The Saga of Alan Moore’s “Swamp Thing”

Not completely aligned with the King reference, but this a pretty deft analysis of what horror is as a subjective study. Plus Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing was jolted back into my memory speaking with guitarist Matt Stevens yesterday.

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by Christopher Sloce

I used to have something that resembled a swamp in my front yard. I spent a lot of time in there pretending to be Roland from The Dark Tower, had a cap gun and everything. I also used to pretend to be Swamp Thing, who appealed to me as a more dynamic kind of hero; he’s powerful but ugly, something I felt acquainted with as a middle school kid. The first run of Swamp Thing made no bones about what it was: it was an attempt to move horror comics into the headier vein that horror literature had moved into. Go back and read Stephen King, who Steve Bissette used as a model for what to do (along with Clive Barker): he’s a competent if not startling prose stylist with a knack for colloquial dialogue. And even if you’re too good for Carrie, read On Writing. Bissette…

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Doctor Sleep and the death of a legacy.

I’ve got to write about Doctor Sleep while I’m still able. It’s The Shining‘s successor, published 37 years after the huge commercial and critical victory of the original (you already know this). It’ll also prove to be one of the biggest creative slumps in King’s vast writing career (you may not know this, although a lukewarm critical reception might have given you an idea). Urgency on my part is required because I finished the book three days ago and it’s already starting trickle out of my consciousness like so much other literary cannon fodder.

I wanted to love this book. Not only because King’s huge hits in the form of 11/22/63 and Under the Dome have proven that his literary legacy won’t just remain in the booming sci-fi heyday of the late seventies, but also because Danny Torrance has so much potential to be a brilliant character. Doctor Sleep doesn’t give Danny the future he deserves, nor the legacy we want.

His pivotal role in The Shining was one of the few examples where a child can be an interesting protagonist. King imbues Danny with the perfect combination of inquisitiveness, courage and fallibility (he does, after all, crawl into that tunnel in the park), whilst his dependencies on his parents and his concerns that they’ll [DIVORCE] seem basic and simplistic. In short, he is a child whose extra-sensory abilities only serve to emphasise his infancy in the face of what he has to deal with.

As an adult, Danny has grown into the role that his father left behind when he died with the Overlook’s destruction. He is an alcoholic (EXPECTED) and drinks to forget the distant (OVERLOOK, GHOSTS) and recent past. The main difference is that whilst Jack’s demons are forced into suppression in trying to save his family, Danny has no dependants and his drinking follows a pattern of self-destruction that seems to have no lasting effect on any fleeting associations.

The well-meaning but awry Danny does develop said-dependants, but you’ll have to read the book if you want to know how that turns out. The thing I want to focus on is the ‘shining’, the ‘sixth sense’ that Doctor Sleep goes a way to try and explain. In attempting to do so, King seems to miss the point.

Danny can read minds, see ghosts and transmit telepathic signals to effect things in the physical world. We know he is not the only one, as Dick Hallorann (his ‘mentor’, of sorts) can do the same but to a lesser extent. Doctor Sleep introduces a world of ‘shiners’ (as I’ll call them) lessening Danny’s gift in this newly discovered psychic hierarchy. The thing is, the ‘shining’ was always the means through which we could properly observe the supernatural. It never really held much interest in itself, because its presence in The Shining only served to illuminate King’s terrifying occupants of the Overlook.

In the present, the ghastly guests of the Overlook are now irrelevant. When the occupant of Room 217 turns up, Danny is able to dismiss her staggering cadaver merely by accessing another facet of his ‘shine’. It is an astoundingly brief dismissal of a supernatural legacy that has resonated for nearly half a century. In a way, this is the biggest example of King’s efforts to shun his label as a horror writer.

More importantly, we were all set for Doctor Sleep to explore the dark future of Daniel Torrance. I wasn’t ready for it to be a compartmentalised, near clinical look at why Danny is the way he is. We’re denied the fragile, isolated man that Danny now is, and instead are given a groomed antihero whose skeletons are out of the closet by the second chapter. King is so keen to give cause and effect in this book that he almost forgets why Danny was so interesting in the first place.

Doctor Sleep is momentarily enjoyable, filled with the little flourishes that make King so important, but it’s ultimately not the legacy that Danny deserves. No, this was never intended to be a sequel to The Shining, but whatever way you look at it, it’s a weak addition to King’s corpus.

Dark Places

Are there dark places, or are the things that inhabit them dark? Can horror survive in and of itself where no human imprint continues to preside? Or is it humanity’s reaction to darkness that allows horror to exist?

This is a complicated topic, not least of all because we humans are inclined to find reasons to be wary of almost anything. My mother, for example, loathes to drive through a village five miles away from our own, simply because of its bad vibes. It’s a pleasant enough place, the only sign of any real element of danger is the extortionately expensive Londis set into a building made of Cotswold stone.

Fears of provincial backwaters and a strong whiff of inbreeding aside, the resonance of places like Long Marston (my ma’s location d’horreur) can rarely be backed up by real-life atrocities having left a psychic imprint on the landscape. This is proof, however, that we humans don’t need to spend a night in a creaky old house to feel our heart rate creeping up or the skin on the back of your neck start to crawl. Whether through inference, or some flashback to a time in my past, there is something intangibly off that lurks in Long Marston, because I feel it too.

This sort of location-based miasma isn’t just a Keevill family psychosis. Frank Delaney felt it at ancient Scottish battlegrounds in his A Walk In the Dark Ages, and almost everyone who walks into Auschwitz feels a deep depression about the place. Writers have taken these ideas and run with them. Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel in The Shining houses a multitude of horrors for the psychic-savant Danny, but it’s clear that the hotel’s dark past has affected previous occupants as well.

King, a master of detaching horror from direct human causality, gave us a ‘pet sematary’ that’s darkness exists of its own accord but only really manifests itself through humanity’s impact. In fact, books like Pet Sematary embody how horror is both separate, but intrinsically linked to the human condition; Louis Creed’s desperation to bring his child back is so essentially mortal but the native American burial ground which he uses to do so exists outside of his will. Created by humans, cursed to protect buried remains, it is desperately inhuman in the indiscriminate and detached suffering that it causes. The inability to find reason in it or attach a human psychosis to its motives makes it an external horror without an ambivalence of character.

Despite the ‘pet sematary’s’ malign motives, our reaction to the Creed family’s sufferings is dependent on our ability to feel empathy. Our horror at the twisted return of Gage comes as a result of our ability to engage with basic parental emotions. Our helplessness peaks because the rationale behind the ‘sematary’ is undisclosed and alien.

Our dependency as readers, and as humans, on seeking out horror is reliant on the author’s will to project all our fears and concerns into their protagonists. In that way, our subjectivity is bound to the impact that dark places make on us.

Warning to Those Who Abuse the Horror Community

Don’t let bullies like this slip through the cracks. Blogging is about accountability as much for the people who comment as for the people who take the time to post.

The Horrifically Horrifying Horror Blog

There are many sharks in this big old sea of the horror genre. They may be authors, bloggers, would-be authors, ‘publishers’…but today, I am going to concentrate on one in particular.

This ‘man’ likes to send others in the community, especially the female professionals, abusive & threatening emails, post articles on his many blogs & just about every social platform going. I have received numerous threats from him, but this does not mean that I fear him. This guy is called Nikolaus Pacione- or Little Nicky- as we all know & fail to fall for his pathetic & somewhat dubious attempts at intimidation.

He is also widely know for his many scams involving other authors, stealing & printing the work of others in his ‘gazettes’, slamming various members of the horror community from Brian Keene to Ramsey Campbell on his blogs & ‘throwing gauntlets’ that make no sense to any living thing above the  amoeba level of evolution.

Today, on…

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Caution, Dangerous Curves Ahead

Horror fiction is a term I’ve used liberally over the last two weeks of this blog’s existence. I’m happy not to set out my stall about what I consider falls into this bracket because:

1. The two people reading this are only doing so because my needy facebook statuses have guilt-tripped them into it and they PROBABLY don’t care. Thanks for your patronage by the way. Trolololol
2. Placing genres is a shitbed of controversy. I should know, I write about metal music where every second a new sub-genre is created to connote a new level of heaviness.
3. I honestly don’t care. This isn’t a dickish sort of ‘I’m above this’ statement, but more an expression of how I like to work. You see, if I cared about things like appearance or labelling, there aren’t enough beers in the world that would have compelled me to read Sarah Water’s A Little Stranger, simply because of its cover. As Liberal and forward-thinking as I like to consider myself, I’m prone to these kind of moronic and debasing insecurities. [BTW I’m tremendously glad I did]

Being free to write about what I want is a pleasure. With the damage filter disabled, it allows me to make my own mistakes and deploy sweeping generalisations about things I shouldn’t really know anything about, beyond intense fanaticism. You’ve got to use your own filter on this yourself, as you should with any piece of writing. Journalism (not that I profess to be a journalist) is about making informed decisions on ideas that you’ve devised, not just creating content purely for clickbait or sensationalism. Long-form will last the course. Bandwagon jumping is strictly for the person next to you.

In other words:  I’m just a girl [David], standing in front of a boy [horror book], asking him to love her [allowing me to read and squiggle things about]

Cheers!

The English Ghost

Like anything that Peter Ackroyd has ever produced, The English Ghost is a sharply written, wry and penetrative look at a subject that has been analysed to death. Ackroyd’s strength in remarking upon this compendium of English ghost tales is his objectivity. Towards the end of his introduction, he quotes from Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, remarking that

It is merely stating the obvious to observe that the witnesses here fully believed in the reality of what they had seen or experienced. Whether the reader chooses to believe in it is another matter.

The English Ghost is compelling, regardless of your opinion on the supernatural. As a nation of unassuming, tea-drinking, queue-hunters, we have a penchant to witness some fairly quaint (read bizarre) ghostly phenomena, including floating glass tubes and disappearing dachshunds. There’s a tale in my part of Warwickshire that a local copse is said to be haunted by a demonic cockerel guarding a hidden treasure horde. With this in mind, it’s no real surprise Ackroyd repeatedly notes on the strange ubiquity of the spectre in this country.

For English horror writers, the appeal of the supernatural has never been singular. Whilst MR James made a point of only ever writing about malevolent spirits since “amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story”, his subject matter ranged from anthropomorphic entities to haunted books.

Michelle Paver’s first book for an adult audience, Dark Matter, too explores our obsession with the multi-faceted horror. Set in a frozen archipelago hundreds of miles north of Norway, Dark Matter investigates the effects of overwintering on an overtaxed mind. Paver’s book contains a tortured, vengeful ghost (nothing new there then), but this book’s real spectre is the narrator’s trembling sanity as he faces the prospect of months of isolation and perpetual dark. Ever so cleverly, Paver’s initially alienating narrator becomes the fulcrum on which all of your dependencies come to rest; through his eyes, the creeping dread that settles under his skin is soon worming its way under yours.

Paver achieves as much through intimation as she does in her words. The bundled insecurities based around social standing and the resentful savagery of the book’s narrator are as English as Paver’s own tentative steps to this story’s dramatic conclusion. In a similar way, Ackroyd’s The English Ghost is so effective because the witness accounts found within are so markedly human in the humour and horror of their reaction to the supernatural.

Unlike HP Lovecraft’s huge, astral creations or Stephen King’s extravagant, qualifying plotlines, stories like Dark Matter and the narratives within The English Ghost enforce the reasoning that the supernatural is nothing without humanity.

How Christianity Saved the Horror Story

Religion, as discussed by Cristina Odone recently, is increasingly becoming the gallows on which the Liberal West hangs all its problems. There’s no surprise in this. Organised religion represents a nameable, tangible cause of a huge slab of the world’s ills, and as such has become a scapegoat for agendas, globally. To add to this way of thinking, extremism, an often nasty fringe of any religion, has much more media-appeal than moderation.

What’s more, Christianity, once a state-concern in Britain, is now a dirty by-word for anything that is atavistic or thoughtless.

Increasingly sidelined in our acknowledgement of religion (and Christianity in particular) is its contribution to our stories and written traditions that once were transmitted from mouth to hand by grace of literacy. Oral traditions, folklore and fables, that exist in every culture across the world and even permeate across civilisations, owe their prominence to a literacy that was often solely practised by a clerical class. Literacy in the British Isles, for example, embedded itself in Brittonic and Gaelic monastic cultures when the ‘illiterate’ Anglo-Saxons invaded in the fifth century.

Lots of tenets of horror fiction exist today and are so prevalent in our consciousness because Christianity provided the means for their dissemination. Beowulf, almost certainly a piece of folklore passed down by oral tradition, probably only survives in the form it does because of the Anglo-Saxon church’s illuminating literacy throughout ‘the Dark Ages.’ The Old English poem, not strictly a horror story, certainly gives us one of the earliest and most fearful [English] non-human antagonists in the form of Grendel. Tenuous as it may seem, even Old English Elegies like The Wanderer recount man’s necessity for camaraderie and fear of the solitary.

Importantly though, the ability to record folklore and oral tradition and turn it into something tangible, is the premise behind many of our imaginary tales and fantastical fiction. Ironically, it would take a Church of doctrinal singularity, to allow us to document things that would be ‘heathen’ and fantastical by its standards.

In other ways religion is almost inseparable from the horror we try to document. Religion is where our fear of mortality meets our fear of the unknown, and its therefore no surprise that it commands such resonance in horror fiction. As readers of the macabre, we like to be reminded of the potential for life after death as much as a Christian searches for clues to his afterlife in the Bible. The big difference, we’re all told, is that one is fiction, and the other is not. 

This vein runs deep. MR James, our greatest supernatural story-teller, buried himself in Christian theology and fringe occult practice to write some of his darkest fiction. As Ron Weighell says in his essay ‘Dark Devotions’, the depth of James’s involvement in Christian doctrine, and its dark counterpoint, is obvious since “the superficially clever soon palls.”  There’s time for much more on this later.

Horror and Christianity are both unsuited to a secular world. In an age where we no longer need to search for anything, there’s great pleasure to be found in quiet contemplation and a desire to search for something beyond the superficial.

A Little Stranger

When I was about 14, I remember the BBC airing a version of Sarah Waters’ Tipping The Velvet. I remember it quite vividly because it was about the time that I recall the crumpled up headshot of Julianne Moore I kept stuffed down the side of my bed suddenly becoming quite redundant. As a teenager, nuance was just an opportunity to turn a newspaper into a Milwall Brick.

My girlfriend recently picked up a copy of Waters’ latest work entitled The Little Stranger, another novel based around identity and the struggle to retain it. Instead of Tipping the Velvet’s ‘deviant’ lesbianism amidst a po-faced Victorian society, The Little Stranger deals with a gentry family struggling to pay for the up-keep of their house. The Ayres’s toils to hold onto their stately pile and status at a time when Europe was being ravaged by war may seem insensitive and deliberately naïve to a modern audience, but it all helps to add to the desperate fate of the family. Waters’ development of a paranormal element alongside the family’s decay is an intriguing aspect that constantly sees you doubting the straight-laced misjudgements of the narrator.

I’m not going to give too much away about the book. It’s incredibly sharply researched and written, with genuine mounting tension that builds to a whopper of an ending. You’ll also find yourself wanting to punch the narrator for his utter blindness and sheer self-assuredness; conversely, this helps you buy into Waters’ ghost shtick a lot more. Clever that.

Anyway, my girlfriend, utterly unaccustomed to the kind of literary deviance that I revel in, bought this book on a) the basis of Waters’ reputation – forward-thinking, excellent writer unafraid to tackle difficult topics – and b) the cover. Now, there are tons of great articles on trends in book covers and blogs on inappropriate book designs, but they all point to one thing; at some point in the publishing process (excluding self-published stuff or self-designed covers), a consideration is made on the cover balancing the content of the book with an image that’ll appear most enticing to its target audience.

In my opinion, and in the opinion of my quivering, sleep deprived other half, this cover is not representative of its content*:

The font reminds me of that 1960s TV show Bewitched. In some dark, alternative reality, there is a Bewitched version on TV where the unwitting husband forgets to wash-up and Samantha wiggles her nose and his innards just flump out all over the floor and his brain boils in his skull. Only then would the two media be comparable.

There’s a deeper, more cynical point to be made here about publishing houses’ static and timid approach to marketing books and a sadness at the ends they have to go to in order to entice a reader to an accomplished author’s book, but that’s not for now. As I said, this is a tremendous novel with a darkness that seeps into your bones.

Note:
* bearing in mind, this is an edition by Virago, probably only for distribution within the UK

That Difficult Second Post

I’ve been re-reading The Shining as a precursor to getting into Doctor Sleep, a Christmas present from unwitting relations. I’m sure they’re totally oblivious as to what they’ve just done i.e. given me a shed more fodder for this wonderful enterprise.

I find it completely incomprehensible how Stephen King published The Stand only a year after The Shining. The former, a sprawling post-apocalyptic fantasy set in a shadowy form of America, deals with proto-religious ideas, alternative realities and a huge array of characters. As with most King novels, it’s lazily hoisted with the horror tag, yet it rarely returns the favours you’d expect from such a label. Its most fear-inducing moments come tied into the fates of its characters. You buy into King’s protagonists and his depth for projecting emotion, you sense, as they do, the creeping, approaching horror, and you empathise with their preconditioned fate.

The Shining, on the other hand, gives horror an entity of its own. This is helped, in part, by the minute cast of players (the majority of the book is just Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy and son, Danny). Of course you empathise with their plight, with Jack’s drinking, his own preconceived fate to become like his own abusive father, Wendy’s own insecurities based around her mother complex and Danny’s over-active ‘shining’ ability forcing him to grow old beyond his years. The family, forced to take the job as winter caretakers at The Overlook due to money constraints, have no alternative but to accept a role that would weigh onerously upon the rationality of even the most balanced of minds.

Outside of this bubbling cauldron of insecurities and sociopathy, there’s an even bigger, more pervading presence; the Overlook itself.

It’s this hotel, a beautiful, malicious place that stands in isolation, both in the novel, and as a character outside of the Torrances’s consciousness. Existing outside of the insecurities and personal nightmares of Jack, Wendy and Danny themselves, the hotel, and the horrors within, are timeless and preserved in frozen isolation against the Colorado mountains.

This is why The Shining remains one of King’s only pure renditions of horror. His detailed investment in characters and their progression would almost always take precedence over the entity of fear in subsequent novels – perhaps explaining why horror ‘classic’ IT‘s Pennywise is one of the most disappointing antagonists in practically all of fiction, whilst the book as a whole is still excellent.

The Overlook is King’s imagination at its most sanguine. The decadence and sexuality of its ghosts, the dark presence in the playground, Room 217’s submerged occupant and it’s superb, seemingly inescapable, isolation are all parts of a standalone, dark presence. Its collision with the Torrances’s own particular bundle of foibles is what makes The Shining so enduring terrifying.

Prefatory Matters

There’s no good way to start a blog. Unless you’re Laurie Penny or Eleanor Margolis, you’re probably just going to bore the ears off people trying to hack their way through an introduction to your silly little self-indulgence project.

You’ll spend paragraphs trying to explain how a composite of catharsis and boredom have led you to this point. Then you’ll end up explaining how you don’t really care how well this blog is taken, it’s something for YOU to express all sorts of FEELINGS at. Either that or you just want to find the quickest place to share the latest fucking Upworthy on Obamacare.

Yeah, yeah, is this meta enough for you yet? A shitty blog introduction on shitty blog introductions. Trust me, the irony is gooping in a membranous, oozy fashion over the top of my wellies.

Anyway, to the meat of this. This is a blog on horror in fiction. When I can muster the time, I shall write about anything I consider to be horrifying. This is not strictly about the genre of ‘horror’ because there’s plenty of darkness to be found in the places you least expect it. You may disagree, and that’s fine.

If you’ve unwittingly wandered onto this blog through some accident or misfortune, or have sought, of your own will, to come to this of your own accord, I am deeply, deeply sorry for what you may encounter within. You see, there’s very little merit in adding to the collected menagerie of words on the internet. There are far too many to read as it is, and there’s surely nothing new that you might learn or divine from this bit in particular.

Okay then, why not consider this the modern day equivalent of a campfire story. No? Oh bore off.