Ghost Story

It is with much penitence that I creep back to my computer. I’m now a few books behind on my resolution to write about what I’ve read and how it’s affecting my style. I have to skip The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber for the nonce, because I don’t have it with me.

Most recently, I finished reading Ghost Story by Peter Straub. The first thing that impressed me about this story was that, in the prologue, he allowed his characters’ names to reveal themselves organically i.e. he didn’t give them narrative introductions. This immediately sucked me into the story and I found myself blazing through pages just to find out about whom I was reading. This wasn’t the only thing that involved me in the story from the get-go. The first two sentences of the story are:

“What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?

I won’t tell you that, but I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me… the most dreadful thing…”

This question, and its response, occurs several times throughout the story, and its placement as the opening lines sets the tone of the story: it’s going to be about bad things, the most dreadful things imaginable. These lines invite the reader to listen, to join in the revelations of the characters. Underneath that, there’s the implication that there’s more to the story than what is revealed. It paints the characters as victims of tragedy, but also hints that they may have had a role in their destruction.

From there, the story becomes a rather typical horror story. Through discussion and interaction, the characters realize that the whole of their lives have been colored by their repeated encounters with the mysterious supernatural beast known as a Manitou, a shapeshifter supposedly at the heart of all other monster stories, including vampires and werewolves.

I’ll save my thoughts about The Dramatic Moment for another time. Suffice it to say, Straub uses the conventional expositional device of characters sharing their backstories with each other as an organic necessity of the story. It’s basically all of what The Chowder Society does. Add to this the Manitou, a creature so vain that it reveals its true nature to its victims. If the prologue sucks the reader in by presenting an exposition-free situation, the body of the story satisfies the reader’s curiosity, and then some.

As an English major, I find myself reading a lot of stuff that, as good as it is, I am completely okay with putting down when I’m done with a chapter. For example, I actually stopped reading Absolam, Absolam! by William Faulkner to read Ghost Story. (This is actually a very rare occurrence for me, and always disappointing.) A couple weeks ago, I found myself, at one fifteen in the morning, justifying to myself, “I’ll just read one more chapter, then go to bed.” It was surprising and pleasing to find that the joy wasn’t dead; it was alive and well, lurking as many insatiable creatures do, starving, but patient, waiting to pounce and sink its teeth into a nice, juicy story.

It is this same joy, and love, that motivates me in writing. I get excited about my stories and characters. Recently, The Dead Oak has been dragging for me, mostly because, since I’m doing it for school, it’s an assignment, which seems to have sucked the joy right out of it. Ghost Story was a reminder of what a story could be, should be to its author and audience.

Thank you, Mr. Straub, for reopening my eyes to joy.

New word

As I mentioned in my post about Edgar Allan Poe, sometimes the vocabulary of the horror genre can seem a little repetitive. So, occasionally, I’ll be sharing new words that I discover. Here’s one that I came across today. I was trying to think of a way to say “with trepidation” as one word. After Microsoft Word registered trepidicious and trepidity as nonexistant words, I finally pulled out my dictionary:

Trepidant – adj. timid, trembling. [Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, eleventh edition.]

It’s okay to laugh. I already know that I’m an English nerd. I’ve made my peace with it. More words to come!

Award-Winning Playwright?

That seems to be what I’m turning into. I’m ecstatic to report that my play, Visceral Memory, was a semi-finalist and honorable mention in the Heck-Rabi Playwriting Competition sponsored by Wayne State.

The experience was thrilling and enlightening at the same time. All of the semi-finalists had their plays table-read by graduate student actors from Wayne State’s Theatre Program. Even though I had heard my work being read by my classmates in Bill Harris’ playwriting class, it was definitely a different thrill to hear actors read it.

Afterword, I got up onstage with John Sousanis, who is a playwright and theatre critic. He reviewed and critiqued my play, and then opened it up to comments from the actors who had read and the other students and professors in the audience. Overall, I received a good response and some very good, constructive critiques. Unfortunately, I did not win a finalist spot. However, I feel good about what I’ve been able to do with my first play.

I’m embroiled with The Dead Oak currently, but I’m already getting ideas for how to build on the criticisms I received at the staged reading. So after I finish the novella, I’ll jump back into Visceral Memory so that I can shop it to some new-play-festivals in the spring.

Edgar Allan Poe

I can’t remember my first Poe story. But I do remember that I already loved him when my teacher assigned “The Raven” in eighth grade.

Every month, we had memorization assignments in English class. It wasn’t always poetry. One month, we were assigned Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. But mostly it was poetry. At the end of every month, we had to take a test based on the assigned piece and we had the option of getting up in front of the class and reciting the work for bonus points.

I threw myself into the assignment and memorized the entire poem. When it came time, I got up and recited it as close to perfectly as you can get and got my bonus points. I can still toss off the first two stanzas and the last stanza, which I still consider to be one of the most powerful passages of American Literature. When I first started writing and found myself attracted to horror, I wanted to write more like Poe than Stephen King.

So when it came time to create a reading list for my independent study this semester, Poe was the first author I thought of.

I started with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, mostly because I’d already read At the Mountains of Madness by H P Lovecraft. Between the two stories, I would like Poe’s better, if it weren’t for its ending. Poe’s story uses immediate scene to great effect, staying with the first-person narrator and filling in the scenes the narrator isn’t present for through conversations with other characters. Poe makes brilliant use of imagery, from the grotesquely-animated dead man on the plague ship to the steam-shrouded figure at the climax of the story. Poe’s scene descriptions are just as powerful, from the claustrophobic cargo hold to the lushly verdant islands beyond the Antarctic ice floes. Unfortunately, the story ends with a cliffhanger. The editor’s note informs the reader that the author has mysteriously died and the final chapters of the narrative, which were in his possession, have disappeared. The ‘editor’ goes on to shed some light on the linguistic implications of the cave formations mentioned by the narrator, but because of the absence of resolution to the climax, the linguistic information seemed irrelevant. Even still, the story rocked me.

I read about half a dozen other stories before moving on: a few old favorites and also a few that I’d never read before. As I read, I realized how restricted Poe’s vocabulary was. Maybe it’s a curse of the genre. I mean, there are only so many words you can use for the kinds of feelings evoked in characters in a horror story. However, the kicker was a phrase that was so utterly powerful and unique – until I read it the second time.

In The Masque of Red Death, when the incarnation of the Red Death is first noticed by Prince Prospero’s guests, they think it is just another guest who has transgressed the bounds of good taste and “out-heroded Herod.” Although I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first read the story in school, I do remember the teacher making a huge deal out of this phrase. And it is evocative, as only references to a king who massacred children can be. When I read the same phrase in William Wilson, it lost all of its power for me. It didn’t detract from the overall effect of the story. However, I was a little disappointed.

Edgar Allan Poe still reigns as king of American Gothic Literature.

What most impressed me was Poe’s descriptions of his settings. As a writer, I’m still learning the necessity of a concrete setting for my characters to exist and interact in. Also, I’m coming to realize how much of an impact setting has on a story’s tone and mood.

I consider myself to be improving in this aspect of story-telling. It comes from a combination of two things. First, I’m slowing down as a writer. Previously, I wrote my stories in rushed explosions, relying on action to drive the story and using only sparse descriptions. Second, when I wrote my play, my characters had to have a set. You’d think that my experience in theatre would have made the importance of setting a given in my mind, but no. The good news is that I’m learning.

The Dead Oak, which is what I’m writing for my directed study, takes place in a wilderness camp ground and the forest surrounding it. I have a lot of opportunity to use the setting to my advantage. The shadows and uneven light in the forest juxtaposed against the illusory safety of the campsite. The distant sounds of other campers. Bird and animal sounds. Not to mention the wide variety of plant life found in Michigan’s wilderness. I’m trying to distribute my descriptions among all of these aspects of a story set in a forest. It’s a challenge, but I’m definitely pleased with the results I’m getting.

Thank you, Mr. Poe, for opening my eyes to the world around my characters.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

            After a couple years of proposed summer projects that get lost in the season’s hedonism, I’m proud to say that I forced myself to buckle down and work this year. I finished one story short of my goal, but nevertheless…

            The first story I tackled was Pink Lemonade. This was actually the second story I wrote, back when I was sixteen or seventeen. In addition to filling out what I had originally written, I added four pages to it that develops the role of the main character’s imagination in the story. I sent this story to Wicked Hollow Magazine.

            After the award that Visceral Memory, my first play, won, I decided to take a more serious look at it. This resulted in an extensive revision that added fifteen pages of material to it, including a more powerful ending. I submitted it to the Heck-Rabi Competition through Wayne State University. Grand prize for this competition is production in Wayne State’s Studio Theatre.

            I wanted to submit a story to Wayne State’s Literary Journal, so I chose First Word. After rereading it, I came to the conclusion that, even though the core idea was still intriguing, the execution was that of a squeamish amateur. So I rewrote it entirely. The result, I think, is much truer to the story’s spirit and intent.

            After a quick reread, I made some minor revisions to Not a Cat Person, which was a somewhat atypical story for me. Unfortunately, Michigan Quarterly Review rejected it. My next move with the story is to submit it to Glimmer Train in October during open submissions.

            I ended the summer by adding some literary depth to The Devil’s Chord. I wasn’t able to complete the edits during the actual summer, but close enough. In the next week, I’ll be submitting it to Damnationbooks.com, an online publisher created this past year.

            What kept me from being able to meet my goal of sending out six stories this summer, perhaps, was the fact that The Dead Oak, which I am rewriting, decided that the reason it never worked as a short story was that it needed to be longer. This was actually pointed out to me by my sister-in-law, who read what is now the first chapter of the… let’s call it a novella. So I had a eureka moment and, so far, the first two chapters have already exceeded the length of the original. I’m very excited about this project because I will be working on it as a directed study at school this fall.

            I also had an interesting experience that found me down at Hockeytown Café with a couple hours to kill before a game started. I was by myself and had nothing to do, so I pulled out my phone and, using the notepad application, jotted down some ideas. I know that I didn’t invent the wheel, but even still, that was a good moment.

            All in all, it was a good summer well spent.

Some News and Looking Forward

I have procrastinated long enough. Although I’m not sure why. I’ve had a lot of good and exciting things happen to me the past couple of months.

First, something of a disappointment: the release of R’lyeh Rising has been postponed, with no other release date set yet. However, I’ve been assured by Chaosium, the book’s publisher, that as soon as a decision is made, I’ll be informed so that I can post it.

I didn’t have any writing classes this past semester, which was kind of disappointing. But I took a third class with Barrett Watten, which was awesome and mind-expanding, as always. I got A’s in both of my classes and am on the dean’s list for the third semester in a row.

I entered the play that I wrote in Bill Harris’ class last semester into the Tompkins Writing Competition at Wayne State and I’m very pleased to announce that it won first place. Since then, I have rewritten and expanded it and entered it into the Heck-Rabi Dramatic Writing Competition. If it wins first place, it will be produced at the studio theatre in the Hillberry.

I have gotten involved with a writers’ group made up of other students from Wayne State. I’m very excited about this because being around other writers gets me cranked for everything that I’m trying to do. I’ll post more on this as it develops.

I’ll be graduating in a year, so I’ve started looking ahead to graduate schools and their MFA programs in Creative Writing. I have several good possibilities that I’m looking into, mostly out of state. Right now, I’m just looking and trying not to get too enamoured with any one program.

And, now that I’m done with my classes, I’m writing. The big project that I’ll be working on for the summer is taking one of my short story ideas and writing it as an epic poem. I’m very excited about this project because I’ll be experimenting with form in relation to content, which is something I’ve never done before. This is something I’ll be working on with the writers’ group, as well as editing other short stories and poems and submitting them for publication. I currently have a story out to Flesh and Blood Magazine, but no news on that yet.

All in all, I have an exciting summer ahead of me.

In defense of being an English Major

The question that has plagued me for my whole college career has been what I plan to do with my degree. It’s a common question for people who major in any kind of creative study, although I think English majors are held to a sharper level of scorn. Certainly, the reason why is obvious. I mean, no one ever asks an engineering student what he or she wants to do with his degree. Or someone in pre-med or pre-law or… Well, you see where I’m going with this.

It was this question that derailed me about halfway through my college career. I had a lapse of confidence in my skills as a writer, and I didn’t want to teach, so yeah, what the hell was I supposed to do with a B.A. in English? Well I turned to Psychology. I spent some time in that department. I still wrote though, cuz that’s what really lit my fire. But I thought that I needed a day job until I made it as a writer. Which is absolutely true. No money means no stamps to submit stories, among other, more pressing, issues.

I met a couple writers through my various day (and night) jobs. My friendship with them and free exchange of ideas reflated my enthusiasm for writing. It was then that I realized that my interest in Psychology was really more of a hobby and a way to write better characters. So when I returned to school in Fall of 07, it was to the English department.

And almost immediately, the questions started pouring in. Well, really only one question, just over and over.

Last semester, before he was chosen as the new department head and turned the class over to another teacher, Prof. Marotti, who I had for British Literature prior to 1700, took up the question before starting his lecture one day. His answer was, “Rule the world!” There was a small amount of sarcasm, but not much. I can’t really remember everything he said, but it got me thinking about what I was actually going to do between graduating college and being able to support myself by writing.

The beginning of the answer for this question came from a conversation I had with a fellow writer, Chris, who I met this past semester in my Writing for Theatre class. Chris was formerly in the engineering department and we were chatting about the pressure we both felt to get a useful degree. My response was that writing allows me to bring together all of my interests.

And that’s when it hit me…

Literature, both fiction and nonfiction, reading and writing, is the intersection of so many areas of study. English majors study the psychology of individual characters, sociology of how they work together. We study the historical and cultural contexts of works, which brings together issues of politics, class and gender. Not only do we study how a work is influenced by that context but we also study how a work can influence society. Depending on specific areas of interest, we add in science, technology, myth, philosophy, religion, economics and a thousand other details. And all that’s in addition to studying the intricacies of the English language and rhetoric.

If you told someone that you had a quintuple major in Psychology, History, Philosophy, Science and Cultural Studies, that person would hit the floor!

It’s my firm belief that you get out of your education what you put into it. I can say this because I wasn’t getting much out of my college education before my derailment and subsequent return to the English department. I really wasn’t putting much effort into it. But since coming back, I’m getting so much more out of my education. I split the credit between the amazing teacher’s I’ve had and the kick in the ass I gave myself this time around.

So now that all of the layers of what it means to be an English major have been specified and the conclusion reached about the correlation between effort put into and benefits gotten from an education, I think I have my answer to that question that’s nagged me for so long:

“What am I going to do with a degree in English?”

Anything I damn well please! I might even rule the world…

R’lyeh Rising

It is official! My story, Secret History, has been accepted by Mr. Jones, and the book, R’lyeh Rising was released on Christmas! The book is available for order from Amazon.com, though currently, it is sold out. This is very exciting for me, as this is my first professional publication ever.

Hopefully more to come.

I’ve been researching horror mags online, so with this first sale under my belt, I will be sending out other stories and poems. But you don’t have to wait! There is a sample story and a sample poem available right here.

In addition to my fiction, the play that I wrote in my Writing for Theatre class came off pretty well. So, after a little polishing, I will be shopping it around to Detroit-area theatres.

The New Zombie

This grew out of a discussion I was having at a party with my friend Dave. He was confused as to the behavior of the zombies in I Am Legend. At the time, I hadn’t seen the movie yet (I have since), so I couldn’t really say anything. But I became intrigued that the movie could be more than another survivor story.

In the past, zombies have, more or less, been straight-forward. Whether slow moving, as in Night of the Living Dead, or quick and lethal, as in Dawn of the Dead, the common thread has been motivation: the consumption of human flesh.

Your typical zombies

Let’s ignore the motivation behind the motivation (i.e. the need for nourishment for a dead digestive system) and look at other behavior.

In 28 Days Later, the zombies are fueled more by rage than hunger. An interesting premise, but I have to ask the question that’s always bugged me: why don’t they turn on each other? There seems to be the instinct among zombies against cannibalism. Zombies don’t eat other zombies. They always attack the living. In fact, in DotD, the zombies seem to be drawn to the group of living people that’s sheltered inside the mall. In NotLD, the zombies instinctively flock to the farm house where the survivors of the town are holed up. This is complicated behavior for an entity to which the adjective “mindless” is frequently affixed.

Virologist at work

Enter Robert Neville, the Legend in IAL. A virologist and survivor, he’s lived in the epicenter of the plague that created the movie’s zombies for three years, battling zombies and trying to find a cure for the condition. (At this point, I have to say, if you haven’t seen the movie, you should, but I’ll try to be as clear as I can). Within a few breaths, he states in his video-journal that all traces of human behavior are gone from the infected, then goes on to say that a male infected exposed himself to sunlight after Neville’s abduction of a female infected. Sounds like human behavior to me. This says alot about the arrogance of Neville specifically and humanity in general.

Just a warning. The next part of my musings is about an episode of Fear Itself in which I have to give away the ending. If you still haven’t seen the episode and want to, watch it first, then come back.

New Year’s Day is in parallel style, with Story A being Helen’s attempts to thread her way through the city to get over to James’ apartment, where he and her friend Chrissie are. Story B flashes back on what happened the previous night, in which we get the origin of the zombies (chemical leak) and (at the climax) the story of how she was jilted by James and betrayed by Chrissie. Right up until the climax, we see Helen as a regular, living, breathing person. She talks, she’s afraid, she still feels emotions for James, etc. At the climax, we finally see her as James and Chrissie see her, as a zombie, which certainly explains why she wasn’t attacked during her journey (another example of the Zombie Code). I won’t give away the end of the ending, mostly cuz I think I’ve already done enough damage, but the episode is a new way of thinking about zombies that begs the question: How do zombies think of themselves?

Another example of this rethinking of zombies is Cell by Stephen King. I can’t really discuss it in depth, mostly because I haven’t read the story in a long time. But what I do remember is that the zombies in the book undergo a re-evolution after the initial de-evolution caused by the Pulse. This re-evolution leads to motivations other than kill and eat.

All this has led me to believe that zombies have been underestimated for a lot of years. A lot of literature has gone into vampires, werewolves and other “used to be human” monsters that tell the monster’s side of the story. Largely unexplored, the Zombie Code continues to grow and evolve as our ideas of what a zombie can be and do evolves.

News and an Explanation

If you’ll look to your right, you’ll see that I have created a new page dedicated to the show “Fear Itself” on NBC. I’ve moved my review of the first two episodes there, and I’ll be adding reviews of the third and fourth episodes soon. Hopefully, I’ll be able to stay current on it so that I don’t have to pack so much in.
In my review of the fourth episode of Fear Itself, In Sickness and In Health, I mention the internal logic of the story. I’ve talked about this a couple times, here and also on William Jones’ blog, and I think that it’s time to explain what I mean by this, in case it’s not obvious.

Obviously, horror stories don’t hold up really well without willing suspension of disbelief. When you apply outside logic, horror stories start to break down. However, horror stories have their own logic to them which, when broken, disrupts the suspension of disbelief.

I give an example of this in my review, but I’ll give a different example here to demonstrate my point:

In the remake of Dawn of the Dead, in one of the extras, the make-up director was explaining the various levels of make-up employed for the degeneration of the zombies. Obviously, dead tissue starts to decompose over time. And if zombies are just reanimated corpses, it occurred to me to question their ability to move even as the muscles that move them deteriorate. Also, and this is what I said on Mr. Jones’ blog, the lack of a “patient zero”, the original zombie, is noticeable. There is a passing reference at the start of the movie to a person who dies from what look like human bites and the main character is puzzled as to why blood toxicology would be ordered on the cadaver.

These two things pulled me out of the movie, made me question the very foundation of why the movie was scary and why I should empathize with the characters. Since then, I haven’t able to enjoy the movie as much. And the kind of “screw you” ending that was employed in the most recent episode of “Fear Itself” really ticks me off.