Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992)

by David G. Hartwell (Ed. )

  Poor Nathan, of course, was not informed of his pants’

  sordid past. And when the kids see that he is lying helpless in the dust of that basement, they decide to take advantage of the situation and strip this man of his

  valuables . . . starting with those expensive-looking

  slacks and whatever treasures they may contain. But

  after they relieve a protesting, though paralyzed Nathan

  of his pants, they do not pursue their pillagery any

  further. Not after they see Nathan’s legs, which are the

  putrid members of a man many days dead. With the

  lower half of Nathan rapidly rotting away, the upper

  must also die among the countless shadows of that

  condemned building. And mingled with the pain and

  madness of his untimely demise, Nathan abhors and

  grieves over the thought that, for a while anyway, Miss

  McFickel will think he has stood her up on the first date

  of what was supposed to be a long line of dates destined

  to evolve into a magic and timeless and profound affair

  of two hearts. . . .

  Incidentally, this story was originally intended for

  publication under my perennial pen name, G.K. Riggers,

  and entitled: “Romance of a Dead Man.”

  Notes on the Writing o f Horror: A Story

  415

  T he S ty les________________________

  There is more than one way to write a horror story, so

  much one expects to be told at this point. And such a

  statement, true or false, is easily demonstrated. In this

  section we will examine what may be termed three

  primary techniques of terror. They are: the realistic

  technique, the traditional Gothic technique, and the

  experimental technique. Each serves its user in different

  ways and realizes different ends, there’s no question

  about that. After a little soul-searching, the prospective

  horror writer may awaken to exactly what his ends are

  and arrive at the most efficient technique for handling

  them. Thus . . .

  The realistic technique. Since the cracking dawn of

  consciousness, restless tongues have asked: is the world,

  and are its people, real? Yes, answers realistic fiction, but

  only when it is, and they are, normal. The supernatural,

  and all it represents, is profoundly abnormal, and therefore unreal. Few would argue with these conclusions.

  Fine. Now the highest aim of the realistic horror writer is

  to prove, in realistic terms, that the unreal is real. The

  question is, can this be done? The answer is, of course

  not: one would look silly attempting such a thing.

  Consequently the realistic horror writer, wielding the

  hollow proofs and premises of his art, must settle for

  merely seeming to smooth out the ultimate paradox. In

  order to achieve this effect, the supernatural realist must

  really know the normal world, and deeply take for

  granted its reality. (It helps if he himself is normal and

  real.) Only then can the unreal, the abnormal, the

  supernatural be smuggled in as a plain brown package

  marked Hope, Love, or Fortune Cookies, and postmarked: the Edge of the Unknown. And of the dear reader’s seat. Ultimately, of course, the supernatural

  explanation of a given story depends entirely on some

  irrational principle which in the real, normal world looks

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  as awkward and stupid as a rosy-cheeked farmlad in a

  den of reeking degenerates. (Amend this, possibly, to

  rosy-cheeked degenerate . . . reeking farmlads.) Nevertheless, the hoax can be pulled off with varying degrees of success, that much is obvious. Just remember to

  assure the reader, at certain points in the tale and by way

  of certain signals, that it’s now all right to believe the

  unbelievable. Here’s how Nathan’s story might be told

  using the realistic technique. Fast forward.

  Nathan is a normal and real character, sure. Perhaps

  not as normal and real as he would like to be, but he does

  have his sights set on just this goal. He might even be a

  little too intent on it, though without passing beyond the

  limits of the normal and the real. His fetish for things

  “magic, timeless, and profound” may be somewhat

  unusual, but certainly not abnormal, not unreal. (And to

  make him a bit more real, one could supply his coat, his

  car, and grandfather’s wristwatch with specific brand

  names, perhaps autobiographically borrowed from one’s

  own closet, garage, and wrist.) The triple epithet which

  haunts Nathan’s life— similar to the Latinical slogans on

  family coats-of-arms— also haunts the text of the tale

  like a song’s refrain, possibly in italics as the submerged

  chanting of Nathan’s undermind, possibly not. (Try not

  to be too artificial, one recalls this is realism.) Nathan

  wants his romance with Loma McFickel, along with

  everything else he considers of value in existence, to be

  magic, timeless, and the other thing. For, to Nathan,

  these are attributes that are really normal and really real

  in an existence ever threatening to go abnormal and

  unreal on one, anyone, not just him.

  Ofcay. Now Loma McFickel represents all the virtues

  of normalcy and reality. She could be played up in the

  realistic version of the story as much more normal and

  real than Nathan. Maybe Nathan is just a little neurotic,

  maybe he needs normal and real things too much, I don’t

  know. Whatever, Nathan wants to win a normal, real

  Notes on the Writing o f Horror: A Story

  417

  love, but he doesn’t. He loses, even before he has a

  chance to play. He loses badly. Why? For the answer we

  can appeal to a very prominent theme in the story: Luck.

  Nathan is just unlucky. He had the misfortune to brush

  up against certain outside supernatural forces and they

  devastated him body and soul. But how did they devastate him, this is really what a supernatural horror story, even a realistic one, is all about.

  Just how, amid all the realism of Nathan’s life, does

  the supernatural sneak past Inspectors Normal and Real

  standing guard at the gate? Well, sometimes it goes in

  disguise. In realistic stories it is often seen impersonating

  two inseparable figures of impeccable reputation. I’m

  talking about Dr. Cause and Prof. Effect. Imitating the

  habits and mannerisms of these two, not to mention

  taking advantage of their past record of reliability, the

  supernatural can be accepted in the best of places, be

  unsuspiciously abandoned on almost any doorstep— not

  the bastard child of reality but its legitimized heir. Now

  in Nathan’s story the source of the supernatural is

  somewhere inside those mysterious trousers. They are

  woven of some fabric which Nathan has never seen the

  like of; they have no labels to indicate their maker; there

  is something indefinably alluring in their make-up.

  When Nathan asks the salesman about them, we introduce our first cause: the trousers were made in a foreign land— South America, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia

  —which fact clarifies many mysteries, while
also making

  them even more mysterious. The realistic horror writer

  may also allude to well-worn instances of sartorial magic

  (enchanted slippers, invisible-making jackets), though

  one probably doesn’t want the details of this tale to be

  overly explicit. Don’t risk insulting your gentle reader.

  At this point the alert student may ask: but even if the

  trousers are acknowledged as magic, why do they have

  the particular effect they eventually have, causing Nathan to rot away below the waist? To answer this question

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  we need to introduce our second cause: the trousers were

  worn, for several hours, by a dead man. But these “facts”

  explain nothing, right? O f course they don’t. However,

  they may seem to explain everything if they are revealed

  in the right manner. All one has to do is link up the first

  and second causes (there may even be more) within the

  scheme of a realistic narrative. For example, Nathan

  might find something in the trousers leading him to

  deduce that he is not their original owner. Perhaps he

  finds a winning lottery ticket of significant, though not

  too tempting, amount. (This also fits in nicely with the

  theme of luck.) Being a normally honest type of person,

  Nathan calls the clothes store, explains the situation, and

  they give him the name and phone number of the

  gentleman who originally put those pants on his charge

  account and, afterward, returned them. Nathan puts in

  the phone call and finds out that the pants were returned

  not by a man, but by a woman. The very same woman

  who explains to Nathan that since her husband has

  passed on, rest his soul, she could really use the modest

  winnings from that lottery ticket. By now Nathan’s

  mind, and the reader’s, is no longer on the lottery ticket

  at all, but on the revealed fact that Nathan is the owner

  and future wearer of a pair of pants once owned (and

  worn? it is interrogatively hinted) by a dead man. After a

  momentary bout with superstitious repellance, Nathan

  forgets all about the irregular background of his beautiful, almost new trousers. The reader, however, doesn’t forget. And so when almost-real, almost-normal Nathan

  loses all hope of achieving full normalcy and reality, the

  reader knows why, and in more ways than one.

  The realistic technique.

  It’s easy. Now try it yourself.

  The traditional Gothic technique. Certain kinds of people, and a fortiori certain kinds of writers, have always experienced the world around them in the Gothic man­

  Notes on the Writing o f Horror: A Story

  419

  ner, I’m almost positive. Perhaps there was even some

  little stump of an apeman who witnessed prehistoric

  lightning as it parried with prehistoric blackness in a

  night without rain, and felt his soul rise and fall at

  the same time to behold this cosmic conflict. Perhaps

  such displays provided inspiration for those very first

  imaginings that were not bom of the daily life of crude

  survival, who knows? Could this be why all our primal mythologies are Gothic? I only pose the question, you see. Perhaps the labyrinthine events of triple-volumed shockers passed, in abstract, through the brains

  of hairy, waddling things as they moved around in

  moon-trimmed shadows during their angular migrations

  across lunar landscapes of craggy rock or skeletal wastelands of jagged ice. These ones needed no convincing, for nothing needed to seem real to their little minds as

  long as it felt real to their blood. A gullible bunch of

  creatures, these. And to this day the fantastic, the unbelievable, remains potent and unchallenged by logic when it walks amid the gloom and grandeur of a Gothic

  world. So much goes without saying, really.

  Therefore, the advantages of the traditional Gothic

  technique, even for the contemporary writer, are two.

  One, isolated supernatural incidents don’t look as silly in

  a Gothic tale as they do in a realistic one, since the latter

  obeys the hard-knocking school of reality while the

  former recognizes only the University of Dreams. (Of

  course the entire Gothic tale itself may look silly to a

  given reader, but this is a matter of temperament, not

  technical execution.) Two, a Gothic tale gets under a

  reader’s skin and stays there far more insistently than

  other kinds of stories. Of course it has to be done right,

  whatever you take the words done right to mean. Do they

  mean that Nathan has to function within the massive

  incarceration of a castle in the mysterious fifteenth

  century? No, but he may function within the massive

  incarceration of a castlelike skyscraper in the just-as-

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  mysterious twentieth. Do they mean that Nathan must

  be a brooding Gothic hero and Miss McFickel an

  ethereal Gothic heroine? No, but it may mean an extra

  dose of obsessiveness in Nathan’s psychology, and Miss

  McFickel may seem to him less the ideal of normalcy

  and reality than the pure Ideal itself. Contrary to the

  realistic story’s allegiance to the normal and the real, the

  world of the Gothic tale is fundamentally unreal and

  abnormal, harboring essences which are magic, timeless,

  and profound in a way the realistic Nathan never

  dreamed. So, to rightly do a Gothic tale requires, let’s be

  frank, that the author be a bit of a lunatic, at least while

  he’s authoring, if not at all times. Hence, the well-known

  inflated rhetoric of the Gothic tale can be understood as

  more than an inflatable raft on which the imagination

  floats at its leisure upon the waves of bombast. It is

  actually the sails of the Gothic artist’s soul filling up with

  the winds of ecstatic hysteria. And these winds just won’t

  blow in a soul whose climate is controlled by central

  air-conditioning. So it’s hard to tell someone how to

  write the Gothic tale, since one really has to be bom to

  the task. Too bad. The most one can do is offer a

  pertinent example: a Gothic scene from “Romance of a

  Dead Man,” translated from the original Italian of

  Geraldo Riggerini. This chapter is entitled “The Last

  Death of Nathan.”

  Through a partially shattered window, its surface

  streaked with a blue film o f dust and age, the diluted glow

  o f twilight seeped down onto the basement floor where

  Nathan lay without hope o f mobility. In the dark you’re

  not anywhere, he had thought as a child at each and every

  bedtime; and, in the bluish semiluminescence o f that

  stone cellar, Nathan was truly not anywhere. He raised

  himself up on one elbow, squinting through tears o f

  confusion into the filthy azure dimness. His grotesque

  posture resembled the h a lf anesthetized efforts o f a patient who has been left alone for a moment while awaiting

  Notes on the Writing o f Horror: A Story

  421

  surgery, anxiously looking around to see i f he’s simply

  been forgotten on that frigid operating table. I f only his

  legs would mo
ve, i f only that paralyzing pain would

  suddenly become cured. Where were those wretched doctors, he asked himself dreamily. Oh, there they were, standing behind the turquoise haze o f the surgery lamps.

  " H e’s out o f it, man, ” said one o f them to his colleague.

  “We can take everything he’s got on him. ’’ But after they

  removed Nathan’s trousers, the operation was abruptly

  terminated and the patient abandoned in the blue shadows o f silence. "Jesus, look at his legs, look, ’’ they had screamed. Oh, i f only he could now scream like that,

  Nathan thought among all the fatal chaos o f his other

  thoughts. I f only he could scream loud enough to be heard

  by that girl, by way o f apologizing for his permanent

  absence from their magic, timeless, and profound future,

  which was in fact as defunct as the two legs that now

  seemed to be glowing glaucous with putrefaction before

  his eyes. Couldn’t he now emit such a scream, now that

  the tingling agony o f his liquifying legs was beginning to

  spread upwards throughout his whole body and being? But

  no. It was impossible— to scream that loudly— though he

  did manage, in no time at all, to scream himself straight

  to death.

  The traditional Gothic technique.

  It’s easy. Now try it yourself.

  The experimental technique. Every story, even a true

  one, wants to be told in only one single way by its writer,

  yes? So, really, there’s no such thing as experimentalism

  in its trial-and-error sense. A story is not an experiment,

  an experiment is an experiment. True. The “experimental” writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is

  very hard to accept, and sometimes too easy. On the one

  hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the

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  telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the

  other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the

  telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him.

  Either way, literary experimentalism is simply the writer’s imagination, or lack of it, and feeling, or absence of same, thrashing their chains around in the escape-proof

  dungeon of the words of the story. One writer is trying to

  get the whole breathing world into the two dimensions of