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.