Amateur Preaching about Horror

Just some thoughts on horror to keep the blog clinging to life until I get some stories up and start posting regularly.

I was reading a new book this morning lent to me by a friend. It got me to thinking a bit about the author’s style. I’ve read several of his other books, and I keep coming away with total ambivalence. On the one hand, I think he’s got something going, a certain Je ne sais quoi. I like the characters he creates, and I think the interactions come across as genuine, which is a tough thing to pull off when you’re trying to move a story along.

I also like his personality. He’s got a sort of high-school bad attitude thing going on in his writing that speaks to me. It’s like, in his world, there’s always a 17-year-old wearing a leather jacket with spikes on the shoulders and smoking a cigarette behind the 7-11. It’s like distilling all of the angst and aggression from early 90s punk and mixing it with a touch of disappointment in the world.

On the other hand, like a rebellious teenager, you’re really supposed to either grow out of that, or refine it to a more sophisticated worldview, by the time you’re in your, say, mid-20s. A moody 19-year-old with piercings is dangerous and cool; a moody 32-year-old with piercings is a little sad, and more than a little annoying.

Which brings me to horror.

It goes without saying that this is strictly my opinion, which means that it’s the opinion of an unpublished amateur. My experience, aside from unpublished stories, begins and ends with being a consumer of horror fiction across several media. As someone who is trying to get published, I have nothing but respect and admiration for anyone who has successfully been published. That said, I have developed certain preferences regarding horror.

Good horror is running into a dark room, locking the door behind you, and hearing a dog growl softly. Good horror is waking up with a rattlesnake in your sleeping bag. Good horror whispers and walks, because it knows you have nowhere to go, and it wants to have a little fun before it gets down to business.

There is a school of thought practiced by many writers, some of whom are very, very famous (Mr. King, lookin’ at you here), which says that horror can also be the gross-out, the shock, and the gore. It says that, if you can’t or won’t get the spooky, intellectual scare, just go for the cringe. Go for the grimace. You can’t use too many colorful obscenities, and you can’t detail enough gore. Scares are great, but discomfort’s good, too.

Eli Roth has made a serious career by making films that skip scary and go straight for gory. Take “Hostel”, for example. It’s basically a feature film of watching someone have a tooth pulled without anesthetic. It’s torture-porn. There’s no subtlety, no slow build of suspense, no sense of dread. It’s the narrative equivalent of a fart joke. Now, as someone who has seen every single Three Stooges short, I can appreciate a good fart joke, but it ain’t horror.

Gratuitous profanity is the verbal equivalent of a slasher flick, and more than a few authors have used torrents of profanity to shock readers (again, King is one of the more noteworthy offenders). The idea is, of course, to play off of the tension and discomfort that offensive language causes in certain situations. Maybe some people dig it. I don’t. I find it to be annoying rather than disconcerting. Maybe because I have such an intimate relationship with the most grievous obscenities in my daily vocabulary I’m just not impressed by its use in other contexts. Like hearing an obnoxious teenager yell “vagina” in a convenience store, I’m not shocked, just sympathetically embarrassed.

It’s bad horror, and that’s what bothers me. If good horror is waking up in a coffin, bad horror is being kicked in the shins by a young child. Bad horror is a blaring alarm clock that you can’t turn off. It’s an exploding cigar, a whoopee cushion, a flaming bag of dog shit sitting on your front porch.

Now, just like there’s a time and a place for Cap’n Crunch, and a time and a place for Steak au Poivre, there’s a time and a place for bad horror. Schlocky slasher flicks can be a lot of fun. God knows Italian guignol horror thrives on over-the-top gore, and does it really, really well. But it’s not what I consider horror.

I’ll bring this ramble to a close by reiterating that there is absolutely no reason to take anything I’ve just written to heart. I have no publishing credits to my name. I’m a fan of the genre, and an aspiring amateur writer. That’s it. So besides the obviously self-congratulatory nature of blogging, the other reason I’m writing about this is almost as a reminder to myself. I can and have written gore, but I’m aiming for something better, something that will stick with my readers, hiding out in a corner of their heads, waiting until it’s been forgotten. Waiting until the dark, early hours of the morning to whisper, “Finally, now we can be alone together…”

Dogs, Penn State, and Stories!

I’m in the middle of juggling a bunch of stuff right now–finding a job, working on a short story, NaNoWriMo, and generally trying to keep on top of stuff–so this post is going to be a little more disjointed than normal. Which is saying something.

With apologies, I have a few observations on the whole Penn State child abuse event. First, with all due respect to the many, many respectable and upright Pennsylvanians who don’t fall into this category, the sight of Penn State students falling all over themselves to express their devotion to Joe Pa is missing only a burning American flag or a crowd waving copies of the Little Red Book to complete the image. Seeing students who are the same age as some of the victims chanting, “We are Penn State”, and throwing themselves on the ground to defend the one person on campus who had the authority and influence to put an end to the serial molestation of children by one of his own staff strains the bounds of credibility. Watching the reactions of these people juxtaposed against the reactions of the rest of the sane world, it’s hard to believe that they’re from the same country as the rest of us. Hell, even the same species. I don’t know what’s in the water up there, but anybody who looks at the situation and the behavior of those involved (according to their own testimony) and thinks that it was perfectly acceptable needs to do some real soul-searching.

And just because there’s bound to be someone who thinks this is all media-driven hearsay and rumor, here’s the actual indictment:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/72104007/Sandusky-Indictment. Try to get through that and defend these people with a straight face. Would Joe have done enough in your mind if you were the one who was raped in the showers? And do you think any of Joe’s precious grandchildren ever spent the night in Sandusky’s basement?

On to happier thoughts. Like puppies! Ever since we adopted Carmen, our Pit/Rhodesian Ridgeback mix, my wife Amy and I have fostered dogs from a rescue called “Island Puppy Rescue” on Kent Island. Well, in the interests of full disclosure, Amy’s been more active than I have, mainly because I am much more OCD regarding biohazards and things that wake me up at night. Anyway, our second dog, a Pit Bull Terrier named Jack, is my fault–er, responsibility–due to my getting a little attached during the foster period.

Since then, we’ve fostered something like 12 dogs, almost all of whom have been either Pits or Pit mixes, without any problems, barring of course certain misunderstandings regarding appropriate places to crap. I say this as the owner of two cats who, other than being annoyed by dogs running around, have cohabited with around 14 dogs without so much as a scratch. In the future I’ll post one of my tirades regarding Pit Bulls, but suffice it to say that I am very fond of the breed.

So, if you’re looking for a puppy, you should adopt. And if you adopt, allow me to point you in the direction of Pet Finder, where you should search for Island Puppy Rescue. We’re currently fostering two six-month-old puppies for them, a little Pit named Sasha, and a Pit/Weimaraner (we think) mix named Teddy.

Sasha, a brindle who might weigh 20 pounds soaking wet, was found on the side of the road somewhere, and spent a great deal of time in crates. She has some anxiety issues, and she has a large bump on her head, all of which leads me to believe that she was abused and then abandoned, possibly by someone breeding dogs for fighting. She might have been what’s known as a “bait dog”, or a dog used as a target to train fighting dogs. At any rate, she’s very sweet, a little skittish, but surprisingly good with dogs. She chases the cats, but not in a prey-drive way; I think she doesn’t get that they’re not other puppies.

Teddy, who, for reasons I will make apparent, I call Debo, is already the height and width of my adult Pit, Jack. He’s got a short, soft, light grey coat, with piercing, pale blue-green eyes. Sadly, one of those eyes is a little, well, lazy. He’s got some issues with depth perception, but other than that seems to be in perfect health. He’s going to be an enormous dog, and he’s inherited some of the assertiveness typical of Weimaraners, but nevertheless gets along well with our animals. Needless to say, he’s very affectionate with people, and has a sweet disposition.

As much as I like these dogs, we live in a house the size of a trunk, so we’d really like to emphasize how good it makes a person feel to give a good, loving home to a dog that’s had such a rough go of it. And to get them out of our small, small house. Seriously, though, if you have any interest in getting a puppy, go to http://www.petfinder.com and search for either of these dogs.

Finally, as part of my ongoing, glacial effort to get the blog up to snuff, I’ll be posting some old stories to a section of the site. As I write new stuff, I find that I have a trunk full of old stories that, for one reason or another, never sold. Rather than consign them to the oblivion of the Recycle Bin, I thought it might be worthwhile to stick them in a corner of the blog.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

Reason Magazine’s Take on Immigration (with Cartoons!)

I just came across this and thought it would make for some interesting reading for folks. I’m wildly in favor of making immigration to this country easier for everyone. The upsides so outweigh any theoretical downsides that it’s not even funny.

Real-Life Horror, pt. 1

So, this actually happened: “A homicide in Bethesda – The Washington Post“

If you’re not from the DC area, or if you don’t read The Washington Post on a regular basis, you might not be familiar with this particular slice of city life. As it turns out, Norwood was just convicted of first degree murder, proving that that Casey Anthony shit doesn’t fly in the DMV.

Click on the link, because it’s the best explanation of just what happened, and it has a diagram. That helps, because the enormity of just how fucked up this is can be difficult to embrace without pictures.

Got it? O.K.

I’m not sure what bothers me more about this murder. On the one hand, the woman stabbed her ex-boss 331 (three hundred and thirty one) times, at a rate of approximately once every 3 seconds for 19 minutes, according to the prosecution, pausing several times to switch tools. On the other hand, immediately next door, employees of the Apple Store heard yelling and commotion, and courageously did nothing at all. Not a phone call, not a peek around the corner, not so much as a thump on the wall. Nothing. Nada.

Note the time. Both stores had already closed, so it’s not like there was a bunch of customers making noise or anything. Shit, one of the Apple employees was a security guard, and the manager on duty actually told police she heard a voice pleading for the attacker to stop. And didn’t do dick.

So, you want scary? How about someone being stabbed so many times that the killer has to switch weapons several times, on a busy street, right next door to people who can hear it happening but refuse to do anything about it? That’s pretty goddamn scary.

World of Tanks (seriously)

For a free game called World of Tanks, WoT is shockingly, gobsmackingly addictive. The basic idea is like a third-person shooter, but with historically-accurate WWII-era tanks. Very simple controls, but enough depth to provoke sudden outbursts of strategy. When you’re not cruising around shooting stuff, or hiding behind someone’s house, you maintain a stable of tanks that you purchase and upgrade.

So far, the tanks are American, Russian, or German (with one Chinese tank, oddly enough), but they’re allegedly bringing in French tanks in the near future. It would be nice to see some British armor, but no word on that. It’s a “freemium” game, so presumably the more profitable it becomes over time (and I expect it will be very profitable indeed), the more likely we are to see additional tanks.

Quick Update

Just a quick update to keep the page warm.

I spent the better part of the day writing an article which will (hopefully) be on The Escapist before too long, about the reasons behind the popularity of military-themed shooters. Also, stay tuned for a short story that I finished for an upcoming anthology. It’s been pretty write-tastic around here lately. Several more stories to come.

In the mean time, I apologize for the atrocious appearance of the blog. I haven’t been able to muster the gumption to prettify this sucker yet, so it looks like crap. Any suggestions would be welcome.

Horror Movies That Don’t Know They’re Horror Movies, Part 1

Recently, I was doing some work with the Turner Classic Movies channel in the background. I’m a huge classic movie fan, and, October being that special time of year, I figured there might be a shot at an old Hammer film, or some Roger Corman goodness.

What I ended up watching was a French movie about truck drivers, and it was absolutely terrifying. Henri-Georges Clouzot, just before he made Les Diaboliques, made a movie called The Wages of Fear. Without giving anything away, it’s about hard-up ex-pats in South America who are hired to drive truckloads of nitroglycerin to a remote oil field.

Four lucky winners drive two trucks for the promise of a large amount of money. The trucks can’t get too close to each other, to prevent the spontaneous explosion of one (surprisingly likely) from taking out the other. They can’t make any sudden stops or accelerate to quickly, because the jolt couldn’t set the nitro off. They can’t drive over road that’s too rough, again, for that whole explosion thing. So most of the movie is about watching two pairs of desperate scabs trying to not detonate.

Without giving anything away, you get the following situations:

• Backing a large truck out onto a rotted wooden pier that extends from a cliff. The pier is so narrow that half of each tire on either side is half off the edge.
• One stretch of road is “washboarded”, or corrugated, so the trucks can either go very slowly, or very quickly. There’s no way for the two trucks to coordinate who does what speed.
• One pair of drivers is faced with the choice between the driver running his partner over, or keeping up enough speed to make it through a pondful of spilt oil.

It’s a French movie that’s sort of a cross between Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Speed, but in a good way. The tension the movie builds, especially in the latter half, is incredible. And, being a Clouzot film, you can bet on a depressing ending. It’s incognito horror.