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/

It’s Halloween: Just Turn Out The Lights (How to Unsettle Yourself in Hi-Tech Times)

It all started because of a thunderstorm. It was a particularly wicked one, clouds plump with torrential rain, and continuous ropes of lightning that knifed through the darkness, bearing with it the sharp tang of ozone and delivering the weird frisson of having walked through something unseen.

It was a Mary Shelley kind of moment.

And it was an easy decision to unplug the electronics and move to a more secure place away from the windows, a no-brainer to assume that nature might well have every intention of inviting itself inside by way of the outside.

So sure enough… in a matter of seconds and one lightning illuminated, very loud clap and roll of thunder later, the lights…went…out.

Suddenly all that was left to sense was what could be held by the dark-filled room – its shape-filled interior lit only by the occasional flash of electrically charged tentacles, the sound of heavy rain cascading down upon the roof like a waterfall, and the rich loamy smells of wet earth.

What if, one could hear oneself wonder, what if I am not alone?

Illustration by 731 …https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-03/u-dot-s-dot-plans-for-power-grid-crippling-sun-storms

 

This is Where I Live as a Writer…

Growing up in the military, I lived for a while overseas, experiencing my first hurricane on the island of Taiwan in 1971, a Category Five Super Typhoon named Bess. I remember watching the walls of our house crack in the flickering light of candles, the winds so loud we never heard the large tree fall on our house, buckling the ceiling behind the kitchen. We also couldn’t hear the screams of the families further up the mountainside whose houses disintegrated during the storm, families that were left huddling against the only remaining wall of their home, holding onto a glass-peppered mattress for protection as the storm took off the roof.

Their suffering went unheard and unnoticed, everything lost to the surreal and unnatural sounds that 130 to 160 mile an hour winds create as they pass over land, ripping trees from the ground and sweeping civilization back into the ocean, drowning anyone and everyone not left impaled, carrying too many back out to sea in the floodwaters of the storm surge.

In a place where our house was slightly sheltered by a natural earth berm, the biggest terror I took away from it all was the warning of our ama (a Chinese appointed housekeeper and nanny) to never open the door during a storm no matter what we heard because the dead wander in typhoons asking to be let in.

Even now, I eye the darkness left by a simple power outage with suspicion.

Even now I tend to turn off all electronics, gather the candles, and sit and…listen.

It is a gift to a Horror writer, these kinds of life experiences.

It is mirrored in the temporary power-outages caused by lesser storms, reminding me not to forget. It forces the arrogant beast of technology back into its cave, disarming the once-brave because there is nothing like a black-out to remind us of exactly where we come from.

In the darkness of a storm, we are all meat.

Indeed, these times of high technology have ruined a great deal of Horror. We mock the measured, detail-laden stories of older times, we sneer at people who would be so superstitious, so easily spooked. We think ourselves so sophisticated, surrounded with technology the way primitive peoples used to surround themselves with amulets and sacrifices.

Yet hiding in our precious lighted castles, we forget that it is the elements in charge of our ultimate well-being. Our planet decides whether we will be allowed to live another day, to ravage her flesh and mine her bones. And on occasion, she has tantrums and moves to excise us from the open wound our existence has created. If you have ever lived through a class 5 hurricane, you would have no doubt of our tenuous rule of this place.

And if you are a Horror writer, you know that it is not all superstition; that it is appropriate that we refer to energy as Power…

Sooner or later we are all brought down to the level of the elements, cast naked among them and dared to survive unchanged.

Yet not-changing is impossible, because even the brief loss of electricity stays with you long after the lights come back on. Suddenly you decide to straighten your room, to put away that sinister stack of clothes that you laugh at now, but suspect strongly did move just when the dark was darkest. And when a holiday like Halloween rolls around, it is that moment you remember… and a new frisson spills across your flesh even as you hide behind the cuteness of kids in costumes.

You can’t shake it. And you won’t admit it.

And therein again you miss the point… Mind that something has noticed, and is now waiting for opportunity to arise just there, at the edge of your vision.

https://www.wallpaperup.com/55819/House_Creepy_halloween_haunted_lights_windows.html

 

Tasting the Fear and Loving It

Those who like to say that Horror is childish and no longer an effective genre have never been completely alone in the dark.

They mistake arrogance for bravery.

They live in electrically lighted homes with what they perceive to be impenetrable walls, armed with flashlights whose batteries never die, with cellphones that Twitter endlessly in the silence. Tragedy happens to everyone else. A “bad” storm is one that interferes with your cable connection.

They gamble and win so often with the odds that they believe themselves to be immune to the effects of Horror and beauty alike… never suspecting that sometimes they are one and the same.

They have never even looked up at the night sky when the streetlights and city lights are blotted out, never sat in the wilderness and seen that thick blackness populated by Carl Sagan’s billions and billions of stars… some of them falling away, the texture and dimension of the velvet of starlit blackness so profound you can feel as though you yourself might fall off the earth and into it as you stare…

They don’t pay attention.

They have never stood on the edge of the continent and felt the power of the ocean as it crashes into the land mass, slowly wearing it away with the promise of more beach sand and broken shells. They have never listened to the sounds a house makes when battered by the elements, the siren-cries of the wind, the sounds made by animals dying in the dark because predators don’t let the rain stop their hunt.

They trivialize nature on a skewed system of relevance.

But these things – all of them – are what shaped our fairy tales, our myths, our legends, our phantoms, our fears. Writing Horror, we ought not to forget that. Reading Horror we are trying to recreate that prickly sense of heightened alert, that brief and profound triumph that comes with eluding the man-eater in the dark.

Only if we remember it can we recreate it for the reader. Only if we’ve felt it and embraced it can we summon it at will.

Thrillseekers. That’s what lovers of Horror are. We find an endorphin-skewered high in sharing scary experiences, a secret thrill not unlike what many an ancestor must have felt in cheating a hungry lion. It is a fleeting feeling, almost impossible to recreate by seeing the movie or reading the book a second time because once learned, we program in the pattern of deceit directly to our brains. We learn from our experiences. It is a survival mechanism from our primordial beginnings.

Horror is so brain science…

This makes it even harder for a Horror writer to shape the old fear into a new design. We must make our monsters unrecognizable just long enough to lure the reader closer, unsuspecting and within striking range.

Then we must give the reader a fleeting glimpse…We must return to the lesson of the storm.

It is deeply primitive and elemental, this lightning-flash view of the drooling beast with open maw that can end us in a split second. And it must happen at precisely the right moment or we cannot trigger that basic instinct to survive… the one that says RUN… or the second monster that leaves us to ask WHERE?

When “people say” Horror cannot scare us anymore, that we are too sophisticated now, they are in denial. They will simply be the first to be eaten. They think technology will save them in the end, and that bravery is about willpower.

They have never really faced the natural world, living in their virtual ones. Hypnotized by their perceived control of all things, they have disabled the primitive responses that can be suddenly and completely resuscitated by a thunderstorm.

“Scare me,” they dare. They watch movies and read books where protagonists get to hide behind digital devices, and roll their eyes when the terror fails to fully materialize. They go into dark theaters of Horror films and cannot even turn off their cellphones. “Not scary,” they proclaim. And I say, probably not.

To scare yourself you have to be willing to meet yourself in the dark.

You should try it. Turn out the lights and sit in complete darkness. Alone. Taste your own fear. Let your mind imagine things that move in the inky black. Did something brush against you? Are those eyes over there? Is that door moving?

This is the sketchy place your Horror writers live. We pack up the notepads and leave the headlamps behind, crawling into dark and dank places where misshapen things slither…because we like it. Because it is strangely familiar.

We go there so we can bring a piece of that world back to you, to jumpstart your heart, to startle your reflexes, to whisper of things that wander in the tall grass with rotting meat in their teeth.

You are welcome to come along, but you will have to turn off your devices, because they do not work here. This is a place for instinct, and sensory acuity. This is where survival happens, and luck can be simply the place you bed down.

Putting Your Head in the Mouth of the Beast

They called it a Super Typhoon. It had a forty-mile wide eye and sustained winds from 108 to 130 knots, depending on where one was exactly. I remember the terrible and sudden eerie silence as that eye passed over Taipei and the mountain community of military housing called Shanzaihou on Yangmingshan (where we lived while my dad served at the U.S. Taiwan Defense Command), sliding stealthily over us from 10:20 to 11:05 pm…

When the storm was over it had claimed 30 lives with 2 missing, 2,200 dwellings were destroyed (and that being dwellings of record, as much of the population unaccounted for were street people at the time, living in lean-to’s between other structures). Flooding was massive, with as much as 18 inches of rain having fallen with a storm surge of 9.9 feet , and I remember almost 10,000 people being unaccounted for the immediate morning after as I and my family stood looking down the mountain at what had been the bustling town of Tianmu surrounded by rice paddies, then looking like an inland bay.

Nothing in my life has ever touched me the same way. I cannot get out of my head that memory of staring at all of that water, remembering all of those people who lived and worked down below, whose restaurants I had eaten in with my ama, quite against my parents’ directives…

Where are all the people?

The thought to this day brings tears to my eyes…the power of nature was overwhelming even in its aftermath. And I knew at that moment I would never forget what had happened, would never stop wondering how many of those 32 lives I might have encountered on my many trips into towns and cities and who were now just…gone.

I remember it as the first time I heard the sound of the elements the way our ancestors heard them when they clung to trees and painted the insides of caves.

I remember it every time a severe storm comes, its worst punch and thrust only a whimper of what happened that September 22nd on the tiny island of Taiwan. I remember it because its language is that of the Horror writer…primal, lethal, savage.

Typhoon Bess would become my benchmark for terror. I would never get it completely out of my head – the sights, the sounds, the smells, the absolute fear I felt even at age ten as fingers of wind clawed at the wooden shutters, trying to get in. It would serve to remind me that no amount of civilization is a match for the things that stalk and shape this world – the older, elemental things that seem to come awake when we overstep our egos, the things that seem to know that all which must be done to cow us is to turn out the lights…

It echoed the truth of what apocalyptic writers say: that technology cannot save us from the natural predator that ultimately stalks us… that in the end, we are all meat, destined to face our maker as naked as we met this world…

And it made me homesick, thinking about that time and that place. So of course I went looking…I went rummaging about in my past. And in the internet search for photos for this post, I took a long trip down memory lane…I used to trick-or-treat in this neighborhood…now in serious disrepair…

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Yangmingshan-American-Military-Housing/188130171205885

 

Here I found a photo that suggested the house that was condemned after the typhoon, along with a similar wall and a same-sized tree that grows in the exact place it would have grown at our house, the one that fell on our kitchen, our ama, Fay, oddly sound asleep in her room beneath it during the storm …

And then there were other houses that look familiar…

 

The Old Neighborhood… http://ustdc.blogspot.com/2010/09/yangmingshan-housing-area-today.html

 

Is it any wonder that we are shaped by the things that rearrange our lives? Do we remember or imagine the things we see in the dark of savage storms? And when it is our time, what might we see then? The storm that left us to recite the tale of its passing?

Horror writers inevitably cannot leave those questions alone. We pick at them like a scab that covers our humanity.

Will we die in our sleep?

Or be devoured alive by something we underestimated? Perhaps the Horrors in our own memories?

Turn out the lights and ask that question. Do it for Halloween when strange things roam the night.

Listen to the inhuman cries in the thick of a storm. Are the voices human? Did the darkness just move?

Don’t open the door… trick-or-treat… who knows what might be asking to be let in.

Maybe you should just set the candy dish out and go to a well-lighted place…

I’m not thinking you have the nerve to sit there in the dark.

Horror is alive and well.

Tweet that.

 

https://stmed.net/wallpaper-64078