Power

Some stories make us laugh. Some stories make us cry. Some make us angry. Some make us frustrated. Important stories touch us in some way, evoking emotion in our heart. I've read stories that have had that kind of power before, but none has impacted me in the same way that Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian has. The power in that story to inspire dread, horror, and a sense of utter futility defies description.

I can't even put a finger on how the author accomplishes that power. The story isn't that different from a dozen other westerns, even if it's told in a unique way with a different point of view. Usually, when a book sucks me in, the characters to most of the work: I become emotionally involved because I relate to the people I'm reading about. Not Blood Meridian though, I can't think of characters that could be more alien. I don't feel empathy for them. But the plot still drives into my heart like a spear thrust.

The story is almost hypnotic, drawing you further and further into madness, and at the end, I felt like I was staring the devil in the eyes. It was an uncomfortable feeling. That slow revelation of dread and insanity works well. It isn't so bad at first...and it gets worse...and worse...and then, by the end, I put the book down without comment. I haven't been able to read sense then. It shook me. I still turn it all over in my head, trying to make sense out of what McCarthy was saying with Blood Meridian.

What story was he trying to tell, and what moral lurks in layers of peeled madness? I haven't riddled it out yet. I'm just now beginning to be able to reflect on the how he accomplished that emotional power. I'm not quite ready to understand the why yet.

What makes horror?

Our protagonist flees from twisted, corrupted evil spirits that drive him from his home. He is hounded day and night by shadows on the road behind him, and uncertainty on the road ahead. Nor are his friends safe, one is attacked by a malevolent spirit possessing an old, rotten tree. Others are taken into the tombs of the damned, tormented and brought to the very brink of death. When it seems our hero may have escaped the grasp of his pursuers, they strike, and wound him in such a way that he is corrupted, damaged, and slowly, inexorably, becoming like them: a tortured soul enslaved to dark powers.

A horror story? Of course, most readers will recognize the plot summary of the first half of the Fellowship of the Ring, book one in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Nazgul are some of the creepiest, spookiest, and scariest villains in literature, but despite this, they don't push LoTR cross genre into horror. Later, Tolkien's characters will be hounded through a black cavern by a demon, stumble through bogs filled with the faces of the dead, and force an undead army to serve them. And then there's the giant spiders, man-flesh eating orcs, and the soul corrupting ring, but at no point would this novel be considered horror. It doesn't feel like horror or read like horror.

Why not? I don't really know. The overt elements are there, but for some reason, I've never read a fantasy novel that crossed into the horror genre. I think it would be a very interesting read if someone wrote one, and there may be one out there I've missed, but in general, fantasy seems to kill the scary part.

I think it's the needed juxtaposition of the world we recognize with the terrible that is needed to produce horror. Lift a Nazgul up from Middle Earth and drop him in the midst of modern day New York, and I think you have a horror novel. Place the Dead Marshes in South Georgia, or the Paths of the Dead in Colorado, and you have the workings of a scary story.

I'm still thinking on it though. Maybe there's more to it than just that. I'm just not sure.

New Book

I write stories to answer questions. I have idea, a scene or image, and the story comes from the questions that I ask of that scene. I see a man driving a car, and I think, "Where is he going? Where did he come from?" Stories arise from those answers. And when two scenes meet at the intersection of the answers to those scenes...well, then I know I have to write that story. It was Stephen Donaldson that said first (at least, as far as I know he said it first) that every story is the intersection of two ideas - one common, one strange. For me, those ideas meeting at the crossroads always start with the answers to questions, and usually raise more questions of their own.

So now, I have two scenes, each with a host of questions. I have to write another book to learn the answers, because even I don't know them yet.