New year, old habits. I've been in the habit of tracking things I do for a number of years. Whether it's words written or books readen, I try to keep a running list. This is to give me a sense of movement in an otherwise very similar existence: The cyclical nature of my job is reassuring in its familiarity, but it can be disorienting if I'm not careful.
To that end, I jot down the titles of everything I complete during a year. For esoteric reasons I don't fully understand, I categorize my entertainment input in two: Books, and Everything Else (except music). In 2020, I read/watched/played 119 comics/movies/video games. The number is not necessarily accurate. I will put things like "Christmas cartoons", which was probably a good two hours or so of The Amazing World of Gumball, Captain Underpants, or Teen Titans GO! Yet I lumped them all together, rather than counting each one separately. I didn't count Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was watched by my boys in the van during our commute time. I will put something like Deluxe Invader ZIM #2, which is actually a dozen comics in one. Also, it's only completed things. That's easy for something like movies (I watched all of the Jurassic Park films with my kids this summer), but I ended up stopping my rewatch of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season 2 with, like, two episodes to go. So it didn't make the list. Even The Haunting of Bly Manor, which I have three or four episodes left, didn't get added on, even though each episode is nearly an hour long--meaning that two episodes combined is more than some movies' runtime. And while 119 titles is quite a bit (especially considering how many hours I obsessed over Bloodborne these past few weeks--and, let me just say, that completing that game was a personal accomplishment), what really strikes me is that I only had 37 books or plays read in 2020. I'll admit that there were some…interruptions to how I normally live my life. I did find it harder to concentrate on the written word during the pandemic, and I even fudged my numbers a little by including books that I wrote and finished during 2020 (two novellas actually, my lowest output in years). Some of the books are the annual retreads: Pride and Prejudice, Things Fall Apart, and All Quiet on the Western Front always crop up in the first half of the year. Hamlet…well, I don't actually reread Hamlet each year. I do watch the film with my students though, so… My point is that despite my best intentions, I don't do a lot of reading. Author Joe Hill said that you can get a rough sense of how many pages you read per day by seeing how many books you finish in a year. At 37 titles, I read only 37 pages a day, on average. Part of me feels insulted by this. The rest of me realizes that's probably more true than I'd like to think. It's also tricky, because I only count what I've completed during the year, regardless of how long it took me to get there. I started The Iliad a couple of different times throughout my career, but I only finished it this summer. (That was a complete read, though; I restarted and finished it in 2020.) I finished London: The Biography after it sitting on my nightstand for three years. So it's really an incomplete list. I put all of that down because it's on my mind and I think it provides a bit of context for what I'm about to describe. I finished Stephen King's The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I today after trying to read it for…I dunno, twelve years? Something like that. An old work buddy gave me his copy of The Gunslinger (and the frustratingly titled The Drawing of the Three, which is the second book in the series…why does it have the number 3 in the title, then?) and I've picked it up a handful of times since then, only to put it back down. After becoming more accustomed to King's writing style, I decided to give The Gunslinger another go. This is in part because I bumped into a former student who was picking up one of the later Dark Tower books and said that, once you get to the third entry, it is really good. That's a bit of a slog, if you ask me. Still, I decided to try it. After all, I reread The Eye of the World and The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan in the hopes that, by the time I eventually get to the third book I'll actually really like it. A man can dream. And I think that's what my problem is with The Gunslinger: It feels like a weird dream. There's a place for that, of course. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are excellent examples of dream fiction (both of which I read this year, as a small aside). A lot of Neil Gaiman's work fits into that mold, too--a place where imagination is the fuel of the story. The thing is, I'm not a huge fan of the genre. Or, perhaps more evenly, a little goes a long way for me. And when it comes to King, I've come to expect a different kind of story. Part of the reason It is one of my favorite novels of all time is because the world is grounded, making the fantastical seem more plausible. King does this in other works, too: 11/22/63 and Pet Sematary stand out to me in that way. (The Stand, which I picked up again when the pandemic struck--wonder why--kind of blurs the line a bit more than I prefer.) But when it comes to The Gunslinger, well… The problem I have with dream fiction is that the stakes feel artificial. Since nothing can be taken as real, sacrifice and death, pain and worry all become meaningless. The impermanence of the situation leads me to apathy. In the case of The Gunslinger, I had a hard time believing that Roland was in a real world with real people. He may shoot his way through much of the book, knock boots with a tavern wench, and traverse a seemingly-endless underground tunnel, but is any of it "real" to him? Chapter Five is essentially a twenty-five page conversation, which turns out to have somehow taken ten years and maybe the skeleton is the corpse of the man in black he's been chasing… King himself admits that the book is a cowboy Western take on The Lord of the Rings, which in and of itself both sounds amazing and totally bizarre. The execution of the book--for me, at least--was tedious and meandering. The rich characterization that King does so well in his other books felt lacking here. Forgive a digression here: For almost all authors (Austen and Shakespeare feel like exceptions to this, though I'm sure there are others), the way that we get to care about characters is through exposure to them. Why does it mean so much to see Hagrid carry Harry Potter out of the Dark Forest? Because we've spent so much time with both characters. Why does It clock in at over 1,400 pages yet leave you wanting more? Because we've spent a lot of time with those characters and we have come to care about them. Why do shows like Doctor Who and Supernatural have such loyal fanbases? Because they've spent time in those worlds. The best short story can't connect with the reader as securely as the tenth book in a series for the simple reason that we readers haven't gone through the adventure with them. Now, there are seven books in the Dark Tower series, so there's definitely a chance to get to know Roland. In fact, I can't really fault this first book for not being more since there's a long journey ahead and this, the slenderest volume of the series, isn't going to give me a lot of time with the gunslinger. However, the time I spent with him felt inconsequential. I think this comes from a couple of things. One, Jake comes into the story with his own confusion and inability to remain connected to the world that he came from. At this juncture, Jake feels like a narrative add-in, a character dropped into the story because the idea struck the writer and so he put him in. Then, unsurprisingly, killed him off. I didn't get a strong sense of the gunslinger and the boy becoming close or gaining a lot by being together. Sure, Roland explains how he earned the right to become a gunslinger because Jake was there, but the narrator could have given us that section of the backstory by having Roland reflect on his own past. Jake felt extraneous and randomly included. I don't know if that is a criticism that stands up with the rest of the series, of course. But it is how I felt for this individual book. One thing, however, that I really did like, was what I mentioned earlier: The last chapter of the book--what should be the climax and resolution, a full-fledged battle, according to most fantasy tropes--is a twenty-five page conversation. The book begins "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." That sets up the goal, which is attained by the end of the book: Roland the gunslinger catches up with the man in black. But, rather than duking it out, the two sit down around a magically created fire and talk. Thanks mostly to the video game Bloodborne, I've been thinking about eldritch horror a lot more recently. (I had a spat with it about thirteen years back; I even have a couple of Lovecraft anthologies on my shelf.*) And though that game does an excellent job of dealing with the cosmic horror themes, I don't think I've seen anyone describe the terror of that genre as well as the man in black does to Roland. Chapter Five does a lot of things, and while I rather doubt that this Western/fantasy/grimdark tale was meant to also include eldritch fear, the existential dread conjured by the man in black pushes the story into that genre, too. Here's a passage: 'Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?' (287-288) Can you imagine what it would be like to be that fish? To be dragged out of the world you know and then, suffocating in an unfamiliar ocean of air, die as you watched beings oblivious to--or worse, the causation of--your plight pass you over? That is an almost unimaginable terror…an eldritch one. Eldritch horror is facing the insignificance of humanity in the face of powers larger and darker than ever before dreamed. In "The Call of Cthulhu", Lovecraft writes, The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to corelate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Black Seas of Infinity, 1) For the man in black, we humans are the fish in a small pond of existence. The idea of so much being out beyond us, past human ken and comprehension, is humbling to the point of disheartening. We do so much in our small scale and view ourselves rulers of the world, yet what can we do in the face of our own mistakes and the turns that consequences inevitably bring back home to us? Like a virus can take a human life (a reality that we've seen iterated thousands of times these past few months--a reality that many millions more outright deny), so too can the comparatively tiny actions of humans accumulate into trophic cascades that may end up ruining the only home we have. We don't even have to go into cosmic horrors to see the effect that size has on us. A single individual's actions can no more change the climate than a twig in the Mississippi will dam it. But you get enough twigs… The idea that there are things bigger than us is maddening. For Roland, it's about interacting and becoming part of light--a metaphysical escape from the eventual nihilism this kind of thinking often leads to. For us, we rest more comfortably in our "placid island of ignorance" than trying to confront the larger (or much, much smaller) worlds that surround us. In Bloodborne, the world the player inhabits is surrounded by enormous eldritch beings called Amygdala. They hang from gothic spires and observe the player from afar. However, until the player gains "insight" (a currency in the game, but also a metaphor), these creatures are invisible. After gaining enough insight, the player is able to perceive what had been there all along. What the man in black is pointing out is that there is so much more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, just like Hamlet told us four hundred years ago. From what I can tell, we have two ways of approaching this: To embrace the reality that there is so much more than we can every possibly learn or understand, or to cave inwards, cocooning ourselves against all uncomfortable aspects of reality. And it's a choice that we have to make again and again. So, should you read The Gunslinger? I don't know. For me, I didn't really like the vast majority of it. Nevertheless, I'm curious to see where it goes. I would say that if a seven-volume epic is too intimidating, don't start. Now that I've begun the journey, I may just have to see it all the way to its cyclical end… ___ * I know about Lovecraft's disgusting racism. I'm not a fan of the guy, and his writing is…well, it certainly exists and can be read. His impact on the horror genre is inescapable, even if I think, as a human, he was a sleaze. Over the past few years, I've become much more interested in the horror genre. Some of it is in response to how big of an impact It had on me (so much so that I read it every year for three years in a row; this past summer, I watched both of the new movies in lieu of reading the book, just to get my fix). But I'm realizing that I've been interested in scary stories since I was little. I loved reading the newest Goosebumps books--I even dabbled in the "more intense" Fear Street books every once in a while (what can I say? I was an edgy nineties kid). I still have Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares: Tales to Make You Scream, which I keep on my own kids' bookshelf in case they ever want to dive into the mind-numbing horror and utter depravity that is a kid's collection of spooky stories.
I never owned Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, though some friends (and maybe my brother?) did. The drawings in them disturbed me much more than the written words did--I had nightmares from those pictures, I'm not going to lie. (One of them leads this post.) I read things like Roald Dahl's The Witches, which scared me more when I saw the traumatizing ending of the movie. In short, I had an interest in the right amount of scary. Ghosbusters 2? I was there for that. Chucky? Not so much. There was something about being spooked just right that scratched a childish itch. This isn't to say I didn't have nightmares or bad dreams. I still vividly remember having a night terror where a gremlin (from the movie Gremlins, unsurprisingly) and E.T. (from the movie E.T., unsurprisingly) tried to shuffle out of the darkness in the corner of my bedroom to grab me. I kept screaming at these shifting shadows to go away. I even hurt my hand when I struck the side of my bunkbed while trying to swat them away. My mom came in, frantic (and probably furious at having been awakened). Her presence made them drift away, vapor in the wind. I don't know if she remembers it happening. Like all kids navigating a strange world, my imagination fueled plenty of frightening things at night, infusing the surety of surreality in my small mind and driving those sleep-depriving dreams deeply into my psyche. Yes, I dreamed of Freddy Krueger, despite having never (to this day) seen A Nightmare on Elm Street. His scarred face and knife-glove jolted me with a pang of panic for much of my childhood. At my grandma's house, she had a VHS collection of the TV show Fairy Tale Theater (hosted by Shelley Duvall, the actress from The Shining that many call the scariest movie of all time and I found interesting and enjoyable and not at all scary). My favorite episode was "The Boy Who Left Home To Find Out About the Shivers". A jawbreaker of a title name notwithstanding, it was the one that I thought was the best made. Rewatching part of it recently, I can remember why I liked it so much--though I don't know what part really scared me. I recall that the Taylor Maid store at the mall I went to as a kid terrified me with its assortment of werewolf, zombie, and gruesome masks--enough that I dreaded it when we came into the mall via the entrance closest to that store. Yet for all of that, I didn't mind picking up scary books. I mean, yes, Goosebumps is hardly the example par excellence of horror, but for a third-grader, it's got some pretty intense scares. And it isn't even the idea that affects me now--namely, a written scary story hardly bothers me at all--that was going on back then. I distinctly remember reading Jurassic Park in the sixth grade (I don't know if my parents knew I had purloined it off my dad's nightstand and read the entire thing over the course of a weekend) and writhing with anxious dread and near-panic as Tim and Lex are chased by velociraptors in the kitchen on Isla Nublar. Heck, there was even a time--I can't remember the book now--where a jump scare actually worked with me and I jolted hard enough to almost drop the book. Nowadays, though, I don't feel that way. Written stories can gross me out (I read Brian Keene's City of the Dead because it was a new take on zombies; it was pretty gruesome), give me a slimy feeling, or fail to impress me (I think the much-vaunted-but-pretty-meh-for-me Hell House by Richard Matheson fits in there). Basically nothing I've read has scared me. Movies and video games, on the other hand… I find that really interesting, actually. I flatter myself that I have a fairly robust imagination (except for when someone's like, "Quick! Think of a clever way to say this…" and I completely freeze), but for some reason, the world of words doesn't feel dangerous enough, I suppose. Even if I imagine something in greater detail than a film might, it sits in my mind differently. I can only hypothesize that this is because of just how many words I use--both reading and writing--in my life. We're too intimate, words and I are, to have that disparity of knowledge that's crucial for cultivating fear. There are knives in words, yes, but they aren't in ghost stories. In the visual world, however, it's a different tale altogether. I already mentioned being traumatized by the illustrations of one of these Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books (though it might have been some imitator version, now that I think about it). During my early married days, another newlywed couple would come over each weekend and we'd watch scary movies. I saw The Grudge and maybe one or two of the other Scary-Face-Booga-Booga type movies that were popular at the turn of the millennium. We'd also play scary video games. Silent Hill 4: The Room, Fatal Frame 1 and 2, and a couple of others graced our CRT television. Once, the scares were so bad that neither Gayle nor I could fall asleep, with my wife finally asking me to talk to her about the details of my then-work in progress just to get her mind off the images of the game long enough to slip into sleep. I finally played Resident Evil VII recently, as well as the remakes of both 2 and 3. There are some jump scare moments in those games, though a lot of any creepiness is alleviated by the presence of shotguns and/or rocket launchers. And while Resident Evil has moved away from the true horror of its roots (with VII being an exception), I don't feel like I've been genuinely scared by an RE game in many years. I tend not to watch too many R-rated movies (clearly, I make exceptions, as I've already confessed my sin of watching both It movies), so I don't have a lot of experience with some of the real touchstones of the cinematic variety. Still, I know the difference between Jason Vorhees and Mike Myers, and while I couldn't really explain the plot of the movie, I can recognize Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre without prompting. Blair Witch Project? Come on: I grew up in the nineties. Of course I'm familiar with it without having seen it. I know the vintage monsters--Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and werewolves--as well as some of their more intense, frightening versions, including An American Werewolf in London. I've seen bits and pieces of The Thing and Alien, as YouTube is a great resource for cinema analyses, which tend to focus on some of these more popular movies. This has given me the chance to become more versed in the subgenres of horror, with an understanding of what I do--and don't--find interesting. I think psychological horror is fascinating; ghost stories are great. I'm not a fan of torture-porn (I don't care to learn what Hostel is about; the original conceit of Saw is conceptually interesting, but I don't have any desire to learn more about Jigsaw) and body-horror really distresses me. Slashers have a certain allure, but for the most part I like a hefty dose of the supernatural to go along with it. In other words, movies like Scream (which I saw on TV when I was younger and, so far as I can remember, is a surprisingly good mystery/horror film) aren't likely to catch my eye. I think part of that is knowing that true crime isn't something confined to opening and closing credits; serial killers do exist and that is alarming to me. Stories about the occult, demons (in certain contexts), and possession aren't for me. Pod-people stories stress me out, though I kind of like them. There's something about the inability to know or trust the characters that's really off-putting, which is the point of horror, of course. (Maybe this is why I really don't like Spider-Man stories with the Chameleon in them; it's so hard to know what's going on.) So I'm not an aficionado of horror films, but I know a bit about them. It's kind of weird, honestly. And, since it's October, I'm purposefully "studying" more about the genre via the aforementioned YouTube videos. And, since I'm me, I've been thinking about why I'm this way. What is it about horror that's drawing me to it, albeit in a slow orbit? Here's a possibility: Horror is supposed to show how people behave in extreme situations, so any demonstration of redeeming qualities--kindness, a helpful attitude, loyalty to friends and family--become that much more impressive. Not all--indeed, not much--of horror relies on that particular trope, however. So there has to be something more to it than that. Maybe it's the fact that horror stories often (not always, of course) show the eventual defeat of the darkness. The night is long, but sunrise eventually returns. That is a star-like glimmer of hope amid the inky sky of the horror story. Or perhaps it's the slight adrenaline jolt that can come. I'm not a fan of jump scares, but really creepy atmosphere? A pervasive sense of unease? The tickling at the back of the neck letting you know that something is wrong, though you can't quite discover how? That can be an enjoyable feeling, with the dread of the drop equaling a literary version of that moment before the doors on the Tower of Terror open and let you know that you're hundreds of feet above Disneyland. Whatever the reason, I'm sure that I'll continue to pick at the idea. Monsters have always been interesting to me; perhaps they'll act as a stepping stone toward other story possibilities in the future. I guess I'm just a boy who's gone out in search of the shivers. It's Halloween month, so it's the one time of the year where it's culturally kosher to indulge in spooky stories and gory TV shows. At least, that's what I tell myself. Because of this almost-expectation to participate in something scary--and since I've now written a horror novella and feel hideously embarrassed that I'd tried to do something in a genre I've hardly read--I decide to read Grady Hendrix's short horror novel, Horrorstor, every night before going to bed.
The book is designed to put a slight (but unsubtle) parody of Ikea on the page with an imitation store called Orsk. They acknowledge that they're a cheaper version of the already-pretty-cheap Ikea in the book, but it's clear that this is a setting that is meant to evoke the precise dizziness of Ikea, even if the made-up Swedish-sounding names of the different pieces of furniture are different. And that, actually, goes a long way to making this haunted house story much more interesting to me than the more widely revered (and, in my opinion, rather boring, no matter what Stephen King's blurb on the outside says) Hell House by Richard Matheson. Part of what Matheson did in his haunted house story was strain the reasons why the people went into the house in the first place. Much like Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (which I haven't finished, though I find it a more interesting haunted house story than Matheson's), there are curious people who wish to learn more about the place and so they go to where the horror is. In Hendrix's haunted house story, he puts it into the workplace--an area where Amy, the main character, has to be. She's an employee on the worst day possible, and is cajoled into remaining in the store after hours to try to catch a vandal they think has been sneaking in and ruining their merchandise. As the night unfolds, the truth of what Orsk is comes to light. That's a fun premise, and I think it works much more realistically than the aforementioned haunted house stories (which, apparently, are all I've read of horror novels aside from It and Pet Sematary). Once a person is in the haunted house, it makes sense within the logic of that world that they can't escape, that they have to survive somehow. That's one of the generic conventions and it totally works. If no one's in the haunted house, who cares about it? So the trick is to put the people--who have lives outside of the horror, ostensibly--into the house. Money does it in Jackson's; money and curiosity and personal honor do it in Matheson's. I guess you could say that money is why Amy goes back to Orsk, but, at the same time, she's really just at her job when the store reverts back to its own tormented and twisted roots. In terms of the writing, the beginning part was actually more enjoyable for me than when it got "spooky". (I recoiled at some of the gruesome moments in the book, but there is surprisingly little language, no sex scenes, and the majority of the runtime is fairly blood-and-gore free.) I know that there are a lot of people who read a horror novel and it freaks them out and makes it so that they can't sleep. I've read It three times and I was revolted at some of the gross stuff and, yeah, an image or two was creepy, but I never was scared. Since It (and, arguably, The Shining, another haunted house novel that does work because the logic of why they're there and why they don't leave is pretty sound) is the scariest that King has ever managed, I guess, as far as books go (not movies--I scare in those really easily), I'm not really scared. So, in Horrorstor, I actually found myself less interested in the horror parts. There were some cool moments, some parts that, if I had been there, I would have peed my pants, but on the whole, I found it less compelling--strangely enough--when the ghosts came out and Amy had to fight for her life. There was also the problem of injuring the heroes too soon. Amy isn't alone, but she and her friends end up getting beaten, broken, bruised, cut, and tortured in all sorts of uncomfortable ways by the ghosts…with a good thirty to forty percent of the book left to go. This is something I've done in my own books, too: I want to show the danger is real, so the main character gets injured. However, most people wouldn't be able to be tortured so badly they can scarcely walk, and then be sprinting for their lives a couple of chapters later. The hard part about this observation is that it means, as a writer, I would have to create worthwhile characters whom people like--or, at least, understand--and then be willing to kill them off. That is, let the injuries be enough to prevent them from surviving through the story. And, so far as I can tell, the only thing that really gets people to care for a character is to spend time with them. Yes, shortcuts exist; have them rescue puppies from animal shelters or something. But those shortcuts don't create the same sort of connection that the spending-time-with-them solution does. As a writer, that means that a book needs to elongate. But with horror, the point is to keep up the tension, of not allowing the reader to feel safe. The longer the book, the harder it is to maintain that kind of intensity (though I've heard Dean Koontz's book Intensity is exactly what it sounds like: Intense, from beginning to end) in such a way that feels authentic. "What about the almost-half-a-million word book you love so much?" I hear someone in my imagination grouse. Well, It is different for lots and lots of reasons, some of which I've mentioned before, and most of them don't apply to what I'm talking about here. See, Horrorstor works as well as it does because it's short. Matheson's went on a touch long, and though Jackson's isn't particularly long, I simply haven't wanted to pick it up recently. Nevertheless, I think there's a reason that most horror movies don't extend beyond a couple of hours: It's hard to maintain that suspension of disbelief as the potential death is evaded again and again. Filling out the cast of characters can help with that, but Horrorstor doesn't really do that: Six people go in, but we're in the head of only one of them. I really only care about Amy, though Hendrix tries to get me to care more about some of the other peeps by using those shortcuts I talked about before. This is a puzzle of the genre that I'm not sure there's an actual solution to. I'll have to think on it some more. As far as a recommendation, there are much worse (in terms of content) books that could land on your Halloween reading list. I liked the atmosphere and the conceit of the book, and its satire was fun, especially to see the early "fun" stuff turn into twisted and dark reflections of the same. I read the book on my Kindle, but I think picking it up in paperback would be great--it's laid out like an Ikea magazine, which really adds to the punch that it's trying to deliver. Is it a glorious new gold-standard of horror writing? Not particularly. But for thrills you make at home, Horrorstor--or should I say Orsk?--delivers. |
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