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.
