O! The horror, the horror!

horror novel, the--a genre which the reader knowingly seeks in anticipation of experiencing fear and possible revulsion; narratives which exploit the hidden menace in ordinary characters and details.

Just as historical fiction has morphed into a convenient hybrid force combining it with the likes of romance, mystery,fantasy, and speculative fiction, horror fiction has proved agreeably flexible. So long as one or more characters is placed in chilling, frightening circumstances, horror stories are appropriately set in past, present, or future surroundings in which other generic categories play supporting roles.

The quintessential late twentieth- and early twenty-first century horror writer is Stephen King, whose prolific output of fiction might cause the reader to overlook his text-book-perfect 1981 publication, Danse Macabre, a personal-but-highly evolved history of horror fiction and, via the frontage road of subtext, an excellent resource for horror writers.

The primary goals of horror fiction include frightening the reader, unsettling, disorienting, and bombarding the reader with potential conspiracy theories that often involve supernatural elements. Haunted houses are so plentiful in horror fiction that they have become a sub-genre. Vampires are another recurrent horror theme, with zombies and werewolves representing yet another fork in the road.

Robert Louis Stevenson's novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, certainly fits the category as does Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Another contemporary writer to consult for insights into the medium is William Peter Blatty (1928--), whose The Exorcist uses the extreme vulnerability of a twelve-year-old girl as a host for invasion by a malevolent, deamonic force, and allows a natural match-up between dark forces and religion.

Henry Farrell (1920-2006) produced instructive examples of horror fiction with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and How Awful About Alan.

In Danse Macabre, Steven King has credited Ira Levin's 1967 novel, Rosemary's Baby, a progressively more horrifying novel in which a vulnerable protagonist is impregnated by a demonic force, as his early inspiration.

Not to forget William Faulkner's notable horror story, "A Rose for Emily."

Nor to forget Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890-1937), whom Steven King has also called out as the greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale in the twentieth century. Lovecraft, a brooding cynic and pessimist, was in his way a polar opposite of the religion-based optimism of C.S. Lewis; he relentlessly took on such major icons as Romanticism and Enlightenment, saving major dramatic thrusts, almost as though he were a Cyrano de Bergerac in a sword fight, against Christian humanism.

Until Stephen King's popularity became established, horror fiction was more likely to be shelved in libraries and bookstores as weird fiction or weird stories. Indeed, a major pulp magazine published between 1923 and 1954, and which featured stories by Lovecraft, was called Weird Tales.

Hint: If the explanation for the horrific or supernatural elements in a story is too rational, the work is more likely science fiction or at least speculative fiction than it is horror.

Ante Up

As George Orwell notes in his comprehensive essay on Charles Dickens, this author was a serious muckraker, a class and social critic, a fierce gadfly of The Industrial Revolution, and yet he attracted considerably more readers than he did political enemies or detractors. Orwell didn't make this comparison, I did: John Steinbeck went after many of the same targets as Dickens, digging, I believe, deeper and wider, certainly adding such subjects as race, migration, immigration,women's rights, scientific investigation, and politics into his examinations. Further, he, more so than Dickens, portrayed the middle classes. For his efforts, he was branded as overly sentimental and naive, a brand that at first blush I naively thought was the result of anti-intellectualism and academic jealousies, but have more recently come to believe is the more insidious effect of a concentrated Conservative (note capital C) effort at discrediting him because of his alleged left-leaning sympathies. This last observation is a distraction from my intent in raising the issue; it will be dealt with later as I begin to pursue the evidence of a smear against Steinbeck for the unwanted vision of behavior he excavated in his major works.

The intended thrust is that Dickens and Steinbeck produced individual and aggregated identifiable works because of the characters they chose, how they allowed their characters to behave, and the results they achieved in helping others to see life as they did. Although each wrote in different times and of differing places, each had a particular filter over his work. Similarly, Mrs. Woolf wrote of a particular class of the social structure, some few years ahead of her more or less American counterpart, Mrs. Wharton. And to add a kind of thematic balance, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner established in their respective works a kind of regional calculus that reminded us how the very specifics of a place and the individuals within that regional specificity caused them to be transsubstantiated into universal truths.

All prologue to the question for the individual, what do you bring to the table? What's your ante to get into the game of being a writer? Do you prefer fictional locales that are, on their face unreal? Do you do so from fear that greater specifics will bring you trouble? Do you write novels set in the distant future so that individuals who read them will not be likely to recognize themselves and thus spare yourself the embarrassment of having them confront you? Was that me in your novel, I who bore you and endured you while you were learning how to tell these very stories that dare show me as who I am? Why, pray tell did you in your last novel or in an earlier short story name a junior high school after me?

Sometimes, if we read carefully, we can see authors at play, using friends names in one way or another. I have been a suspect, a protagonist, a corpse, a Marine Corps recruiting officer, and a Bronx detective in the works of friends and a number of less respectable personae in the works of shall we say less than friends. My dear friend Barnaby Conrad has found his way into a number of my stories as Conrad Burnaby, thought to be a purveyor of replica watches and automotive chop shops. Digby Wolfe appears often as himself, a bemused Englishman who at an early moment in is career had to go on stage to warm up the audience before the Beatles. Brian Fagan, a world-class archaeologist, appears as Major Fagan of the Salvation Army. When called upon to read a short story in Steve Cook's modern lit class, I chose a story in which he appeared in a mandatory group therapy session as the result of a bureaucratic mishap, and in more than one story, Duane Unkefer is referenced as living unhasseled by the police in his 1968 Pacer, thanks to his weekly classes for wannabe writer cops. So we know what I bring to my work, which is mischief at the very least, if not a kind of noirish romanticism.

These visions you have need not be humorous or dire or dreary or overly optimistic; they needn't be parody or satire or dark horror, but they must reflect or refract some semblance of your vision, all the while projecting a world, a universe, a solar system palpably real and plausible. It is said of some times, times such as the present in fact, that they trump in their quotidian display any attempt to parody them. It is said of some times that the unthinkable not only came to pass, it set up branch offices and is seeking an employable staff. Nevertheless we must look beyond the very incidents we create to see how, by exaggeration, we can evolve our drama into satire, mindful in an absurdity of its own that such drama will eventually come to pass.

Outrage and absurdity are every bit as Darwinian as the so-called deadly sins.

It remains for us to pick a target which we will weave into our work. But weave we must if we are to keep up with the unyielding tenacity of our human condition and render it in drama for all to see.

Horse Latitude

1. A happy combination of a watering trough for horses at Parma Park and a chance remark by LK provide--provoke--the trifecta, the combination that will be perfect for this week's book review, which falls on the Golden Oldies side of the coin, which means a dip back into the past. Thus Faulkner's Spotted Horses, Steinbeck's The Red Pony, and Chapter XXIV of Roughing It by SLC, the iconic tale of the Genuine Mexican Plug Horse. Although I have in the past engaged in research related to the relative speeds of various horses over various lengths, I am not a horse person. These three tales, two pure inventions and one Twain reportage, could change my mind.

2. Another happy chance sent me down the lower part of Milpas Street, whereupon I passed the store that displayed the pinatas I was so pleased to see yesterday. Around the block and into a freshly vacated space to see that apparently the display is changed every day. Hot dog! Or should I say, Hot horse? Today's display, as you will note, includes a horse

3. Lovely discovery: Pure-bred Australian Cattle Dogs have a white blotch somewhere on their forehead. Said blotch is called a Morgan, supposedly after one of the pioneer breeders of the ACD. How do I know this is not an urban myth? I asked the man--an ACD owner--who imparted this information. Because, he said, my brother breeds ACDs and all forty-five of his current crop have Morgans; it is a sign of ACD authenticity.

Sally, he noted, is enough--half--ACD to have a Morgan, a sign that the ACD genes are dominant in her.

4. Haruki Murikami, an excellent novelist (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, etc) claims he learned everything he needed to know about writing from listening to music, and most of that is jazz.

5. A hungry customer approached the hot dog stand at the Yoga Center in downtown Santa Barbara. "What'll it be?" the attendant asked.

"Make me one with everything," the customer replied.

The attendant shook his head. "Can't do that," he said. "You already are."

Amicus Curiae

Writers, whether they intend it or not, are judges; they judge history, they judge the present, they judge the individuals in these places and the places of their imagination, and yes, they judge each other. Writers are simultaneously juries, prosecutors, attorneys for the defense; they are the defendant and the accused, all rolled up into one and expected by their craft to render a considered verdict on every matter that comes before them.

In the legal profession, an amicus brief is a considered opinion, a gloss, on a matter before the court. Writers do have friends. Some of these friends are:

1. books

2. other writers

3. actors

4. musicians

5. painters

6. photographers

7. chefs

8. dogs

9. cats

10. editors

Writers have a reference shelf and a to-read shelf, things to be consulted, search engines, as it were. At the very minimum, the ten friends listed above should be considered a part of the writers' reference shelf.

Among my favorite books are The Canterbury Tales, because its characters and language still stand after six hundred years; the collected poetry of William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Marianne Moore, all of whom I have increasing hopes of understanding, if everything continues on schedule; Macbeth because of the way it introduced me to politics and point of view; The Trial by Franz Kafka, for showing the way to get past the reader's defenses and into the heart of his complaint; Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi, which were the only text books on writing I return to at every stage of my life; Tales of the Jazz Age by Fitzgerald because they awakened me to the immensity of the short story; ditto The Long Valley by John Steinbeck, The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury, and the Knopf Collected Stories by John Cheever. The opening paragraphs of All the Kings' Men by Robert Penn Warren, and the stunning humor of "Spotted Horses" by William Faulkner, and The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler turn my heart to instant oatmeal.

Numbers 2 through 6 on the list serve as a constant reminder that we are all preoccupied with time and how it affects the work we do, whether it is capturing an image or pacing a performance or judging an event. By looking at and listening to these worthies, we understand how to transmit, say, the photographic equivalent of shutter speed to a short story or a novel, how to PhotoShop point of view. We listen to the monologues of George Burns and Jack Benny and we learn all the better how to withhold information until the right moment, strengthening the tie of these two performers to Mark Twain. We learn how an exaggerated pair of eyebrows, a shambling gait, and an eye for the absurd transforms Julius Marx into an integral archetype struggling to break free within every male.

Number 7 is vital; we must be on good terms with at least one first rate food preparer. Not to disparage peanut butter and jam sandwiches, eaten for fuel when the creative flame has us at our work; not to raise an eyebrow at a can of Franco-American spaghetti, eaten cold out of a can under similar work-intensive or financially burdensome times; rather to remind us that a splendid meal and a glass or six of a fruity pinot noir reminds us that the inner man is sensual, too.

Dogs and cats are quintessential extensions of ourselves. When I was living in a one-bedroom apartment within hearing distance of the Hollywood Freeway, writing a pulp novel a month for a ridiculously small advance, a cat came into my life, a cat the likes of which I have only approximated, a cat who opened for me the doors to growth, understanding, and a sense of what true companionship was all about. Sam, the cat, opened my eyes to Blue, the Blue-tick hound, and from that point on, I knew that fountain pens, typewriters, and, now, laptops are only one part of the tool kit--the other essential ingredient is a proper writers' dog.

Every now and then an editor will ask me a question about something I have written, my answer to which makes me realize that if I have a blind spot for accuracy, the editor does not. I am frequently reminded of an interview I listened to on radio in which Somerset Maugham told of making it a point to send an enormous bouquet of flowers to his copyeditor and to arrange a lavish dinner for his content editor, each of whom, he argued, had contributed considerably to saving him from an embarrassment.

If we as writers are to be friends of the court in which we practice the laws of humanity, observing fully the rigors of our craft, we need all the friends we can get.

Readers? Listeners? Viewers? They are not friends, they are clients. To them we owe at least as much if not more than we can ever hope to know.