A Rock To Tie A String Around

I’ve been reading the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer. It was loaned to me by one of my sixteen-year-old students, and I started to read out of obligation, but now I have found that I’m hooked. It’s not that it’s the most brilliant, original, inspired fiction I’ve ever read, far from it in parts. There’s just something very soap operaesque about those four books that hooked me. A friend suggested that Meyer laced her book with heroin, I’m not sure she’s wrong. I can tell you this though, I’m thirty-three and I can’t put them down. If I were sixteen, I would have been building a shrine to Edward in my backyard. Hence, I now understand why my student had this fiery gleam in her eye when she gave me ‘Twilight’ to borrow for the summer. She wasn’t just loaning me a book, she was converting me.

But it has raised a couple of questions. And to be fair, there’s some spoilers coming your way – beware. Okay, so if Bella bleeds at all, even a paper cut, the Cullen family is likely to be at her throat sucking her ever so succulent blood from her body. I get that. However, and not to be obscene, she’s a healthy seventeen/eighteen year old girl. There is one time of the month when she will have to bar her windows and hide from her boyfriend and his family. Meyer doesn’t discuss Bella’s menstrual cycle, obviously it’s not a major plot point, but it is a notably glossed over complication of being in love with a vampire who can’t even stand for you to scrape your knee.

So should Meyer have addressed this issue? Or is she counting on my suspension of disbelief to carry me through the four book series believing that Bella never menstruates? Not to mention, the Cullen’s go to high school. For four young vampires who cannot be around blood, they are in the wrong place. Nary a day goes by when some kid doesn’t run into my classroom needing a band-aid for his cut finger or gashed arm or grabbing Kleenex for her bloody nose. Kids are messy, and bloody. High school would be a terrible place for a vampire.

Meyer isn’t the only author to do this. But as an author, it makes me think. It’s an interesting dilemma as a writer trying to decide what details to include about your character’s daily lives and routines. Too much and you have a book about brushing your teeth and driving in rush hour, too little and your character comes off like a magical fairy creature that never needs to urinate. I suppose most of our daily activities are implied throughout the telling of a story. However, when does implication lead to elimination of potential complications for the sake of convenience?

I admit, I wonder about odd things. I wondered throughout ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’ what would happen if one of the women had to pee after they had just gone through the all day process of getting all corseted, tucked and tied into those fancy dresses? I wondered in Stephen King’s ‘Cell’ if the horrible phone call that went out to all cell phones and caused everyone to go mad was just limited to the phone, or was texting still safe? Could I still send and receive email on my phone without being driven mad by the invisible horror? If so, than the Iphone and the Blackberry have a definite market advantage in the event of impending apocalypse.

In other words, it’s a thin line between suspension of disbelief and absurdity. As I write my second book, I’m trying straddle it. Now, if you will excuse me, my protagonist has been needing to pee for hours now, I better go write a bathroom break before she pops.

I got hooted at today. Hooted at by a nineteen-year oldish looking guy in a beat up station wagon. My first thought was that this was the beginning of the horror movie, where the woman is walking home, something weird happens and she shrugs it off only to find that same nineteen year oldish dude has been digging through her trash for the past year and hatching gruesome plans. My reaction really is the epitome of vanity, I mean really, who would actually be interested in my trash? The only guy digging through my garbage is a short man on a bicycle who pulls out the cans and bottles, which I supply him with a lot of. Someday I’m going to come home to find him sitting in my living room with the crew from Intervention.

Anyhow, I was able to rule out psychotic, stalking serial killer pretty quickly. I then tried to explore other possibilities. Maybe I was just really that hot, I mean hawt. I mean, I was wearing my bright pink gardening clogs, torn up jeans and was tugging an unwilling toddler down the sidewalk. I mean really, what’s not hawt about that? Maybe he was being ironic….except, and I’ll never know for sure…he looked like he meant it.

Which leads me to the biggest question that arose from this incident: what did nineteen year oldish guy in beat up station wagon hope to get out of that situation? I watch Dr. Phil, I hear him telling people every afternoon that we do things because they work for us, because we get something out of it, that our actions bring about a desired result and when that result ceases to happen, we stop doing what we were doing. So what was the desired result in this situation?

I see this happen a lot. By nature I’m an observer. I love nothing more than to tuck myself away in a corner of a busy room – a hotel lobby, a crowded coffee shop, a train station and watch the goings on around me. I like to see the little human dramas play out like miniature two-minute tele novellas.

The other day I was in a supermarket and twenty-something guy in line next to me was desperately trying to hit on twenty-something girl in front of him. His tactic was a simple one, try to spark a conversation about the celebrity on the cover of People Magazine. On Attempt #1 twenty-something girl utterly ignored him, he stuttered, looked around self-consciously to see if anyone else had seen him talking to himself. We had.

He then waited about thirty seconds and began Attempt #2. This time he tried to compliment twenty-something girl by telling her she looked just like Brittany Spears. I’m not sure that’s a compliment anymore, in fact one could take it to mean that you look like a cheetoh eating, Marlboro smoking, trucker hat wearing oddball so out of touch with reality that you’d walk into a rest stop bathroom barefoot. I’m assuming that this is that twenty-something girl was also thinking since she informed her suitor that she had a boyfriend. He hadn’t asked, she volunteered the information.

Attempt #3 was blunt and somewhat desperate. I guess on the heels of the intimate moment they had just shared, twenty-something guy blurted out “Do you…want to go out for a drink….” I can only assume that he meant to add “tonight” or “sometime” but unfortunately he was cut off. Twenty-something girl glared, turned and walked out.

Part of me admires his moxy. The other part of me thinks he demonstrated the working definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different result. I’m pretty sure that the dude who hooted at me has tried this tactic before, he sounded pretty confident. And I can’t speak for all women, but I imagine more responded as I did – they immediately reached for their pepper spray and looked around for hidden cameras.

Alright, so it’s time for Part Two – I talked a little bit about some of the books and movies that fell somewhat short in my last blog, but to do honor to my favorite genre, I thought it only fair to tell you about a few that continue to scare me into insomnia.

Incidentally, my poor husband is pretty sad that I’m immersing myself in horror books and movies right now as he gets to deal with the fallout.  I’m fine all day, very brave, nothing phases me.  But as soon as I’m lying in bed, I start quizzing him on whether or not the doors are locked, is he sure they’re locked, did he double check, did he hear that strange noise, does he think the baby is alright, has the fridge always made that noise…. it goes on and on like that until one of us eventually gets up and checks or falls asleep.

I should issue my spoiler alert again, don’t read anything that you don’t want too much information about – can’t say I didn’t warn you!

1.    I Am Legend – The Richard Matheson novel this time.  Last time I talked about how the movie was nothing but a not-so-scary zombie movie with the same title.  Skip the movie, go straight to the book.  The book is zombie-free, it’s a vampire story told from the perspective of the last non-infected person alive.  I don’t know what was scarier, the isolation Robert Neville faces or the idea that he’s the last of his kind and that he’s the monster now.  All really great horror books and movies manage to intertwine social commentary while not sounding preachy.  I’m still a little jumpy and I’m pretty sure there aren’t any vampires outside my door.  Pretty sure that is…..
2.    The Orphanage – movie, not sure if there’s a book to this one.  There’s just nothing scarier than ghost children, unless it’s deformed ghost children.  I made the mistake of watching this one when I was home alone.  If I ever see anyone play that ‘1, 2, 3 Knock on Walls’ game, I’m going to pass out.  The scene where Laura is playing with the ghost kids was one of the most chilling movie scenes I may have ever seen.   I was hiding behind a pillow begging her to come to her senses and stop.  She didn’t listen to me.
3.    The Shining – book by Stephen King and/or Stanley Kubrick movie.  Both incorporate mental illness, ghost kids, creepy, empty hotels and mysteriously misunderstood psychic ability.  I must confess I never finished the book.  It managed to creep me out so much that I wanted to shove it in the freezer just like Joey on a very old episode of Friends.  The movie, however, scared me for a very different reason.  It was patient with its horror.  Kubrick wasn’t afraid to show us Danny wheeling around the empty hotel on his big wheels for five minutes because he knew that the first time Danny hit a bump we were all going to scream.

I’m leaving out a ton of goodies.   But all three of these have the same thing in common:  they didn’t feel like they had to wrap up the story in a neat little package at the end.  There were loose threads, questions unanswered; the evil was still very much out there and likely to strike again if the right situation arose.  That’s the kind of stuff I can’t kill with an industrial strength can of Raid.

There are some major spoilers in this blog – if you haven’t seen the movies or read the books discussed wherein – I warn you now, I’m going to completely, and totally ruin the ending for you.

That aside, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of scary.  I’m starting the groundwork for the next book and I’m about 95% sure it’s going to be horror.  But I have a lot of issues with horror books and movies, and I’m worried about doing it right.  Let me say first off, I love horror.  I do.  I love zombies, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, ghouls, and psychopaths.  I love swamp monsters, rapidly mutating insects, mysterious viruses, malevolent fairy tale creatures, I love it all.  But I’m frequently disappointed with the second half/ending of most horror books and movies.

The reason is this:  once you know what’s going bump in the night, it’s no longer scary.  Once I know it’s an evil, virus ridden garden gnome that’s murdering the co-eds in the night, I know how to take care of the problem and am more annoyed than scared.  Sometimes we know the problem but we don’t know how to take care of it.   Zombie movies are like this – we know what they want (brains) we know how to kill them (brains) and we know how to hide from them (shopping mall).  These movies are scary to a point, but I will never understand why the people in the shopping mall are so hasty to leave when they have a fully stocked food court at their disposal.  And before you say it, I know, I know – they will eventually run out of food and water.  But that never happens in the span of the movie.  In all instances I’ve seen they still had quite a good haul in the hiding spot before they really, really had to go.

My point is this.  At some point in most horror mediums I end up angry at the main characters.  Here’s where the spoilers come in.  I’ve thought about some of my favorite all time horror classics and why they just didn’t quite make the cut for me.

1.    Event Horizon:  Scared the living daylights out of me.  Seriously almost walked out of the theatre when I first saw it.  The idea that first of all it’s you and your small crew on this huge, empty space ship, and second that it’s your own memories that are creating the horror was a little too much for me.  About the time when the doctor’s sick little boy appeared in ghost form on her examining table covered in a sheet and breathing shallowly – yeah….check please.  But, and it’s a big but here – it ceased to be scary after they determined that the evil was a centralized force and it became borderline comical when it manifested itself in a scary Sam Neil.  I can get away from Sam Neil, I can hide from him and I’m pretty sure with enough motivation – I could take him out.  Should’ve left it at mysterious psychological horror – which I can’t bash in with a 2×4.
2.    Hell House:  the Richard Matheson novel that is.  I know they’ve made several mediocre film versions of this one – but they’re nothing compared to the book.  Matheson is the master of creepy atmosphere, of not revealing too much too soon, of letting your imagination scare you before the ghost does.  I read this in two days and I’m not a particularly fast reader – I couldn’t put it down.  It’s your classic haunted house story, four investigators go to notorious haunted house to determine if there’s verifiable evidence of life after death.  The house provides ample evidence and picks off half the team in the process.  My problem is this:  once they determine that it’s Belasco that’s doing all the haunting and that he can no longer leave the chapel, and that he wasn’t affected by the EMR because he buried himself in a lead lined room.  It all got a little less scary for me and became way too scientific.  It also seemed a little arbitrary – why was he so interested in being so evil?  Once they pulled back the curtain and showed me the monster, I felt like he lacked the proper motivation.
3.    I Am Legend:   movie version this time, not the vampire novel by my favorite guy Richard Matheson.  I have no idea why they strayed so far from the novel when they made this movie.  They went the zombie route in the movie, whereas vampires are almost scarier.  But that aside, the movie did a great job at making the isolation, the psychological torment the focus of the first half of the movie.  I was scared stiff that something was going to happen to Sam the dog, who didn’t exist in the book, and that Robert Neville would be all alone in the world and finally lose what few marbles he had left.  However, as soon as they showed me those CGI’d zombies leaping around like psychotic frogs, I went from scared to amused.   Not that I know how to get away from uber-dexterious zombies, but I think I would have giggled myself silly trying.
4.    It:  book and movie by Stephen King – I’ve met more people than I can count who developed a life long fear of clowns from this story.  There’s nothing scarier to a kid than the idea of a clown appearing out of the storm drain and dragging you down to your death.  King is the master of tapping into all the primal, irrational childhood fears that we secretly harbor.  I would have never have admitted to anyone how much storm drains freaked me out as a kid any more than I would have told my mom how scary the circus really was.  Stephen King is either psychic or extraordinarily in touch with his inner, cowering child.  Problem is in the ending – King lost me when the scary clown is identified as a giant, trash talking underground spider.   That I can avoid, that I can kill.  Maybe I need a giant can of Raid; maybe I need to keep a giant shoe handy so as it squish it.  I’m not scared of spiders, clowns yes, spiders no.

I sense a part two coming on this topic.  Maybe I’ll highlight a few that did it right in my not-so-professional opinion.  Till then, tell me about what scares you – why it scares you, what makes it cross the line into funny?

I read a lot of message boards. I don’t usually participate, I’m the one the message board people hate…I’m a lurker. I read and read and read and every so often I’ll pipe up with a smartass comment before I sink back into the virtual shadows again. I don’t have a very good reason for doing this other than I have been an active member of more than one message board and privy to the special kind of catty drama that inevitably breaks out. Sure, everyone is getting along just fine, we all love each other, people drunk-post sweet messages to the community, declare that they’re the best friends they’ve ever had, blah blah blah.

But then out of nowhere, someone makes the mistake of responding in all capital letters, or saying that they voted for Nadar, or they tell a horrible joke that would’ve only been funny if you’d have told it to your equally drunk friends at 2am. It’s all downhill from there. Soon enough you realize that you’re all in a pinch and angry with someone named ‘sweettoes94’ who you will never, ever meet in person.

I think it’s because message board drama is bit like road rage. No one can see you, no one is likely to actually confront you and your asshattery, and there are few consequences for your irrational actions. Obviously road ragers face a few more dangers than Internet ragers. You can get pulled over; you could even get your ass kicked if you go far enough. I think if we actually treated people in the world the same way we treat our message board pals and fellow drivers, we’d all be in a Tyler Durden induced hell.

Still that doesn’t stop us. I was a part of an Internet community for years, and after professing our love for each other, pledging to be together forever, I had to say my goodbyes. I eventually came to the conclusion that they were, indeed, crazy people. I’m positive they thought the same about me.
Evidence Item #1: ‘Spazz’ and ‘Mono’ were at one time best friends. They met up in real life and even decided to start a business. Then ‘Mono’ made a smartass comment on the message board, they collapsed the business and continued to bicker between themselves in the virtual world even though they lived in the same town.

Evidence Item #2: ‘WCM’ which stood for Wind Cries Mary, would frequently post about what a good Christian she was and how much she loved Jesus. Fine. Except that whenever politics/abortion rights/other religions were discussed she would explode in anger wish death on the dissenter. Very Jesus-like behavior.

Evidence Item #3: ‘GlamourGirl’ who claimed to be an international model who also ran a 7/11 and was dating an NBA star would frequently post page long rants about how pregnant women should be banned from the beach because their pregnant bellies were disgusting and she was sure the sun was damaging the baby in-vetro.

Evidence Item #4: ‘Tim’ who acted like a normal dude for a long, long time until I made the mistake of editing one of his comments in which he openly insulted another poster. Flew off the handle is not the word to describe what he did. He instant messaged me for two straight hours, every message more angry and obscene than the last. He posted long rants about what an evil bitch I was for censoring him. He claimed I was stomping his first amendment rights.

Evidence Item #5: ‘Dash’ who kept posting openly racist cartoons and jokes. Then he would explode at the people who spoke up about being offended and declare that we had no idea what racism was and that he had every right to post those jokes, that he’d earned the right. Incidentally, from the pictures he posted of himself, he was a 30ish white guy, I’m not sure what ‘rights’ he thought he had earned, but I wasn’t buying it.

In short, I’m glad I moved my social life off the Internet. I like having real names for my friends, no matter how deep the discussion; it’s hard to take anyone named ‘robokitty’ seriously.