Why Is Mary In the Attic? Frankenstein & the Challenge of Authorship (An Open Salon Re-Post)

(In this Women-in-Horror month re-post from my defunct Open Salon blog, “The Horror” originally published on February 16, 2015, I want to share with you a second case of Literary gender assault which I referenced in the previous post. This is a real “controversy”… a debate, and a Critical argument being discussed in academia and elsewhere. What I ask you to do is to read this post and ask “why” it is even being entertained…)

Most women who write and read Horror are used to the idea that it is predominantly men in the driver’s seat of our canon. Most of us are fine with the works chosen to represent canon. After all, we girls have Mary, author of Frankenstein. Yet a closer look reveals the very real reason the arc of feminism has risen through the Critical ashes: because several “someones” have been trying to put our Mary in the attic since the publication of Frankenstein.

“…the first edition published anonymously in London. Mary’s name appears on the second edition…” https://www.pinterest.com/pin/83387030570722338/

 

How many of know that there is (even today) a theory which postulates that the real author of Frankenstein was Mary’s husband – Percy Bysshe Shelley and/or any combination of he and his Famous Writer friends?

Why? Because a decent woman should not and – more importantly – could not write such a critically acclaimed work…especially a woman of nineteen.

This is hideous – even for our genre. Because what message does this send to young women writers of Horror? What does it say to writers of anything?

For those who have read my prior posts about Literary Criticism, this is where Roland Barthes and his dead authors meet the pavement of reality. We and our Critics need to think very carefully about how much biographical minutiae we really want to require in Literary Criticism, and how much it matters. We also need to recognize that if we do decide that biography is relevant, that – well, quite literally in this case – what’s good for the goose is good for the gander…

Conspiracy Theory

When one thinks of revising Literary Criticism, theories of conspiracy are not among the typical fare. Indeed, having any Critic of merit present such an argument – even in light of his times (and Critic was a man’s job in those early days) – flies in the face of modern Critical giants like Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and his own theory about the importance of keeping dead authors dead.

This theory that a large conspiracy took place to make Mary the author as a cover or a joke by a group of male poets and essay writers dredges up a Need-to-Know everything one can about every author and the circumstances of the birth of a work. It heightens the importance of copyright and the genesis of intellectual property, it takes the focus off of the work and the message of the work and makes it all about the author and the author’s times.

Is that really why a writer writes? So that Critics can thrash about in one’s personal and private existence and air the most intimate details of one’s life with the written work left as a mere afterthought? Is it really all about the writer? Do we want it to be?

One has to ask those questions and be prepared to answer them if one is equally willing to entertain the idea that Mary Shelley is our modern “who was Shakespeare” mystery.

One has to look at the motivations of all of the parties involved in such a conspiracy theory– including the very Critics who allege and support that a conspiracy was afoot. This started – after all – during a time in which decent women certainly didn’t write beyond invitations to social events and demure correspondence… and most definitely didn’t write like that (except that Mary’s own mother most certainly did). In fact, decent women were not to think at all about the world or its complicated subjects; it was not the place of women to speculate on the doings and the motivations of the doings of men. If it wasn’t about placating their husbands, raising children and looking pretty, about decorating the patriarchal parlor, proper ladies did not do it.

In such a world (argue conspiracy Critics), how could a nineteen-year-old woman with three illegitimate children to her credit write a work like Frankenstein – right under the noses of famous Romantic Poets like her husband – Percy Bysshe Shelley – or his friends also allegedly present that night in Lake Geneva– none other than Lord Byron and his personal companion/physician John William Polidori, who was also a published essay writer and who nurtured his own professional writing aspirations (Hitchcock 26-27).

Isn’t it more likely argue those Critics that such talent would have emanated from professionally established Writers and Poets? Didn’t Shelley himself admit to editing the novel in question?

Forget for a moment that “no poet of any renown would write a novel; no elevated person would stoop to read one” (Hitchcock 25). Forget the “shock” that “a popular poet would descend to write a novel, a new and not altogether respected literary form” (24). What would be the point in publishing it at all? If it could only be a professional amusement between poets, why drag it out into daylight? To put one “over” on the Critics?

Such would seem an awful lot of work with a serious risk of discovery and subsequent damage to a poet’s reputation… all for a giggle. Even given the indiscretions of youth, as well as the Idiot Gene that we all have encountered at one party or another, what is the likelihood that these young men would toy with their own tenuous reputations?

But Percy Bysshe Shelley admits to editing the work…He was present that night and many others…isn’t it at least feasible? Possible?

Many Critics thought so. Susan Wolfson and Ronald Levao state in their introduction to The Annotated Frankensten:

“Confronting a novel propelled by male adventures and transgressions, saturated in the languages and ideas of Milton, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Godwin, Byron, Shelley, and contemporary scientists such as Davy and Darwin, a novel, moreover, known to have been shopped by Percy Shelley, many reviewers assumed that the author was male – probably Shelley himself, or some other deranged, atheist Godwin disciple.” (53)

Perhaps we should pause here a moment to refresh. Frankenstein was written in an estate house (Villa Diodati) at Lake Geneva once rented by Milton in 1638 (Hitchcock 24), Coleridge, Wordsworth and Byron were publishing contemporaries of Shelley, Byron was a friend and present during the alleged contest, the “atheist Godwin” was Mary’s father, and London newspapers of the time were publishing tales of “galvanism” in which Luigi Aldini “toured Europe during the first years of the nineteenth century, demonstrating how electrical charges could move not only the legs of frogs but also the eyes and tongues of sevred ox heads as well (Hitchcock 33).

All of these things would have had influence on our Mary, who at one time recalled “how discussions of at Villa Diodati of these scientific marvels had filled her with ideas” (34). Indeed, “poetry and science, Gothic horror and reanimation—these topic tingled in the Geneva air that summer of 1816”…(34) How could they not influence any imaginative, thinking young adult? But more interestingly, how could they influence only the male members of the Geneva party on that night of nights?

Shelley versus Shelley

I say these conspiracy Critics must be fair in their use of historic and biographical detail. What Percy Bysshe Shelley was exposed to and influenced by, so was his wife.

Some may feel the need to “compromise” by saying that the possibility of editing by Shelley would indicate that he at least co-authored the novel… to which I ask, where are the residual checks for the editors of Harry Potter or Tolkien?

Editing is not writing. Editing is about organizational and compositional guidance. It is about streamlining the flow of consciousness, the application and follow-through of logic and the rules of grammar. It is not creating…it is shaping the created. It is about dressing up a story in its finest attire.

And indeed Shelley admits to “editing” the work and Critics have long complained that his influence is indeed “obvious” and that “the manuscript shows assistance at every point…so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator” (Wolfson & Levao 11-12) – which is in itself if true a sign of poor editing – and that while his hand in the novel improved some technical quality, it also threatened the integrity of the novel in places where he clearly insinuated himself (Wolfson & Lavao 54).

Does that not imply that it would have been a far different novel had Shelley written it? Or is it merely evidence of … editing not by a professional editor?

Distinguished Professor of English Literature, author and essayist Anne Mellor says something important in her review of the evidence. Mellor, “while acknowledging Percy’s improvements on several levels—from grammar and syntax to narrative logic, ‘thematic resonance,’ and the ‘complexity of the monster’s character’ – also notes Percy’s own missteps: rhetorical inflations and Latinizings, a penchant for imposing ‘his own favorite philosophical, political, and poetic theories on a text which either contradicted them or to which they were irrelevant’ and revisions that distorted Mary’s intentions and ideas [my emphasis]” (Wolfson & Lavao 54).

And isn’t his admission that he functioned as agent, and both his and Mary’s admission that he functioned as editor(Hitchcock 70-73) good enough for conspiracy Critics?

If not, one should look at supporting evidence; for example, despite the loss of the original draft manuscript, what of the copytext manuscript which “argues very strongly against’ the story of Mary-as-scribe “(unless it is an elaborate hoax that they [Percy’s advocates] and their conspiring friends cooked up to fool future scholars)” (Wolfson & Levao 54)? J.W. Polidori confirmed Mary’s “busyness” the “day after” her inspiring reverie, and the only surviving “draft she worked on shows a lively and affectionate relation between the older published poet and his talented lover” (54). Some might say this is merely more evidence of those willing to contribute to conspiracy. But at some point, one would have to be willing to suspend an awful lot of logic.

Furthermore, it would seem that if this document could be used or cited as evidence against Mary as author, then it should also be evidence for Mary. In fact, for Critics who accept Mary as Frankenstein’s author, it is this and other existing documents that bear the greatest weight:

“Here appear numerous local rephrasings in Percy’s hand, most (but not all) retained in the publication of 1818, occasional teasings of Mary about some of her habits of style, and a few ideas about local plot developments. Although Percy was an encouraging, attentive reader and a caring adviser, Mary’s primary authorship is confirmed by documents (letters and memoirs) containing comments from everyone who knew them – Byron, Leigh Hunt, Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, Godwin – that refer to her working on Frankenstein and regarding the novel as her project” (54).

And why does this Critically intense scrutiny of the author – if the rightful author were Mary, stop at calling her a nineteen year old woman? Where is the acknowledgement of her professional pedigree, upbringing and present company?

Her parents were well-known writers and activists – William Godwin – a philosopher, publisher and social critic, a “brilliantly popular writer in the 1790’s,” her mother Mary Wollenstonecraft, a feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, both parents being acclaimed novelists and essay writers (Hitchcock 27)). Our Mary had been writing since she herself was ten years old, had been a reader in her father’s vast library, the lover and wife of Percy Shelley. Her entire life had exposed her to the arts and the writing community along with the likes of Samuel Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Milton and Lord Byron to fuel her imagination. She was a daughter of activists coming of age during the rise of the Gothic, surrounded by poets and philosophers.

Now place her in the times of rising technology – the era of electricity and science. Place her at those contemporary and surprisingly common séances and lectures on the possible reanimation of corpses. See the arcs of electricity that were common affectations of lighting demonstrations and the rise of the Gothic period in literature, the rise of the Victorians as social culture.

Now remember what it was like to be nineteen. Remember the raw emotions, the primal fears, the easy way in which monstrosities rose in the imagination and dreams came vivid in their visitations in the night. If you are a writer, remember how rich and tactile an experience it was to write at nineteen. Remember the ideas? Remember how easily monsters came unbidden? Remember the perverse joy of Horror?

Then consider what it must be to witness the death of a child, to be surrounded by infidelities, disinheritances, public scrutiny, suicides, the endless pursuit of creditors, children birthed and dying out of wedlock… to constantly try to hide or disguise the decline of wealth, to be young and in love as passionately as you are afraid of the changing tides of your times. Imagine all of this in your primal imagination on a dark and violently stormy night with the reading of ghost stories and the ultimate challenge of writing one of your own as a contest of youth.

Consider also what it was to be nineteen in 1816. Life expectancy hovered around 40 years… (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/davidjstokes/1800.htm and http://longevity.about.com/od/longevitystatsandnumbers/a/Longevity-Throughout-History.htm) This means that even a morose teenager had some measure of right to be contemplating death and its meaning, because our Mary would have rightfully assumed she was at middle age.

Consider to be wrapped in all of that, and to be a writer. Consider the company she kept—in fact, visit the world of the Romantic Poets for a real taste of the Gothic…

Even using the very rules of conspiracy set about by those anti-Mary critics, one has to acknowledge that Mary had the necessary background – the chops as it were – to have done the deed herself. She had motive and opportunity.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Many modern Critics admit that Frankenstein was Mary Shelley’s finest work, that much of her subsequent novels (and yes, she most certainly did write other novels) were lackluster by comparison, seemed somehow distracted and not as focused. But our Mary was also widowed by then, and lost even more children to untimely death.

Try writing novels and not having real life impact your voice and plot. Try being a woman with a complicated reputation in those times. Try keeping a roof over your head.

Perhaps the pressures of being a woman, and a writer, and the possible author of a work like Frankenstein weighed heavily – even like a burden upon her.

Then if all else fails, look at Harper Lee, who it was once said believed that she had nowhere to go but down after the success of To Kill a Mockingbird. Truths do not matter. What matters is what the writer believes when she is writing.

How do we know why Mary’s other novels were not as successful? How do we possibly get in her head?

Again, I say that Roland Barthes is right: we don’t belong in writer’s heads. We as Critics or readers don’t have a right to their history. We need to appreciate the work as the work.

Maybe we don’t even have a right to know for sure that Mary Wollenstonecraft Shelly wrote Frankenstein. But she said she did. Her husband said she did. All of the people who were there that night at Lake Geneva said she did. They have even found peripheral information – letters, journals, etc. corroborating those very claims – from people who knew the players of the time. No one alludes to a conspiracy but those odd, dissatisfied Critics who believe a woman of nineteen could not have possibly written a work of merit – especially if she were married to an established writer, a man of position...

How incredibly sad. And how incredibly bigoted and sexist.

It is for these very types of reasons that women in Horror today feel skeptical of the publishing machinery that makes canon fodder of them and meteoric successes of more men than women in our genre. We have to question because there are just enough idiots out there to give us cause.

Case in point: every biography of Mary Shelley includes mention of the controversy, mentions the one idiot doubt of her authorship of the work known as Frankenstein. The disenfranchisement of her work has become associated with her very history and tainted the wondrousness of the novel itself. The only male author subjected to the same scrutiny is Shakespeare. (My, Mary, what good company those skeptical Critics have put you in….)

And to the Critics who believe that a nineteen-year-old could not possibly write such worthy stuff, I say that Percy Bysshe Shelley was not that much older, and gee whiz look at H.P. Lovecraft and what his childhood nightmares did for him. I say quit trying to make controversy where historically there is none.

Quit trying to shove Mary in the attic.

We need young women writers in Horror. We need them because they become old women writers in Horror. We need them for vision and the carelessness and impetuousness of youth. We need them and our canon needs them.

The birthing of Frankenstein as a novel is one of the most documented and argued cases of inception we can summon into argument. How it came to be, when it came to be, why it came to be and a list of all the pedigreed witnesses to the birth are available for anybody who wants to do a little research and reading. Ultimately, there is little foundation for supporting the theory of a conspiracy; it’s not only unlikely, it’s just plain weird.

So get off her. Let her breathe. Our times and modern Critics are busting Mary out of the attic prison sexist Criticisms have attempted to make for her. And there are bigger reasons for leaving it to rest than Conspiracy egos can support. Bigotry has had its time, its opportunity, a socially constructed stage upon which to prove its allegations. Nothing came of it except one important truth:

She’s our Mary. She is the rightful birthmother of Frankenstein. And we as readers and writers of the genre couldn’t be more proud or defensive of her right to be. No matter who she was married to or partied with on one dark and stormy night.

References

Hitchcock, Susan Tyler. Frankenstein: a Cultural History. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, c2007.

Spark, Muriel. Mary Shelley: a Biography. New York: E.P. Dutton, c1987.

Wolfson, Susan J. and Ronald Levao, eds. The Annotated Frankenstein by Mary Wollenstonecraft Shelley. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, c2012

 

Based on a True Story: the Amityville Horror & the Ruin of a Subgenre

I have always had a passion for true ghost stories. “True” in this context has generally meant that the account of the story was based on vetted fact, that the ghost was once a real person in verifiable recorded history, and whose death carried enough sadness, tragedy, misfortune, or treachery to warrant a ghostly haunt.

Of course I expected some storyteller’s/writer’s license – the typical exaggeration used to embellish a slightly duller truth. But “truth” has always carried a burden of some verifiable fact – especially in the (sub) subgenre of true ghost stories. That is, until The Amityville Horror came along.

After that, “truth” was never the same in tales of the paranormal; suddenly the concept itself took on a suspiciously fluid quality where despite the implied anchor of fact, the story itself floated considerably far out to sea. “Truth” became a marketing tool, a concept, and a staged event.

And while the market has now modified most claims of truth from calling newer ghostly tales “a true story” to “based on a true story,” the damage to the subgenre of ghost story is done. What was once a fascinating – and often disturbing — tradition has become an invitation for laughable exaggeration and snarky skepticism.

We were tricked. For money… and all based on the seriously tragic deaths of a very real murdered family. How did we get here – this place so naturally grown from the fictionally displayed “truth” roots of The Exorcist to the public denigration of a very old, time-honored tradition of ghost story-telling?

Amityville: the Greatest Show on Earth

While recently digging through my vast collection of stuff, I found a little treasure of a book that I hadn’t read in a long, long time. The pages are now bright amber, the spine broken in so many places it looks like my forehead after a troubling day, the cover bent from multiple moves and careless stacking, the edges turning white as the cover begins to buckle and the colors begin to flake off the edges.

I bought the book about when it was published, in 1986, a typical Mass Market paperback of the period– the kind that were often never published in hardback, and most likely had never seen a trade edition. It was $4.50, priced to sell to its New Age market – young people, those who decided they were more “spiritual” than “religious,” and folks looking for a fun read while waiting between planes.

I probably belonged to all three groups at one time or another, which explains why I bought it. But why I kept it is another reason. I kept it because it was the first book I read about the paranormal which seemed interested in truth and how to find it. It was called ESP, Hauntings and Poltergeists: a Parapsychologist’s Handbook by Loyd Auerbach.

Now, to be clear, I was never planning on becoming a ghost hunter. After seeing Great Grandma herself in all her ghostly glory at the foot of my (ok.. her) bed at four years old, I was simply curious about a few things.

So like every other teenager my age at the time, I went to the bookstore instead of my parents or church. Needless to say, I endured many a parental eye-roll at my literary and regular reading choices, and my librarian mother bore witness to an apparent struggle of interests and maturity as I bounced between various and sundry lurid New Age titles, religious histories, and general psychology as easily as Louis L’Amour, Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, and Irma Bombeck. (Hint: Stephen King won.)

But what I did recognize early on in Horror fiction was the new subgenre bursting onto the promotions-rich fictional scene – the “true” Horror story. So I decided that if I was going to write the stuff (Horror), I should understand about truth and when to wield it.

And of course the biggest, most sensational title of the time was both its shining star, and its most invalidating one: The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson.

I read it during my “true” and “fictionalized true” ghost story phase. As such, it was just “right there” on the shelf, not quite the full-fledged blockbuster it was to become but well on its way. And I will be honest, it was the hardest book to read that I’d ever read – short of Pride & Prejudice, or the Silmarillion – and not because it was in any way like those two titles (whose matter was dense and complicated), or because it was “scary.” No, it difficult to read because I found it incredulous that any writer could with editorial blessing abuse punctuation like that, or ever needed to use that many exclamation points… (they were like the flies on the cover – and not in a good way.)

But I muddled through in the name of research, hoping to glean some details about allegedly real, modern hauntings, and how to write about them.

Now that the second objective was pretty much clear, I set about dissecting the first. But being a kid whose own paranormal expertise included checking under my bed at night and making sure the closet door was firmly closed, I wasn’t sure where to start. And then I found Auerbach, a researcher of the paranormal who seemed willing to believe in reasonable evidence, and whose expertise included an actual degree (among the first ever offered by a university I might add), and a healthy dose of investigative skepticism. My kind of guy, I was thinking… almost ok to bring home under the gaze of Librarian Mom.

I immediately liked the guy. He wrote in an informal, humorous style that anyone who has ever had to rationalize seeing a ghost could appreciate. But I also liked him for his attempt to clarify the scientific criteria used by parapsychologists in the investigation of phenomena. Under his watch, we would have no Orb Psychosis, no investigators who go to investigate haunted houses then drop equipment and yell “run!” when the things they go to investigate come out to play.

No, under the terms of his Handbook, things are a lot more tediously scientific, a lot more objective. So when I got to the chapter on the Amityville Horror, things got interesting.

In short, he didn’t see any evidence that indicates the haunting ever happened, stating outright that there is more evidence that the whole thing was a hoax than there is that it wasn’t. (Auerbach 296-297)

William Weber, Attorney for Ronald Defeo

Primary to the argument that there was no “true story” behind the published one, was the statements of several well-respected paranormal investigators of the time (Karlis Osis, Alex Tanous of the American Society for Psychical Research –guys who want to believe) who concluded that not only had they been unable to find any real substantiating evidence of any haunting, but that they had seen a signed contract for a book and subsequent movie of the alleged haunting, indicating that the account itself was fraudulent, designed for the manufacture of a blockbuster “based on a true story” – a fact compounded by the admission of then convicted murdered Ronald DeFeo’s attorney William Weber who claimed the whole story was conjured up over a bottle of wine with the alleged haunted couple, the Lutzes (Auerbach 302-4).

Ed & Lorraine Warren, Demonologists

And while he acknowledges that everyone’s favorite demonologists – Ed and Lorraine Warren – did participate in the investigations, he does not include any detail of their findings at the time. Nor does he credit them with being objective, however, describing them as more “occultish” in their work than investigative…(298) At best, this means that testimony by such celebrity personalities as the Warrens, (or even famed paranormal writer Hans Holzer), may be impressive or pursuasive to some, their qualifications are still not quite measurable in scientific terms, rendering their accounts motivationally if not legitimately questionable.

He also points out that one should not discount that Ronald DeFeo (who was convicted of murdering his entire family in the house in 1974), might profit from the conclusion that demonic forces coerced him into committing a crime he would otherwise have not have committed. And with regard to the Lutzes (who moved in afterward in 1977 and allegedly fled 28 days later after experiencing a demonic haunting), Auerbach only concedes that studies of residual hauntings caused by such trauma as mass murder can potentially create an atmosphere where some form of haunting can take place. He theorized, for example, that it was psychically possible that the Lutzes experienced some level of that kind of haunting, which prompted them to sensationalize a story for profit. However it is the amount of paranormal activity that flagged the story for fraud.

And once vetted parapsychologists began to look at those boring, sciency details, the account began to spawn holes in logic and fact.

For example, Auerbach mentions the discovery of a number of inconsistencies in the Lutzes’ story, such as incorrect weather reports, incorrect dates, incorrect sequences of events, implications that the same ASPR that denounced the whole thing as a fraud instead confirmed the haunting, etc. (Auerbach 302-304)

So why does this particular book in turn affect a whole subgenre of fiction?

The answer would be because if a story is alleged to be true, it should be both true and substantiated as true.

There should be facts. Proof. Not allegations and slight-of-hand with celebrity distractions and the ready dismissal of those facts in exchange for profit.

After all, we had not yet gotten the movie with the full Hollywood treatment (the first film releasing in 1979) when the Amityville haunting story burst all over the national consciousness. And if a book presented to the public as “true” is not, then it is already and only fiction.

And then if a fiction is written about an incident that is true, the word “true” needs to have some teeth.

What was true is that a horrible crime happened in the house which may or may not have involved at least some mental illness, and may or may not have involved some paranormal influence that has not yet be validated to the satisfaction of science. But alleging that the devil made one do it is a powerful truth or an insidious lie. One needs to be skeptical of those who validate such things who also stand to profit from them.

Like I said, I liked Auerbach. I like that he suggested strongly that one bring one’s healthy skepticism to the paranormal table.

And that in turn has meant that I now look at fiction differently when it claims to be based on a true story or true events.

Defining “Based On”

Forget for a moment that “truth” has its own problems… that vetting the source that claims something is true can be a real challenge, as the qualifications of one authority may or may not be universally respected.

Forget also that the paranormal itself is has not been scientifically “proven”… only symptoms and conditions that may be a product or consequence of the paranormal or something as yet undiscovered in nature are documented to science’s satisfaction.

The simple words “based on” present their own problems.

How loosely or strictly based on “true” events are such stories?

As a writer, how much freedom do you have – should you have – while still calling a work “based on” true events?

A look at how filmmakers interpret a book might give us some insight as to how a writer should interpret a “true event.” For example, a film typically simply identifies itself as an adaption of one of three types:

• Transposition (a literal telling)
• Commentary (when a filmmaker intentionally or inadvertently changes the original without malicious intent)
• Analogy (using the original work as a source for departure to an entirely new work)

Honestly, if we kept up with filmmakers and their Critics, we might be doing better in fiction genres… And as I have said before, we have a lot to learn from our filmmaking Critical counterparts.

Because if we keep this list in mind when we are plotting our next novel, planning on using a “true story” as a merchandising tagline, we should be clear with our audience what the words “based on” mean to both us and the work.

For me, I confess I know nothing about the truth of the Amityville Haunting. But I do know that what the book appears to be “based on” is the guaranteed silence of the Catholic Church (which neither confirms nor denies what happened there or with its alleged priestly visits to the house), and the documented fact that a mass murder of a family by one of its own members tragically occurred at that address. Everyone involved in the promotion of the book and movie has something to gain, even if it resides in the sketchy value of alleged professional qualifications.

And I do know that the whole scandal of the Amityville Horror has tainted our little Horror subgenre because of its outrageous claims, its oft-described abnormal or atypical parapsychological “true events.”

We are now approaching a kind of overkill with the tagline, and when a book or movie claims to be “Based On True Events” it may still get our attention, but the damage that is inevitably done after the debunking or disappointment begins has left us with only the merchandising value of the phrase. What was once a powerful precursor to a thrill-ride of storytelling made even scarier by its connection to real life has become itself an eye-roll of derision.

Defining “Truth”

As most of us recognize today, “truth” is not as easy to spot as it once was. But even in the day of The Amityville Horror, we were willing to suspend belief in order to take a thrill ride.

Says Dale Bailey in his book, American Nightmares: the Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction: “A book like The Amityville Horror – published as non-fiction but marketed as a horror novel (complete with spooky black and red cover and flies printed on chapter headings) – is almost guaranteed a minimal level of success.” (53)

So why did we swallow it as truth – hook, line and sinker? Why did we flock to the theaters and the bookstores?

Because audiences of fiction and film are already willing to believe the illogical and the fantastical in exchange for a few minutes of pleasure or distraction, and what our memories retain is an endless loop of the Horror of possibility...

Furthermore, we have a tendency to immediately surrender judgment if we believe an allegation to be true. We overlook inconsistencies, the illogical, and even the absurd. We give ourselves permission for the necessary suspension of belief…especially if we want something to be true…

In the case of The Amityville Horror, the absurd was not an allegation that a house where a tragic mass murder occurred could be haunted, but rather in the blanket acceptance that all of the things alleged to have happened could possibly have happened in that Long Island house.

Says parapsychologist Auerbach, extreme claims of the paranormal “may make wonderful (and not so wonderful) horror books and films, but even when they claim to be ‘based on a true story’ remember that you are reading or seeing a story, unless you can dig further to uncover what part of the story was true, if any at all. Anyone and everyone might have a psychic experience, perhaps even an intense one. But anyone and everyone doesn’t have experiences like these. In fact, in the history of parapsychological field investigations, no one really has. Outside the realm of fiction, that is.” (304-305)

Yet the addition of the words “A True Story” on the cover combined with the format of non-fiction insisted we accept the allegations as truth. While one could almost argue that The Amityville Horror is almost a satire about our collective willingness to believe that “if it is in print, it must be true,” it is more likely that it is a relative of the Found Footage/Found Journal subgenre of Horror.

Yet the difference is that in really claiming it is true when it is more likely not cheapens and taints the whole subgenre it is in. Before Amityville came along like the proverbial bull in the china shop, we had a thriving subgenre of truth-based ghost stories told as fiction. And it was awesome.

The Amityville Horror wasn’t especially well-written, or especially well-told, nor apparently was it especially, well, “true” – at least in the way in which the book insinuates. It was Critically maligned, and coolly received – despite its hand-over-fist publishing and film success (Bailey 55). But it did touch a New Age nerve: specifically our fear of repercussion for drifting from our parents’ traditional religion, that latent fear that the Devil might actually be out there. Waiting to pounce. On innocence. It wrapped unsavory, fraud-scented tentacles around the American dream of home ownership like it had extrasensory perception of what was to BECOME our home-owning reality some thirty years later…

But it caught us at something else: a cultural sea change in thinking.

The New Age movement was simply carte blanche permission to consider the existence of psychic and paranormal phenomena. From angels to demons we were poking the Veil… curious. We were willing to believe that the superstition of organized religion had hidden important truths from us as well as denying the powerful and unrelenting influence in our daily lives of things beyond our control just like what influenced any who dared live in the Amityville house. It played to our growing national tendency toward conspiracy theory and fears of heavy-handed authority. Best of all, it freed us from all that collective guilt and responsibility.

We could be innocent anew.

And it was not only exciting; it was validating. Once again, we were relieved of accountability for the bad things in our lives and our world.

The need to be relieved of personal responsibility was a major player in our willingness to swallow the story completely.

With The Amityville Horror, as with The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby before it, the message was the draw. A good thing, apparently, because as Bailey states, “it did not succeed because it was especially artful”; rather it was more a success because it exploited “audience expectations” … in fact, “among the most conventional, the most formulaic, of haunted house tales, it fails to fulfill our expectations in only one rather unusual way – its insistence that it be read as true…” (53-55)

Why is that?

The Lutzes, alleged Demon-fodder

For one thing, it is natural in storytelling for the audience to find a link that makes a connection between that story and ourselves.

Offers Auerbach, “If it could happen to an ordinary family like the Lutzes, why not to someone like me?” And that supposition is invaluable for providing that leap into audience surrender. Continues Auerbach, “Both the film and the book did very little to suggest that the story was anything but true, and even the attorney for Ronald DeFeo joined in to say that there were indeed odd goings-on in that house. DeFeo himself had apparently claimed that prior to the murders he had heard voices telling him what to do.” (296)

You may be wondering why this whole discussion is important to our genre. After all, The Amityville Horror is a “fun” film franchise, and a titillating read.

I think it’s important because it is one thing to write fiction which uses a convention of being the truth: a lost narrative, a secret work… But it is another entirely to exploit a horrible true crime by unapologetically claiming that a story is completely true, even if one paints any number of absurdities into the prose to prove the audience will believe anything – even satire, if we give Anson the benefit of the doubt.

Whether the house in question was truly haunted before, during, or after the crime is indeed a curious one. And of course, there is an abundance of conflicting determinations and “findings” by celebrity psychics and others who stand to gain by the belief that the stories are all true.

But when we intentionally misrepresent our fiction as truth – or any fiction as truth – we are doing a disservice to everyone, and especially the subgenre in which we write.

While The Amityville Horror tends to remain a kind of turning point in Horror fiction, and a topic for debate for paranormal investigators, it most certainly rests in a bed of scandal because it claimed to be truth right on its cover while stories fester about fraud and collusion.

Ghost story is about telling a tale that reveals a secret, an injustice, lies and ruin. It is not about exploiting the dead, the murdered, the victims of crime.

The bottom line with regard to The Amityville Horror and what it has come to represent is that our genre should never be about “duping” the public, about fleecing the gullible or desperate or vulnerable, or making one’s own reputation on the misfortunes of others. For that reason, we should never be afraid to question the voracity of an allegation of truth placed on a book cover. There is nothing wrong with a good story, a true story, or real fiction – as long as it is honest.

Besides, Horror is scariest when it is possible… Not when it is “true.”

 

References

Auerbach, Loyd. Esp, Hauntings & Poltergeists: a Parapsychologist’s Handbook. New York, Warner Books, c1986.

Baily, Dale. American Nightmares: the Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, c1999.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Getting” Weird: When a Subgenre is a Subgenre and its Shadow is Over More Than Innsmouth (Part One)

Here’s the question in debate: Is Horror a subgenre of Weird Fiction, or is Weird Fiction a subgenre of Horror?

When I returned to college and began to comprehend the organizational structure of Literature as established by Literary Criticism, I thought it would be fun to apply the substance of what I was learning to Horror. Why? Because I was convinced there was structure in Horror.

There had to be. Right?

But what I found not only surprised me; turned out it was interesting, too…Because Horror – having long been the splinter in the flesh to Literary purists – had only the structure and spurts of structure authors and Critics had sporadically given it. And once we left English soil, American Horror’s plan to re-invent itself instead resulted in a kind of Literary disorientation rife with distracting rumors and its own mythology.

To my surprise I discovered that there was no canon; there was historically no established Criticism by Critics other than essays and articles created to roundly condemn the genre as genre (and its writers by association); and that the very genre name was something even its authors historically argued over.

Horror – as the red-headed-stepchild of speculative fiction – continues to emerge from the darkness in this country, shedding forms as it grows, morphing from one interpretation to the next as it blindly seeks to discover and define itself.

No wonder the Critics are frustrated and our writers seem to wander and careen about the genre…

How then do we have a discussion, let alone a debate? Answer: we listen to the words of our best writers and the constructive comments of new Critics…. Then we all need to participate in the careful examination of points presented.

When Horror Was Horror, or Was It Ever?

Perhaps the first and most surprising thing for this child of the sixties to trip over was the discovery that Horror was not always Horror. In fact, the name “Horror” for the genre was a relatively “recent” attachment. Horror – as we know it – began with names we no longer call it.

Those earlier names made it clear that stories told under the genre umbrella were largely sensational short works designed for quick chills and thrills with their folk roots showing: Ghost Stories, Spectral Fiction, Supernatural Fiction, Thrillers, Tales of Terror, Gothic Fiction… Critics were quick to point out their campfire glow, their dependence on both superstition and the naiveté and/or rural links associated with the illiterate and uneducated masses.

In other words, the genre was considered childish and unsophisticated; it was most certainly not for a mature audience tuned to the marvels of modern scientific thought, and it was not a genre that represented our best profile. And as the genre blossomed at the precise time of the industrial revolution and the birth of technology, it was an unwelcome reminder of times ruled by emotions instead of analytical thought.

So emotion became both the hallmark of and the motivation behind the choice of genre name. The choice seemed likely: Horror was what you were promised in those early publications…. terror…fear…creepy… scary….eerie…frightening….amazing…astounding…unbelievable… indescribable… tales.

The parade of adjectives led directly to the name “Horror.” And it did so because it managed to encompass and corral all of the many subgenres that were developing their own rules and authors. This is not to say that all of those subgenres are subgenres of Horror… but that “Horror” was hung as a name over all of the writings in the genre – whatever its proper name should have been…

We cannot know what would have happened in the vacuum of a printing press-less world. Writers were already sharing and bending terms to their purposes, and perhaps it was Critical derision that resulted in the spotty criteria writers used to define and clarify subgenres. But despite the best efforts of some editors and some writers, terms and definitions began to swim and swirl in the creative currents until many became inseparable from each other.

Meanwhile even as the first publishing boom was happening and pulp dotted the writing landscape, a small detachment of writers began writing something “new”… and they were calling it “Weird.”

It was the emergence of the Weird tale – a proliferation of the strange, the supernatural, the cosmic dominated by unique group of writers who knew their fiction was “different” than the norm, and who did not consider themselves so much “horror” writers that sparked the venom anew of earlier Critics and now hold the academic interest of contemporary Critics.

But something weird happened to the Weird: while it began before Lovecraft, it seemed to culminate with his efforts, thereafter sliding into a combination of hackneyed Literary efforts and Critical disinterest. For Critics today, there is a noticeable pair of bookends surrounding this period, and to at least one modern Critic, the thread that made the Weird so fascinating a kind of story has been all but lost.

Says S.T. Joshi –the most prominent of Literary Critics now laying the Critical groundwork necessary for Literary Criticism in our genre – “It is my impression that what has frequently been termed the ‘ghettoization’ of weird fiction – especially in America – occurred as a direct result of the pulp magazines. All of the standard ‘genres’ we now recognize — mystery, horror, science fiction, western, romance – either grew out of the pulp magazines of the 1920’s (even though the pulps as originally conceived at the turn of the century were by no means specialized in terms of content) or received considerable impetus from them…” And here Joshi asserts “As a result, weird material in particular disappeared almost entirely from mainstream magazines, since there seemed to develop a notion that such material now had a market of its own.” (Joshi-Modern Weird 4)

One has only to look at the assortment of magazines to see the coalescence of our genre into semi-firm molds of subgenre. Early writers had already began to weigh in, discussing in essays exchanged in letters and Amateur Press Associations the nature of what was being written – all as part of the argument that the genre had a glimmer of Literary offerings. But just as things might have been becoming clearer, the paperback was born…and back to the primal mud our genre crawled… and it may have taken the Weird with it.

The official market “tagging” of the genre by publishers as “Horror” sometime in the 1970’s all but obliterated the earlier discussions. Weird fiction – which had its own audience and writers – became an alternative adjective instead of the noun it was intended to be. Publishers – not being Critics – saw a sales-driven mission of lumping everything together into a broad category – whereas Critics and writers are wont to separate and define. Editors were somewhere in the middle, and have been trying to argue their way out for some time.

But perhaps the most damaging and consequential result was what happened to the rest of us… because the publishing boom did something else – instead of enlightening us all to the history and progression of the genre, it simply ceased to clearly define subgenres and instead vomited up a plethora of terms for which none of us had immediate association. No wonder we lost the ability to build on the Weird tradition in this country; we lost our vision of tradition altogether.

Those of us “coming of age” in the genre of the 1970’s and 80’s were awed by the tossing about of terms, certain that those who were using them knew what they meant. We never dreamed that they did not. And it has been the genre nerds who woke us up – the Lovecraft fans, the passionate heirs and curators of the Weird.

While the rest of us were luxuriating in the massive deluge of scary and strange stuff, even pretending we understood the term “Gothic,” we were losing everything we had gained in genre awareness. In this country, it was the Weird fan who kept us grounded by adhering to a bold and determined declaration of ‘genre.’ Those of us not disciples of the Weird were ignorantly adrift in a flotsam of alleged subgenres that shared and cross-pollinated names and distorted conventions.

While Horror was exploding onto the popular fiction scene, it seemed that American writers became disoriented instead of inspired. It did not matter that writers referred to what we now consider classic works; we did not feel the connection to recreate it. If you read American 1980’s Horror, what started out as inspired eventually becomes circular and redundant. Today’s American Horror is still stuck in that rut, prompting many of us as writers and fans to return to Lovecraft and Poe to try to figure out where we lost that thread of continuity while others try to hide behind the concerted effort to force the genre into a more Literary straitjacket.

I don’t know how it feels for European writers, for British writers of the genre… But here in the U.S. it is confusion resulting from our lost or disordered history that seems to dominate and dog our fiction. It prompts both editors and Critics to say we don’t comprehend what has already been done or done to death in the genre.

That in turn has caused a resurgence of interest in the Weird – and in Lovecraft specifically. We may not understand what we feel, but we know we feel it in Lovecraft’s shadow. So we sit there in it… enveloped in tentacles, begging Cthulhu to tuck some Horror in our minds. Editors feel it, too: we are awash in Lovecraftian-themed anthologies, struggling to recapture the elements that make Weird fiction so effective a storytelling device. But then we ran into a complication. Whether it is subgenre or genre, where are the rules?

Suddenly those of us who thought we could write it find no guidance and empty references to unnamed conventions and undefined formulas.

What is Weird Fiction? And if so many people can reference it, why can’t anyone define it?

We thought it was us.

Yet the more we set out to understand what was “wanted by the genre” (itself a paradox because we have abdicated who the authority of the genre is and publishers are never the genre even as this is who we continue to look to even now), the more the structure of genre evaporated. Our conventions are convoluted and polluted. Our fiction is substandard and hybridized and we feel it but cannot name it. The epiphany will come from Innsmouth…of that we all seem certain.

What we have to realize is that the train came off the rails with the hand-over-fist American publishing boom of the 1980’s. We buried the essays and drowned the voices of the early genre writers with a flood of new writers seeking careers in storytelling. Certainly a peek at all of the financial reasons is self-explanatory, but only a handful of thoughtful editors who placed important Critical writings and author commentary in the front matter and endpapers of classic collections of the genre kept our history from completely going dark. When we began to follow the Pied Piper and call the genre Horror, we ceased to see what else it might have been.

Weird Heroes: the Literary Critic

Now we are scraping all of these commentaries together, and our first Literary Critics are having the task of sorting out exactly where the genre was heading before the boom of reading, writing, and publishing that inflated the 1980’s into a wanton writer’s market. As already stated, prior to that time Horror had been addressed by many other names, and had already established a long and tumultuous history of impoverished writers condemned for their artistic choices.

When the emergence of the mass market paperback created the explosion of affordable fiction which seeded the Horror boom, it also created a generation of readers who knew the genre by one name only: Horror. For most of us, “Weird” as a term has no traction in our memories, and there is no clear understanding in our composition of contemporary writing. We are Horror writers, we say… and isn’t “Weird” just a synonym for “strange?”

This is where newer writers need the Literary Critic – or at least those with Critical analytic capabilities such as writer and Critic China Mieville – who can help put our socks on straight. Mieville not only helps us greatly by reminding us that the “invention” of the tentacle heavily influences the texture of what should be considered Weird, but that “Weird fiction [shares] with Surrealism a conception of modern, orderly, scientific rationality that [is] in fact saturated with the uncanny.”(Mieville  xiii)

Our hackneyed understanding of the Weird has now spilled into our own interpretations of what we are trying to write, or think we are writing. It is presenting a problem for some Critics, who themselves are trying to unravel a clear understanding of what the effective Weird was and now find themselves awash in what some writers are calling Weird fiction that appears to be not. And sometimes it is when something is diluted that the pure solution becomes more obvious.

The more Critics look at the original writings and writers of the Weird, the bigger, more viable its legitimate core seems to get…So much so, that some are starting to propose that Weird fiction encapsulates Horror, and not the other way around.

Asserts S.T. Joshi, “Strictly speaking I regard ‘horror’ as a subset of the weird, since fantasy of the Dunsany or Tolkien type is just as much a branch of weird fiction as any other, and ‘horror’ itself must be subdivided into supernatural and nonsupernatural horror” (Joshi-Modern Weird 3). For Joshi, the impervious structure needed to provide a broad foundation for subgenres is already fractured when attempting to apply the name “Horror” to the whole genre – a Critical sign that it cannot be the parent of Weird offspring and is therefore not the correct name to use.

Mieville proposes that “Traditionally, genre horror is concerned with the irruption of dreadful forces into a comforting status quo—one which the protagonists frantically scrabble to preserve. By contrast, Lovecraft’s horror [Lovecraft being the towering genius among those writers of fantastic fiction for whom plot is simply not the point] is not one of intrusion but realization.” (Mieville xii-xiii)

While Mieville’s description of the Weird simply seems to differentiate between what we perceive as Horror and what we experience as the Weird, he actually has something in common with Joshi. It is important to note that like Joshi’s interpretation, in Mieville’s look at the two in the context of a Horror versus Weird as genre argument, it is again the Weird that provides greater Literary foundation which seems more potent and Literarily promising than any singular assemblage of the moving parts of Horror.

This is not to say that sometimes the argument for Weird as a more likely independent and Literary genre doesn’t get – well – weird…

Another – and I find odd – part of this dissatisfaction with the term “Horror” is encapsulated by Joshi’s exasperated question, “What other mode of writing is designated by an emotion?” As Joshi interprets it, “horror” is a term rendered even more inadequate for him as a Critic because “The term ‘horror’ also suggests” – and he emphasizes – “(falsely, to my mind) that the arousal of fear is somehow the prime concern of weird writing” instead of the more Literary depiction of world view. (Joshi-The Modern Weird 3)

Never mind that Lovecraft himself went down this path…

I find that this part of the argument against the term “Horror” implies that the word “Horror” as applied to genre involves only the emotion of fear and not its cousins – dread, discomfort, disturbance, disgust. I find that both Horror AND Weird fiction has some of those elements on a regular basis (as apparently does Mieville (“Lovecraft’s stories …move tightly and precisely, evoking growing foreboding…aggregating a sense of dread and awe” (xii)) – and those adjectives are especially evident in the descriptions used to define cosmic horrors and human failures. So while I empathize with Joshi on this point, I do not agree with him. I do agree with Joshi, however, that the intrusion of “world view” in Weird fiction is of Literary blood, and is an important point in establishing the criteria that would define Weird fiction as a genre/subgenre.

For Literary Critics, this relevance to bigger things – to the real issues that shape and affect humanity – is what defines Literature. And as such, it is the bread crumb trail that helps identify when something in genre writing is bigger than genre. It is most certainly there in the Weird. But is Literature always the biological parent? Or might the parent be a gangly, disproportioned and lovingly awkward mutt?

With so much confusion and overlap of genre and subgenre, the muddle of terms, Joshi admits with considerable exasperation: “I do not know what one is to do about this whole issue.” However just because a matter is entangled by centuries of amateur theories does not mean it should not be UN-entangled….clarified….and committed to. And Joshi himself cannot seem to let it go, because the question and argument of which came first haunts all of his work on Criticism in our genre.

So while I do not agree that “Horror” being an emotion disqualifies it from being a genre name, I do agree with Mr. Joshi that study and discussion of this messy subject is necessary to sort it all out. And I agree that if Literary Critics can do so with legitimate theoretical reasons for creating a better terminology for the genre, then it should be done. We may all have our preferences, but the truth of the matter is that until we settle on terms and definitions, we cannot present arguments or press works through Critical Theories.

And Critical Theory is how we get canon.

Deciding what we call ourselves may seem a moot point, but for Critics, the name of the structural tree from which we hang our Literature does matter. And it should matter to us as writers, so we can be certain we are delivering the goods to our readers, and making conscious choices about the quality and creative direction of our fiction.

Like the new Literary Critic, we need to revisit the discussion that was in play during the time of Lovecraft… Because if we are to argue the Literary merits of the genre, we have to start thinking more like the Literary Critic and that means we must be looking at what we write and where it falls on the scale of genre definitions. And that means we must not be adverse to the reordering of terms and conventions.

It’s time to go there… and due to the length of the discussion, we will in the succeeding post.

 

References

Joshi, S.T. The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, c2001.

Joshi, S.T. Unutterable Horror: a History of Supernatural Fiction (the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. New York: Hippocampus Press, c2012, 2014.

Joshi, S.T. Unutterable Horror: a History of Supernatural Fiction (From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York, Hippocampus Press, c2012.

Joshi, S.T. The Weird Tale. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, c1990.

Mieville, China. “Introduction.” At The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. New York: the Modern Library, c2005.

Montague, Charlotte. H.P. Lovecraft:the Mysterious Man Behind the Darkness. New York: Chartwell Books, c2015.

Montague, Charlotte. Edgar Allan Poe: he Strange Man Standing Deep in the Shadows. New York: Chartwell Books, c2015.

VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff, eds. The Weird: a Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, c2011.

Horror the Second Time Around: the Paradox of Misremembering Scary Things

In the constant quest to scare myself and compare newer works to old, I have come to notice something peculiar happening: when I choose to revisit that special movie or book a second time to recapture that eerie, horrified feeling of doom and dread… to savor it once again, to relive the scary…the magic isn’t there. (Or maybe I should say: the same magic isn’t there.)

In fact, whole sections of rather detailed – and what I recall as emotionally integral – terrifying scenes routinely turn up muted or missing.

How can this be? What happens to the mind reading Horror or sitting in a dark theater that we invent so much that isn’t there? Does Horror really lose its effectiveness because we get older? How do we come to misremember the Horror that we remember so well?

Our Brains in a Jar: the Science of Horror

When H.P. Lovecraft rose to the defense of our genre in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, speaking against the Literary Critics of his time, he stated:

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (105).

Savor those words a minute…because the literary definition of Horror has long been “stories that exploit fear…”

It is around the potency of this emotion that the Horror genre (even when called Weird) is built. And for that exact reason, every student of Horror should dig deeply into the anatomy of fear. Of course that means digging into some science – specifically the science of the brain (neuroscience), the science of perception (psychology), and the science of the body (biology).

Because for anyone who ever wondered why watching the movie or reading the book the second time around is so totally not the same experience, reading up on the technical end of things sheds some fascinating light. Horror, it would appear, it a whole-body experience.

One of the most interesting books I happened across recently is called What We See When We Read: a Phenomenology with Illustrations, by Peter Mendelsund. The associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf and designer of some pretty iconic book covers, Mendelsund did some interesting digging of his own into the application of imagination in reading.

What do we see when we read? This (it turns out) is a very interesting question. Because apparently, reading is a kind of marriage between what the author suggests and what we remember.

You read right: what we remember. Because according to Mendelsund, we build new literary images from consolidating relevant or similar details born of our own experiences.

Says Mendesund, “the idea of [a] house, and the emotions it evokes in me are the nucleus of a complex atom, around which orbit various sounds, fleeting images, and an entire spectrum of personal associations.” (207)

Furthermore, “These images we ‘see’ when we read are personal: what we do not see is what the author pictured when writing a particular book. That is to say: Every narrative is meant to be transposed; imaginatively translated. Associatively translated. It is ours…and the feeling has primacy over the image…” (207)

So when we read, we reach into that catalogue of remembrances for the most similar thing and attach it to the skeleton of the author’s words. We shape and refine, correct and adapt as the author gives us more information, but the power of the moment – the very images we associate with that first reading – are not only retained in ghostly fashion, but are most likely ours and based on our personal experiences at that moment in time.

Says Mendelsund, “Much of our reading imagination comprises visual free association…untethered from the author’s text… (we daydream while reading)…A novel invites our interpretive skills, but it also invites our minds to wander…” (294)

And wander Horror minds do…

It goes back to the psychology of the moment associated with the image the author has summoned by the spell of his or her words. Say our victim is wandering an old house in her nightgown. We all have a concept of an old house in mind, but we all also most like remember a very specific old house, one that had some creepy element that haunts us still. We also all understand what it is to discover that we are not safe after all when we are asleep at night (at our most vulnerable, very likely naked or nearly so). So with one simple concept, likely one simple sentence, we have created the whole scary house and put ourselves in it.

We remember, we empathize, and we shiver. It doesn’t matter that, as we read the book, we concede certain facts to the revelations of the author – who constantly divulges them bit by bit. We keep what we kill.

“When we remember reading books, we don’t remember having made these constant little adjustments…We simply remember it as if we had watched the movie…” (Mendelsund 53)

Unfortunately, when we re-read the same sentence years later, we very often have more houses to compare the images to, and have made some decisions about sleeping naked (or nearly so). Therefore when we read the same book or passage years later, it is not the same because the house is different, the victim is different, and the survival plan has changed.

The truth of why Horror doesn’t scare you the same way a second time is one of biology: you changed and the book did not.

Thank God! It’s Brain Science & Not Old Age…

People like to say that Horror is a young person’s game. They claim that it is really a Young Adult obsession, or worse – a phase.

But it turns out that this is not completely true. Of course there are consequences to growing older that affect how our brains ­process Horror. And that has more to do with memory than it has to do with becoming more “emotionally mature.”

But the good news is: if you love Horror, you can love it all of your life. Contrary to speculation (if not popular opinion), we do not outgrow Horror… we out-fox it.

First, we have to look at the profile of those who like Horror, who love to scare themselves, those who refuse to let go of the genre. While there may be a thrill-seeker or two among us, we tend to be pretty “normal” types. But we do confess to having an addiction to adrenaline rushes that a good Horror story can inflict. Having seen what Real Life can do, we also tend to prefer the mental-emotional playground that is the Horror genre.

We also tend to have been the types that have drilled ourselves relentlessly from childhood on how to survive life-threatening events – including the monster under the bed. Only now we choose Zombies over middle-eastern wars, troublesome Ghosts over broken social mores, Vampires over empty relationships. We still have minds that like to work on problem-solving (as all humans do). So we like to pimp our ride: we decorate the threat with shreds of rotting flesh and fangs dripping with radioactive drool and see if we can survive the experience of the encounter.

The reason any of this works or presents any “value” is because of what that little primal germ of fear enables in the brain. As Mendelsund says with regard to the feeling, we “do not want it supplanted by facts.” (206) We crave the feeling of fear.

So with Horror we recreate the tiger in the tall grass, and every time we make him bigger, gnarlier, scarier…to challenge ourselves.

We practice survival of the primal instincts as complicated by the rational mind.

And biology is our co-pilot.

…Because it is the nature of biology to adapt to changing circumstances and ever-changing threats, and Horror is one biological roller coaster ride that lasts from the first sensory intake, loop-de-loops through the amygdala, races through the nerve endings and thrusts fast-twitch muscle fibers of our legs into action even as the scream leaves our mouths.

Yet even then something is happening in our brains – young or old – that makes a significant difference in recapturing that same feeling more than once.

Just as we are hard-wired to jump at indistinct motion in the darkness (thus illuminating the biology behind the jump-scare success of Hollywood), we are hard-wired to catalog the experience for comparison later.

A tentacle wraps around your ankle like a cat…you scream…

And you live to tell all your friends the next day over lunch. The next night, a tentacle wraps around your ankle like a cat… you wonder where it is coming from….

Already your brain has logged the experience as non-lethal and maybe not even important – just curious.

Your brain has stepped in and…”helped” you. Now you won’t waste precious time and calories running crazily and needlessly through the tall grass. You can wait for the next tiger. The bigger, more lethal tiger. Because this one has shown you all of the criteria for being present and noticed but not a danger to you – not worth endangering yourself. See enough tigers, and you might become desensitized.

Suddenly the Zombie is just this wobbly dead guy; sure he’s ugly, but he’s slow and if you split open his head, it is Life As Usual. Big whup. What else you got?

But this is not necessarily a good thing. Every Zombie has the potential to be different the way every tiger is different. Sometimes we have to remind the brain that it is prudent to run… which is why the rational part of our brain keeps buying into Horror. Deep down, we know we are prey and we really, really want to run…

But this presents a challenge for the makers of Horror, who battle their own cardboard tigers even as they figure a way to surprise their audience with new and improved tigers to fool the brain… So the successful Horror story becomes one in which a new Horror emerges – one you never thought of. It means we have to find ways to outsmart ourselves and our increasingly desensitized audience.

Which makes writing and reading Horror as an older person …even harder; we go through more books and movies before we find a passable scare because as we get older, we have a much thicker catalog to compare things to. But it also means (if we are also writers) that we have the opportunity to make things even more interesting.

Misremembering: It’s Not You, It’s ME

It’s so easy to blame the filmmaker or think the author tricked us. Somehow. All that time ago.

Because the truly weird thing about Horror the second time around is the inserting of whole scenes that we come to discover were never there.

How and why we do this resides in the way human memory works. Because we form memories from a collection of our own experiences – even as we are gathering new ones – every monster is Frankenstein. When we read or see certain images, they resonate with our subconscious and glom together in the darkness of our imagination. Sometimes right in the middle of a book or a movie we go off on a primrose path lined with gothic bleakness and horrible thoughts or crippling fears born of our own personal experiences… our own minds present a few what-if scenarios connected more to our pasts than to what we are reading or seeing and we subconsciously press the emotions generated right into the pages of a book or the cells of a film. We create a ghost of those personal memories and mistakenly think the book or film is speaking directly to us. But then we risk imagining terrors greater than what are actually shown or described. And terror lasts a long, long time in our limbic system.

Being aware of this recollection and comparison of intimate and personal Horrors makes no difference to the outcome.

Even as we rationalize about how that moment is taking us right to this or that memory or traumatic event, it is incorporated into the exoskeleton of the story. Later when we recall the book or film, we remember the terror invoked even when it was our own terror that rose from the ashes of real memory or supposition. We attach those emotions to that fiction and tell ourselves, “that was a good Horror story.”

We even tell our friends. And then they go see it or read it and think it was inane or toothless and tell us so.

And then in indignation, we go and read it or see it again and think what was I thinking? What about that scene where… But there is no such scene. Or it is a big nothing…a field of monster seedlings that no longer germinate in your mind.

Your brain has moved on.

And boy, do you miss that scary part that was never, ever there. You can keep the book as long as you like, but the fairy glamour has dissipated…a fading spell, well-worn even as it has been touched and caressed many times in the imagination. The Horror has become a ghost.

It’s called “emotional re-learning,” and it’s how we manage our trauma which, in turn, transforms the impact of the original Horror.

Here we can learn a lot from sufferers of PTSD. For example, “the sense in which PTSD patients feel ‘unsafe’ goes beyond the fears that dangers lurk around them; their insecurity begins more intimately, in the feeling that they have no control over what is happening in their body and to their emotions. This is understandable, given the hair trigger for emotional hijacking that PTSD creates by hypersensitizing the amygdala circuitry.” (Goleman 210-211)

Nobody wants that. Except that we do –as Horror fans. It is exactly what we attempt to create and experience in a good genre novel or film. But the revelation as to why Horror loses its punch the second time around has a lot to do with how PTSD sufferers resolve their traumas…

Because one step in healing PTSD “involves retelling and reconstructing the story of the trauma in the harbor of that safety, allowing the emotional circuitry to acquire a new, more realistic understanding of and response to the traumatic memory and its triggers. As patients retell the horrific details of the trauma, the memory starts to be transformed, both in its emotional meaning and in its effects on the emotional brain.” (Goleman 211)

In other words, it is the turning on of the lights and the exiting of the theatre where “The therapist encourages the patient to retell the traumatic events as vividly as possible, like a horror home video, retrieving every sordid detail…the goal here is to put the entire memory into words, which means capturing parts of the memory that may have been dissociated and so are absent from conscious recall. By putting sensory details and feelings into words, presumably memories are brought more under control of the neocortex, where the reactions they kindle can be rendered more understandable and so more manageable.” (Goleman 212)

What Horrors cannot be rewired? The ones we can’t put into words… I detect a conundrum…

Every time we intentionally revisit the memory of that movie or book that scared us so well, every time we read it or see it or talk about it, we remove a tooth from the tiger…we are rewiring the memory and its requisite trauma. And we can’t help ourselves. It’s a brain thing.

The Difference Between HD and Analog

The pure biological truth is tough: we are going to have to outwit ourselves, to trick our brains into being scared in order to keep enjoying Horror. We do that by making and seeking monsters that are infinitely indistinct, partially sensed, indescribable, primal creatures. We do it by letting the audience fill in important blanks with their own PTSD, phobias, and painfully personal details.. and then by not spoiling those images with a far-too total reveal.

Look at Stephen King’s It (in particular in movie form)…a great, truly creepy story that I always abandon at the ending. It got ruined when they wheeled out the Muppet Spider. It was too much information that my own brain had a solution for (a really big shoe). I much prefer to stay in that nebulous, monster-and-clown-infested country that Stephen King novels create before Hollywood gets hold of them.

It really is the difference between analog and HD… because our brains (once they categorize something) shift the images right into analog: worthy of note, but not anything to write home about… a kitschy black and white monster with the zipper showing. We see that the tiger has gray on its muzzle and a bit of a limp; we suspect we can out run him.

In our first encounter on the savannah we saw sudden, undefined motion in the dark…then the green glow of eyes…then TEETH… we imagined the claws ripping us apart and we screamed and grabbed our boyfriends. Or girlfriends. We came out of the movie theater or put down the book and felt positively breathless…like we had stood in a wind tunnel that sucked away everything but us…

But once the biology sets in, there is no getting that feeling back. Once we see tons of tigers, we start counting stripes instead of teeth. We biologically forget the danger because our experience nullifies it. Our inner computer updates with what is – in reality – wrong information. But it is right for the suburban family whose main concern is paying the cable bill and what’s for dinner. Horror works when the writer or film maker can change out the predictability expected by our brains. And what works for me might not work for you…

This is why success in Horror is spelled Stephen King: he connects with the broadest sampling of modern fears. The rest of us (in trying to out-Horror the King of Horror) all too frequently discover that our fears are more to the outside of the mean. Maybe we like Old Horror because those stories contain the kinds of Horror that sneak up on our brains…while maybe Old Horror falls flat to the guy who lives near a graveyard. Horror is relative. Figure in the unpredictable amount of experiences a person can have that mutes those Horrors and the genre is a challenge. But it is a fun challenge.

Just don’t expect to be scared effectively twice by the same monster… Only irrational fears get past the catalog. Even Muppet Spiders. For the rest of us, it’s an endless search for HD in an analog world. Beware the tall grass.

 

References

Mendelsund, Peter. What We See When We Read: a Phenomenology with Illustrations, by Peter Mendelsund New York: Vintage Books, c2014.

Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. New York: Bantam Books, c1994.

Lovecraft, H.P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” At The Mountains of Madness.The Definitive Edition. New York: The Modern Library, c2005.