

 

So we have to expect this kind of disparity to happen in translations of works that come from other language traditions. We have to be patient…flexible.

But we also have problems with writers who use what we have been institutionally guided to consider “bad” “incorrect” or “flawed” English…the most noticeable of which has been “Black, Regional, or Urban” English. In fact, we have the exact same problem in native speakers of English when it comes to interpreting and accepting slang, and cultural diversity within a work.

While sometimes we cannot connect to the story because we are not the intended audience, it is a fact that we tend to shy away from stories that involve language we are unable to “decode”…

Sometimes it is because we simply cannot pick up on the important nuances, the cues, the double entendre – the dog whistles. Never mind that this is because we are used to our own dog whistles…We feel shut out in the same way people from other cultures feel shut out when reading about ours. We simply have gotten used to the idea that being “top dog” in the publishing of Horror, it was “everyone else’s” job to understand the nuances of what we meant.

The shoe always pinches when it is on the other foot…But pinching is a sign that there is something alive in the shoe – that maybe the shoe is wrong, not the foot. We need to have the patience to unwrap the mysterious gift. Yet we have been institutionalized right out of the curiosity.

We bristle for example when non-Christian references are in the stories, unless we can give them the appropriate “Lovecraft spin” where exotic means “sinister” and “threatening”… And if the character does not look and act like us, we feel summarily “excluded”… as if “our” genre has been pirated…invaded. This is one reason why women wrote pulp and men wrote Literature back in the day…and why the inference remains a ghost on the battlefield of diversity in Horror today.

Because “today” we are excluding Horror from all over – including right under foot. We have been taught that reading should be easy and entertaining. We have forgotten that reading – especially Literature with its references to history and socio-economics and tyranny and justice– is work…

Publishers “get” this – that we are now not only lazy but expected to remain content to be lazy from here on – and clearly consider that this is far too complicated an issue to fix. So instead of new and exciting and different Horror, we have Horror from “Other” countries and cultures being farmed out to other genres or marketed as Literary statements – fodder for Critical Thinkers and Lit-lovers to decipher and ruminate upon. The face value of the story-telling is simply dismissed.

The very idea that Horror should include more than monsters is being banished while having the Bible of Lovecraft waved in our faces. Talk about contradiction. No wonder American Horror writers are all-too-often writing peculiarly ineffective and vacant fiction…

Banishing all works by “Others” which doesn’t carry a pre-approved Lovecraftian exploitation of fearing the same “Others” only re-confirms our suspicion that this makes these works not really Horror…Because Horror comes in only one color and one flavor: vanilla.

We further conjecture that all American Horror should be non-threatening and easy-to-digest, even when salaciously gory. And as the market for Horror tightens, the belief is becoming reinforced – making the whole idea that we all should be writing in some way like Lovecraft while being all pulpy and writing fast moving, two-dimensional action figure prose right into that very pair of cement shoes dragging the whole genre to the soggy bottom…

We have a tendency to decide that we are better off to reject works which require a bit of decoding.

We don’t want to think and we don’t want to go outside our comfort zone. But isn’t that exactly the price of admission? Isn’t that the very essence of Horror?

We have done this with African Americans for decades. We shrink from the use of Black English because we are just not sure what to do with it. Is it a dialect? Is it just “bad” English? Is it a regionalism? Slang?

And what about regionalism? Does a Southern character or a Southern accent make the Horror Southern Gothic and Literature because we don’t want to work to understand it in Horror? Why is Horror only Horror if the dialogue fits in a comic book balloon?

Why does it matter in Literature? How many Cockney accents have we navigated in English Literature because it was part of the story? Part of the setting? The time-and-place of historical value?

Experts are still in debate over it. And meanwhile editors everywhere – especially in traditional publishing – are at a loss as to how to edit such fiction. It is far easier to call “Black” and “Other” writing niche and reject the work, or pronounce it too burdened with Literary elements because most likely it will take African American and “Other”editors to edit such works submitted for publication…editors from the culture the story comes from in order to edit the right things out and clarify the things that need to stay in.

Decisions have to be made as to whether the language in the work is supposed to (pardon the pun) add “color” to the language, to orient characters and setting, but also as to whether or not it is also meant to exclude certain readers not in the intended audience, or to educate them into a different culture and viewpoint.

This is not as easy as it would seem. And this affects international and national works as quickly as it effects regional U.S. ones…

For one thing, we have been taught that language is either right or wrong in its execution. Yet we have so many regional subcultures in the English language alone we should be familiar with the fact that such “color” when added to Literature seats that work firmly in a time or place – it becomes part of setting and character. The only good excuse for exclusion on these grounds is when the work cannot be in some way “accessible” and its meaning appreciated by outsiders to a storytelling degree.

For example, when a work comes from another culture, country or language, the author or translator should allow for some “redundant” coaching… some of the native language should stay in the story – reminding the reader where it is coming from.

Example: “Mira,” said Pablo, “Look.” (Mira means “look.. And we learned something from the redundancy without losing the author’s proficiency of language.)

But there are also other cultural things that need explanation for new and “reverse-Other” readers.

Example: “When she calls out to Ashoke, she doesn’t say his name. Ashima never thinks of her husband’s name when she thinks of her husband, even though she knows perfectly well what it is. She has adopted his surname but refuses to use it, for propriety’s sake, to utter his first. It’s not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or a caress in a Hindi movie, a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ashoke’s name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as ‘Are you listening to me?’” (From Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake)

(Here we have learned about the character, her husband and her culture…yet presented in a way that does not offend the outsider or someone from that culture because it adds color to the prose.)

This is how good writing and proper editing is done. It is not the job of the reader to figure things out, but the job of the writer to draw us in – to make us want to learn more and to learn something by way of the story in spite of ourselves. And it is the job of the editor to help us all get there, especially in translation and even in our own language.

Those of us who like Horror already speak a second language – the language of our genre. Most of us who like Horror like it for the escapism – and the one predictable trope that never, ever changes: not the one about white creation myths, but the one that proves time and again, through ghost and monster and sheer coincidence that justice will prevail through the impersonal and savage law of nature because we are none of us innocent.

In the world of Horror where cross-pollination is key, we need different voices – ones whose different cultures or ways of speaking frame Horror in a new light, cast shadows in familiar yet peculiar angles…

Sometimes I think it must just feel like too much work to resolve in the eyes of traditional publishing – too much work for too much of a gamble…And that is exactly how we keep winding up with the same voices in Horror and Literature, all speaking the same way…It’s how we lost our DNA, our sense of direction and originality nested in our commonality.

So take a minute. Peruse the following list of writers from all over – including a few right here in these United States whose work was probably labelled a bit “niche.” You want new Horror? Original Horror?

Start here. And yes, there are Americans on it – either from or influenced by somewhere else, and in one case from traditions outside the mainstream but homegrown nonetheless…These are voices of different cultures…

Get your crucifixes… because these writers are the future of Horror – if we will only open our eyes and read.

Horror Authors Unseen – A List From Here to Everywhere Else

Asa Nomani (Japan) Now You’re One of Us

Otsuichi (Japan) Goth

Asamatsu Ken (Japan) Queen of K’n-Yan

Mariko Koike (Japan) The Graveyard Apartment

Yrsa Sigurdardottir (Iceland) I Remember You

John Ajvide Lindquist (Sweden) Let the Right One In

Karin Tidbeck (Sweden) Amatka

Eden Royce (African American/Gullah and Southern Gothic influence) Spook Lights, Tying the Devil’s Shoestrings –YA coming Summer 2020

Tananarive Due (African American/Nigerian influence) My Soul To Keep

Violet Kupersmith (Vietnamese American) The Frangipani Hotel

Stephen Graham Jones (Native American) Mapping the Interior

David Bowles (Mexican American) Chupacabra Vengeance

Jeremias Gotthelf (Germany) The Black Spider

Daniel Kehlmann (Germany) You Should Have Left

Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Netherlands) Hex

John Harwood (Australia) The Ghost Writer

Michelle De Kretser (Sri Lankan-Australian) Springtime, a Ghost Story

Simone St. James (Canada) The Haunting of Maddie Clare

Cherie Dimaline (Canadian First Nations) The Marrow Thieves

Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Canadian-Mexican) Certain Dark Things

Samuel Marolla (Italy) Black Tea and Other Tales

Giorgia de Maria (Italy) The Twenty Days of Turin

Samanta Schweblin (Argentina) Fever Dream

Guillermo del Toro (Mexico/Mexican American) Pan’s Labyrinthe

Luis Abbadie (Mexico) El código secreto del Necronomicón(The Secret Code of the Neconomicon)

Julio Cortezar (Argentina) Tomada House

Bernardo Esquinca (Mexico) Demonia (and Other Stories)

J.F. Gonzalez (Spanish American) Clickers

Carmen Maria Machado (Cuban American) Her Body and Other Parties

Andres Barba (Spain) Such Small Hands

Zhou Haohui (China) Valley of Terror

Han Kang (South Korea) The Vegetarian

Rene Depestre (Haiti) Hadriana in All My Dreams

Carolina Sanin (Columbia) The Children

Sadegh Hedayat (Iran) The Blind Owl

Otessa Mosfegh (Croatian Iranian) Eileen

Ahmed Khaled Tawfik (Egypt) Beyond Nature

Ania Ahlborn (Polish American) Within These Walls

Anna Starobinets (Russia) The Recrudescence of the Cold

Tony Vilgotsky (Russia) Eye of Satan (aka Warriors of the Church)

Ludmila Petrushevskaya (Russia) There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

Nuzo Onoh (Nigerian British) The Reluctant Dead

Amos Tutuola ( Nigeria) My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

 

 

Tanith Lee: Why Horror’s Future Depends on Subgenres — A Women In Horror Month Tribute (Part 2)

What this entire “episode” with Tanith Lee has taught me is that our genre needs to grow up…

We have enshrined the period of time which most purely and evidently exemplifies its natural growth from its original Literary DNA – the period we call The Weird. But is that time representative of The End of originality in the genre, or was it a simple (though awesome) creative burst born of circumstance, of writers who could inform each other’s work via education, exposure, or direct contact and support…and then died with them?

I say that like the Horror Boom of the 1970s and 1980s, the period of Weird was an exception – a glorious, once-in-a-lifetime explosion of insight and creativity built on a contrived and flawed premise that men write more and better Horror. And it being over means nothing more than the rest of us go back to the drawing board – after a cigarette, maybe – but back.

But it also means our genre needs to be attentive to the next creative wave, the next influencers, because the future most likely is NOT Weird. Writers like Tanith Lee who opened a wound and let it bleed out its truth along with its poison are no less formative and influential than the Weird writers. For better or worse they, too, reveal our innermost fears, our prejudices, our imagined terrors. It is because a writer like Tanith Lee wrote about gender issues in the exact way that she did, that we have welcomed other authors who toy with other previously “forbidden” subjects and threaten to open even bigger cans of worms. We have so much further to go. Why are our knuckles being rapped and our heads being forcibly turned to worship the last mutually acknowledged Horror greats? Why are we only worshipping the works of primarily white men?

Our genre needs rebellious writers – writers like Lee who rebel by their natures. We need writers who push envelopes and test our tolerance, opening the very Literary doors we claim to want to pull from their hinges. Horror must grow and change to survive. We must embrace those Literary issues we claim we want. And we must defend them even when they are uncomfortable or unsavory.

We can start by acknowledging the contributions of Tanith Lee.

 

When Horror Is Literature

When we look at Horror history, we tend to see a lot of homogenization…

This is partly because the Horror writing community was smaller, more influenced by each other and what publishers would or would not publish – a social currency owned by the white male majority. But it was also because Horror has been patriarchically dominated for most of it publication history. That earliest of publishing booms which happened at the turn of the 19^th century segregated our writers into two camps – one struggling to climb out of pulp into the Literary via books and reputable newspapers and magazines (led by men like Poe and Lovecraft); and one sentenced to cheaper pulp magazines where “women’s writing” was destined for women’s consumption only and made of less-permanent materials as its lesser value warranted.

This, was the true meaning, origin and purpose of what we call pulp: Critically deemed substandard written content meant to be read in the moment and tossed away because it had no Literary or relevant news value. This is where women’s Horror often wound up, along with Horror from men who might fall into disfavor by choosing to write for women, or to write the far-fetched, the unacceptable…the sensational…

So with fewer women’s writings surviving, and even fewer finding any measure of publishing or Critical success, is it any wonder that we were all left to assume that only white men wrote Horror, and the best of our genre carried a kind of identifiable, formulaic content, character and interest?

And when we look back at seminal works, why are we surprised that not only do those works have a cachet of coming from a narrow, homogenous type of writer, but that they also demonstrate a clear Critical relation to each other?

That these predominantly white male writers seem so much to have created a concise body of work is no mistake: it is what happens when writers are isolated in a singular pool where ideas are freely exchanged and respected. It is not unlike a school of writers with the same teachers and influences – because in many ways that’s what they were; writers whose successes taught each other. Yet they were also representative of a moment in time.

Each of us has one. Some of us use it. Some of us just write to see what happens.

For our genre right now to continue to look back with heavy sighs and great longing for the likes of Poe and Lovecraft is telling. It is not that those works are not worthy, but that we have mistaken a creative burst from the late 19^th and early 20^th century as the thing Horror was destined to be – ALL it was destined to be.

Talk about disappearing every writer that comes after…

When we consider that many of our early writers – especially Poe and Lovecraft – spent a good deal of time arguing the case of Horror being Literary to very astute and stubborn Literary Critics of the time, it comes as a disappointment to see that at the precise moment our genre has won the attention of those same Critics and our editors are hoping to groom more Literary elements in genre writing, we are stepping over authors writing about those very Literary issues.

We step over them like they are poisonous.

Is it because we are aware of how tenuous the attentions of publishers are right now? Because we are afraid we cannot risk losing a single dollar in sales? Because we are wary of alienating readers and fans whose idea of Literature is represented by a bunch of dead writers, or “issues” we have a predisposition to prefer? Is it because neither editors, publishers, nor our base has any stomach for diving head first into the pool of ugly modern issues? Or because they don’t have the guts?

Are we afraid we will “become” gay, or Muslim, or womanish, or poor, or immersed in wars, or become unChristian if we accidentally or on purpose read about those things? What exactly are we afraid of catching? Of discovering?

Horror has always had Literary DNA. Horror is always about the human condition and how we interpret and treat each other. That includes with regard to unsavory issues – especially unsavory issues.

Yet in contemporary Horror, we have a Literary desert. And it feels perpetrated. Orchestrated.

Hidden away within this whole mysterious disappearance of Tanith Lee thing are these two important questions:

Do we in the Horror genre have a “problem” with Queer fiction and open gender issues?

Do we demand and then reject Literary subjects, preferring to kill the genre rather than accept new subgenres?

At what point do we stop waiting for a bloom from the corpse of the Weird writers to rise and save Horror from itself? When do we begin looking at the issues that are disturbing modern writers in general and Horror in particular?

When it is ok to be Tanith Lee?

Any writer who writes utilizing or framing issues of the day – the social, cultural, racial, class, national, religious and historical issues – that writer is potentially writing Literature. Do it often enough and they are Literary. We don’t get to qualify which issues see daylight in a writer’s work. We don’t get to hide the work that scares us.

We don’t get to hide the Tanith Lees. Not even when things are confusing enough without her.

“Her books were often rather directly queer and feminist in their appropriation of fairy tales, fantastical and perverse worlds and creatures, and narrative tropes. She also wrote lesbian fiction under the pseudonym Esther Garber and weird fiction under the related name Judas Garbah, as collected in Disturbed by Her Song and Fatal Women (both available from Lethe Press).” https://www.tor.com/2015/05/29/tanith-lee-a-brief-retrospective/

We live in a push-me, pull-you world. Sometimes we are told that Horror as a genre is all-but-dead. Other times we are told we are in a Renaissance, finally escaping the Dark Ages (which I personally believe we are). But does what happened to Tanith Lee suggest the problem is a little bit of both? I think it does.

Just as Horror from the Weird generation has changed enough to be suspected of being truly dead, Horror as an extension of the 1970s-1980’s Boom is indeed on life support; we have exhausted all of the trite, commercial and exploitative plots and themes those times spun out from that brilliant center of storytelling. We have to be honest: at the end we got sloppy… desperate… cheaply gratuitous. There were very few good novels issuing forth at the same time publishing began to take Technology body blows – and at the same time (it was later theorized) a chunk of our fan base had aged out.

So much began to collapse all at one time: publishers, periodicals, editors, brick-and-mortar bookstores, newspaper with their book review columns, library budgets, education in the Liberal Arts, the field of Literary Criticism… It was a perfect storm. And everyone in the genre in every position in the genre was left to sink or swim, to figure out what it would take to survive. As the bodies began to wash ashore, one thing became crystal clear: what once worked no longer worked. Change was going to have to happen if the genre was going to survive, let alone prosper.

As a genre it was a sobering, pocket-patting moment. There was so much carnage, we resorted to counting our own body parts, too distracted by the fear for our own survival to protest the hemorrhaging of midlist authors and the death songs of editors and publishers everywhere. Some might even venture to say that this is why Tanith Lee seemed to vanish, why publishers ceased to publish her, and why we had nothing left in the tank to protest.

But that is a cop-out. With the Horror ship going down for the third time, we clung to writers like Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell and Richard Matheson to save us all. That Tanith Lee used to be among that solid-selling list and then suddenly was not is what is noticeable. Even with her cross-genre dabbling, her control of the Gothic left trails of cobwebs from and to our genre. Why let go of a writer who consistently proved an ability to bring home the Horror bacon?

And is it because she started writing about Literary issues before we fully accepted that as a blatant, fully stated goal in Horror? Or was it the issue she chose?

We have to start asking these questions seriously in the genre. Accepting such writings does not make us an LGBT genre. But it does create a necessary subgenre… I mean, if we are going to be really serious about this Literary thing…Because even Literary Critics are – you know, those stuffy snobs we believed for so long were trapped in a Shakespearean tomb? Even THEY caught on… and they are the engine on the Literature train.

The Rise of Queer Theory: Can We Get There From Here & Why It Matters

Ok. So the subject matter is discomfiting for many. Imagine if you will what it is to live it.

This is why Queer Theory is one of the newest of the New Literary Critical Theories…because it is an actual issue with actual human consequences and casualties; it is the newest twist on our understanding of the human condition. But what is it exactly?

Queer Theory is specifically derivative of women’s studies, gender studies, and LGBT studies. The subsequent origination of what is called Queer Theory is a “new” Literary Critical theory created in the 1990’s to analyze LGBT (or “queer”) Literature – because it goes further and in different directions than its cosmic twin, Feminist Theory. It is called Queer to identify that the area of Literary Criticism dealing with Queer fiction which includes all LGBT concerns. It looks at the cultural and societal and religious roles played in affecting the LGBT population, and all areas of its suppression involving characters, behavior, plot lines or themes. But is it also about the indistinct borderlands in which many of us live.

Tanith Lee was one of our first Horror authors to get there, and to decide it should in some way inform her fiction because it affected her:

“Lee was asked about her recurring theme of ambiguous sexuality. She told the Innsmouth Free Press blog, ‘I think ambiguity intrigues me generally. Not just the hard-drawn line between male and female heterosexuality and lesbian/gay desire, which hard line may waver in the most staunch of the ‘straight’ or the ‘homosexual’ — but the shadings between wickedness and normality, evil and the divine. The state of human life and the god or demon within. The constant internal war that being alive can conjure.’” (https://www.advocate.com/obituaries/2015/05/26/remembering-tanith-lee-celebrated-author-queer-science-fiction )

Wickedness and morality. Evil and the divine. Gods and demons. What part of Horror don’t we get?

But of course this new recognition by Critics does not guarantee either popular acceptance, nor that of publishers and editors. In fact, we see a rise of territoriality happening – perhaps some of it genuinely with good intent to protect the integrity of some genres. However, we also need to see the forest for the trees. The existence of an LGBT character – even as protagonist – does not make that story exclusively Queer Fiction. It may be also Queer Fiction. But what if it is also Horror or another genre?

Answer: then it is a subgenre.

Why is that so hard? If the emphasis is so Literary, so unquestionably about the experience of being LGBT, then the overarching and dominant character of the work is LGBT Fiction. But just LGBT characters? Characters wrestling with issues while frolicking with monsters? A way to twist plot or extort confusion? No!

We have maniacs in hockey masks and folk who like carving up lost teenagers for sausage in our genre repertoire. Never once have I heard these described as “suspense” or “thriller” or “psychological” fiction…Is that because it is all gratuitous and two dimensional? Why is cannibalism ok, but an LGBT character a direct sentence to Queer fiction, an expulsion from our genre and many others?

I think sometimes we are not capable of seeing patterns and hierarchy, happy to export any writing with a gender question into its safely contained, separate-but-equal “Literary” box… Just like we do with writers of color, because God knows it happens with other minority-voiced works, which suddenly become “Literary concerns” instead of Horror because “their audience is too small, too niche,” too burdened with social accoutrement…

Again: that is subgenre. But it may still well be Horror.

Why are we jettisoning perfectly good, Literary writers to Theory-driven categories?

Why, indeed, when we are demanding writers master Literary-worthy Craft? Then dinging those who actually dive into Literary issues?

Is our Establishment actually willing to say that if a story has “too much” Literary content, is too “controversial,” that is cannot be Horror? That therefore…pardon me… Horror is not Literature after all, if it “has to” include LGBT issues, race issues, women’s issues, or class issues? That acceptable Horror is contingent upon acceptable norms?

Is that REALLY what you are saying real Horror is? Then aren’t you ALSO saying Poe and Lovecraft were wrong and Literary Critics got it right the first time? And to be Horror is to be hack?

Because if our genre is not willing to grow with our population and its changes and cultural spurts, then its death is inevitable.

Our profiled fan base is shrinking, because the rest of the population is growing on without us.

Still Tanith, After All This Time

Horror is a big genre.

Every once in a while a trend will be born and flower and awe us all. Like the Weird (of which Tanith Lee was once generally considered a writer), those creative bursts humble every one of us – living on in immortality to torment writers and editors and haunt Critics. But they truly are just a burst of light.

We have to learn to let go. We have to be willing to look elsewhere for the next Poe or Lovecraft, for the next creative cluster, probably currently rejected if history is any indication. We cannot abide that. Our genre is not so deep in foundational authors and works that we should allow the ostracism to continue.

What happened with Tanith Lee could be debated, what with all of the Horrors we have been drowning in since Amazon rose from its industry-killing ooze.

But we should not ignore the obvious: the very real possibility that we are afraid of real Literature reframing our genre, that we fear one theory or one issue will rise up to hijack our future and change our audience the way we seem to feel everything we cared about in the world has been changed.

But isn’t that progress? Didn’t we tell all of the minorities and cultures we swept out of our way that in order to flourish ourselves?

Why not then as a genre? Why not go there in American Horror? In British Horror? In world Horror?

When exactly are we ready to shed the mask?

Alas, sexuality remains different, somehow more personally threatening.

“Faces Under Water is an alchemical supernatural thriller, set in a parallel Venice about 1701. Its hero is a very enraged and lost young man who is, in a way, acting as a detective in this water-girt city, and he comes across the most bizarre alchemical plot. In the midst of this is a beautiful woman who suffers from something which we have in our world: her face can’t move. She can’t show any expression, and she can’t talk. She can’t even blink or close her eyes. It happens at a time of Carnival, when everyone wears a mask – but her face is the mask...” (Tanith Lee) http://www.locusmag.com/1998/Issues/04/Lee.html

Is that the real reason we hide behind Lovecraft? Are we afraid of what moving on means in our tiny primal minds? Are we taking it personally? Running away when we should be embracing the variety of voices? The new monsters? The forgotten folklores? The old gods?

As scary as change is, stagnation is terminal. Are we ready to say “better dead than subgenres”? Do we really think we can stuff the genie back in the bottle? Clearly even stodgy Literary Critics could see the answer to that one…

Thank Cthulhu for Tanith Lee. We have proof that we once ventured out on that very Literary limb…before we got all paranoid and banished her to – of all things – Literature.

Writers like Tanith Lee represent gateway writers in a genre – ones whose work leads to even more exploration of topics or plots or character… to potential growth in new directions.

I believe Tanith Lee performed that function in Horror, her control of “ambiguities” leading us to try and then fully embrace a writer like Anne Rice (with her assortment of religious crises, amorous male vampires, erotica and adventures in B&D sex clubs), and then later to “forgive” a Clive Barker whatever imagined sin we previously ascribed to him…to accept a Gerald’s Game for the sake of the Horror…

I believe that Tanith Lee deserves a place in our canon as it becomes established, that Literary Critics need to bookmark her works for serious analysis as foundational for the 1970s and 1980s work in our genre. I hope that they will remember her when they go building our canon.

Tanith Lee planted seeds. And I can hear them growing.

Don’t you want to see the blooms?

References

Gidney, Craig. “Tanith Lee: Channeling Queer Authors.” LambdaLiterary, September 13, 2010 as retrieved 1/9/2019 from http://www.lambdaliterary.org/interviews/09/13/tanith-lee-queer-authors/

Flood, Allison.“World of fantasy: Death’s Master by Tanith Lee.” Alison Flood’s world of fantasy

Books , Fri 27 Aug 2010 06.05 EDT, as retrieved 1/9/2019 from

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/aug/27/fantasy-death-master-tanith-lee 

“Tanith Lee: Love & Death & Publishers” excerpted from Locus Magazine, April 1998), as retrieved //10/2019 from http://www.locusmag.com/1998/Issues/04/Lee.html