All Hallow's Eve

I admit it, when it comes to this time of year, I'm twelve years old. I love all the decorations, the cool costumes, and the hundreds of different sources of myth that get dredged up and mixed together into a rich, spicy soup that feeds every fear of the dark and the unknown that has crawled around in the back of mankind's collective heads since we started banging the rocks together. Does it hurt that down here the temperature finally takes a bit of a dip this lovely time of year, and that it gets dark sooner? No, not at all.

Problem is, these last couple of Halloweens have not been as epic as I had hoped they would be. Something always seemed to pop up at the last minute that would wreck my plans. Or, and this is the shitty part about real life, that really awesome idea I had come up with that looked so perfect in my head turned out to be something off the set of the original Doctor Who series when I translated it into worldly matter. That's how it goes sometimes.

This year, it looked like the same thing was going to happen. There's still leftover problems from Harvey to deal with, I left renewing the registration on my car until the last minute, and I've made three trips to the dentist in the last month to take care of a problem that's been causing me enough pain to keep me from sleeping at night. This morning I got up early, headed in there again, and got a set of stitches taken out that I've been feeling inside my mouth for a week. Then I came home and let the pain killers kick in.

Then, I got off my butt and got to work. I hit Home Depot and picked up a couple of poles and some jute twine. Then I slapped together a pair of Saint Andrew's crosses, dressed up a dummy I had lying around, (go ahead and ask) and with the addition of some lights and the plastic, pre-carved pumpkins Claudia and I have been collecting over the years, my house was ready. A few days ago I stopped by one of the Halloween mega-stores that I've mentioned in a previous post, and picked up a mask that wasn't half bad. Add that to some black ren faire garb, and I was in business.

There was rain, but it stopped often enough to let the kids get out. I was up and down most of the evening answering the ringing of the doorbell, and I got another taste of that lovely moment when small children don't get to finish saying 'Trick or Treat.' One little girl came right out and said that she was scared of me, but that she loved my costume. She left smiling.

Let me know what you think. B-movie material?

Still writing.

A feast of flavors

How many Hannibal Lecters are there?

Well, that depends on how many you've gone out and met. The first one I met was a small man with six fingers on one hand. The second was a man with a subtle, sinister smile and who sometimes made a lisping, slurping noise when excited (and he looked a lot like Odin from the recent Thor movies). The third had darker hair, a much bolder voice and pronounced the first syllable in 'privacy' as in 'prim.' The fourth was a young man, and I followed him through the sort of childhood that would either make a sane person hope for the end of the world or drive them to nudge it along toward that end. The fifth I recently made the acquaintance of, and he's a quiet, cultured man who moves through his life with a slow, deliberate grace.

All of them are killers, and none of them would blink while they cut you open and browsed through your insides like a housewife at the local farmer's market.

Makes you wonder. There's only one source, regardless of the inspiration for that source. So where did they all come from? Why, from you and me of course. Let's take a moment and feel pride in our creations.

Why did Thomas Harris give the good doctor his initial traits, small, with slicked-back hair, limbs possessed of wiry strength? Well, Harris encountered a real-life killer who looks a bit like that, only at first he didn't understand the crimes the man had committed. I'm pulling this from Wikipedia, so there's likely a richer story behind it, but every good character has multiple roots, and you and I only have so much time here. Harris had a gut-level experience that was back-dated with the word KILLER in bright, bold letters, and he picked details from that experience with the intent of us putting our own KILLER stamps on his character, on his book. We were the target audience. I'd say the technique worked rather well, wouldn't you?

If we work chronologically, the next incarnation comes from Brian Cox working in front of a camera for the film Manhunter. He has a some of the physical traits, but we never see him kill anyone, despite all the backstory we're given about the bodies he's left in his wake. Instead, this Lecter is a button-pusher. He sends our hero running out of the room in a panic with a few well-placed points of conversation, and the tortured, murderous psychopath who slaughters whole families admires Doctor Lecter. These facts are presented to us to make us think, 'Christ, if this man can do all this while he's locked up, what would happen if he could get his hands on people?' What indeed.

Now we come to Mister Hopkin's portrayal. Yes, in a movie where you don't have a powerful actor there are some things that you can do to compensate for it, and hell no I'm not saying Cox's performance is sub-par, by any means. But Hopkin's Lecter has enough presence to blow all the other characters in Silence Of The Lambs out of the water. The accent he speaks with alone is just creepy, and the quiet monotone that it's delivered in makes me think of an audio recording of The Facts In The Case Of M. Valdemar I heard many years ago, the voice of the dead speaking to the living. See you soon, it whispers, at all of us.

Then there's that boy, that fine young Hannibal. (Nope. Couldn't resist) We see him portrayed with more than one actor's face, but there's only one that we associate with the cold dread that the name Hannibal inspires. Give me a contrary opinion if you want to, but that face is a little... Off. It's odd in the same way that Christopher Walken's is, handsome, but not something a lot of us would want to open our eyes to in the middle of the night. This Hannibal starts off his life a little better than most of us, which adds another dimension to the intelligent personae that's consistent through all the incarnations of our anti-hero. He gets dealt a bad hand of cards in his life, but presses on, though the part of that boy that might have once been able to laugh at himself seems to be missing. He wanders through life until he has a new family to replace the one that was killed, and for a moment maybe we get to believe that the rest of his life could have been lived 'normally.' He kills before the opportunity to avenge his little sister's death presents itself, but only after being insulted and bullied by someone bigger, stronger, and dumber than himself, and I think that qualifier is important. For all his skill and rage, this future icon is still a boy. We can enjoy stories about evil kids, but how many good or successful ones are there that don't have the child infected by some outside element, be it extra-terrestrial or supernatural. Innocence and childhood are intertwined icons, and if this handsome blond boy had begun his grown-up life already indulging his murderous urges, he would have lost our sympathy. As a character, Hannibal needs our empathy. This is one of the bigger challenges facing everyone who re-imagines him.

Of course we also have the latest and certainly not the least. In the TV series, Hannibal seems inhumanly poised and cultured, so much so that I think the only reason we can believe in him as a person is because we walked into this story already knowing the characters. Using my in-depth research techniques (browsing IMDB when I can't sleep) I discovered that Mads Mikkelson approached the role with a fresh perspective, playing this charming killer as if he was the devil. If you watch the series you'll see that the character does a good job in this role. He tempts, and it might even be said that he fulfills the traditional duties of the devil, dealing harshly with those who transgress. Though it might be more accurate to say that he does the work that we wish the devil would get around to, chopping up that asshole who cut us off on the highway and making that snooty clerk at the DMV regret being so rude. That's the key.

I'm not trying to just gush here about how engrossing Hannibal is as a fictional character, I do that in private. This is peeking into the whys and wherefors behind the fact that a lot of people (myself included) are willing to pay money to read and see this man's story. Hannibal is an anti-hero, like any other bad guy we root for. But the intensity of his actions make it hard to admit why we like him. I think a lot of us have moments where we would love do exactly what he does, kill some person in our lives who offends us (not hurts us, offends us) and express such pure contempt for that person that we eat them. I try to avoid getting too graphic here, but let me address an unspoken fact that would be a part of Hannibal's life if he existed in the real world: his digestion. We all know what goes up must come down, right? Well, what goes in must come out. Imagine all those faces of Doctor Lecter, each taking care of personal business, remembering their meals and remembering the preparation. These men would be smiling while they sat.

But we never see, or even hear about that. Why? Because while our egos would love to lead us on an exploration of alternative cuisine, those same egos don't want us within a thousand miles of all the complications. Lecter went to medical school. Look around, because it's not difficult to find horror stories about that experience. Have you ever smelled the insides of a mammal that's been opened up? How about had fluids from those insides splash over you, soaking down into your socks? Once the good doctor removed the delicacies he was after, there would have been a hundred and twenty more pounds of person to dispose of, minimum. That weight comes from bones, blood vessels, organs, and goopy stuff inside those organs. Yeah, the movies never show our well-mannered gentleman dealing with bowels.

By not showing that, it lets us gloss over the ugly bits of reality. We get the good without the bad. The gourmet meal without having to pay the bill or wash the dishes. Obvious, right? The trick is knowing which is which, what to serve and what to toss in the trash and hope our neighbor doesn't get nosy. If I had the secret to that, well for starters I'd be getting paid for these words you're reading. But I can at least recognize when someone gets it right, like with the good doctor. I can think about what I like and what buttons it pushes inside me. I can put all that in my own blender, hit puree and see what I end up with. Dinner is served.

By the way, I'm eating while I write this. Eating meat.

While I write.

It was a dark and -

So there's this Harvey. Drops in uninvited, and won't take the hint and get the hell out. Now true, he did give us some notice that he was coming. But, honestly? He's the sort of jerk who's so unreliable that notice isn't really much help. We can't keep him out, can't tell him to stay away, and even if we leave to avoid him there's a risk he'll break in and trash our place. Hell, he might even show up early to catch us while we're packing the car or delay his arrival so we waste time out of town and end up exiled, unable to come back to our home until who knows when.

I'm finishing this on Friday, the Friday after the huge rainstorm that hit Houston so bad that the damage is being counted in billions. I started writing it the previous Friday, hoping the power would stay on. It did, and for the first day or so when the hurricane became a tropical storm and hit Houston with endless water and wind, things were okay. My friends and I passed texts around to say who had the lights off in their neighborhoods and everyone swapped videos of rivers that have street signs barely sticking out of them and the roofs of cars that can almost be seen under their surface. It rained, hard and fast, then it would stop long enough for me to take the dog for a walk around the neighborhood. Of course, we had to walk in the middle of the street because a lot of the sidewalks were either caked in mud or under water, and we could only walk so far before we hit places where the streets themselves were submerged. Then we would head back in before it started pouring again. At night, during the quiet moments, there were frogs all over the neighborhood, singing. At home, with the storm locked outside but raging, it felt like all the real disaster was a comfortable distance away.

That was it through Sunday. On Monday evening as I was forcing Diamond to tend to her business in the backyard even though the sky was pouring water on her head, Claudia yelled that she needed me. I got in to see that the ceiling was leaking in the library, less than three feet from her desk, where her computer is. We got buckets and plastic bags under the leak, which was coming down in multiple streams. While we were trying to come up with a long-term plan, we noticed the sheet rock was sagging.

The whole piece fell down within twenty minutes, all in a mess of insulation, cardboard backing for the sheet rock, and the nails that had been holding it up. We got a tarp under the buckets, and watched a part of our house fall apart while trying to make peace with the fact that we couldn't do anything to stop it.

Eventually the rain stopped for a while. I stayed up that night to make sure it didn't get worse. I'm not sure what I would have done if it had.

Cabin fever is a real thing. Claudia and I were cooped up in the house from Friday afternoon until Tuesday, when I was able to drive around and find one of our favorite Mexican restaurants open. But on that Monday night, we had been crammed together the whole time, both worrying. You would think it would be a perfect time to binge watch Game of Thrones, or do anything else that eats up time, but it wasn't. We gave each other space, both of us feeling tense and anxious. Sad fact is, I couldn't even write, especially after the leaks made the ceiling fall in. I was too locked in the moment to go anywhere else in my head, even though a trip elsewhere would have been just the thing at that time.

The next day we heard that the national guard had been called out, and on those moments when I got out of the house I started seeing and hearing helicopters. There was water built up along the edges of the streets around my house, but not covering them. I had slept during the morning, and I stayed up again the next night, insisting that Claudia get some rest. Of course it was raining that night, and the ceiling started leaking where our kitchen meets our living room. I got some plastic tubs under it, cursed, and tried to keep an eye on it to make sure I caught any leaking water. There was still water leaking into the first set of tubs in the library.

At around one in the morning, there was another wet, tearing sound and another piece of my house hit the floor hard enough that I was sure it was going to wake Claudia up. At that point I just said fuck it, made sure the buckets were still catching the old and new streams of water, and started on the mess. I put on latex gloves, because my hands began to itch not long after picking up the huge piles of insulation from the first collapse, and scooped handfuls of wet gunk into a trash bag. I took the larger pieces of what used to be my ceiling and put them in a cardboard box. (trash pick up had not happened, naturally) I got out my old ka-bar knife and cut the pieces of sheetrock that were broken off but still hanging from the cardboard backing at the edges of the hole. While I was doing at this I would pause every once in a while to look up through the hole that was the size of a car door. I could see the slats of my roof.

That's where we stand now, except that I noticed a slow leak in the damned garage too, some night when I was walking around the house. The rain is gone for now, and Claudia hit the ground running as soon as it did. We've already filed an insurance claim, had FEMA come out, and now we're just waiting on the roofer, who understandably is a tad busy right now.

Now I've got a moment to sit still and really think. My workplace opened up on Thursday, and and during those disorganized two days we got some hint of the real mess. Some of my friends and co-workers got out in their trucks and boats during the worst of it and rescued people who were trapped in their houses or up on their roofs. Despite, or maybe because of, all the crap that I needed to keep an eye on at home, when I read their posts and saw their pictures I really wanted to get out there, to ride out there on the cold, black water and help all the people who are a hell of a lot worse off than I am. During the storm there would be occasional photos of flooded houses and rescues by jeep or boat. The official death toll has risen, and I don't think anyone's surprised by that. Pieces of overpasses have collapsed, and at one place so much water washed over one of the highways that the concrete barriers along its sides were pushed perpendicular to the line of traffic, forming an above-ground river channel.

So what's next? Start fixing. Though we've got some ugly damage, Claudia and I still have a roof over our heads. Other people are still in shelters, some are throwing out all of their furniture because their house was flooded, and others have to go hunting for wherever their cars were washed away to. Gas prices are going up, and there's a curfew on. But we're alive, and we're moving on.

As for me, I'm still writing.

Regulation ghosts

There's a well-known series of books about vampires that I once started to read. I picked up the first book, read a powerful, graphic opening, and then about five pages into the meat of the story, closed the book. I haven't picked it up since, and that was over ten years ago.

That book, and that second scene where I was first introduced to the hero of the story, has stayed in my head all this time. Because I think I can make a point that can help other people who just might be picking up a pen for the first time, I'm going to explain why.

As I tend to do, I'm not going to specify the series. If you've read it, you'll recognize it. It happens to be one of my wife's favorites, so it's yet another subject for us to have lively discussions about. We've had quite a few.

It's set during the cold war, and the opening shows a very unconventional autopsy that ends in shootings and an explosion. This sets a top-secret Soviet program back years of progress. The second scene shows a young man reporting for his first day of work as the person in charge of a British project that opposes the other one that we just read about. Inside a room accessed by a secret door, our hero meets a ghost. Instead of rattling chains or demanding that his son avenge his murder, this spectre gives our hero a short report on the events in the first scene. This patriotic spook passes on military intelligence.

Disclaimer: you already know that every word of this is my opinion. This is my word, not the word, and it's sure as hell not the last word. This is a word about what I choose to write words about. Horror.

What's wrong with a ghost doing its part for queen and country? Nothing. It shows nobility and a willingness for self-sacrifice. But it also shows a connected, enlightened empathy, a willingness to look out for the little guy. It also shows an intelligent involvement in the present. This ghost is not an old, dusty record player endlessly spinning the same scratched vinyl disc. More's the pity.

Despite having vampires as the main antagonists of the series, the series isn't horror. It's science fiction. There's an understandable rhyme and reason to the universe, clear cause and effect, and some ghosts have our back.

You know, maybe it's that last point in particular which explains why I don't think I'll ever pick that book up again. I like horror, and part, I believe, of a good horror story is our inability to truly grasp the parts of the universe that are trying to drown us in its bathtub. Borrowing/Butchering a quote, the strongest fear is fear of the unknown, and when we can see an expression of love from a ghost, we feel we know it, even if there are facets of its existence that we can't possibly grasp. It smacks too much of Casper, and cheesy Lifetime movies where the tragic but plucky heroine is constantly getting scared out of her wits by the spook in her new house, which – surprise! Was only trying to warn her that the cardboard-cutout handsome guy she's seeing is the asshole who ghostified the house's prior tenant.

You know, if I never achieve anything else lasting as a writer, if I can only get 'ghostified' in the dictionary, my life will have meaning.

I've covered a bit of this before, so let me try to rephrase it while contributing something new. I'm going to label this set of words the rules for ghosts. These points are what I keep in my head when I sit down to write a ghost story that I want to scare people with, and not just because these guidelines would produce a story that I would probably enjoy reading. I think each of these points pushes a button in people's minds. I think they dig under the floorboards and get inside the spaces between the walls.

1. A ghost did something unusual during its mortal life. Though it's rarely explained why this matters, it's important because millions of people die every year, but they don't all come back. So our ghost has to have been remarkable in some way. It developed an obsession, it became consumed with greed, it died a painful death, or it lived a life so empty that just reading about it makes us worry that we haven't done enough with our own lives. There will be no ghosts of milquetoast accountants who died in their sleep or of mediocre soccer moms who passed peacefully, surrounded by loving family members. Normal doesn't make a ghost.

2. A ghost does not have a wide range of responses to stimuli. A haunt can be subtle or obvious, though our story is more effective if it at least starts off subtle. But it won't break dishes in the kitchen one day, file a lawsuit at the county clerk's office the next, and finish off the week by possessing the lady next door so it can sit down with the new owner of its house and hammer out a twenty-page contract agreeing to co-inhabit the house on a time sharing basis. A ghost is emotion and energy, like lightning finding the shortest path to the ground.

3. A ghost has a limited range of focus. The internal logic on this is sketchy, but in all the stories the shades are fixed to something, some remnant of their past (more on that below). A haunted house, hotel, car, toy, or town. Even a person can be haunted. A ghost might be mobile, but not randomly so. It's tied to a person, place, or thing. A spectral afterlife is an old-fashioned marriage where the options for divorce are extremely limited.

4. Because it was once a living person but is now dead, a ghost is tied to the past. This reflects the symbolism of what a fictional ghost is to a reader, old memories or feelings that won't stay buried. In a haunted house, radios play commercials for companies that went under twenty years ago, a bottle of soft drink sweetened with high fructose corn syrup tastes like the good old stuff that was made with real sugar, and a tattered old dress smells fresh and clean with just a hint of a forgotten lover's perfume. But it's all a phantom. Spend a night in a house that once burned down and you'll wake up in a moldy ruin. Join that gracious host for a week of feasting, and you'll starve to death. Show up on a dock to meet that lover who once got away, and sooner or later your body will wash up on shore. The past belongs to the dead, not the living.

6. A ghost can't experience personal growth, including learning new facts, or keeping up with changing events. This is a matching point to the previous one. The possibility of change, of molding the future, belongs to the living and not the dead. Those who have died but are sticking around are stuck with what they had when they were once alive, body, mind, and spirit. A ghost of someone who died in the service of MI-6 would whisper, scream, and write, 'Blake is a traitor' long after the man himself was dead and buried. They're always playing the same game of chess, one where the moves are announced but the pieces never advance. A person who freezes to death comes back as a ghost who will never be warm. The shade of a person who died feeling betrayed will never forgive. Never.

Hey, remind me to read something with a happy ending when I'm done here, okay?

Another A-kon has come and gone. This year it was held in Fort Worth, but there were familiar faces and familiar shenanigans. The day before the con started, some knucklehead decided to play Bruce Lee and kick open a pair of double doors at the hotel. The doors were expensive.

I wrote Bruce Lee in the above paragraph, but the person who told me about it actually cited Jet Li. Uh oh, can't I learn new names, or references? Am I stuck in the past? Maybe I am.

Because I'm still writing.