Monthly Archives: July 2014

Fiction and fear

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What are you most afraid of? Spiders? Dogs? Death? Loneliness?

Chances are, whatever your fear is, it’s been dramatized. Horror stories are about laying bare our fears. Think of some of the most notable horror stories and at their root you can find a fear.

jaws_dts_hires–Bram Stoker’s Dracula is about the fear of sex and sexuality, a direct reflection of the repressed Victorian era

–Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise have both been interpreted as a fear of becoming a parent

—Jaws is not only about a fear of sharks, but it touches on a primal fear of our vulnerability to deadly creatures that lurk in the deep

One thing that always frightened me is mental illness, especially the kind that leads to delusions. I know this type of mental illness has a physiological underpinning, but it still disturbs me on a core level. I incorporated my own fear into my new novella, House of Flies.

House of Flies

The plot: 19-year-old Alec Pearson, recently orphaned, lives in a huge house and has all the money he could need. Then he starts seeing flies. These aren’t ordinary flies; they carry with them dark visions. He tries to fight the flies but he fears he’s losing his mind. Finally he takes a drastic step to rid himself of the madness around him.

I used a common horror trope—insects, specifically flies—as a way to dramatize Alec’s plight. Insects creep most people out, so it’s a built in special effect. The whole point of the story, though, was to discover how suppressing emotions—grief in this instance—can push you to the brink of madness.

Writers are lucky. We have a vehicle to explore our fears, examine them, and work through them in a way that not only benefits us, but hopefully entertain others. If you have the chance, check out House of Flies.

Read this story: Don’t Eat Cat

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Not too long ago, short stories were relegated to specialty magazines or book-length collections. Want to read a single story? You had to buy the book or subscribe to the magazine.

Now, thanks to e-books, stories of any length now have a home, and this has led to a rebirth of the short story as a form of art and entertainment. I’m happy as a writer — I’ve been on a novella-writing kick lately. And I’m glad as a reader too — sometimes you don’t want to invest too much time in a story. Sometimes you want to dive in, read to the end, and walk away, satisfied.

Satisfied is what I felt after finishing Jess Walter’s zombie-themed story Don’t Eat Cat.

Don't Eat CatFirst, a warning to zombie aficionados. Don’t Eat Cat is a zombie tale in the loosest sense. His zombies aren’t the mindless, swarming re-animated dead. They’re self-aware — victims of a party drug that carries zombie-like side effects, such as white-to-translucent skin, mental numbness, and a taste for living flesh, especially small animals (hence Don’t Eat Cat).

Second, for the animal lovers out there, no animals are actually eaten in the course of this story. So don’t let the title dissuade you.

The plot: following a confrontation with a zombie barista in a Starbucks, Owen decides to seek out his ex-girlfriend, Marci, who willingly consumed the drug and left two years earlier before the zombie effects set in. That’s it. Not too much happens in this story.

This is not a criticism. Walter packs his pages with humor and tragedy. In a limited word count, Walter deftly creates a world of the near-future that is overloaded, cynical, and nearly broken. Walter’s prose is clean, lean and fluid.

His protagonist is a good traveling companion. From the opening scene in the zombie-staffed Starbucks to the sudden end, Owen is impatient, moody, and thoroughly relatable. We know just enough about him to willingly go along for the ride.

But Don’t Eat Cat is not perfect (I have yet to find a story or book that is). These imperfections can be simply summed up: the story is too short. I wanted more. I wanted more of Owen and Marci. I wanted more of the hilariously nightmarish world. I wanted more of the negative effects of the zombie/humans. And when the story ended abruptly, I was left wishing there was more to come.

 

Bioluminescent creatures in the darkest realms

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Life on earth is truly stranger than anything we’ve imagined. Science continually finds more evidence of this. Just one example? Fish in waters devoid of any natural light equipped with light-giving powers of their own.

bioluminescent

How do these fish manage to produce light from their own bodies? Through a mix of two chemicals. One is called, ominously enough, luciferin. This chemical creates the light. The second chemical, luciferase, spurs the reaction that, along with oxygen, creates the light. Deep-sea creatures use this light to not only find their way, but also to communicate with other fish and trap their prey.

What I love about science and nature is that there are so many twists and turns in the evolution of life, ones we are still discovering, that rival the wildest creatures dreamed up in our imaginations.

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Fun with skulls

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I’m not a macabre person by nature, but I like skulls. I’m not talking about actual human skulls, but representations: drawings, T-shirts, liquor bottles, candles, etc. Sure, it’s a cliche by now, but it’s still fun.

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(Image courtesy of Gerrard King)

Where did my affinity for skulls start? Who knows? Maybe from the image of Hamlet holding up poor Yorick’s skull and talking to it. I always got a kick out of that when I was a kid. (Here’s a picture of Doctor Who‘s David Tennant as the moody Dane.)

Tennant Hamlet Yorick

Obviously I’m not alone. Skulls are everywhere in pop culture, and not just American culture. For instance, the Mexican Day of the Dead (Dia de Muertos) holiday is a festival that recognizes the dead, and similar traditions can be found throughout the world. Though the Mexicans seem to have perfected the imagery.

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My own theory: these representations of skulls are a safe way for us to reference our own mortality. We can observe it at arms’ length, poke fun at it, while still acknowledging it. Sure, some people choose to avoid anything that will remind them of death, while others seem to revel in it. For most of us, we can acknowledge it, have a laugh, and then move on.

And now I’m happy to be adding a skull to the pop-culture pantheon. My soon-to-be-released novella, House of Flies, will feature a skull on the cover. House of Flies follows Alec as he battles a fly infestation that drives him to the brink of insanity. It’s a psychological horror story about suppressed grief and the avoidance of death, hence the skull. I can’t describe how cool I thought this imagery was when my designer first showed it to me.

House of Flies

It turns out that there have been more than a few skull-themed covers. The website Science Fiction Ruminations has compiled a collection of skull covers from the recent era. Here are a few funky examples — check out the site for more.

Philip K. dick

Robert Heinlein

Harlan Ellison

 

 

The latest Doctor: older and wiser?

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The BBC just released a new trailer for the latest season of their classic sci-fi hit Doctor Who, with Peter Capaldi taking the lead role. Will this older Doctor signal a shift in the writers’ approach?

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I’ve loved the reboot of Doctor Who. It’s been a thrilling ride, beginning with Christopher Eccleston as an edgy, battle-scarred Doctor, followed by David Tennant’s whimsical, haunted Doctor, and then onto Matt Smith, who brought a child-like, though deadly serious, quality to the Doctor. What all three Doctors had in common was that they looked significantly younger than Doctors of the past (I grew up watching Tom Baker — he was my first Doctor). Matt Smith, while a great actor, was in his 20s. Kind of strange for an alien who is centuries old.

The writers of Doctor Who seemed to be trending toward younger Doctors, maybe chasing a youthful audience. But then they announced that Peter Capaldi would take over for Matt Smith. While there’s much unknown about how Capaldi’s Doctor will be written — and played — he’ll definitely bring a new level of gravitas to the role.

But what will all this mean in terms of storytelling? I guess we’ll find out when Doctor Who returns in August.

In the meantime, BBC’s minute-long trailer highlighting the upcoming season includes the returning companion Clara (Jenna-Louise Coleman) and the voice of one of the Doctor’s classic enemies, the Daleks. Check it out below.

 

Reinventing Lovecraft at Tor

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A fresh spin brings new life to a controversial horror legend.

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Arguably, HP Lovecraft is one of the fathers of modern horror (the grandfather would probably be Edgar Allen Poe). Rhode Island native Lovecraft, who lived from 1890-1937 created a bleak, horrific mythology that was both seamless and Howard_Phillips_Lovecraftexpansive. His creatures included the now iconic Cthulhu. His monsters were both alien in origin and Earth-evolved races that rose and fell long before Homo sapiens wandered off the savannnas.

What made Lovecraft a master of horror wasn’t necessarily his prose — it was his outlook. The monsters in his world were not remotely like us. In fact, they considered us no better than we would consider a nest of ants. It’s the theme that we don’t matter one bit to the universe that makes Lovecraft so horrific.

But Lovecraft is not without controversy. Today he’s widely derided as sexist and racist. His works are criticized for their fear and revulsion of the other. His critics have a point; I’ve always been hesitant to proscribe modern mores to past characters, though I wouldn’t let them off the hook.

This controversial aspect of Lovecraft has kept him at arms length from contemporary writers, which is a shame, because once you extract his personal views, there’s much gold to be mined from his works.

Leave it to Tor.com, one of my favorite (and free) sites for the latest in modern speculative fiction. They recently published a (long) short story, The Litany of Earth by Ruthanna Emrys. The writer brilliantly uses Lovecraft’s mythos to create a new world that, while it relies heavily on Lovecraft, removes all of his detestable aspects. Instead of reviling the other, Emrys’s world is about the other.

My point? Just because a writer/artist/actor/politician is a jerk in real life doesn’t necessarily mean we have to disregard all their efforts. Emrys’s short story is proof of this.

Here’s an intro to the story:

The state took Aphra away from Innsmouth. They took her history, her home, her family, her god. They tried to take the sea. Now, years later, when she is just beginning to rebuild a life, an agent of that government intrudes on her life again, with an offer she wishes she could refuse. 

Read the whole story here at Tor.com.

And, for an interesting take on Lovecraft’s controversial elements, read this blog post from the editor at Tor.com who decided to buy Emrys’s story. It’s fascinating to watch him grapple with his own mixed feelings.

(Art copyright © 2014 by Allen Williams)

Apocalypse obsessions

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Why are we so fascinated by end-of-the-world stories? It’s personal.

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Sci-fi is filled with apocalyptic stories, from asteroid flicks like Armageddon to zombie/plague movies such as 28 Days Later. And this end-of-world obsession is nothing new. Think back 2000 years ago to a book in the bible titled Revelation. What’s it about? Basically, the end of the world.

And now sci-fi themed website io9.com has a list of the most plausible ways that the world, as we know it (meaning human civilization) might end.

Their list:

1) pandemic

2) asteroid/comet impact

3) large igneous province (not a volcano, but a crack in the earth that oozes lava and toxic gases

4) climate change

5) radiation disaster, either nuclear war or a gamma ray burst from space

6) an invasive species that upsets the natural ecosystem and ruins our food supply

7) a black swan, or, something we have no way of accounting for (think The Terminator movies)

The point is we love to think about the world’s end. But why? I believe it’s because our world will truly end one day (at least on Earth). We will all die. That fact is inescapable, and it’s burdensome to think about it every day. Still, it’s there, and it seeps out into mass culture through armageddon stories.

We can’t change this fact, but at least we can have fun along the way.

 

Lukewarm Leftovers

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Will The Leftovers become a TV classic? Too soon to tell, but it doesn’t look good.

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HBO’s new sci-fi-ish series The Leftovers has an intriguing, if unoriginal premise, is based on a high-profile novel, and is produced by the man behind Lost. Yet the first episode left me underwhelmed.

The set-up: two percent of the world’s population has vanished with no explanation. Three years later, the residents of Mapleton (aka Anytown, USA) struggle to move on despite the uncertainty and lingering grief.

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The story follows police chief Kevin Garvey (played excellently by Justin Theroux), who is not quite with it. He struggles to relate to his rebellious teenage daughter Jill, and his son Tom, who has fled to a mysterious commune. He butts heads with the town’s mayor, Kevin and LucyLucy Warburton, and tries to keep the peace between the townspeople and a strange cult that wears white, chain smokes, doesn’t talk, and taunts the grieving. And he may or may not be crazy.

So far, so good. Plus, The Leftovers based on a book by bestselling writer Tom Perrotta. I like it when TV shows and movies have a literary legacy (then again, as a writer, I’m biased). And, it was brought to TV by Damon Lindelof of Lost fame. Say what you will about Lost; that show is a classic in my eyes, with spectacular storytelling and gripping characterization. The Lost connection, more than anything else, had me excited for the show.

But based on the first episode I’m not confident that The Leftovers is headed for greatness. I see two main problems:

1) I fear we will never get any kind of explanation for the disappearance, and this show will become an endless grief-fest.

2) There were so many characters who we zoomed past that it was difficult to get sucked into any of their stories. Theroux’s Kevin Garvey worked well, but aside from him, I felt no real connection with the faces who passed by.

Some of the subplots were interesting. Nihilism has gripped the youth of Mapleton, as we see with Kevin’s daughter Jill. There’s a party scene that perfectly captures the sense that if anyone can suddenly vanish, what’s the point of trying?

The story following Kevin’s prodigal son Tom, who is part of some survivalist-type cult is also intriguing (though the actor is miscast. He is 29 in real life, while his “father” is 42. It shows).

And then there’s Christopher Eccleston of Doctor Who fame who plays a preacher. I’ll tune in to anything with a Doctor Who alum in it.

I’m nowhere near ready to give up on The Leftovers, though I’m somewhat pessimistic. It’s hard to NOT compare The Leftovers to Lost, but as with Lost, I fear that the writers will lose their way when it comes to the sci-fi elements.

I hope I’m wrong.