You know when you have a book you love, I mean really love. You know all the creases on its cover, you can recite the thing cover to cover, you have a familiarity with the smell of the pages. Maybe you don’t and I’m just obsessed with books. But if you do, doesn’t it just break your heart to think of someone coming along and separating you from your beloved treasure? Well, fear no more because this wonderfully monstrous and creative knit book cover is here to frighten away anyone who has untoward thoughts for your book. You can check out the site and order your own book monster and have the piece of mind that comes from knowing your books are safe and sound.
I just finished Christopher Moore’s amazing book A Dirty Job and I got to thinking about the horror genre. One of the thoughts that ended up developing was how the book managed to both make me laugh and at times descend into horror territory. I won’t say that it’s a scary book. I can’t really think of any times where I was really feeling the glacial drift of ice slowly filling my veins. However, there were parts that could certainly be said to be uncomfortable. Still, the thing that got me was just how well the two seemingly opposed aspects fit together. This got me thinking about the 80’s again (though that isn’t all that hard to do.). What struck me was that many horror films in the 80’s managed to pull of being genuinely scary while being humorous. And I’m not talking about the camp-tastic Army of Darkness either. I’m talking about genuine frightfests like Dawn of the Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and to a lesser degree In the Mouth of Madness. These films, while certainly not comedies, brought forward material that managed to provide us with a giggle, even an uneasy one. But why mix such diametrically opposed tones into a single work? Could it be that maybe they are more alike than they seem and that they may even complement each other?
The obvious and I suppose you could say calculating reason to include humor in a horror story is to disarm your viewer or reader. Often horror is like an arms race. You bring out a scare. The next one has to be bigger, otherwise, the emotional impact will lessen and then stagnate then the reader or viewer will totally lose engagement. So the ante has to be constantly upped to keep the audience enthralled and frightened at what will come next. However, if you frighten the audience then disarm them, the next jolt will seem as powerful as the first since they won’t expect it. They will go from a low anxiety state immediately to a high anxiety state and the shift will be very jarring. This isn’t as easy as throwing in a joke or a clown in the middle of a scene though sometimes the characters can lampshade the events of the story and try to crack a wry remark. It’s risky but if done right it has the potential to give the audience a moment of levity before rubbing salt in the wounds again. So this tactic is used in conjunction with scares to keep the audience afraid. The risk of course is that the addition of humor in an otherwise straight-faced horror film can call attention to itself like a beacon and draw the audience out of the world of the story. But this is not the only reason horror and humor cooperate.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an absolutely terrifying film in my opinion. It’s a demented odyssey into realms of twisted human psychology. But it maintains a perverse sense of humor that is just as entertaining as the scares. So how and why? How do we not end up taken out of the film? The answer to that I think is that the humor and the horror grow organically from the situation. The humor is not forced into the situation but is a direct result of it. The main psychopaths are funny themselves. But they aren’t funny in the way that a genuine comic relief would be funny. Instead they are funny as a result of their absurdity. While they are undoubtedly insane and dangerous, their instability and exaggerated personalities allow for the very stuff that humor and horror are made of: exaggeration. And that is why I think that, when done well, humor and horror may actually be great partners.
“The divine is no less paradoxical than the vicious,” said Eric in The Crow and there is a lot of truth to that. Both humor and horror develop when the universe drinks too many whiskey sours and ends up flopping on its ass. Both take what is expected, what our lives have so far told us is possible and to be expected, and subverts it to the point where we can either react with mirth or terror. For example, the dead coming back to life can be played for laughs since the idea is so absurd as to be unthinkable or we can play it as horrifying since it takes something that shouldn’t happen then slaps you right in the face with it. It all depends on what aspect the creator wants to emphasize. But by recognizing that both horror and humor are both a result of roughly the same process, the creator opens up new avenues to explore the idea. How far can you push until the horrible becomes laughable or the humorous horrendous? What does that say about the subject or our reactions to it? How can it just switch emotional textures? We also have to consider that both laughter and horror can be used as defense mechanisms. Sometimes something can be so horrible that the only way to respond to it is with laughter. Like when people suddenly laugh at a funeral. The more accepted or predictable response to something frightening are the typical physiological reactions we usually associate with fright. But both are ways of reacting to uncomfortable stimuli therefore, playing with both reactions can be very powerful for the audience especially since it can potentially lead to cognitive dissonance where they are no longer sure what they should be feeling. This ties nicely into the feeling of being trapped in a dream or rather a nightmare. Without any rules or land marks, the audience is totally at the mercy of the story. This takes the horror and elevates it to the level of a subconscious assault where the audience may be uncomfortable and not even know why. And the unknown is always scarier than anything any author or director can com up with. Thus, using humor in horror is a way of snaking into the audience using a method they may not be aware of and thus have no defense against. As an audience, we no longer can say what is safe and what is dangerous. Is there any safe place at all? Can anything in this insane world of the story be trusted? The humor here only heightens our apprehensions so that the world of the story becomes one massive dangerous labyrinth.
To wrap up before I go on for too long again, humor and horror, seemingly of the good twin evil twin dichotomy may not be so at odds as they seem. Both play with what we expect and subvert our expectations. Because of this, both can be deployed in the service of creating more tension and unease in the audience. When done well, the audience is stripped of a sense of knowing what will or what ought to play out. This thus a fantastic way of keeping the audience of balance and constantly wondering where you’ll take them.
I didn’t want this blog to go political but sometimes you have to talk about these things. Sometimes these issues sink into the ground like radioactive isotopes and threaten to poison the very ground you stake your home and livelihood on. The SOPA bill (Stop Online Piracty Act) is just one of those occasions where we have to look beyond the niche topics we cover and see the quagmire of under-the-table corruption, cronyism, and insidious fascism that continually assault us. These are mad times we live in boys and girls. Mad times plucked by the atrophied, gnarled fingers of old ideologues who can’t begin to envision a world where their rules are considered quaint and hokey yet utterly irrelevant. Of course I’m referring to Lamar Smith and his buddies. Our good friend Lamar is Republican House Judiciary Committee Chair from Texas. He’s the quisling who sold out rights out to the movie and record execs with the introduction of the SOPA bill. There has been a lot of talk about SOPA and a bit less on its deformed cousin PIPA recently. You might have heard about it. Or you might have noticed that your favorite websites are looking a little different today. Wikipedia has taken itself down for 24 hours as protest to the bills that would take an acetylene torch to everything good about the internet. The internet really is one of the last places we have that is truly free. With the Patriot Act and wire tapping that might have even made that naked mole rat Nixon retch, this republic is collapsing into itself like a geriatric who’s been clocked in the diaphragm. But never mind our national nightmare and let’s concentrate on this most recent affront to our dignity as members of the so-called free world. SOPA will create a firewall around the US pretty much. Sites based in foreign servers can be blacklisted and made inaccessible if there is any indication of copyright infringement. So you better pray your web content providers are paranoid bastards who only use public domain photos and pictures of their own kittens (which will have a watermark under the fur of course). And if you should be so daft as to upload a movie clip to youtube or facebook, you can expect Uncle Sam to bust down your door with a machete in one hand and a strap on in the other. You can look forward to luxuriating in Club F*ck Your Rights for up to five years. Yeah. That’s right. If an exec wakes up one morning and decides he wants a gold plated speed boat that can fly across the surface of the sun and he doesn’t quite have the cash for it, he’d going to send his good squad’s greasy little tentacles through the web, find some poor granny who thought it would be cute to put a clip of 101 Dalmations on facebook, and send her senile ass to prison for half a decade. Because her and her verminous criminal ilk deprived him of the money he needed for his solar boating expedition! Yes! I know this sounds a bit crazy. I seem to have gone off the rails a while back. If you’re still unsure of what all this is about, check this video. I am feeling more than a bit frigging crazy with this thing but we can do something about it. This is the important part so listen closely.
Boycott the fiend intelligences who are mainlining money into the stenosed veins of congressmen to support this bill. Groups like Sony, Viacom, and Marvel. Also, write to your representative in congress and tell them that this is unacceptable. Do not let these twisted people carve up the internet. It isn’t perfect but they are going to use a scorched earth policy then sow salt in their wake so nothing can grow. The internet has irrevocably change everything. It is a dreamscape where innovation and ideas can lead to amazing things. It’s a small wonder these people are so fervently trying to kill it. It’s like watching elk in rutting season bellowing and scrapping the ground with their antlers. They need to perpetuate the comfortable way of life they have been accustomed to, just blindly following the cycles. They may only be able to articulate these lizard brain needs through belches and grunts but you don’t want to get in their way because like the dumb beasts they are, they have only one setting. The internet has gotten in the way. It is unprecedented in human history and so those who have depended on locking information down are feeling a distinct chill march up their spines.
Now, stop reading this and write to your congressperson. Don’t let them erode our rights any more than they already have. And don’t let them carve up the vast, amazing dreamscape of the internet.
Nothing like a good decapitation to start the day out right in a zombie infested post-apocalyptic world. And judging by how zombies have utterly taken over everything in culture, I’d say we’re already in the zombie apocalypse. It seems like every book, videogame, movie, and television set are overrun with the undead. Not to mention sex shops. (Slightly NSFW: Why God? Why?)
A heart warming story about zombies learning to recycle.
Who remembers the Night of the Living Dead and the absurdly fun Return of the Living Dead? Even if you haven’t seen it, you know about it. It’s part of our collective cultural consciousness. You probably also know about Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and all the other dead films George A. Romero has been making. Then there is 28 Days Later, its sequel 28 Weeks Later, and so on. We’ve got the Resident Evil series of games and movies. These are just the most obvious examples of zombie films. Now we have books about how to defend yourself from zombies (Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide) and Marvel has decided that it would be fun to see what our favorite superheroes would do if they were zombies. We’ve seen a gradual ramping up of the amount of zombie content in just about everything. You can’t throw a stick without hitting something zombie related. Even our roads are fair game.
We can’t stop here, this is zombie country.
So what is going on? Why are there just so many bloody zombies? And rotten zombies? And fast and slow zombies? And every other zombie you could conceive of? We can go the boring route and just say that everyone is just hopping on the bandwagon and booking it to profit town (which probably is partially to blame) but is there more to this? I think there is because people are buying this stuff. If they weren’t, there would be no incentive to create this kind of content. So it may be that the real question is why do we love zombies so much all of a sudden?
There have been many who theorized about why we love the undead and love media in which the undead come back to gnaw on us. Death is the final frontier. After that line has been crossed, there is no undoing what has been done. All wrongs done in life transfer into death. This is probably why there are many cultures that put a stone over the dead. Imagine a wraith returning to get a little payback on someone who’s done them wrong. There are many such myths across the world of the dead coming back such as the draugr of Viking mythology. As bad as that is, imagine a giant skeleton coming for you. This myth comes to us from Japan and is called the odokuro. Everyone is afraid that the dead will make a return world tour at some point and so we devise practices to appease them and dissuade them from coming back to visit. So, the dead come to represent all of our misdeeds and wrongs. They are our bad behavior incarnate. More generally, they are our limitations and weaknesses. Who do you think put those skeletons in the closet? You did. And with zombies, they come out to get you. The zombie can therefore be our deep-seated fear of all that we’ve done or failed to do. They are the mythical wraith come back to exact revenge on the sinful living. This shared fear helps to make zombies so popular. We don’t want the dead to come back, we are afraid of this antagonism between what is alive and what is dead. This also explains why in so much zombie fiction and film, one of the main characters gets infected and turned into a zombie and out other protagonists have to kill him or her. This is also why it is so affecting. Our other protagonists have failed to protect this person and now have to take responsibility for their failure.
But there is a literal fear of death itself. A lot of it goes back to our fear, not specifically of the body, but of all the things that can go wrong with it. This is a fear that has traveled across centuries with us. The dead remind us of our mortality and they also show what happens when the wonderful machinery of the body gets shut down. We are instinctively repulsed by decay, sickness, and death. Sit around a hospital waiting room for a while with broken bones, coughing, sneezing, and all manner of bodily fluids leaking and I don’t think you’ll be having a big dinner later. When we see what can happen to others, I think we tend to wonder if that can that happen to us. Not only that, we wonder, can I catch that from this other person? The zombie is the absolute embodiment of this fear of both contagion and death. When a zombie comes along, oozing bleeding, moaning, zombie lore dictates that the shambling mess is going to try to bite you. If your horoscope that day says that Jupiter and Neptune are at odds and have conspired to send a hoard of undead cannibals after you, you know that once the inevitable happens, you’ll join their ranks. You will be infected. Even the act of infection though is redolent of ancient fears that go back to when we weren’t on the top of the food chain. We can deal with getting shot, stabbed, blown up. Our media is filled with representations of this kind of cruelty. But being eaten is somehow even worse. It isn’t a fast process. You get shot in the right place, you’re gone in a flash. But imagine being eaten alive. Imagine the feeling of jaws clamping onto your flesh and ripping it from you bones. The thought is perversely horrible. And it goes back to when there was a threat that you could get mauled by something much more powerful and deadly than you. Now why would you want to experience this? Probably for the same reason you experience any adrenaline pumping experience: the distinct, visceral feeling of being alive. It’s almost like exercising a muscle. We still want to experience that rush because it gives us access to other parts of ourselves that we don’t normally encounter. I discuss reasons for loving horror in an earlier post though so I won’t dwell on it here. The preceding reasons go into very broad, almost universal fears that predispose us to enjoy this particular sub-genre of film and they do partially explain why we can’t get enough of them but I think there is a more specific reason for our love of this gory genre.
Better than the jogging dead
Zombies seem to resurrect when we go through some kind of turmoil. Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968, the year before the infamous summer of ’69. The hippy movement was strong and we were embroiled in a very unpopular war. Spring forward to 1985 when the classic Return of the Living Dead came out. At the same time, Reagan was president and we were in the middle of a repressive moral cultural movement. Now, flash forward to September 11, 2001. I don’t think I need to go into what happened. The year after, in 2002, we got the smash hit 28 Days Later. It was a hit. And since then, we’ve been inundated with zombies. We’ve had a remake of Dawn of the Dead by Zack Snyder. We had George A. Romero come out with Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead. We’ve had the hugely popular Shaun of the Dead. We’ve seen the world get in on the zombie love with Rec from Spain and The Hoard from France. I could keep writing and writing. The point is that zombies have made quite a nice living in the post-9/11 landscape and I have some theories as to why they’ve done so well.
After 9/11, an avalanche of changes hit the world. We were all terrified of the threat of terrorism that could strike everywhere and anywhere. There was no place you could feel secure. We suffered invasive increases in security and domestic spying turned the world into a sick mirroring of Orwell’s 1984. War was killing thousands and driving the country into bankruptcy. Then the housing bubble burst and people were finding themselves homeless and without a job as the economy tanked. Meanwhile, the rich continued to live in peace, secured by their massive stocks of money. For the rest of us, the world was no longer certain. And it wasn’t just us. It was everywhere. Riots shook Greece, Italy, and Britain as they floundered. There was nothing to be trusted. Establishments we thought were secured began to crack and no one came to save us. Sound familiar? It should. This is the plot of every zombie apocalypse story I’ve ever heard. It’s often the case that life imitates art imitates life, creating a feedback loop. Entertainment is also the place where we can exorcise our demons and after this decade, it was time to break out the crowbars and shotguns. Zombie fiction, film, and games allow us to deal with the traumas we’ve suffered. We can see characters trapped in a world that no longer offers any safe place. Danger comes from everywhere and when your time is up, you get to join a legion of the walking wounded. We put the pain and suffering on the screen or on the page and it helps to draw it out of us. And it also allows for the possibility of vicarious revenge on forces that are far beyond us.
The senseless war that dragged on and on, the dead economy, foreclosures and banks still standing colossal. It felt like living in the valley of the giants. Or in this case, watching the dead stalk towards you. It’s something you can’t reason with. It is driven by something you can’t understand and the only thing you can be sure of is that it means to hurt you and those dear to you. This is sort of how many of us felt as our world collapsed around us. The zombie embodies this strange, threatening Other. The zombie, like whatever forces were busy this decade, is unassailable with our present conception of how things ought to be. But with a zombie, unlike burst bubbles and wars waged on dubious premises, you can blow its damn head off. And don’t we all love that moment? You know the one. At some point, things have to get gooey for the zombie. Arms and legs get blown or chopped off. Heads get vaporized. The thrill is even more extreme in games where you get to pull the trigger. Through these representations of zombie violence, we get to take back a little feeling of control. Every crowbar to the skull makes us feel like we’ve gotten back at the things that have stolen our faith in a reasonable world.
In the end, the zombie stands tall and ugly as one of our archetypes of fear. It is iconic to the point of becoming a cliche at this point and, as some are saying, it may be time to retire their rotten hulks to the crypts. But this isn’t the last we’ve heard of them and I can expect that, even if they go away for a while, they’ll be back when we’re at our most frustrated and wounded. Remember, they always come back.
One of the great things about living in this technological age is that we have access to pretty much anything at any time. Go on Amazon or Google and type some random keywords and you’ll come across many different products or articles and webpages. It truly is quite incredible. In fact, there is a game in which you try to think of two words to search in Google that will only get one result. I’ve been successful once but then again, I don’t spend my days doing that. No sir, I’m a productive member of society. But never mind that. Literature is similar in that there are too many genres and subgenres to count and there are always more coming along. What I’m interested here is talking about an incredible new genre I’ve discovered recently and that I’m quite excited about. For those of you with children or still developing clones, you may want to have them leave the room because we’re talking about. BIZARRO FICTION!
So what is bizarro fiction? There are a few sites you can look at that will answer that. To get some answers right from the source, I’d suggest reading a great interview with Rose O’keefe who is head of Eraserhead Publishing, one of the main publishers of this evolving genre. Another description of it and its many conventions can be found at the always insightful tvtropes. But here is what I have picked up about the genre so far and why I think it’s an exciting genre to keep an eye on.
A story that deals with giant monster penises, impregnating Satan’s daughter, or a living suit of cockroaches can’t possibly be considered good fiction, right? It’s just puerile, crass humor, right? Well, how about if instead I described three books as a look at how one’s insecurities can lead to terrible consequences, how love and and feelings of responsibility can bridge the gap between families, cultures, or creatures of different planes of existence, and finally how important companionship is and how it can be found in the oddest of places? They sound a bit better though both descriptions pertain to the same books. Yeah. The books are The Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere, I Knocked-Up Satan’s Daughter, and Angel Dust Apocalypse. It is partially this disconnect between theme and execution that attracts me so much to this genre.
Many in the genre have described bizarro fiction as first and foremost being a genre dedicated to entertaining the reader. With stories like those, I can see that writing philosophy in action. It is also described as being the written equivalent of the cult movie section of the video store. Again, no argument there. Another prominent aspect of this genre is how its style or MO are very punk-like. One can’t read one of these books and not think of the avant-garde nature of punk and its energetic refutation of everything established. This alacrity is wonderfully refreshing as is its willingness to dive into the ultra-violence of a Saturday morning cartoon or the crazy sex antics of a- come to think of it I can’t even begin to equate the sex antics of anything of this world. Nevertheless, everything is on display for entertainment and if you get offended, it’s probably more of a personal malfunction than mean-spiritedness on the part of the writer. After all, if the story didn’t push some, or all of the limits, then it wouldn’t be a bizarro story! Enter at your own risk and buyer beware.
I’ll be sure to keep posting about this genre and maybe get some reviews up in the future of books in this genre.
Speculative Fiction Writing 