Happy Halloween: "The Infant"

I’ve been trying to write a Halloween poem for three weeks and finally got fed up.  No matter what I did, it just looked and sounded horrible.  So I took the story idea and decided to try something I’ve never done before:  flash fiction.

Flash fiction is a story told in 100 words or less.  I wrote it in 156, and finally pared it down to 99.  I cannot tell you how much of a headache that was.  You wouldn’t think it would be that difficult to get rid of over 50 words, but you’d be wrong!

But anyways, it’s the holiday for the eldritch and freaky, and this is me sharing a taste of what happens when you leave me alone with my imagination.

                        ***

I’d killed the vampire but couldn’t sleep.

I stood in the hall outside our bedroom.  My wife slept as a hibernating bear.  The vampire refreshed himself from her last week.  She miscarried right after.

I heard her cry and ran inside.  She lay atop the covers, the naked invader nestled at her breast.  It was smaller than my hands.  I watched it suckle at her throat, slurping her blood like milk.

I killed the vampire but left his child.  I saw my wife’s smile and how she caressed the infant.  The baby was still hers, and she happily nursed.

Ghostbusters

Do I need to say anything about Ghostbusters?  No, but that’s never stopped me before.  This movie is a classic.  The special effects, which undoubtedly were pretty decent at the time, look so ridiculous, but that’s just part of the fun.  It’s was never supposed to be a serious film; they go from doing “serious” science work to cashing in on an unexplored business field.  Despite rescuing the damsel and preventing the apocalypse, they really don’t have any other goal in mind except to make a lot of money, and they assume most everybody else is as greedy and fiscally minded as themselves.

My favorite moment in the film is when they’re talking themselves out of jail, trying to get the mayor on their side, and Bill Murray says, “You will have saved the lives of millions of registered voters.”  Yeah, it’s not about morality or good versus evil.  They appeal strictly to the modern sensibility.

I think perhaps this is partly why Ghostbusters 2 wasn’t as successful as the first.  It wasn’t any hokier than the first; less so, actually.  It ended up having a different tone and developed the characters differently.  In the first, everybody only cares about themselves.  In the sequel, it’s not just about making it in the world, they’re actually trying the change the world.  The characters actually grow up and deepen just a little bit.  It makes for good storytelling, but it wasn’t as much fun.

Carrie

I first read Carrie towards the end of my high school senior year.  I was at a park and it only took me a day to get through the entire thing.  It wasn’t the first Stephen King novel I read, but it was the first to stir me so emotionally that it changed not only the way I view relationships, but how I look at my own childhood.

The novel is about Carrie White, an abused high school senior with telekinetic powers, and after a series of horrendous events from her mother and classmates, she slaughters her high school and a good portion of the town.  Carrie is a monster, but never is she the villain.  That goes to Chris Hargensen and Carrie’s mom, Margaret.  Both are bullies and Carrie is an easy target for all sorts of abuse.

I sympathize with Carrie because from elementary school through junior high, I was Carrie.  Not so much the home abuse, but at school, life was awful.  I remember a long series of humiliation, taunts, and spoiling of any good thing I thought I had.  There were only three or four who actively sought to make me miserable, but it was enough to throw me off, and considering how awkward I was, I was generally ostracized from everyone.  Since reading Carrie, I’ve often wondered what would have happened if things hadn’t changed for me in high school.  I highly doubt I would have tried to take out my school, but I can relate to her rage.  After a long series of abuses, something breaks and you search for release.

Considering how much I love the story, there was no way I wasn’t going to see the Carrie remake in theaters.  I not only like it better than the 1976 version, I almost like it better than the book.

The casting is superb; Chloë Grace Moretz is luminous as Carrie.  Even when she goes murderous, it was impossible for me not to still love her, and Julianne Moore is incredibly frightening as Carrie’s mom.  I don’t know if anybody has captured insanity better than her.

There are moments of cheesiness, mostly at the end when they fall into the cheap horror tricks of one more scare just to make the audience jump.  Carrie’s mom should have just stayed dead after being stabbed in the heart.  Making her gasp on for another half-minute was ludicrous, and the final scene at Carrie’s grave is as pointless as the hand coming out the ground in the original.

But these are nitpicks.  I was impressed, very impressed, with everything else.  I dreaded the shower scene; the 1976 version made that opening sequence feel lurid, almost like it was encouraging the audience to ogle high school girls.  The 2013 version takes pains to avoid this and instead focuses on making it the truly frightening and traumatic start to Carrie’s story, as it should be.

Updating the story to fit in with today’s technology was also a clever move.  It never felt intrusive but developed Chris’s awful nature and even made the prom night more believable.  And the prom rampage was, of course, amazing.  I wish this movie great success.

Halloween's Coming!

Halloween represents different things not only for different people, but also for different times of life.  When I was a kid, Halloween was about dressing up in awesome costumes and getting candy.  I got older and it became just about the costumes, to which I put in less and less effort.  Then I got even older, and it became looking at other’s costumes.  The time spent preparing these are comparable to the outfits some bring to sci-fi conventions, and that’s saying no small thing.

But what Halloween has truly become for me now is the massive influx of spooky movies.  I enjoy scary movies and there seems no better time of year for them than now.  So this week is devoted to nothing but Halloween films, starting with one I can’t stand.

The House on Haunted Hill could have been good.  It’s one of those old black-and-white classics about a group of people who take a bet to stay in a haunted house for an evening, and in the morning, if they’ve survived, they’ll be given a tidy sum of cash.  Weird crap happens, ghosts appear, people die, and then…it’s shown that it wasn’t ghosts but an elaborate and really hokey con to commit the “perfect” murder.

It’s like being promised The Sixth Sense and being given a bad episode of Scooby Doo.  I was so mad by the end of it I played an episode of X-Files I’d already seen, just to remember that there is quality entertainment.

How to Never Teach Math

I’ve never actually hated math.  In fact, I’ve made a hobby of going back and reviewing the math I learned and school to see if I still have it.  There are branches of math that are easier for me than others.  Geometry is a breeze.  Perhaps this is because my dad’s a carpenter and I’ve absorbed a lot of it just by observation, but put lines, angles, and shapes in front of me, I will get it done.

Algebra was a different story.  I passed my classes but it always took more time than I wanted; I’d do the steps three or four times and still end up with the wrong answer.  The frustrating thing about it wasn’t just that I didn’t know how I would ever apply it; I was never taught what it was for.  Arithmetic is about counting and counting accurately.  Geometry was all about measurements and seeing how math worked in nature.  Algebra?  No clue what the equations were about or why they were important.

Khan Academy has been great.  I finally understand the basic premise behind algebra.  It’s about balance and making sure that everything on one side is equal to the others, kind of like making sure the scales are equal.

So, it’s cool that I have resources, time, and no pressure except from me to understand this field of knowledge.  But that’s not the reason I decided to talk about this.  I’ve kvetched about my public school education before and I’m going to do it again because this baffled me when I was in class.

When I took Algebra, our teacher did not care whether we got the right answers on our homework.  I’m not kidding.  If a student came to class the next day with only the answers written on his or her paper, even if they were all the right answers, our teacher wouldn’t give them credit.  If, on the other hand, they came to class showing the work, i.e. the steps they took to get to the answer, even if every answer was wrong, they’d get credit on the homework.  The principle was that if they could show they knew how the process went, they understood how the math worked.

It should not take a genius to know how stupid that sounds.  You might get away with crap like this in English class.  Ask students to write on a specific topic, every one of them could come up with a different opinion and they would all legitimately be right.  That kind of diversity doesn’t work with math.  There’s only one answer, and showing the work doesn’t mean jack.  If you show your work and the answer is still wrong, it means they didn’t get it.  I sure didn’t.  And yet I got an A in that class.  It’s the least deserved A I ever received.

I passed it off as sheer laziness from one teacher.  After some discussion with family, I’ve discovered that that has become the standard practice in my sister’s high school curriculum.  And suddenly I’m very concerned about the rising generation’s education.  If our students are not being held to achieve mastery of this disciplined subject but are essentially being given a free ride, what’s the point of making them go through all those years of math?  This is insanity.

Reading Aloud

There is an art to reading stories aloud.  Given my review of Shadows in Flight, it’s clear I like audiobooks, but my love for verbal storytelling goes back beyond my discovery of them.  My parents and one uncle used to tell bedtime stories to me and my siblings and it made the stories come to life quicker than any book I’d read.

I knew there was magic to the spoken word, though, on a Scout camp when I was 14.  Around the campfire, one of the Scoutmasters read “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs.  I’ll never forget how vivid the story was that night; I shivered and it wasn’t just from the cold.  I could feel the monkey’s paw in my hand as those fatal wishes were made.  The terror of the dead son knocking at the door thundered clearly in my heart and I went into my sleeping bag terrified.  It was the best night of my life.

I’ve since gone back and reread the story in print.  It’s still a good tale, but the experience is not the same and never could be.  That’s okay.  I’m glad of the experience.

I’ve tried reading stories aloud, but to little success.  The stories always felt a little boring coming out of my lips and for a while, I chalked this up to a talent I wouldn’t possess in this lifetime.  Then came Mary Robinette Kowal.

I’ve mentioned her before on this blog.  She’s an author I quite enjoy and I especially like her place in the Writing Excuses podcast.  Kowal is not just a writer, though.  Before her entrance into the science-fiction and fantasy community, she was (and still is) a professional puppeteer of 20 years, and has been the reader for several audiobooks.  This is a very talented woman.

I recently found a YouTube video of a lecture she gave titled “Tips for reading fiction out loud.”  It’s a two-part video going over the basics of how to read stories, what to do with your voice, the different muscles you use to convey different sounds and how to make them for you.  It’s wonderful advice and great for me, not just because I love learning anything new, but because it’s right up my alley.

I understand that she teaches the same principles on her website: www.maryrobinettekowal.com.  Check it out if you’re interested, or if you’re not, check out her site anyway and see what she’s all about.

Shadows in Flight

The Enderverse is easily Orson Scott Card’s most popular series, and I, like many others, am very excited for the upcoming Ender’s Game movie next month.  As much as I loved Ender’s Game, though, I’ve long felt that Ender’s Shadow, the parallel novel, was the stronger of the stories, and the Shadow sequels were among the most thrilling of them.

A lot of it was the character of Bean, a kid who has incredible talent, more talent than any others, yet he remains the most humble and consistently lets others lead and make their own decisions, because even though he is the smartest, he’s not always right and he’s brave enough to admit it.

Shadows in Flight is about Bean’s death.  He’s living in a spaceship with his three children searching for a cure to their genetic mutation that will kill them.  On top of preserving their lives, Bean, who is on his death bed, is trying to raise his children to grow into decent, civilized individuals.  This is a story about family at its most painful and meaningful moments.  Tragic though it is, death has the power to unite families and bring them to greater knowledge about themselves and about what love means.

I’ve listened to the audiobook to and from school, and that was one of the best storytelling experiences I’ve had.  Something unique about this was that there were four readers, each alternating chapters depending on which character’s viewpoint we were seeing the story through.  It was a very touching and lovely story.  If you can get it on audio, do.  If not, check it out.  It’s very short but full of life.  I am looking very forward to the final (planned) book in the Enderverse, Shadows Alive.

The One Thing I Agree with Ayn Rand About

Ayn Rand is a marvel.  She might be the only American philosopher of note, having formed her own very persuasive philosophy of Objectivism.  And there’s no denying her talent.  I read The Fountainhead in college and last week I decided it was time to a crack at Atlas Shrugged.  I’m still not finished yet but I can already say with conviction that she was one of the most talented authors ever published in the Twentieth Century.  There is good reason for her books to still be bestsellers, even after all these years.

 

She shirks on nothing.  Her settings are vivid, the plot is clear and demanding, and her characters are always memorable.  I don’t have greatest memory for details; within a year, I tend to forget who is who in a story, especially since I don’t reread books much.  I still vividly remember the people and the drama from The Fountainhead, and I have every reason to expect that will remain true with Atlas Shrugged.  Even when they’re not complex, the characters are still strong and refuse to be ignored because of the life Ayn Rand gives them.

Her novels were told specifically to put her philosophy into practice, show it works in our world and the relationships and contentions the come with it.  She worked long and hard to make a case for her beliefs and many are still following it today.  I understand why.

It’s such a shame that everything she believed bothers me to the bone.  Her espousing the “virtue” of selfishness is the core theme in her stories, philosophy, and the way she lived her life, and the more I learn about her, the more troubled I become because I understand now how her philosophy penetrated our modern culture.  Since I was a child, I’ve listened to friends, neighbors, and even some family members make the same arguments and statements Rand makes to justify their greed and scorn for the poor.  Not that many of them, if any, would know that Rand came up with the arguments first (I sure didn’t until I read her books and watched television interviews she gave).  They don’t need to know it came from her; her philosophy penetrated our culture so well that many live it, something I’m sure would have given her no small satisfaction.

I didn’t write this just to rag on her, tempting though it was.  She gets enough attention as it is.  No, the reason I decided to write this post is because I finally found one statement I agree with completely from Atlas Shrugged, and I wanted to pick it out for my own reasons.  Here’s the statement in part:

“[D]o you know the hallmark of the second-rater?  It’s resentment of another man’s achievement…They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them—while you’d give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them.  They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors.  They don’t know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear.”  (Atlas Shrugged, p. 358)

I have long felt that jealousy is among the ugliest of sins, and one that baffles me every time I come across it.  There’s only been one time I can recall anybody being envious of me; living an unremarkable life usually does wonders in how many things you don’t have to deal with.  I remember it being incredibly frustrating, especially because it ruined what could have been one of the greatest friendships of my life.

That’s the worst part of jealousy: it tends to be directed at the people we’re closest to.  Time and again, I’ve seen a coworker, a classmate, or a neighbor be honored for something they did, earn an award of some kind, and it becomes their friends who talk behind their back.  It’s their friends who start to ignore them, treat them like they didn’t deserve the attention, when in the end, the friends are angry that they weren’t in the spotlight.

Jealousy is the opposite of charity, for where one seeks to give and receives more in return, the other seeks to take and spends more for nothing.

#55--Dracula

I’m usually not impressed with the horror classics.  I’ve read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde twice and thought it was boring both times; and Frankenstein, while a good book, is far too philosophical to be truly scary.  Hollywood has done more to bring terror into that story than the book ever did for me.

I’m happy to say that Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an exceptionally great novel and deserves all the recognition as the horror classic that it is.

The first 50 pages were delightfully creepy and hold back nothing.  You have a haunted castle, man-eating wolves, succubi, crazy locals, and the great vampire himself, Count Dracula.  The narrator of this portion, Jonathan Harker, is a delightful companion to have as he finds himself trapped in a nightmare.  As he slowly realizes that a monumental business trip has ended with him becoming a prisoner, and then from prisoner to being on death row, the claustrophobia and suspicion of madness feels very real and very intense.

And then we leave Transylvania to London very abruptly and for the rest of the book, Dracula barely appears at all.  Instead of being master of the house, he becomes the monster under the bed; you can hear him, smell him, even catch a glimpse of him here and there, but only for a few shocking moments on a page do you actually get to see him as the great demon that he is.  He acts and behaves as a common criminal throughout, sneaking about, trying not to be noticed and yet the whole time, his presence is felt.  One minute it’s sunshine and roses, and the next, there’s an army of rats, mist arising from nowhere, him slipping through the cracks at the bottom of the door, commanding wolves, and of course, the drinking of all that blood!  That’s why vampires became famous.  It’s the soft version of why zombies are terrifying:  It’s all about good old-fashioned cannibalism.

Okay, that’s not all what it’s about.  It’s a draw, but the vampire is much more of a mythical figure.  Taken at face value, Dracula is supernatural tale of dread, and if that’s as far as you want to go, awesome.  It works on that level very well.  But if you’d like to go deeper, here’s some things you can look at as you read.

Dracula is actually a very—dare I say?—religious and, specifically, Christian story.  When we begin in Transylvania, we’re brought into a setting that is primitive, superstitious, and altogether terrified at every passing shadow.  The description is beautiful (Stoker has a wonderful talent for imagery; I felt like I was right there as I read and loved that moody, dark, yet wondrous terrain) and yet the whole time, you feel that there is an ancient being ruling over all.

Count Dracula is a gentlemen, very composed and intelligent, but he is also a king, an ungodly tyrant who takes pleasure in taxing his people by creeping in the night and stealing his citizen’s babies, haunting their every step; he is a being that knows he is master, has been for centuries, and time has seemed to stop.  Nothing of the modern world may enter there.

Then he goes to London, attempting bit by bit to establish a new kingdom there.  His plans begin to work, but he is quickly met by Abraham Van Helsing and his loyal band of friends: Quincey Morris, Lord Godalming, Dr. John Seward, and Jonathan and Mina Harker.

At first, Van Helsing tries to fight Dracula by using the same tactics that the superstitious in Transylvania use to defend themselves: garlic, mountain ash, and the like.  He puts up a valiant fight with those ancient, known defenses, but he’s stymied at every turn and Dracula only seems to gain ground; this is brought home by Van Helsing’s failure to save Lucy Westenra.

Although it’s not stated overtly, Van Helsing and company trade tactics; instead of using the folk remedies, they instead rely on holding the crucifix holy wafers from the Host instead to battle Dracula.  The constantly invoke God on their side, always praying and accepting that after all they can do, they’ll leave it in his hands.  And it’s once they use that that they actually repulse the monster and send him retreating to his homeland in Transylvania.

On the same note, you can make the observation that Dracula could be a commentary on modern versus the ancient.  In Transylvania, Dracula relies on transportation and methods that have stood for years; boats, caravans, and subjects with the crudest of weapons, like knives.  Van Helsing and Co. use trains, steamships, Winchester rifles; in short, the latest of all good technology, and they come out ahead in their war against Dracula.

I was going to make a comment on the use of money, but I don’t really need to say much.  Both Dracula and Van Helsing’s people have it, and a lot of it; the difference is how they spend it and that seems to fall under what I said in the prior paragraph:  Dracula invests in the tried-and-true, while Van Helsing invests in the here-and-now.  Guess which paid off.

As kind of a final note, I am neglecting to mention part of what makes the vampires a terrifying, but also somewhat sexual, monster.  There has always been a terrible sexual undertone with the vampire.  Dracula preys on women, the vampires in Dracula’s castle trying constantly to “kiss” the men on the grounds, and Lucy Westenra, after she turns, preys on the young and helpless.  There is much talk about purity in this story and how those touched by the vampire are “unclean.”

I could make much of the fact that part of the reason for Lucy Westenra’s downfall was that she was kind of loose.  While she technically remained chaste for the course of the story, she was a ridiculous flirt, getting three marriage proposals in one day, and during the blood transfusions, Stoker makes an interesting comment how all those who donated blood to her were somehow her husbands (read the book to understand; it’s really weird, but it makes a horrible kind of sense within the rules of this story.)  That she was kind of a wild woman could be part of the subtext of why she fell completely in Dracula’s clutches.

Mina Harker, on the other hand, was completely faithful to only one man in the whole story, and even when Dracula attacked and cursed her, she survived because she remained true to the end.

All fun things to think about when going through this story.  It is over a century old and was written in a time with a much different culture than the one we live in now.  Although maybe not as different as we think.  Otherwise, could this story last as long as it has and still be relevant?

Before I finish, I have to say that I loved the character of Renfield.  He’s the mad patient John Seward looks after.  While I found his madness intriguing—I’ve never heard of a zoophagous before, but the study was very cool—his place in the story was inspired.  I knew that he was going to play some key role in ruining things for the hero, but I didn’t guess what small part he was going to play in that.  When Renfield does help Dracula, it is one of the cleverer twists that I could have imagined, and shows an even spookier side of Dracula than I had pictured.  One of the powers Dracula has that is overlooked in many modern vampire tales is his power over the verminous animals, and one that has incredible potential few ever take advantage of.

Verdict:  Glad I read before I died.  Very, very glad I read it.